Restaurant review, Quinto Quarto Brings a Bit of Rome to the Village.

I haven't had such killer bucatini amatriciana ($11) since the last time I was in Rome. The pasta—like thick spaghetti, but bored up the middle to facilitate boiling—came gobbed with a tomato sauce whose richness derived from guanciale, the cured jowl of pigs. Like snow on an Apennine peak, grated pecorino blanketed the top. Though the recipe originated in the small Lazio town of Amatrice, the Roman populace has clasped it to its bosom, and now there are dozens of variations—and the plate that sat before me was a particularly delicious and aggressive one.

I was dining with a friend in Quinto Quarto, a relatively new restaurant at the tail end of Bedford Street that styles itself an "osteria Romana," which roughly means "Roman inn." The place was launched by a pair of sibling restos in Milano, but our branch has received little attention, even though it's been open for six months. "I feel like I'm in Rome," my date observed, noting the flickering tapers, dark paneling, and utter unpretentiousness of the atmosphere, where guests feel free to linger over their glasses of wine. Besides, everyone around us was chattering happily in Italian.

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Restaurant review, Brighton Beach's KeBeer Bar & Grill.

It's been nine years since Zum Schneider debuted on Avenue C, kindling a minor craze for German beer gardens. This being New York City, many are entirely indoors. Now you can snack on sausages with a foamy stein at a dozen rollicking places in the Lower East Side, Astoria, Williamsburg, Fort Greene, and the West Village. But in Brighton Beach? I was incredulous when I spotted KeBeer one evening as I descended from the Q train. The place sat at the foot of Coney Island Avenue, in a storefront formerly occupied by Eastern Feast, one of the city's earliest slingers of Uzbek charcoal-grilled kebabs.

In fact, the 2000 Village Voice Best Of issue touting Eastern Feast still hangs on the wall, though the rest of the interior has been transformed completely. Big picture windows now look out on downtown Brighton Beach, where, unaccountably, two branches of Chase Bank face off against each other across the same intersection. KeBeer's décor is positively medieval, with white tiles clinging to the wall behind a bar sprouting beer taps, and dark wood shrouding the balance of the sizeable room. Black iron fixtures with guttering candles dangle from the ceiling, and, as you go downstairs in search of the bathrooms, you can't avoid the impression that you might find yourself in a dungeon.

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Restaurant review, Doggy Style in Park Slope: Bark Hot Dogs.

Wear your sunglasses as you exit the 2 or 3 train at Bergen Street, because the giant neon sign that spells out B-A-R-K glows with thousands of nuclear watts late into the evening. The interior is far more dark and chill, with raised counters running the width of the storefront, flanked by stools that allow you to perch but not slouch. Make your way past the seating area to find an ordering station deep in the interior, from which the dogs are dispensed. The staff is friendly as hell, clearly trying to win you over to their effete frank lifestyle.

Years ago, I noted you can tell that times are bad when hot dogs become dinner, rather than just a snack. And today, just as hot dog carts have progressively disappeared from city streets, dogs have found a new kennel in semi-upscale restaurants. Bark is the most advanced evocation of this idea, styling itself as an eco-friendly hipster hang, and mounting a menu that gives tube steaks the respect they may—or may not—deserve.

First off, the weenies themselves. Snob-wise, a Nathan's or a Sabrett wouldn't do. Bark offers a single frank, a proprietary link manufactured by Hartmann's Old World Sausage of Canandaigua, New York. That's nearly locavoric, right? These franks display a wonderful snap when you bite into them, but the pork-beef combo inside is as pale as Casper the Friendly Ghost. To compensate for this comparative blandness, the boiled dogs are basted in a smoked lard-butter combo, which lends an amazing savor.

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Restaurant review, Rum Along to Ambiance.

The ambiance at Ambiance can be summed up in one word: green. The walls glow lime green, the wainscoting dark marbleized green, while the bulbs that race around the coffered ceiling shine neon green, making the faces of the diners look like scary Halloween masks. The agreeable waitress will seat you somewhere mid-room, and as you wait for the menus, you'll note odd accoutrements that date from previous establishments: big antique mirrors, fake potted plants, huge chinoiserie vases resting on truncated Ionic columns, and lavish sprays of artificial flowers, now pleasantly faded, making you think of proms long past. The front of the room is given over to a bar, at which a few phantom hangers-on perch, as the bartender mixes greenish cocktails of limeade and Babancourt Rum ($6).

When the menus arrive, you'll discover that there are no apps, no sides, and no desserts. Ambiance—a Haitian restaurant a few blocks from the terminus of the L train—intends to feed you, and feed you well, but is not concerned with the subsidiary frivolities that dominate modern menus. Theirs is a very ancient idea of what a restaurant should be: a place to provide rudimentary yet substantial refreshment to wayfarers, a function that has become all the more important as Brooklyn's Haitian population has dispersed from Flatbush to the farthest reaches of Canarsie.

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Restaurant review, Abe & Arthur's Says Goodbye to Disco, Hello to Comfort Food.

Once it was Lotus, a trendy trilevel disco, about which a female detractor once wrote, "As soon as you walk in, you're instantly swamped by pretentious, idiotic guys who think it's OK to grab your backside!!" It seems like a sign of the times that where once stumbled dissolute clubgoers swilling $300 bottles of champagne now sit the solid burghers of Chelsea and the West Village, tucking into roast chicken, chops, and whole fish.

There's little backside-grabbing going on at Abe & Arthur's. The main floor is devoted to an expansive barroom, leading to a dramatic, two-story dining room. Around the top runs a balcony, where my date and I sat on our first visit, surveying a half-filled restaurant. Giant cylindrical light baffles hung like space stations at eye level, and the room was surrounded by a scrim, limned with faded images that recalled prehistoric pictographs, or maybe Wassily Kandinsky. Adjacent to the balcony sprawled another large barroom—proving, at least, that the alcoholic function of Lotus remains entirely intact.

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Restaurant review, Some Incredible Qingdao Cuisine Hits Flushing.

Not long ago, I found myself delighted by a restaurant in Flushing with the noncommittal name of Golden Palace, serving the cuisine of northeastern China. The owners hailed from Liaoning province, and the food was amazing. Instead of white rice, there were puffy, pale-yellow baos made from corn flour, and dishes dotted with wobbly agaric mushrooms. Such northern Chinese standards as lamb with cumin contended with recipes that scrambled eggs with unfamiliar leafy vegetables. Pig skin in aspic and noodles that were dead ringers for spaetzle seemed to represent German influences from Shandong, another northern province that had once harbored a German "concession."

So, when a restaurant from Shandong opened just around the corner, whose owners emigrated from the port city of Qingdao (where German-style Tsingtao beer is still brewed), I was there in a flash with a carload of friends. M & T Restaurant is just as anonymous-looking as Golden Palace, and the friendly staff can't wait to try out their English on you. In the three months that I've been eagerly eating there, the menu has evolved, and now the specials once inscribed in Chinese that fluttered on paper strips have been translated.

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Restaurant review, Ovelia Psistaria's Fear of Frying.

Ovelia Psistaria doesn't look like other Greek restaurants in Astoria: Missing are the iced displays of fish, barnyard animals rotating on spits, 3-D pictures of the Parthenon, and rustic taverna décor that have long characterized the neighborhood's Hellenic eateries. Instead, there's a long bar that twinkles like a starry sky with light-emitting diodes, slinging a menu of sweet, colorful cocktails that owe nothing to metaxa or ouzo. Lit by fixtures resembling ghosts dangling from the ceiling, the dining room ascends to an elevated rear platform flanked by smeary paintings of half-ruined boats. While the diverse décor doesn't quite hang together, neighborhood patrons seem to relish eating in a relentlessly modern-looking place.

The bill of fare remains resolutely Greek, though, with a handful of interpolations from other Astorian ethnicities, and a few modern fripperies. The "psistaria" in the name refers not to a walk-in clinic where cysts are speedily lanced, but to a restaurant that specializes in grilling. This activity dovetails nicely with the modern distaste for fried foods, and thus do the galeos ($15) arrive prison-striped from the grill, rather than thickly breaded and fried as they are elsewhere. Also known as sand sharks, these ambassadors from the Gulf of Maine are the only sharks that breathe air, and also use their gills. Even more strangely, each female has twin uteri, in which a pair of youngsters gestates for as long as a year.

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Restaurant review, Avast Ye Saltie Williamsburg Mateys!

Entering Saltie for the first time one crisp fall afternoon, I overheard the following conversation between two sandwich makers: "I like curly parsley better than any other kind," observed one. "It has loft and volume." "No," replied the other. "Flat-leaf parsley is more earthy and chewy, and in a sandwich, chewy is good." At Saltie—a serious new restaurant masquerading as a sandwich shop—you get the idea that this sort of discourse goes on all the time.

The founders are three women (Caroline Fidanza, Elizabeth Schula, and Rebecca Collerton) who once worked at Marlow & Sons, a Williamsburg temple of locavorism and sustainability. Each brings her unique personality to the mix, and elements of those personalities worm their way into the very unusual sandwiches. The place is small, with fewer than 10 barstools, and a big chalkboard also lists baked goods, homemade ice creams, one daily salad, one daily soup, and beverages (the most refreshing: mint iced tea). The prize seat looks out through the front window onto Metropolitan Avenue. From that perch, you can watch the Williamsburg populace prance by.

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Restaurant review, Tribeca's Trattoria Cinque Has That '60s Campari Glow.

Lately, we've seen a spate of restaurants seeking to imitate Roman trattorias. Obika re-created a famous mozzarella-themed wine bar in the soaring lobby of Midtown's IBM building, while Quinto Quarto built out a small storefront in the West Village, getting the rustic look just right and offering authentic Roman pastas. Now along comes Trattoria Cinque ("Bistro Five"), invading a rambling space on Tribeca's Greenwich Street. The 250-seat restaurant features two small outdoor seating areas, a front-of-the-house dining room, a barroom with seating on stools and at tables, a humongous dining room that parallels the bar, and a pair of glassed-in private dining rooms, one at the rear of the main floor, the other downstairs with the bathrooms. As the website brags: "The dining room mimics a 1960s trattoria"—though "mimic" is a loaded word, isn't it?

"This lighting is great, if only the bulbs were aimed better," said a friend who works as a lighting designer. Indeed, a wealth of overhead fixtures and spots that stream upward through red bottles of Campari set the tone for the main room, which is filled with long blond-wood tables surrounded by red chairs, as if waiting for the hordes to arrive. Trattoria Cinque is clearly a project that hit the drawing boards before the economic downturn, when eager restaurateurs decided that bigger was better when it came to minting money. The businessman in this case is Russell Bellanca, who operates two Alfredo of Rome restaurants, one in Rome and the other in Rockefeller Center. Both are aimed at tourists and reportedly not very good.

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Restaurant review, There Will Be Blood (Sausage) at the Vanderbilt

Starting at Vanderbilt Avenue and running west along Bergen Street, 10 times deeper than it is wide, the newly opened Vanderbilt first presents an extensively windowed front room, given over to a few raised tables and a long bar. This area is strictly for tipplers, since a snack menu constitutes the only food available. Luckily, the snacks are excellent: More Malaysian than American, the sticky beef jerky pokes out of its coffee cup, an impressive quantity for $6. I also recommend the trio of crisp croquettes, their squishy insides flecked with Serrano ham; hard-boiled eggs pickled yellow, served in a slush of dark chutney; and, best of all, a new take on brussels sprouts ($5), wherein the small cabbages are roughly chopped and then sautéed, so that the crisp outer leaves fall off and become coated in sweet sesame sauce.

An extended row of tables marches deeper into the restaurant along an unbroken banquette—punctuated by lavish flower arrangements—toward the darkened rear dining room, which is clad in what look like railroad ties. But mid-restaurant, opposite the banquette, discover a beautiful counter of white Carrera marble. As if the focus of some Renaissance masterpiece, the counter is brilliantly illuminated. Perch on one of the stools and you can be Jesus, blessing the well-organized tumult of the open kitchen, as soups are poured and garnished, salads tossed, and entrées carefully positioned on their schmear of squash or potatoes.

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Restaurant review, The Best Dining and Drinking Trends of the Decade.

If Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in the former Dutch settlement of Bushwick in the year 2000, and awakened today, he'd be rubbing his eyes in astonishment at the startling developments in the demimonde of restaurant dining over the last 10 years.

Pies from Naples: While the city's hallowed neighborhood slice—once available on every corner in town—has seen some decline, innovative new pizzas have covered the city like melted mozzarella. Our range of choices alone is amazing, but the single greatest addition to our pizza collection has been semi-authentic Naples-style pies, twirled at such places as Motorino, Franny's, Baci & Abbracci, Fornino, Pizza Fresca, Keste, Saraghina, and Roberta's, as well as Una Pizza Napoletana, which closed this year, showing that the trend may already be subsiding. These pizzerias serve single-person pies, yanked from smoky wood-burning ovens and featuring finely milled flours that render the crusts glove-like, with toppings that include imported tomatoes and Italian cheeses. Waking up in Bushwick, our sleeper doesn't have very far to slog to taste one, either. How about Motorino or Roberta's, Rip?

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Restaurant review, Woo-Hoo for Ruhu at Sunnyside's Sonali Cuisine.

Imagine for a moment a trio of silky lamb chops just yanked smoking-hot from the tandoori oven, deeply brown on the outside, but still a faint juicy pink in the middle. Now deposit them in a cream sauce laced with such spices as coriander, cinnamon, clove, cumin, and fenugreek, rendering the gravy dark and fragrant. Finally, fling a handful of crushed almonds into the swamp—making lamb pasanda ($9.99), one of the richest and tastiest dishes ever to grace a stainless-steel salver in a South Asian restaurant.

With a name meaning "golden" in Bengali, Sonali Cuisine is the latest small dining establishment to arrive on the Sunnyside stretch of Queens Boulevard, which has gradually developed into one of the city's best food neighborhoods. It's also the most recent Bangladeshi café to hit west-central Queens, following in the footsteps of Spicy Mina and Deshi. I'm pleased to report that Sonali is less quirky and cantankerous than the former, and less obsessed with mustard oil than the latter. (Although the intemperate use of mustard oil isn't such a bad thing, I guess.) The Sonali premises may be tiny—just a couple of unadorned tables, a counter, and a door leading into the kitchen—but the flavors are big, big, big.

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Restaurant review, Enjoy the Fish Stomach at Best Fuzhou Restaurant.

I'd zoomed past the gleaming new restaurant a couple of times on my bike, but it wasn't till the third occasion that I noticed the name: Rong Hang. "What a hook to hang a review on," I blurted out. So the next week, I dragged a crowd of avid Sino-diners to the location, a couple of blocks north of Canal on Eldridge Street, in the heart of Chinatown's Fujianese neighborhood. But when we tried to get in, the manager waved us away, asserting in shaky English that all the tables were reserved—even though the place was more than half-empty.

To make a shaggy-dog story short, I went twice more with groups of friends at various odd hours—in one case, dragging along a fluent speaker of Cantonese ("I can only understand every sixth word," she lamented of the Fujianese dialect). But each time, the story remained the same: No room at the inn. Luckily, on the first occasion, there'd been a helpful local lurking outside; he pointed at a restaurant on the next block and said, "Owned by the same man." Best Fuzhou did indeed have a similar sign and a nearly identical menu, though it was minus some of the more arcane seafood we'd admired in the tanks at Rong Hang.

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Restaurant teview, The Breslin's Little Britain.

I've been following April Bloomfield since she cooked Tuscan at the River Café in London. Six years ago, the English chef weighed anchor and crossed the Atlantic to helm the Spotted Pig in the West Village, whipping up an odd but effective combo of Central Italian fare and Brit pub grub. Late in 2008, she added the John Dory to her list of culinary successes, a posh Chelsea seafood spot that closed unexpectedly a few months ago for reasons that still remain shrouded in mystery.

The Breslin is her latest vessel, and, while the Spotted Pig was decorated with dozens of pig statuettes, and the John Dory with entire schools of multi-hued fish, the Breslin features pastoral paintings of cows, framed as if they were long-lost relatives. Located cheek-by-jowl with the wildly popular Stumptown Coffee, the restaurant nestles next to the lobby of the Ace Hotel, a former SRO hostelry turned trendy playground in Manhattan's gritty wholesale district. The Breslin comprises a darkened warren of rooms with an open kitchen gleaming at one end, casting light on the upturned faces of foodies who can't wait to graze on Bloomfield's latest inventions, and foreign travelers who seem frankly confused by the menu choices.

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Restaurant review, The Organ Meat Society Convenes at Northeast Taste Chinese Food.

The Organ Meat Society meeting was called to order at Northeast Taste, a Flushing restaurant that features cooking from China's northeastern provinces. Fourteen members were present [names redacted for reasons of privacy], including two journalists, a publisher, a national security expert, a maker of absinthe, a physician who supervises boxing matches, two lighting designers, a visiting Danish backpacker, a restaurant critic, an industrial designer, two chefs, and a toddler belonging to one of the chefs. Commencing at 5:30 p.m., the meal lasted two hours. The Society was installed in the front window at a pair of round tables pushed together—newbies at one, old hands at the other.

A brief introduction was offered: "Northeast Taste is the second Dongbei restaurant to appear in the immediate neighborhood, joining two places from Shandong. These four Yellow Sea restaurants have overlapping menus, notable for their unusual selection of vegetables, including corn, tomatoes, and winter squashes; their profuse use of eggs; the paucity of rice in favor of wheat, used to make noodles, steamed buns, and dumplings; a plethora of seafood, some of it unfamiliar to Westerners; a love of lamb and mutton; and, most important for our purposes, a stunning selection of organs and other variety meats. No restaurant in the city has a more aggressive offal component."

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Restaurant review, Katsuhama 55's Master Cutlets.

The original East 47th Street location of Katsuhama occupied the smallest of spaces: a narrow corridor and tiny dining room concealed behind a carry-out sushi bar. A waiter would challenge you at the door with a question that ran something like this: "Do you know what is served here?" Then, pretending not to hear your answer, he'd practically shout, "No sushi! No sashimi!"

Apparently, customers wandered in all the time demanding sushi. Instead, the house specialty was tonkatsu, a perfect pork cutlet breaded and deep-fried by experts. As is the convention at this type of restaurant, known as a tonkatsu-ya in Japan, the cutlet came sided with a haystack of shredded white cabbage, a dab of mouth-puckering mustard, and a mortar and pestle in which you'd be invited to concoct your own condiment out of roasted sesame seeds, a spice powder called shichimi, and a thick, sweet brown fluid of a proprietary composition unique to each tonkatsu-ya.

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Restaurant review, No F*%#ing Onions at Jersey's Sapthagiri.

Ever since the local debut of the potato-stuffed crepe known as masala dosa at Madras Woodlands—a franchise from India that lurked near the U.N. in the late '70s—southern Indian vegetarian cooking has gradually become more available in the metropolitan area. Exploiting grain and lentils for their complex nourishment, it's the most advanced vegetarian cuisine in the world, supplementing earthy flavors with adventitious fermentation and a rainbow of chutneys. Moreover, the cuisine is so delicious and spice-intensive that no one misses the meat.

In the interim, we've become familiar with a catalog of dosa variations, including the Mysore masala dosa (coated inside with fiery spices), the paper dosa (thinner and crunchier), and the rava dosa (substituting wheat for urad dal in the batter). We've even witnessed the birth of new dosas, such as the "cheese dosa" I ate recently, oozing mass-produced mozzarella and not really very good. Believe it or not, further surprises await us from the vegetarian cuisine of southern India.

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Restaurant review, Roman's: Ungodly Din, Good Food.

"Do you know how our dishes work here at Roman's?" the waiter intoned, bending over the table and sounding very much like a priest probing for a painful confession. Not waiting for an answer, he continued, "The servings are small, so with two people, each of you should order one dish from each category." He gestured at a menu handwritten on graph paper. It listed two or three dishes in each of five unlabeled categories, which boiled down to apps and salads, pastas and soups, meat and fish, vegetables and more salads, and desserts. Since the menu changes completely every day at Roman's, as the waiter further warned us, you're guaranteed that every meal will be a unique experience. And, of course, since the bill of fare is never posted outside, just entering the restaurant on any given day requires a leap of faith.

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Restaurant review, Give Your Egg the Fist at Red Sea 47.

It wasn't until the third visit that I developed an affection for Red Sea 47, a new Ethiopian restaurant in Hell's Kitchen. My previous meals there had been lackluster—the food had had a reheated quality (Ethiopian is one of the world's most microwavable cuisines), and most of the fare had been mind-numbingly bland.

There were exceptions. Generally regarded as the cuisine's signature, doro wat ($13.95) fell just short of spectacular: two small pieces of chicken—skin, bones, and all—tussling with a boiled egg in thick red sludge. It's the Ethiopian answer to mother and child reunion, the Cantonese dish celebrated by the Paul Simon song. Even more important, the spice level of the doro wat had been incendiary, in a cuisine that's famed for its heat. How you attack it is up to you, but I recommend smashing the egg with your fist, then stripping the chicken off the bones so that everyone may share it. As in many Third World cuisines, all the action is in the sludge.

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Restaurant review, Choptank's Maryland.

The sweet, briny taste of Faidley's bulging crabcake was still fresh on my tongue as we hopped off the train at Penn Station and zoomed downtown to check out Choptank. Located in Baltimore's historic Lexington Market, Faidley's is famous for fabricating that city's best and biggest crabcakes. Choptank, located in the West Village, seeks to give those crabcakes a run for their money, on a menu that focuses primarily on the cuisine of Maryland. One rarely has the opportunity to make a direct comparison between an authentic product and its upstart imitator, so I'd spent a weekend in Baltimore re-familiarizing myself with the local chow before diving into Choptank.

Named after a river that flows into the Chesapeake Bay, the restaurant occupies a double storefront that was once Anita Lo's Bar Q, a place intended as a small-plate Asian-fusion gastropub—which may have been one concept too many. Without moving much around, the U-shaped space has been renovated so that it seems much larger. The sight lines have been opened up, and nautical prints hung on walls painted deep green and yellowing ivory. "This looks like an old men's club," my date murmured as we studied the menu, sitting on high stools at a raised table that our waitress had to stand on tiptoe to reach. And then we set about ordering things we'd just eaten in Baltimore.

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Restaurant review, Hop the Train Out to Tanoreen and Athena Express.

Cheap rents, a population of wildly diverse ethnicity, and some charming storefront architecture has helped Bay Ridge grow into one of the city's foremost dining destinations, so that today you can find well-prepared cuisines as far-flung as Sichuan, Sicilian, Siamese, Syrian, and Spartan. The enhanced speed of the N train—which comes out of Manhattan like a stone from a slingshot—has also fueled this growth, though one has to change for the R at Sunset Park's 59th Street station to complete the trip. The number of Greek restaurants, in particular, has zoomed, so that now Bay Ridge has become better than Astoria if you have a yen for charred octopus and spanakopita (spinach pie). Here's the latest restaurant news from the B.R.

Ten years ago, Tanoreen opened in a small storefront that was mostly cluttered kitchen and glass display cases, with a paltry number of tables in a tight space out up front. The fresh-tasting salads and creamy bread dips made the place an immediate carryout hit, and it soon became one of the city's most respected purveyors of Middle Eastern fare. Very recently, Tanoreen transformed itself into a full-blown restaurant—and a semi-luxurious one, at that. Elegant light fixtures descend from coffered ceilings, while pierced-metal baffles shoot stray beams of light from walls painted desert colors of sand, russet, and ecru.

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Restaurant review, Northern Spy in East Village: The Apple of Their Eye.

Named after a haunting 1940s showtune, the East Village's Old Devil Moon mounted a menu of what might be called "transgressional cuisine"—things that even the most brazen junk-food addict would concede are not particularly good for you, like Cajun nachos and chicken-fried tofu. When Northern Spy replaced it last November, it was as if the Healthy and Sustainable Fairy had descended from a recycled-water cloud, and affected the substitution with a flick of her wand. The new restaurant is aptly named after an upstate apple descended from ancient heirloom stocks. (By contrast, the owners of Braeburn, another "market-driven" establishment, blew it by picking a modern apple from New Zealand.)

Enter the Spy's intimate space and find it, too, transformed from the Devil days: Now it's all tongue-and-groove board, sturdy park benches, antique mirrors, repurposed chairs, and green-blue wallpapers that add a Martha Stewart touch to the décor. Further demonstrating its tendencies, the restaurant features a food market in the rear, where—this beingwinter—your locally sourced choices are restricted to jams and jellies, little tubs of yogurt, granolas, pickles, and caramels made by hand in Brooklyn.

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Restaurant review, Even the Watermelon Gets Pickled at Skovorodka.

The mix of Russian restaurants in Brighton Beach has changed profoundly in the past few years. While the typical establishment was once a giant nightclubby place like the National, where Casio-pounding entertainers in sequins regaled tables of vodka-swigging conspicuous spenders, the landscape today presents a larger variety of choices, from German-inspired beer halls like KeBeer (recently reviewed in these pages) to smaller, family-oriented restaurants that offer big-screen TVs instead of floor shows.
One of the latest family-style places is Skovorodka ("The Skillet"), located in the shadow of the Q train on Brighton Beach Avenue, just steps from the elevated station. While the nightclubs featured a combination of food that might be described as Russian peasant meets old-school haute cuisine (remember that French was the scarf of the czars), the menu at Skovorodka leans more toward regional fare from former Soviet republics, minimizing the importance of cream-heavy retro-French.

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Restaurant review, The Meatball Shop's Hero Worship.

The world has never known a more perfect meatball hero. The bread is a demi-baguette from Il Forno Bakery in the Bronx, crusty without being so tough that the ingredients squirt out the sides. The cheese is excellent fresh mozzarella—not the packaged stuff that masquerades as mozzarella, smothering most of the city's meatball heros like a vengeful heir with a pillow. Chunky and bright red, the sauce has a bit of zip to it, but does not overwhelm the other ingredients. And what about the meatballs? They're of small circumference, beefy, and slightly herbal-tasting.

I acquired this magnificent sandwich at the Meatball Shop, a new restaurant on Stanton Street that does only one thing, but does it very well. While the $9 price tag may seem excessive, especially with a similar-size hero available at every pizza parlor in town for $5 or $6, note that this one comes with a baby spinach salad topped with lemon vinaigrette and thinly sliced apples, transforming your hero into a balanced meal.

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Restaurant review, At Hibino, Start the Presses!

In many ways, Kyoto represents the heart of Japanese cuisine. This city, located 500 kilometers southeast of Tokyo in the Tamba highlands, was the country's capital for a millennium ending in 1868. So when I heard of a restaurant serving Kyoto-style specialties in an obscure corner of Cobble Hill, I was there in a flash. Located opposite Long Island College Hospital on Henry Street, the three-year-old eatery is something of a sleeper—popular among foodies and stroller-pushing families that live in the neighborhood, but little known outside of it. Painted a subdued shade of orange, with soft lighting provided by a series of hanging white globes in perfect alignment, Hibino is so appealing in its austerity that one guest gasped with pleasure as we entered.

The focus of the high-ceilinged room is the sushi bar, with its line of ceremonially garbed itamaes—but conventional sushi is the most forgettable part of a fascinating menu. There are virtually no assortments offered, making a standard sushi and sashimi meal a relatively expensive proposition that requires extra thought to assemble. More interesting is an ancient sushi variation called hako sushi. Developed in nearby Osaka, but still popular in Kyoto, hako sushi predates the nigiri sushi ("finger" sushi) and maki sushi (roll sushi) that form the basis of contemporary sushi meals.

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Restaurant review, Portugal in Jamaica at O Lavrador.

A few blocks south of downtown Jamaica, Queens, lies a miniature Portuguese neighborhood that has managed to remain intact for decades. There's a soccer club, a churrasqueira, and a couple of taverns, set amid truck depots, warehouses, and frame habitations decorated with ornate metal grillwork that might remind you of Lisbon. The neighborhood's anchor is O Lavrador ("The Farmer"), a restaurant dating to 1981 that rivals those found in Newark's Ironbound in fidelity to its Portuguese models. Out front stand spindly trees cocooned in tiny lights, and the façade blazes with signage offering seafood and valet parking.

There are two competing entrances. Through the left, heralded by a sign that traces "Bar" in what look like bullet holes, sporting a gnarled branch as a door pull, find a long, narrow barroom clad in rusticated wood, plastered with TVs tuned to European sporting events. The more handsome door on the right provides ingress to a formal dining room that has all the charm of a mausoleum, attended by waiters in starched waistcoats who sometimes wait for customers that never arrive. By contrast, the convivial barroom is often thronged with homesick Portuguese nationals, travelers who need a cheap belt on the way to JFK, and office workers from downtown Jamaica. They come for drink specials that include $15 ice buckets sprouting five bottles of Portuguese Sagres beer.

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Restaurant review, Arrivederci, Table 8, and Hello Faustina!

Almost a decade ago, I spotted chef Scott Conant in the newly opened Italian Wine Merchants on Union Square. At 29, and still somewhat wet behind the ears despite stints in what seemed like half the Italian kitchens in town, Conant was eagerly trying to persuade wine store partners and hugely successful restaurateurs Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich to visit City Eatery, his first gig as an executive chef. Whether they indulged him or not I never found out, but 10 years later, Scott Conant has become the new Mario Batali.

While the gloomy and expensive-for-the-neighborhood City Eatery soon disappeared, Conant introduced dishes there that were to become staples at his wildly successful L'Impero and Scarpetta, including sumptuous roasted goat and polenta with truffled mushrooms. Now the chef finds himself at a crossroads in his career, and he's clearly chosen a Batalian path, which means helming a restaurant empire of global proportions—and maybe losing his soul in the process. Having opened a Scarpetta in Miami, he currently has projects debuting in Toronto and Las Vegas, just as his East Village restaurant Faustina teeters into existence, like a newborn colt on unsteady legs.

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Restaurant review, Pies-N-Thighs Returns!

Have you ever loved a restaurant that was—how shall we say it?—not quite up to your standards of hygiene? Such was the case with the old Pies-N-Thighs. It crouched behind a down-and-dirty bar across Kent Avenue from the Domino Sugar Factory. The café looked iffy as you entered by a rear door, where you'd see pots and pans, teetering stacks of pies, and dirty plates littering every surface, including the floor. Washing dishes was not their strong suit. Only two entrées were routinely available: fried chicken and pulled pork, the latter done on a barbecue grill in a side yard. You'd place your order with a shudder, then carry the food—which was often quite delicious—into the bar in front.

Yet, in addition to excellent chicken, something about the place struck a romantic chord with diners, evocative of Williamsburg's can-do, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants spirit at the time, and it quickly became one of the neighborhood's most beloved dining establishments. The place was closed by the Department of Health in January 2008, and since then fans have collectively held their breath, fearing that the owners—Sarah Buck, Carolyn Bane, and Erika Geldzahler—would chicken out, and never reopen.

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Restaurant review, Talent Thai's Kitsch Kitchen.

"This place doesn't look very good," exclaimed a veteran member of my dining posse as we crawled into Talent Thai after a hard day's night of gallery hopping across town in Chelsea. Indeed, even the location on the lower slopes of Murray Hill was all wrong for one of the city's best Thais, which usually pop up in places like Elmhurst and Hell's Kitchen. Talent Thai is part of a formidable new restaurant row that has developed on East 34th Street between Second and Third avenues in the past few years, a stretch that also includes a superb Turkish café (Ali Baba) and a crowd-pleasing Peruvian chain rotisserie (Pio Pio).

Talent Thai is deep and narrow, and clad in kitsch: Silvery artificial leaves flutter on deep brown walls, a line of seated Buddhas smile in a niche, and spindly orchids decorate tables so small that, if you order more than one dish per person, you're going to experience some teetering and maybe some spillage. As you wait longer than you should for your food to arrive, you can't help but notice delivery guys sprinting up the center of the restaurant on the way to their bikes outside, seeking the luxury high-rises that ring the site like a deformed sphincter. Never mind: The food on the aggressively pan-Thai menu is worth whatever wait you have to endure.

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Restaurant review, Set Sail for Maima's Pepper Coast.

The West African Republic of Liberia was founded in 1847 by freed American slaves, who named their capital Monrovia, after the fifth U.S. president. Constituting an elite class, their descendants ruled the country until a coup in 1980 threw the country into chaos. After a period of repression and civil war, in which an estimated 200,000 were killed, relative calm ensued in 2003, led by a group called Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace.

Civil wars will be the furthest thing from your mind, though, as you journey down Guy R. Brewer Boulevard, a minor commercial thoroughfare in Jamaica that—with its non-franchise frame storefronts—retains the sort of small-town feel that reminds us that Queens was once a collection of autonomous villages. This pleasant neighborhood north of Baisley Pond has become home to a burgeoning African population, with a Nigerian, a Senegalese, and a Liberian restaurant recently appearing. Located near the intersection of 107th Avenue and Guy Brewer, Maima's is the Liberian place, the only one in town. The sparsely decorated dining room is small and bright, and three steps in the rear lead up to the kitchen where Maima, the cook and matriarch of the establishment, presides.

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Restaurant review, Oil Slick Hits Brooklyn Veggies at Bay Ridge's Casa Calamari.

Step inside Casa Calamari and be blinded by a red-and-green neon squid, sporting a floppy chef's hat and flailing 10 arms. With his crooked smile and pupils of different sizes, it's clear this dude is already fried. After turning away from the misshapen apparition, the second thing you'll notice is the glass shelf above the steam table, which runs the length of this boxy and informal Bay Ridge restaurant. The shelf flaunts a wealth of glistening vegetables. There's an orderly pile of thick asparagus—straight as soldiers at attention—and a helter-skelter stack of portobello mushroom caps. Dotted with cloves of garlic, broccoli rabe is often displayed, as are fat, crumb-spilling baked artichokes and grilled zucchini slices black-striped like prisoners in the movies. You'll see all sorts of salad fixings, too, including hothouse tomatoes, pristine leaves of romano marshaled for Caesar salads, pickled baby artichokes, and brined olives in several earthen shades.

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Restaurant review, Downtown's New Haunt: Kenmare Restaurant.

I often shiver with apprehension when crossing the threshold of the latest overhyped eatery, and Kenmare was no exception. The place is partly owned by Chloë Sevigny's night-clubby brother, Paul—not promising—though the choice of chefs is: Joey Campanaro, whose pedigree includes two hits (Harrison, Little Owl) and one miss (Market Table). Like the name says, the restaurant is located on Kenmare Street, a gritty Lower East Side thoroughfare that takes up where Delancey Street leaves off, then promptly dead-ends into Lafayette Street.

For nearly a century, ending in 2000, the space held Patrissy, an Italian joint that became notorious as a hangout for the staff of EC Comics, who inked Tales From the Crypt and other goth-horror titles in the 1950s, in addition to launching Mad magazine. Indeed, the interior retains a certain sepulchral quality via a vaulted ceiling, arched doorways, dirty-beige stucco, and scary metal sculptures that might remind you of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If you seek out the bathrooms down a darkened hallway in the rear, keep your eyes peeled for things that go bump in the night.

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Restaurant review, Mile End Brings Montreal to Brooklyn.

Mile End could be the poster child for three recent trends in the city's restaurant industry. The first is the increasing popularity of facsimile restaurants—places that go to great pains to pretend they're anywhere but New York. As with Choptank (Baltimore), Hill Country (Lockhart, Texas), Pies-'N'-Thighs (Podunk, North Carolina), and Keste (Naples, Italy), Mile End wants to make you feel like you're in Montreal. Specifically, it drops you in a neighborhood north of the Plateau notorious for its indie rock, hipster boutiques, and historic Jewish quarter, known as Mile End. In fact, our imitation Montreal deli imports its bagels directly from St.-Viateur, the neighborhood's venerable bagel bakery. But more about those later.

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Restaurant review, El Cantinero Proves Tex-Mex Ain't Muerto.

Chile con carne was first introduced to the American public at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair: a bowl of highly spiced beef in a rich red sauce laced with onions and cumin. From that point on, there was no stopping it, and soon chile parlors had sprung up across the country. The dish originated around San Antonio earlier in the 19th century, sold by colorfully dressed women known as chile queens; it constituted the centerpiece of a local style of cooking that eventually became known as Tex-Mex.

The cuisine resulted when immigrants from northern Mexico arrived in Texas, and, not finding all the ingredients they'd been accustomed to, made substitutions. Tortillas were concocted of supermarket flour rather than corn masa, yellow American cheese replaced white queso fresco, and instead of the complicated roster of chilies available to Mexican cooks, the new immigrants often made do with canned jalapeños and serranos. While goat and pig ruled back home, now there was cheap chicken and ground beef galore. As more newcomers arrived, the cuisine evolved, with many of its signature dishes—like fajitas, nachos, and chimichangas—being developed during the mid-20th century.

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Restaurant review, Coney Island Taste Heaps Up the Flavors of Peru.

A carload of friends and I had to flee Sheepshead Bay one Sunday evening like escaped prisoners on the lam. We'd started our expedition with the modest expectation of eating in one of the Turkish seafood joints that line the bay's concrete bathtub. What we discovered when we arrived—and saw crowds of diners milling in front of every restaurant—was that not only was it Mother's Day, but Victory Day as well, when Russians commemorate vanquishing the Nazis. Double jinx!

But hope loomed on the horizon. We jumped back into the sputtering Volvo and sped toward Coney Island Avenue, one of the city's best incubators of ethnically diverse eats. After side-winding down Avenue U, we hit the CIA (as its admirers call it) and immediately spotted a few unfamiliar new places: a Peruvian bodega, a Turkish gyro shop, and an Uzbekistani restaurant with lace curtains, which we feared would also be subject to the Mother's-Victory whammy.

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Restaurant review, Halikarnas and Marmaris Make It Turkey Day in Brooklyn.

Named after an ugly fish with almost-human teeth once caught by colonial English anglers, Sheepshead Bay has long been the city's capital of cheap seafood. But where once ruled Italian clam bars (of which Randazzo's remains the last holdout), the margin of the bay sandwiched between Coney Island and the Brooklyn mainland is now filled with Greek, Turkish, and Chinese seafood spots, all offering prices about half of what you'd expect to pay in Manhattan.

Roll-N-Roaster once marked the eastern end of this restaurant row, but now the strip is creeping further eastward, with Turkish, Ukrainian, and Italian restaurants extending the strip by several more blocks. The Turks seem to be the most aggressive, with two competing saltwater spots. My crew and I set about contrasting these on consecutive weekends. The first was Halikarnas, named after a humongous outdoor disco in Bodrum, on Turkey's southwest coast.

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Restaurant review, The Commodore in Williamsburg Helps You Drink Like Your Dad.

'Hey, this looks like my dad's rec room," said my date, scanning the darkened premises as we entered the Commodore. "Danish modern hanging lamps and padded bar stools with backs, beamed ceiling, a circular booth in the corner, and a bar as long as the basement would allow," she continued, cheerfully ticking off the common attributes. The Commodore doesn't look like much from the outside, either, resembling the kind of signless corner bar where the patronage is confined to regulars and you may find your welcome colder than the beer.

But the Commodore is yet another of Williamsburg's theme restaurants, and a pretty good one at that—though the theme is as muddled as the mint in one of the bar's juleps. The name suggests a nautical motif, but that's confined to the cocktail menu, which looks to mixed drinks of the past for inspiration. Jesus, they're strong! In crude line drawings, these cocktails are depicted on a placemat with the ingredients scrupulously listed beneath, as if the mayor himself had demanded it. There's the self-titled Commodore, an achingly sweet piña colada with Amaretto poured on top. (The placemat calls the liqueur a "float," but it's more of a "sink.") At the opposite end of the sugary spectrum, find the Boat Drink—a hyper-dry concoction of dark rum and soda, with just a dash of lime juice.

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Restaurant review, Cascabel Taqueria Brings Fine Food and Distant Bathrooms to the Upper East Side.

America's foremost Mexican chef resides, not in New York or L.A., but in Chicago. Author of celebrated cookbooks, host of several PBS series, and upset winner of Top Chef Masters Season One, Rick Bayless has finally become a familiar name. His restaurants are enormously successful in translating south-of-the-border gastronomy into both bistro and fine-dining idioms, making use of Mexico's vast catalog of herbs and chilies in a way that Midwesterners can enjoy—which means light on the chile heat, but heavy on flavor, while sticking with plebeian ingredients.

Unfortunately, Bayless has no restaurant here. Sure, New York has long had its ambitious, pan-regional Mexican restaurants—Pompano and the Rosa Mexicano chain come to mind—but none succeeded in matching Bayless's Windy City moves, instead erring by making their menus too effete and refined. Now, though, an Upper East Side newcomer has gotten it just right.

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Restaurant review, Brazil and Nepal Hook Up at Katmandu Spice.

It's the quintessential New York buddy story: Two friends from Woodside—one Brazilian, one Nepalese—decided to open a restaurant. But they squabbled over what to serve: One loved the grilled steaks and coconut-milk-laced stews of his South American homeland; the other adored the meat jerkies and outsize dumplings of Nepal. So against the advice of others, they decided to fuse both cuisines in a single restaurant, and Katmandu Spice was born. It may be the only Brazilian-Nepalese restaurant in the world.

Though a mere two blocks from the 7-train stop at 61st Street and Roosevelt Avenue, the place is a bit difficult to find, since you have to dogleg left on Woodside Avenue through a pocket park filled with children of more ethnicities than can easily be identified. The restaurant façade is dominated by a concrete wheelchair ramp leading into a wide, shallow dining room clad in lacquered woods, with little in the way of embellishment except a Buddha head in a niche. As it happened, one of the friends moved back to Brazil, leaving the other guy in charge, hence the Asian vibe. Quite gloriously, the tall windows swing open, making you feel like you're dining outdoors—so sit by a window if you can.

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Restaurant review, Momokawa Shares the Taste of Kyoto With Manhattan.

A few weeks ago, I was blown away by Hibino, a Japanese restaurant in Cobble Hill specializing in the food of Kyoto, a city 200 miles west of Tokyo with its own venerable micro-cuisine. Soon after, a Japanese friend told me it wasn't the only such place in town: Another Kyoto joint called Momokawa opened a year ago on the outskirts of Curry Hill.

The restaurant has been jiggered into two floors of a sagging townhouse, so that you have to make your way through a narrow hallway to reach a tight spiral staircase that ascends to the dining room. Emerging on the second floor like a newborn babe, you'll see four booths along one wall, which can become semi-private by rolling down rattan shades above them. A few tables overlook the street, and several seats line an L-shaped bar. That's the extent of the place.

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Restaurant review, A-Wah Serves Up Pot in Chinatown.

Those who think of Hong Kong restaurants as grandiose, glitzy, chandeliered rooms, reached mainly by escalator—where the menu flaunts nearly every Chinese dish you've ever heard of, but emphasizes pricey seafood—will be pleasantly surprised by A-Wah. This tiny place lurks just off Confucius Square on Catherine Street, with the ducks hanging in the window suggesting it's just another of the rice shops that line the neighborhood. But persevere down the hallway, past prep areas and a gas-fired brazier, and take an abrupt left turn, and you'll find yourself in a bright, plainish room whose only notable decoration is green-checked tablecloths that might have been selected by a colorblind Italian restaurateur—but where are the candles in Chianti bottles?

As you eagerly scan the extensive, fold-out menu—while Chinese karaoke videos flicker soundlessly overhead—you'll detect several themes. One of the most arresting is the borrowings from Japanese cuisine. Thus, a bowl of bright green edamame is the spitting image of one you might get in the East Village, except the price ($1.50) is a fraction of what you'd expect to pay. Steamed and glossed with sesame oil, a haystack of iceberg lettuce comes splattered with a chunky fermented miso called fu yu ($3.95). Though it sounds dodgy, the dish is mind-bogglingly good. Eel can be had in a rice casserole done two ways: the first steamed with Chinese vegetables, turning the fish rubbery and crumpled; the second, in the Japanese-style, coming out salty, greasy, and perfectly prone. The menu identifies the latter by the Nipponese name of "unagi."

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Restaurant review, Buka Serves Up the Slimy Sauces and Goat Heads of Nigeria.

Located in Clinton Hill, Buka ("Eating House") is a new Nigerian restaurant on Fulton Street, but it certainly isn't the first—there's been a constant national presence on the thoroughfare going back 30 years, to the aftermath of that country's oil boom and subsequent economic bust. While the presence has been mainly limited to shipping companies, art galleries, and boutiques selling West African togs, in the '80s there was a place called the Demu Café a few blocks west in Fort Greene, with a menu hilariously mixing bagels and fufu (white yam pounded to an elastic consistency).

Buka's premises are deep and high-ceilinged. There's a lounge up front with a comfy couch and bar, where a recently conferred liquor license makes Buka one of the few West African restaurants in town serving alcohol (most West African restaurants are run by observant Muslims). A narrow hallway leads past a kitchen to the rear dining room, which is sparsely decorated and contains only 10 tables despite its prodigious acreage; if you're tired of cramped restaurants, this is your place. The sole diner as we arrived was a woman eating fufu and stew, but later a group of 10 boisterous men in colorful caftans settled down to a leisurely and convivial meal.

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Restaurant review, Plein Sud Plain Sucks.

Ever been to a place where the food knocks your eyes out, but when you taste it—blech! Such was the case at Plein Sud, a new French restaurant at the corner of Chambers Street and West Broadway attached to the ritzy new Smyth Hotel.

Take Plein Sud's pissaladière ($13), for example. An oblong flatbread of impressive dimensions, it arrived criss-crossed with shiny anchovies and punctuated with oily black olives, while the traditional focus of this Provençal tart—caramelized onions—was relegated to the backseat. Nevertheless, my date and I could barely contain our enthusiasm as we commenced to hack the shimmering flatbread into pieces. Alas, the moment knife hit pie, we knew something was terribly wrong. The bread was thick and dry, more mealy than flaky, and when we took a bite, the anchovies displayed a jaw-aching sweetness that made the whole thing slightly repulsive.

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Restaurant review, I Sodi Charms With Its Authentic Tuscan Fare.

"Tuscan" must be the most abused term in the gastro-lexicon. Originally, it referred to the cuisine of a Central Italian region where a limited number of emphatically local ingredients were used to create limited collections of antipasti, primi, and secondi for three-course meals that varied from town to town, but always maintained the same themes: olive-oil-glossed veggies plucked directly from the fields, cured pork products, pungent pecorino cheeses, fresh and dried pastas in arrestingly simple sauces, and wood-roasted meats, with nary a can of tomatoes or package of frozen vegetables in sight.

As proto-foodies returned from Tuscany, skewed imitations appeared here, often encompassing things like pizza and pesto that were alien to the region. Eventually, "Tuscan" became a buzzword for nearly any kind of Italian cooking that could be accomplished with plain ingredients and facile preparation, including invented dishes believed to share similar characteristics. As a final stage, the term was applied to mass-produced breads and canned cat food.

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Restaurant review, Hong Kong Restaurants Spread to Brooklyn and Queens.

For more than a century, Cantonese was the Chinese food New Yorkers ate, first in the four streets of Manhattan's original Chinatown, but gradually spreading to every corner of the city. In the past two decades, restaurants from other parts of China have muscled in—featuring recipes from Shanghai, Fujian, Xi'an, Chaozhou, Taiwan, Dongbei, and Sichuan. Often flaunting more complex and pungent flavors, the fare of these other regions came to squeeze out plainer Cantonese in the city's Chinatowns, while neighborhood carry-outs experienced a similar decline as Thai and pan-Asian cooking styles became more popular.

But in the past few years, Cantonese has been reborn as its more sophisticated and urbane cousin, Hong Kong cuisine. The startlingly diverse menu is rooted in an elegant take on Cantonese, emphasizing big-ticket seafood and a flavoring scheme that depends upon scallions, ginger, garlic, dried sea creatures, and a greater variety of soy sauces. While the original "H.K." restaurants were kitschy palaces, with red-eyed dragons spewing neon fire, more modest cafés such as A-Wah have appeared, recently reviewed in these pages. Like their Cantonese brethren before them, Hong Kong restaurants are now fanning out across the city, as immigrants escape crowded Chinatowns and move to more commodious and upscale neighborhoods, principally in Brooklyn and Queens.

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Restaurant review, Aria, Pinkerton, and Enoteca on Court Bring Different Things to the Table.

The past decade has seen an unprecedented growth in the number of wine bars, so that currently, Yelp counts 524 in the city. For an owner, the appeal is obvious: It's a restaurant category in which the emphasis is always on alcohol instead of food, offering a chance for pirate-like mark-ups on bottles that often run three to four times the retail price (restaurateurs pay half that). Moreover, the food can be perfunctory, often limited to cheeses, charcuterie, and bread—which can be prepared on a single counter with a sharp knife, with or without a chef.

Certain neighborhoods—such as the West Village, Williamsburg, and Carroll Gardens—have become riddled with wine bars. While some provide carefully focused wine lists with clever and delicious accompaniments, too many have lists haphazardly slapped together, alongside no-effort collections of viands. I decided to check out three new establishments in the neighborhoods mentioned above, to see where the genre is headed.

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Restaurant review, Testaccio Tackles the Taste of Rome.

As with other great food cities—Paris, say, or Hong Kong—Rome's most profound gastronomic triumphs often lie buried, like ancient ruins, beneath a welter of dishes imported from other regions of the country, and other parts of the world. Sure you can get great pizza, pesto, caponata, and even shish kebabs and sushi in the Eternal City, but what is the real essence of its cooking?

Testaccio seeks to answer that question. This newish Italian lurks in Long Island City, just off the first stop on the 7 train. Billing itself as a modern Roman trattoria, the place takes its name from a neighborhood in southern Rome anchored by Monte Testaccio, a mountain composed of garbage left by the ancient Romans, the site of innumerable archaeological digs. More recently, the neighborhood has been home to a working-class population famous for its nightclubs, butcher shops, and restaurants specializing in some of the city's funkier meat delights.

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Restaurant review, Lu Xiang Yuan Serves Some Tasty Astroturf.

In the past two years, restaurants from China's northeast region—adjacent to the Yellow Sea, across from Korea—have been flooding South Flushing along Main Street and Kissena Boulevard. Counter Culture has covered three so far, but not the newest: Lu Xiang Yuan. As with M&T Restaurant, the proprietors come from Qingdao, Shandong, a coastal city of 8 million that was the site of a German concession (mini-colony) from 1897 to 1914. During this period, the Germania Brewery was founded, where Tsingdao beer is still manufactured today. The city was later occupied by the Japanese, then the Americans, and is now bristling with Korean factories, a history that makes for a potent mix of culinary influences.

The logo of the restaurant is the Xiaoqingdao ("Little Qingdao") Light, a famous beacon erected by the Germans more than a century ago. Inside, the place looks like any modern Chinese restaurant, with ornate paper fans spread on the walls, and strings of orange lanterns dangling from the ceiling. In addition to the food we've come to expect from this fascinating region (lots of lamb and beef, virtually no rice, unusual seafood, and plenty of yams and pumpkins), there are some dazzling oddities on Lu Xiang Yuan's menu.

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Restaurant review, Bab al Yemen Wields Daggers and Cauldrons.

For years, the city's limited collection of restaurants serving the food of Yemen has been confined to the corner of Court and Atlantic streets in Cobble Hill, where the current count is three. Imagine my surprise when a journalist friend texted me about a new one he'd stumbled on four miles south in Bay Ridge. While the older Yemenis are bare-bones operations, offering a small but shifting catalog of dishes each day, the new place, called Bab al Yemen, makes everything on its sizeable menu, providing our most comprehensive take on the national cuisine to date.
The interior is far more sumptuous, too. Large, colorful paintings of the Bab al Yemen (a 1,000-year-old gate in the city walls of Sana'a, the nation's capital) are installed in dye-cut metal frames, part of a metallic theme that also includes hanging lanterns and wall-mounted sconces, along with ornate trays and tea services. Seating is in a well-windowed front room, with further tables along a hallway leading to the kitchen. These back booths are outfitted with curtains, so that the most observant Muslim families may eat with a modicum of modesty.

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Restaurant review, Strong Place May Be the Perfect Postmodern Bistro.

A decade ago, Manhattan's romantic little French bistros withered away, like lardons left too long in the frying pan. But now the institution has been reborn in Brooklyn, at places like No. 7, Buttermilk Channel, General Greene, and the Vanderbilt, though with a menu more attuned to contemporary tastes. The definition remains nearly the same as when the bistro first appeared in 19th-century Paris—a small, comfortable café doing a predictable range of tried-and-true recipes, with an unexpected dish or two thrown in. Also in common with the Parisian originals, our new bistros are relatively affordable, wedged into quirky spaces, and helmed by chefs who can be seen laboring in the kitchen, rather than roaming the countryside seeking TV deals or opening new restaurants in Vegas.

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