Restaurant review, The Joy of Smoking.

Even modest restaurants need a thematic gimmick these days, and the trick at Char No. 4 is smoke. The smoke in question isn’t fiery or billowing; it’s smoke of a more subtle and ultimately satisfying kind. You smell it as soon as you walk into the clean, utilitarian space, which opened not long ago among the jumble of storefronts along Smith Street in Carroll Gardens. In accordance with the now-sacred David Chang template, the room consists of a long polished-wood bar up front, a series of utilitarian dining booths in the back, and not much else. Smoky bourbons are the house specialty (the restaurant’s name refers to a term for fire-treating whiskey casks), and there’s a wall of bottles behind the bar, culled from the restaurant’s impressive 300-plus bottle collection. But the centerpiece is the state-of-the-art smoker in the basement, which informs many of the recipes on the modest, artful menu and fills the joint with comforting traces of applewood and oak.

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Restaurant review, Don’t Call It a Fish Shack.

In the rough-and-tumble, caste-bound world of restaurant kitchens, different jobs tend to attract different personalities. Sauciers are supposed to be secretive and mercurial, pastry chefs are persnickety, grill men are famously aggressive and verbose. And then there are the lordly seafood chefs, a delicate band of aesthetes, famous for their snooty, hypersensitive attention to ingredients and cooking technique. April Bloomfield, who made her New York reputation serving up elegant, two-fisted gastropub recipes at the popular West Village restaurant-bar the Spotted Pig, doesn’t seem to fit into the classic seafood-snob mold. Her most popular dish at the Spotted Pig is a giant Roquefort-smothered cheeseburger. As an acolyte of the great “nose-to-tail” London chef Fergus Henderson, she has a fondness for offal specialties like grilled beef tongue and crispy pig’s ear spritzed with lemon and capers. She serves chicken livers, too, and plenty of bacon, and has a happy English penchant for drowning her recipes in flagons of melted butter and country cream.

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Restaurant review, Hot Number.

In restaurant land, like everywhere else, there’s a quirky, unfathomable quality to the wisdom of crowds. Some places never get off the ground, some take off after one good review, and some are popular the minute they open their doors. 10 Downing, which opened a couple of months ago in an angular corner space on lower Sixth Avenue, appears to be one of the lucky ones. Possibly it’s the Euro-accented name, which also happens to be the restaurant’s address. Or maybe it’s the carefully contrived downtown vibe, which includes a Damien Hirst poster in the bathroom and lots of jumbled artifacts on the walls, among them a pair of entwined antlers and a lush landscape photo of somewhere in Mexico. Even though the place has no hard- liquor license, the patrons were three deep at the bar, waiting for their tables, when I dropped by a few weeks back. On a recent Friday evening, the party was still more or less in full swing, even with the city sunk in its deep recessionary gloom. One of 10 Downing’s proprietors used to run a buzzy Village bistro called Le Zoo, among other establishments, so they know a little bit about the delicate alchemy that goes into creating a trendy restaurant. It helps to have an eye for real estate (10 Downing is across the street from Da Silvano; Le Zoo used to occupy the space that now houses the Spotted Pig), an energetic publicist (the food blogosphere has been chronicling the oft-delayed project for months), and the services of a chef who cooks the kind of food that even the most addled hipster might actually wish to eat. The person they’ve chosen for this challenging job is a talented though star-crossed young cook named Jason Neroni, who made his reputation creating inventive, high-wire recipes at the prominent Lower East Side restaurant 71 Clinton, then almost ruined it in a murky, much-blogged-about dispute with the owner of a now-defunct restaurant in Brooklyn.

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Restaurant review, High on Shang.

Sushi snobs have their Masa, rotund Italians have Mario and Mike White, and the Greenmarket aristocrats have Dan Barber, Thomas Keller, and the ubiquitous Tom Colicchio. So you can forgive certain members of the city’s long-suffering, increasingly cranky band of Chinese-food nuts for treating Susur Lee, who landed in our midst a couple of months ago from Canada by way of Hong Kong, as that most elusive and longed-for New York food demigod: the Chinese superstar chef. And Lee, who runs two successful restaurants in Toronto, has certainly embraced the role with gusto. He has chiseled, telegenic Bruce Lee features and a long warrior’s ponytail. He’s enlisted the services of an aggressive PR agent (“the Nobu of Toronto” is the phrase I heard), has at least one glossy cookbook to his credit, and has made numerous celebrity-chef TV appearances, including an epic encounter on Iron Chef America (the theme was pork), where he fought the mighty Bobby Flay to a draw.

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Restaurant review, A Lower Bar.

Not so long ago, dinner at the bar was a kind of in-house secret among the restaurant-obsessed. You didn’t need a reservation when you ate at the bar, and the meal was often more streamlined and intimate than at a regular table. Sometimes you met other quirky, like-minded characters at the bar who told tall tales about their Runyonesque lives and gave you menu tips. If you didn’t feel like talking to anyone, you had a frosty martini for company or an inky glass of Bordeaux, and instead of communing with chatty guests or intrusive waiters you communed directly with your food. Of course, bar dining isn’t anyone’s secret anymore. Danny Meyer was the first serious restaurateur in the city to popularize the habit in lofty gourmet circles, and more recently, chefs like Joël Robuchon and David Chang have taken the classic Japanese-bar-restaurant model and turned it into a full-blown international fad.

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Restaurant review, Get Serious.

Is David on set?” asks the lady with the grape-size earrings as a crowd of us mingle uneasily by the coat check, in the narrow mosh pit of a bar space at Fishtail, David Burke’s new seafood restaurant on East 62nd Street. Burke isn’t “on set,” as it happens, but all around us the chef’s trademark Willy Wonka flamboyance is on full display. The downstairs bar area is stuffed with purple banquettes and the walls are patterned with white, wavy ridges like the belly of a whale. Upstairs, the walls are adorned with oil paintings of psychedelic fish, and nattily dressed waiters bustle between the tables, hoisting toppling “Fishtail Towers” heaped with stone-crab claws from Florida and oysters from Yakima Bay. The tables are packed with antic couples from Jersey and round-faced gentlemen with deep Florida suntans, and the din in the joint is so loud that one of the bedazzled downtowners at my table compared it to “a grenade going off in the basement of Barneys.”

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Restaurant review, Humble As an Apple.

Not so very long ago, new restaurant rollouts in this town were conceived along the lines of Colin Powell’s famous doctrine for military engagement: If you’re going to fight, use overwhelming force. Restaurateurs shocked diners with giant, spangled rooms, awed them with inventive culinary techniques executed by imperious superstar chefs, then pummeled them into submission with a multitude of menu choices and highly sugared cocktail drinks. But these days, with the city’s upmarket restaurant community tucked in a protective crouch, culinary entrepreneurs have something more elemental in mind. At all levels, glitz and grandeur have been replaced by simplicity and economy. Neighborliness and congeniality are in, and destination dining is out. Your goal, if you’re crazy enough to open a new restaurant in the midst of this economic tsunami, isn’t to dazzle, distract, or even entertain. It’s to cut your costs as much as possible, provide a soothing bunker of comfort for your customers, and, above all else, survive.

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Restaurant review, A Lower Bar.

As any blog-obsessed restaurant geek worth his gourmet salt can tell you, the hallowed Michelin-guide star-rating system works as follows: Three stars denote “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey”; two stars “excellent cooking, and worth a detour”; and one star “a very good restaurant in its category.” But as tastes change and the economic downturn continues its rampage through restaurant land, the notion of “exceptional cuisine” continues to shift before our eyes. While bourgeois burger joints and glorified noodle bars proliferate around town, old-line “three-star” restaurants are coming under increasing pressure from diners who either don’t want to eat their “exceptional” brand of cuisine anymore or can’t afford to pay for it. If Michelin retains its lofty, increasingly outdated standards in this age of culinary deflation, soon there won’t be any stars to dispense at all.

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Restaurant review, Sol Brother.

Gaudy revivals may work on Broadway, but they’re a hazardous proposition in restaurant land. Just ask the poor souls who put their dollars behind the star-crossed attempt to resuscitate the Russian Tea Room a couple of years ago. But if you are going to reprise a restaurant from the city’s dashing culinary past, you could do a lot worse than Joe Baum’s fabulous, Mad Men–era, three-martini-lunch spot, La Fonda del Sol. The original restaurant opened on the ground floor of the Time-Life Building in 1960, shortly after Baum had rolled out his famous over-the-top flop, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, and his great masterpiece, The Four Seasons. Baum was the inventor of the theme restaurant, and La Fonda’s theme was Latin America (the name means “Inn of the Sun”), complete with a blue-tiled bar; tall, decorative, custom-made sangria pitchers; and special La Fonda swivel chairs, built for the room’s designer, Alexander Girard, by his colleagues Charles and Ray Eames. “It was like having lunch at a New York version of the Fontainebleau,” said one of my nostalgic guests as we examined the new incarnation of La Fonda del Sol, which opened a couple of months ago in a dark little corner of the Met Life Building, near the western entrance to Grand Central.

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Restaurant review, Godzilla Returns.

Those of you with an appreciation for the quirky anthropology of New York City restaurants will remember, with a quiet shudder, the invasion of the boisterous Japanese Godzilla restaurants during the first half of this decade. These giant, big-box establishments (Matsuri, Megu, EN Japanese Brasserie, to name just a few) blossomed around town during the peak of the Bull Market Bubble. They featured herds of shouting waiters, great barn-size dining rooms, and menus rich with luxurious expense-account delicacies, like fatty tuna belly and Kobe beef flecked with gold leaf. These days, most of the Godzilla-size joints are still functioning, but, like the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous era, they are in a period of existential crisis. They are beset by hordes of smaller, more nimble competitors. Expense accounts have withered away. Health-conscious big-city gourmands no longer eat mercury-laden sushi by the boatload. And, most ominous of all, the simple cheeseburger has replaced Kobe beef as the city’s totemic food.

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Restaurant review, Not Just Another Wine Bar.

A tale of two lower East Sides unfolded recently on the corner of Allen and Delancey Streets. It all began four months ago, when two twentysomethings recently sprung from cooking school and inspired by a jaunt through the Italian countryside opened Sorella, a stylish Piedmontese wine bar with a façade that rivals Momofuku Ko in its studied inscrutability. Then, earlier this month, Sorella’s venerable neighbor, the cheap-eats mecca Fried Dumpling, shut its doors for good. Social critics and dumpling devotees might link these two events, forging some socio-culinary moral about the evils of gentrification, but the Underground Gourmet—no stranger to the greasy charms of five-for-a-dollar pork-and-chive potstickers—is a bit more conflicted. For one thing, although the loss of a good dumpling dive is a cause for concern, there is a small measure of comfort in the fact that commensurate deals can be had in the vicinity—including Fried Dumpling’s own sister establishment on Mosco Street. For another, we’ve become too attached to the distinctive appeal of Sorella to hold its conspicuous elegance and culinary refinement against it.

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Restaurant review, McNally’s Minetta.

Clamorous fake-speakeasy joints have been all the rage since Graydon Carter and his friends opened their semi-private West Village dining club, the Waverly Inn, on the corner of Waverly and Bank two years ago. Pricey, lavishly sourced gourmet hamburgers have been proliferating on menus around town for much longer than that. But as in any other fashion-obsessed industry, trends in the restaurant world don’t officially become part of the mainstream Zeitgeist until certain tastemakers come along and put their stamp on them. Enter Keith McNally, the man who made distant neighborhoods like Tribeca (the Odeon), Soho (Balthazar), and the meatpacking district (Pastis) safe for the dining masses, and unleashed upon the city a plague of a million ersatz brasseries, which continues to this day. Like all ambitious businessmen, McNally misfires now and then, but he has a genius for gathering disparate notions and designs from the collective ether, distilling them down to their essences, then reconstituting them for his loyal public, in a professional, popular, often palatable way.

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Restaurant review, Swimming Against the Tide.

During these dark and tenuous times, there are certain qualities in a new restaurant that all but guarantee sparsely filled dining rooms, skimpy profits, and inevitable doom. Location is one, especially when the establishment in question is on the ground floor of a lonely townhouse building, next to a deserted parking lot, on a bleak stretch of sidewalk above the Holland Tunnel entrance. In this age of a cheeseburger on every menu and hyper-ecoconscious dining, building your restaurant around ambitious high-end seafood dishes is also a high-risk proposition. Intricate emulsions and archaic, formerly trendy foams interspersed with not one but two amuse and intermezzo courses is another dubious, potentially fatal, idea. And in an era when bars are replacing tables, and the most fashionable new restaurants tend to resemble bomb shelters, classically trained waiters sporting silk vests are still another possible kiss of death—not to mention the presence, in the front of the house, of a bow-tie-wearing maître d’ who speaks with a refined French accent.

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Restaurant review, Not Your Father’s Wiener Schnitzel.

The great economic hurricane of ’08 (and ’09) has caused all sorts of well-documented havoc in the restaurant world. Grand old dining institutions have been consumed in the whirlwind, and countless chefs, waiters, and barkeeps have been tossed out of work. But every cloud, as the song goes, must have a silver lining, and if you’ve had a couple of nickels to scrape together to buy a decent restaurant meal in the last few months, you may have noticed a subtle, not altogether unpleasant, change in the air. The price of a good cheeseburger has skyrocketed, but just about everything else on menus around town is demonstrably cheaper. Formerly snippy “reservationists” are now oozing false charm over the telephone, and once snooty maître d’s have dropped their icy veneers. The glitzy, oversize, Vegas model of the go-go years has been swept away in favor of a more intimate, less pompous style of dining, and the insufferable chatter of hedge-fund wine geeks and their jewel-encrusted wives coming from the next banquette has mercifully ceased.

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Restaurant review, Parched on the Pampas.

How do you feel about dinner without drinks?” That’s the burning question on the lips of patrons of a number of new, mostly Brooklyn-based restaurants ever since a recent State Liquor Authority crackdown on unsanctioned BYO, and it’s worth noting the steps these innocent victims are taking to deal with the Draconian law. Take, for instance, a recently observed party of three at Williamsburg’s six-month-old El Almacén. These resourceful revelers would slip out of the restaurant, two at a time, amble over to Acqua Santa across the street (or, more accurately, to Acqua Santa’s bar), quickly toss back a refreshing tipple, and stagger back. But not all of El Almacén’s customers are driven to between-course booze runs. The rustic Argentine restaurant already has enough going for it culinarily to hold the attention of the Underground Gourmet—not one to teetotal at mealtime—even before the arrival of an impending beer-and-wine license.

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Restaurant review, The Restaurant of Tomorrow.

Some (okay, most) talented chefs announce themselves with grandiose bluster. Others ghost under the radar for years, attended by whispers of greatness. George Mendes, whose long-awaited restaurant, Aldea, opened last month in the Flatiron district, is one of the New York restaurant world’s more storied ghosts. The Portuguese-American chef (Aldea is a riff on “village” in Portuguese) has worked with an impressive array of divas around the globe (Alain Ducasse, Kurt Gutenbrunner, and David Bouley, to name a few). His own restaurant, however, is small, stylishly modest, and characteristically muted. The double-height, blond-wood-paneled space is set with chairs covered in plush white and blue leather, and the view of the outside world is filtered by a façade of white-striped glass. The room is luminously lit and partitioned with sheets of more glass, which make it feel intimate and also worldly, like a boutique tapas bar in some hidden modish section of Barcelona.

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Restaurant review, Out of Place.

Aspiring chefs who arrive in New York with dreams of fame and fortune tend to plot their paths to greatness in one of two ways. Most slink into town anonymously, at a relatively young age, and work their way up the greasy kitchen pole, from commis to sous-chef to restaurant chef to superstar. Then there are those poor deluded souls who attempt to ride into the city from the provinces in mid-career, with their reputations preceding them and all guns blazing. The second path, as out-of-town chefs from Alain Ducasse (from the province of Paris) to Gordon Ramsay (from the province of London) have discovered, is infinitely more precarious. New Yorkers used to blindly worship chefs from far away, but not anymore. Nowadays, we prefer to anoint humble artisans (David Chang, April Bloomfield) who have slaved for suitable periods of time in anonymous kitchens around town. Conversely, we take an almost perverse delight in trashing out-of-town cooks and their lofty out-of-town reputations.

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Restaurant review, Seafood Imperial.

The urge toward empire is common to business titans and tin-pot potentates, but it’s a relatively recent phenomenon among chefs. Prior to Jean-Georges, Mario, and the rest of the preening super-chefs of the recently concluded go-go years, great cooks rarely opened more than two restaurants in a lifetime, and usually both were in the same town. During the boom, however, culinary moguls expanded their brands with a kind of lunatic zeal. They popped up on TV shows, spanned the globe in private jets, and lent their names to crackpot, overleveraged projects in Vegas and Dubai. Now, of course, many of these chefs’ empires are under duress. Some have quietly folded their far-flung outposts, while others’ operations are teetering perilously close to collapse. The next generation of chefs, meanwhile, have retreated meekly back to the kitchen, where their ambitions don’t extend much beyond cultivating new cheeseburger recipes and keeping their restaurants open from month to month.

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Restaurant review, Verde Delicious.

Opening a successful big-money restaurant in this finicky town has always been a dark, mercurial art. But these days, with the economy being buffeted by hazardous downdrafts and popular tastes changing at warp speed, the process can be downright perilous. Just ask that grizzled veteran of the New York dining scene, Robert De Niro. This past year, he and a group of constantly revolving partners have, at great cost and frustration, opened (and in one case, closed) two vastly different styles of Italian restaurant in the same corner space of the new Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca. The first was the New York outlet of a traditional, upmarket Italian joint favored by the movie glitterati in West Hollywood called Ago. The waiters wore white shirts with vests, like bartenders in an elderly Vegas hotel. The menu was an antique assemblage of pricey, tediously familiar entrées (greasy veal Milanese, wrinkled disks of eggplant Parmesan) and tired red-sauce ragùs. The room was designed to inspire grandeur but felt vacant and bland, possibly because, as the acid reviews rolled in, nobody was ever there. Ten months after it opened, the starchy waiters were sent packing and Ago mercifully disappeared.

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Restaurant review, Hummus of Champions.

Amazing—some might say sad—the way today’s elite athletes are turning into food snobs. If you saw the so-called “Sports Sunday” section in the Times the other day, you know what we mean. On page one: an on-the-road piece about a chef for a Tour de France team from Colorado. Inside, an account of Los Angeles Angel Vladimir Guerrero’s mother, who, on game days, cooks Dominican for her son the gastronome and his fussy colleagues. And that’s not all: Another mouthwatering story, entitled “From Israel to the NBA, but Missing the Hummus,” told the tale of six-foot-nine, 225-pound Omri Casspi, the first Israeli to play in the NBA, who, although excited to join the Sacramento Kings, wondered whether moving to the United States would mean he might starve to death. “[Good] Hoom-us,” he said, when asked what he’d miss most about leaving Tel Aviv. “You don’t have that here.”

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Restaurant review, Sub-Primate.

Dyspeptic, world-weary critics who dine out night after night, year after year (and, God help us, decade after decade), develop certain unfortunate habits. One is to regale their helplessly trapped, mutely attentive guests with endless gasbag tales about how they’ve seen and devoured everything under the culinary sun. But on one of my early visits to Graydon Carter’s new renovation of the old Monkey Bar, I had to admit to my assembled (and mutely attentive) guests that here was something entirely new. Halfway through our undistinguished, though intermittently entertaining meal, we asked one of the waiters whether that was, in fact, the designer Tom Ford promenading through the tightly packed tables in an impeccably black Tom Ford suit. “I’m not supposed to say,” the waiter whispered, before explaining, with a conspiratorial grin, that the front-room staff at Mr. Carter’s restaurant had been asked to sign confidentiality agreements when taking their jobs.

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Restaurants reviews, Daniel Goes Downtown.

These people are definitely not from the neighborhood,” one of the weary old fressers at my table observed, as we sat down to dinner at Daniel Boulud’s boisterous new restaurant, DBGB Kitchen and Bar, which opened a couple of months ago on the Bowery. The neighborhood in question used to be called skid row, of course, but those days are long gone. Boulud’s latest experiment in downmarket dining (the name is a ham-fisted play on the vanished Bowery punk institution CBGB) occupies the ground floor of a new residential building made of steel and glass. Its long, glittery façade is etched with random quotes from erudite foodies through the ages (Hemingway, Samuel Johnson, Proust), as are the mirrored walls of the front “tavern” room, which was routinely jammed, on the evenings I dropped by, with groups of antic food-magazine editors and flush-faced bank interns gobbling fancy hot dogs and eagerly swigging flagons of artisanal Belgian beer.

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Restaurant review, Above Standard.

It’s always been fashionable to compare restaurants to theater. After all, every establishment has a cast (the chef, the wait staff, the patrons) and an intricately designed, carefully lit stage (the dining room). The meal unfolds in three acts (appetizer, entrée, dessert), often with a musical score playing in the background, and the price of admission, when drinks have been included, often exceeds that of a Broadway show. But in reality, a successful restaurant is less like a stage production than an old-fashioned factory. The kitchen is a processing plant that takes in raw ingredients, fashions them into a product, then pushes that product out the other side. The front of the house is a showroom (yes, your friendly waiter is a salesman), designed to move the maximum number of customers through in the minimum amount of time. The trick is to make this prosaic, bottom-line business seem like entertainment. To pull this off in a small setting is harder than it looks. To do it night after night, on a grand, industrial scale, is as close to Broadway, in restaurant land, as you’re likely to get.

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Restaurant review, A Mighty Muffuletta.

If the notion of New York bar food keeps changing, it’s because New York bars do, too. Take, for instance, Fort Defiance, the newly opened (and multihyphenated) café–bar–soda fountain–home away from home in Red Hook, currently firing on all cylinders except maybe their gas-line connection, a stumbling block that occasioned their temporary closing last week. It’s not that the place, named for a Revolutionary War fort, has an identity crisis. Modest and inviting, with a smattering of tables and front windows flung open to the street, it seems most of all to want to be a neighborhood social center, and it provides the food and drink to facilitate that role at any hour. At 8 a.m., that means Counter Culture coffee individually ground and brewed on a drip bar and pastries culled from local bakeries. At lunch, there’s a short sandwich and salad menu, plus homemade sodas starring a bracingly fizzy house-carbonated seltzer that the blackboard menu justifiably touts as “the best in Brooklyn.” At night, despite the presence of a substantial grazing menu, the place tends to be treated like a bar, thanks to the high quality of the drinks and the pedigree of the owner and bartender, St. John Frizell, who honed his craft at Pegu Club and the Good Fork.

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Restaurant review, Back to the Boom.

For months now, reports of a mysterious retro dining palace have been floating uptown from Wall Street, like rumors of a lost world. Intrepid restaurant anthropologists who made the trek downtown returned with tales of vanished wonders, like caviar spoons carved from mother-of-pearl, and miniature crêpes decked with fluttering flags of gold leaf. There were exotic, rarely glimpsed ingredients on the menu (urfa spice, wilted tetragonia, galangal gelée), and not one but two towering glass wine displays filled with the kind of conspicuous boom-era vintages people can no longer afford to drink. The place took its weird, tongue-twisting name (“It sounds Mongolian,” someone told me) from a mysterious chef no one had ever heard of and who is reputed to be a master of the kind of ancient, half-forgotten French and Asian-fusion techniques that haven’t been seen in this burger-ravaged metropolis since the glory days of Nobu and Jean Georges.

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Restaurant review, Great No More.

Charlie Palmer occupies a special place in the first generation of boom-era superstar chefs (Larry Forgione, Charlie Trotter, David Bouley) who began migrating from their kitchens into the popular consciousness during the eighties and early nineties. Like them, he’s authored several glossy cookbooks. Like them, he’s run his share of seminal “New American cuisine” kitchens, including the River Café (where he followed Forgione) and his first restaurant, Aureole, which opened in 1988, in an ornate townhouse on East 61st Street, to rave reviews. But his pioneering skill over the years has been in the realm of branding and marketing. Palmer was a TV regular before the Food Network ever existed. He was among the first chefs to strike it rich in Vegas (Aureole Las Vegas opened in 1999), and to cash in on the upmarket-steakhouse craze (he has chophouses in Washington, D.C., Reno, and Vegas). Today, his sprawling, surprisingly durable empire encompasses thirteen restaurants (including a fish restaurant in Reno and a wine boutique in Napa), and if you can scrape together enough cash to dine on a luxury cruise line, he’s a consultant to one of those.

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Restaurant review, A Refuge for the Plutocracy.

This place feels very Bernie Madoff to me,” said my wife, as we scanned the intimate little room at Caravaggio, which opened not long ago among the lonely art galleries and half-empty boutiques just off Madison Avenue in the Seventies. There were plumes of bread sticks at the linen-topped tables and little bread baskets made of woven silver. The loquacious maître d’ looked as if he’d suddenly appeared from a semi-grand restaurant in Milan (“Yes, it’s true, I’ve been married five times”), as did the portly gourmand next to us, who was carrying a gold-tipped cane and wearing a handkerchief stuffed in his breast pocket. The graying, still-moneyed crowd sniffed white truffles shaved over plates of buttered fettuccine ($130, or $65 for an appetizer portion) and poured their big Tuscan wines from glass decanters. They wore spangled blouses and stiff corporate suits, and everyone in the brightly lit room seemed to know one another, including a gentleman in the corner who looked suspiciously like the governor of New Jersey.

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Restaurant review, Distant Kinship.

If I see another decorative pickle jar, I might go insane,” I muttered (then dutifully tweeted) to no one in particular, while cooling my heels before dinner at the buzzy new West Village bistro Joseph Leonard. Like countless buzzy downtown restaurants these days, the snug, candlelit room was filled with all sorts of carefully procured down-home knickknacks. There were Mason jars placed on the distressed farm-style tables and along the pewter-topped bar (and filled with actual pickles), and old hardcovers stacked along the walls. Faded photo portraits were hung here and there on the white brick (“They’re the investors’ grandparents,” the bartender confided), as were assorted antique mirrors fuzzed with age. The checkered napkins looked as if they’d been cut from old tablecloths (they hadn’t), and the mismatched flatware seemed rummaged from assorted flea markets up and down the eastern seaboard (it had).

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Restaurant review, Shack Attack.

Bill’s, in case you’re not up on the current burger chronicles, is the latest restaurant from serial gastropreneur Stephen Hanson, and if you believe the fervent food-blog reports, it’s the best thing to happen to freshly ground beef since the Kraft Single. Occupying the old Hog Pit space, Bill’s comprises a nondescript front barroom with high tables and a view into the frenzied kitchen, and a back dining area with an exposed-brick and checked-tablecloth décor in the cozy P. J. Clarke’s mold. Service is conspicuously pleasant and mostly attentive, and the mainstream, mellow vibe seems calculated to appeal to gurgling tots, their indulgent parents, and the precinct’s rowdier-as-the-night-progresses bar-hoppers alike.

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Restaurant review, Hello, Columbus.

At last, a return to proper eating,” declared the Weary Omnivore at my table, as we sat down to dinner at A Voce Columbus, which opened not long ago in that extravagant midtown food court known as the Time Warner Center. I’d been dragging the Weary Omnivore all over town recently on my increasingly grim gastronomic rounds. He’d covered his ears in clamorous basement speakeasies, wandered the empty streets of Bushwick in search of the perfect pizza crust, and nibbled pieces of overhyped fried chicken in countless obsessively underdecorated rooms. But here, overlooking Columbus Circle, there was a tentative, ineffable sense of order being restored. The room was elegant without being showy, and intimate without feeling too small. The menu was moderately priced (only two entrées over $30), but filled with interesting-sounding things to eat. “I don’t see any cheeseburgers,” whispered the Weary Omnivore, as he scanned the document in quiet amazement.

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Restaurant review, Sea Change.

It wasn’t so long ago that assorted gasbag food pundits and jaded old-media restaurant critics were confidently pronouncing the death of the high-end fish restaurant in Manhattan. And why not? The $25 lobster roll replaced caviar as the city’s gourmet seafood dish of choice years ago. And with expense accounts imploding faster than global fishing stocks, who wants to pay half a day’s wages for a taste of blue marlin, say, flown in via jumbo jet from the coast of Peru? Plenty of people, apparently. In fact, new big-ticket seafood palaces have been popping up at an alarming rate all over town. David Burke has Fishtail on the Upper East Side. Jeffrey Chodorow just opened Ed’s Chowder House near Lincoln Center. And over the protests of a few lonely critics (like me), Marea, Michael White’s extravagantly expensive, highly stylized Italian seafood palace, continues to draw hordes of rhapsodic diners in midtown.

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Restaurant review, So Hip It Hurts.

Tony May’s San Domenico restaurant, which closed last year after a long, respectable run on Central Park South, was a stately place designed to feed 150 or so clubby, well-heeled patrons at a sitting. But its radically modernized successor, SD26, which opened not long ago off Madison Square Park, has clearly been designed, somewhat self-consciously, with a younger, more fickle generation of eaters in mind. The waiters at the old joint wore white jackets with gold buttons. At SD26, they’re dressed in postmodernist outfits with Nehru collars. The old wine list was set between thick leather covers, in the traditional style. At SD26, it comes embedded, for the benefit of tech-savvy oenophiles, in a kind of handheld, PSP-like touchscreen device. The old room was decorated in lustrous tones of scarlet and gold. The new one has a darkened, disco-style wine-and-cocktail bar in the front, and what appear to be giant decorative balls of wool strung, more or less randomly, across the dining room ceiling and walls.

Mercifully, however, the chef running the large whitewashed kitchen at SD26 (the salumeria station alone is the size of a small bus) is Odette Fada, whose cooking won her a loyal following at the old San Domenico uptown. Which means once you’ve oriented yourself in the cavernous, bizarrely impersonal dining room and puzzled your way through the tortuous new menu (organized according to food products, like “Salumeria,” “Vegetables and Salads,” and “Meat, Poultry, and Game,” instead of the usual progression from appetizers to entrées), you’ll find some very good things to eat. I’m thinking of glistening ribbons of lardo served on wedges of fresh bread (from the excellent salumeria section), and a classic Sicilian caponata folded with pine nuts and segments of melting Japanese eggplant. Panzanella is a rough country dish, but in Fada’s hands it’s transformed into a kind of savory pastry, made with a round of finely mashed bread soaked in the juice of fresh tomatoes, with strips of silvery anchovies on top.

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Restaurant review, Mexican, Unmasked.

As any West Coast taco lunatic will tell you, New York’s Mexican food is not the city’s strongest culinary selling point. Still, it’s never been that hard to find a fast and tasty fix on any of the tortilla-griddling corridors, from Spanish Harlem to Sunset Park. And lately, in fact, makeshift taquerias have been springing up everywhere: on carts and trucks of varying degrees of hipness and authenticity, ensconced in the back of nondescript bodegas, tucked inside tortilla factories in the industrial outer-borough wilds, even down in Dumbo at the Brooklyn Flea, where one self-proclaimed Choncho (“fat guy”) has been stuffing fried cod into tortillas made fresh daily in an artisanal Corona tortilleria (see here).

The taco boomlet might not yet threaten the burger craze, the fried-chicken frenzy, or the pizza explosion, but it is big enough to birth an entertaining subgenre: the Mexican-wrestling-themed taqueria. Lucha libre, as the “sport” is called, is something like the WWE, only with masks, a lot more finesse, and a kitschy motion-picture tradition that extends way beyond the Jack Black vehicle, Nacho Libre. It’s a national pastime and a cottage industry, and, as of this fall, it’s the decorative inspiration behind two new taco joints.

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Restaurant review, In With the Old.

If you’re one of those sad, obsessive souls who spend their evenings wandering the city from one hot new restaurant to the next, the Great Bust of the late aughts was, in certain respects, a golden time. Prices were down all over town, formerly imperious waiters turned suitably groveling, and if you wanted a decent table at an exclusive restaurant, you were usually in luck. But there have been signs recently that this halcyon era is coming to an end. Downtown demigods like David Chang and April Bloomfield are opening ambitious new ventures farther uptown (Má Pêche, in the Chambers Hotel, and the Breslin, at the Ace), and for the first time in years, Danny Meyer is rolling out an ambitious upscale restaurant (Maialino, in the Gramercy Park Hotel) instead of a burger joint. And when I called to book a table at Le Caprice, the new high-end bistro at the Pierre, the uninterested voice on the other end of the line informed me that their tables were booked for the week. “What about next week?” I asked plaintively. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the voice. “That’s full up, too.”

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Restaurant review, Danny Does Rome.

Except for one errant uptown restaurant and a proliferating number of highly profitable burger stands, the parameters of Danny Meyer’s culinary Yoknapatawpha County are well known. Its physical borders run ten blocks or so around the epicenter of Danny Land, which is the Union Square Greenmarket and his original flagship establishment, the Union Square Cafe. Its interior terroir is, if anything, even more well defined. In a Danny Meyer restaurant, you will find a casual “tavern” area up front designed primarily for eating instead of drinking. Once at your table, you will be swarmed by platoons of solicitous, well-drilled waiters dressed in cheerfully colored cotton button-down shirts and a standard-issue Danny Land bistro apron. Your menu will be laced with sophistication in a comforting, user-friendly way, and no matter what kind of food you order (Indian at Tabla, haute cuisine at Eleven Madison Park, haute barnyard at Gramercy Tavern), dinner will proceed without a hitch, inside a cocoon humming with the proprietor’s almost ruthlessly efficient brand of hospitality.

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Restaurant review, Diet Someplace Else.

As we march, wearily, into the new decade, assorted gastro-bloggers, tweetheads, and old-line culinary gasbags like me have been dutifully pontificating on the future of posh big-city dining in this post-boom era of comfort-food madness and general thrift. But if you want to glimpse firsthand how the obsessions of the old-school food world have shifted from four-star soufflés to a more elemental style of cooking, do what I did the other day and take one of your classically attuned food-snob friends to April Bloomfield’s latest gastro-grub outlet, the Breslin Bar & Dining Room. Braised beef shins appear on Bloomfield’s menu, as do many trendy, predictably heart-stopping iterations of pig, including a fried trotter the size of a small canoe. But the dish my friend focused her refined palate on was the headcheese (a.k.a. skull meat), which Bloomfield fries in little bonbon-size nuggets. She popped one in her mouth and savored it for a time in rapturous, even priestly silence. “You can tell it’s good,” she said, “because it tastes like sweat.”

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Restaurant review, Somewhere South of Great.

Where’s the fried chicken?” one of the portly, southern-fried-food freaks at my table asked as we squinted at the menu of the amiable Chelsea restaurant, Tipsy Parson, which has been open for a couple of months now, among the jumble of storefronts on Ninth Avenue. There were no crispy fried pig tails on the menu either (although for a time the kitchen did serve fried turkey tails), and unlike other southern-themed establishments that have sprouted up in the midst of the city’s well-publicized fried-chicken boom (Brooklyn Star, the Redhead), there was a curious lightness to the décor. Silk tassels hung from the ceiling fans, and the windows were adorned with cushioned seats and carefully sewn striped pillows. Elegant, antebellum bric-a-brac was scattered here and there (julep cups, tiny porcelain dogs, a riding helmet), and as another of my portly friends discovered to his horror, the tidy unisex bathroom was heavily perfumed and decorated with painted white peonies.

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Restaurant review, Off Wright.

Restaurants have always been self-conscious, if erratic, showplaces for art and design, but every few years, it seems, someone has the bright idea to take this equation and stand it on its head. There’s the Modern, Danny Meyer’s upscale operation at MoMA, of course, and many primly respectable cafés have sprung up in similarly artsy venues (Sotheby’s, the Neue Gallerie, the Met) over the last decade. Now, with big donors becoming more and more scarce, and arts budgets tightening, a new wave of museums have taken the plunge into the murky world of food and entertainment. Two months ago, the Guggenheim opened a fancy little canteen called the Wright (after Frank Lloyd), which serves lunch five days a week and an elaborate dinner menu on three nights. And if you take the elevator to the top floor of the monolithic new Museum of Arts and Design, on Columbus Circle, you will find Robert, a restaurant that has a piano bar, a lavish cocktail list, and a glittering, million-dollar view of the sort you’d find at the top of a hotel in Vegas.

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Restaurant review, Off the Farm.

If the careers of prominent chefs can be divided into epochal stages, like the careers of playwrights, or metal bands, or ego-mad painters, then this recently ended decade was an eventful time for Tom Colicchio. First came his formative “Apprentice” period, which culminated when he became partner and executive chef at Danny Meyer’s Gramercy Tavern. Then came the breakout “Craft” period during the early aughts, when Colicchio opened his first trailblazing restaurant (he now has eight), published his first glossy cookbook (he now has four), and began to establish what many righteous Greenmarket chefs secretly crave in this multiplatform era: a formidable national brand. The Craft period was succeeded, in dizzying succession, by the “Spinoff” period (Craft begat Craftbar, which begat a slew of baby ’wichcrafts), the Go-Go “Vegas” period (a grandiose Craftsteak opened in Vegas in ’02, followed by a second giant steak joint in the meatpacking district in ’06), and the Hollywood “Celebrity” period, which began with the first season of Top Chef, four years ago, and continues to this day.

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Restaurant review, Two-Fisted.

Saltie and Cheeky may sound like the headliners of some downtown burlesque show, or maybe Snow White’s eighth and ninth dwarves. In fact, they’re two new sandwich shops, a category that’s experiencing almost unchecked growth in these recessionary times. These two, though, stand out from the pack, mostly because they deliver something distinctive and delicious, in modest surroundings that are still imbued with their owners’ personality and passion.

First, Saltie. The space is white with blue trim, sleekly nautical, and lined with a handful of pointy stools uncomfortable enough to discourage undue lingering. But luxury isn’t the point. The joint effort of three seasoned alums of Diner and Marlow & Sons, the ultracasual spot was designed to be an escape of sorts from the daily restaurant grind. But its owners couldn’t forsake their refined tastes and creative impulses. So they bake all their own bread, source top-notch ingredients seasonally and locally, and construct signature combinations you won’t find anywhere else. Attempts at culinary categorization are futile, but if we had to give it a shot, we’d sum it up like this: Mediterranean-inflected, a little Indian, pickled, herby, a bit messy, with heavy veggie tendencies and a few blatant Britishisms, including Eccles cake and a first-rate pork pie.

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Restaurant review, Faustian Italian.

High-profile hotels have been showplaces for ambitious cooking ever since Auguste Escoffier and César Ritz made their famous pact back in the 1890s. But as a new wave of restaurateurs (April Bloomfield, Danny Meyer, and David Chang, to name just a few) are discovering, there are Faustian aspects to this age-old bargain. Yes, you get plenty of free exposure for your new project, along with a semi-prominent location and address. If you’re lucky, you also get a hefty cut in rent (no small lure these days) and a sizable, built-in clientele who are looking for a convenient, respectable place to eat. On the other hand, you may find yourself orchestrating hundreds of room-service breakfasts every morning, the way Bloomfield and her staff at the Breslin do in the Ace Hotel. Your built-in clientele may be slightly stodgier than the riotous crowds who fill the hopping little bandbox restaurants downtown (hello, Mr. Chang), and the room you’re stuck with may be awkwardly laid out in all sorts of clumsy, unforeseen ways (see the Breslin, again, or L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon at the Four Seasons).

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Restaurant review, Let Them Eat Cassoulet.

For a certain subset of wistful, French-leaning gourmands, bistro remains one of the most durable, comforting words in the restaurant language. It conjures images of convivial carriage-house quarters with steamy windowpanes and country stews cooked in tiny backroom kitchens. At a spare little space down on Hudson Street, two seasoned—and, I’m guessing, slightly wistful—restaurant veterans, Maryann Terillo (formerly of Jarnac) and Elisa Sarno (formerly of Babbo), are attempting to re-create this old world once again. They call their restaurant Bistro de la Gare, after Terillo’s vanished West Village café where they worked together in the eighties. Their narrow railroad space has fifteen tables and a five-seat bar where you can chill bottles of wine brought in from the liquor store around the corner (the restaurant’s currently BYOB, but the wine-and-beer license should arrive in a few weeks). There are familiar, earthy preparations on the menu, like duck rillettes, and an appropriately bulky cassoulet served in an earthen crock as heavy and round as a cannonball.

We’ve seen this show many times before, of course, and like a classic, old opera, its pleasure isn’t in the content necessarily. It is in the neighborly scale, the ritualized pace of the proceedings, and, if you’re lucky, the modest price of the show. This bistro (the menu’s stated theme is “Mediterranean,” which means a French-bistro format mingled with hints of Italy) isn’t exactly cheap, however. On one of my early visits, $9 bought a small tuft of mesclun salad, and for $3 more you could get a smattering of seafood (mussels, ribbons of squid, a shrimp or two) thrown into a tangle of frisée. The duck rillettes ($10) come in a thimble-size cup but are redeemed by their unctuous, country- style flavor. So were the fat, fresh scallops ($14 for two), which the kitchen sears, then tosses with sherry vinegar and shreds of black garlic, and perches atop a little mountain of fava beans.

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Restaurant review, The Gastropub Goes Scottish.

So tell me about your skink soup,” I heard myself say to the London-born waiter, who was gamely sporting a tartan tie. All around me at the Highlands, a self-consciously styled “Scottish gastropub” in the West Village, I imagined, bemused New Yorkers were asking the same question. And why not? At theme destinations like this, everyone’s happy to play the role of tourist for an hour or two. The wallpaper in the snug little dining room (which not so long ago housed an experimental restaurant called P*ong) was patterned with giant pink grouse, like in the bridal suite of a not very grand Scottish bed-and-breakfast. A stag’s head was nailed to the barroom wall. And here and there, youthful, shiny-cheeked pub crawlers were perched on stools, swirling glasses of the prodigious (and prodigiously priced) house selection of blended whiskeys and single malts with evocative, tongue-twisting names like Pittyvaich and Auchentoshan.

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Restaurant review, Jean-Georges Hits Replay.

Do I hear the yapping of a small dog?” asked my mother, in quiet horror, as we settled into the pink dining chairs at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s posh new restaurant in the Mark Hotel off Madison Avenue. In Paris, it’s the custom, in certain swank precincts, to dine with your tiny dog on your lap, and in spirit, of course, we weren’t far from Paris at all. I don’t know exactly what it was my mother heard (there were no dogs in sight), but all around us the ladies of the neighborhood were picking at their salads and their properly flattened portions of chicken paillard. Many sported glittering brooches on their lapels and carefully tended thousand-dollar hairdos (the Frédéric Fekkai salon is upstairs). The menus at Vongerichten’s new uptown venture are also decorated in pink, as is much of the space, which includes a pinkish bar area (graced with squat cowhide disco chairs) and a pinkish dining room, the back of which is set under a glass skylight, like the atrium of a mid-level Parisian hotel.

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Restaurant review, Locavorism Grows Up.

Imperious superstar chefs tend to present themselves as pristine magicians, floating above the messy day-to-day fray of restaurant life. But if you think the gods of classical cooking are immune to the fickle winds of gimmickry and fashion, you’d be wrong. Jacques Pépin famously worked as a tastemaker for Howard Johnson’s; Paul Bocuse was an early proponent of the microwave oven; and it was Daniel Boulud, of course, who invented the haute hamburger. During the course of his illustrious and hyperkinetic career, however, no one has tried his hand at more gimmicks than Jean-Georges Vongerichten. The great Alsatian chef is famous for fusing Asian flavors with the classical tradition (at Vong, originally). He has dabbled in Vegas steakhouses (Prime Steakhouse), Southeast Asian street food (Spice Market), and dim-sum parlors (66). In deference to the comfort-food craze, his West Village restaurant, Perry St, now serves fried chicken for brunch, and if you have an appetite for overpriced Japanese food, Jean-Georges has a restaurant for that, too (Matsugen).

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Restaurant review, Pizza à la McNally.

I feel like I’m in the front row at a U2 concert,” hollered one of my guests as we sat pinned, more or less helplessly, in our stools at the crowded bar of Keith McNally’s boisterous new restaurant, Pulino’s Bar and Pizzeria, down on the Bowery. It was a Friday evening, and all around us hell was very loudly breaking loose. Assorted downtown nabobs (indie-movie moguls, neighborhood tattoo artists, bewhiskered male models) jostled for possession of their drinks among hordes of freshly scrubbed bankers and one or two dazed-looking thrill-seekers from the fine-dining hinterlands uptown. Out in the dining-room scrum, waiters squeezed between rows of tables filled with loud parties of Euro-swells and assorted food bloggers furtively taking pictures of the biscuit-thin, weirdly ovoid house pizza pies. McNally himself presided over one of the tables by the door in a blue cardigan, and although it was early in the evening, a restless crowd was already milling around on the sidewalk, eager to join the party.

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Restaurant review, Supper or Club?

It’s an old parlor-game question among those of us who spend too much time cogitating on the elusive qualities that go into the making of a successful New York restaurant: Can a talented chef overcome the curse of a perpetually doomed piece of real estate? Lately, the answer would seem to be yes. David Chang runs his impressive empire out of a series of previously forlorn storefronts in the East Village, after all, and all over Brooklyn (and elsewhere), ambitious young cooks are turning abandoned, tumbledown venues into restaurant destinations at an alarming rate. But in the quirky world of edible Manhattan, the myth of the haunted, destined-to-die space still survives. Some locations are cursed by an irredeemably grim internal feng shui (no windows, stunted ceilings, etc.), others by a tragic location (avoid busy stretches of avenues and the undersides of major bridges), a hopeless neighborhood (even Chang hasn’t opened yet on the Upper West Side), or simply the unquiet spirits of failed establishments that came before them.

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Restaurant review, An Asian Phoenix.

In restaurants, as in everything else, the aughts were a time of rampant gold-rush expansion, when a rabble of talented cooks (Boulud, Jean-Georges, Colicchio, Batali) stampeded over the fine-dining landscape, expanding their brands (restaurants, books, TV shows) in a kind of mad frenzy. It was a time, for many chefs, fraught with temptation and peril. Just ask Anita Lo, who opened her original flagship restaurant, Annisa, in a small, garage-size space down on Barrow Street exactly a decade ago. After making her name there, Lo attempted to expand her brand in all sorts of fashionable ways. She opened a dumpling chain, Rickshaw Dumpling Bar, with mixed success, appeared on the requisite cooking shows (Iron Chef, Top Chef Masters), and attempted to capitalize on the David Chang–induced Asian-barbecue craze with a West Village restaurant called Bar Q that closed, despite favorable reviews, less than a year after it opened. Then, last July, in a freak nighttime electrical fire, Annisa burned down, leaving Lo back more or less where she began.

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Restaurant review, Chang Heads North.

Like wild honey, great wines, and prize Iberian hogs, world-class chefs tend to have their own distinctive terroir. Antonin Carême’s ornate creations were a product of Napoleon’s imperial Paris. Thomas Keller is a Napa Valley chef, not a New York one, and despite his recent attempts to peddle burgers and hot dogs downtown, Daniel Boulud will always be a creature of the Upper East Side. Then there’s David Chang, who perhaps more than any notable chef of the past ten years has cultivated his own idiosyncratic, highly local sense of style and taste. Since the original Momofuku Noodle Bar opened six years ago in the East Village, his empire has grown by only two restaurants and expanded just four blocks. In Chang country, the best seats are at the bar, the gourmet dish is pork belly, not filet mignon, and dinner has a decided downtown quality to it—a sense, as you slurp your noodles and devour your pork buns, that you’re involved in the local culinary equivalent of a midnight rave.

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Restaurant review, Bad Kitty.

The chef and co-owner of the new West Village scene restaurant the Lion is John DeLucie, who made his reputation at the Waverly Inn, the place where the nouveau-speakeasy restaurant model first entered the collective food consciousness. That formula has since been expanded (at the Monkey Bar, among other places) and more or less perfected (by Keith McNally at Minetta Tavern), and at this point its components are clear. The entrance to your establishment must be unmarked or have a stoic doorman posted outside (at the Lion, it’s both). There should be no reservations, or you should have to grovel to obtain them (“We only have tables at 5:30 and 10:30, sir” is the mantra I heard whenever I tried to book a table at the Lion). And never, ever, underestimate the importance of a dungeonlike lounge area–slash–Siberia. This limbo, where a rabble of assorted frumps and arrivistes congregate, sets the tone for the evening, and helps give your main (and, one hopes, celebrity-stocked) dining room its crucial sense of occasion and, of course, heat.

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