Restaurant review, Kittery Brings a Taste of the Beach to Carroll Gardens.

Many New Yorkers cherish memories of New England seacoast vacations. And a visit to a lobster pound, clam shack, or oyster bar poised by the water or on a dock is often one of those favorite sensory snapshots. The food isn't complicated—fried or boiled seafood, french fries, mayonnaisey coleslaw—but the taste is enhanced by the proximity of lapping waves and the smell of surf, and it provides a lasting lesson in the virtues of plainness and freshness.
While the city has always had its seafood palaces such as the Grand Central Oyster Bar, and homegrown clam shacks like Randazzo's in Sheepshead Bay, it wasn't until Pearl Oyster Bar opened in Greenwich Village in 1997 that an approximation of the intimate seaside spot became a trope of modern urban restaurateuring. It was followed by perhaps two dozen other places—and soon you could get a lobster roll from a café, truck, or food event in many New York neighborhoods.

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Restaurant review, Café Cluny Chooses a Surprising New Chef.

No place better displays the quirky charm of West Village architecture than Café Cluny. Connected by a narrow passageway, the dining rooms are at slightly different elevations, the stamped-tin ceiling rises and falls like a wave, and the place is suffused with parchment-colored evening light. On every wall taxonomic specimens are displayed: an array of electric-blue butterflies here, a series of odd fish there, with fern fronds splayed serenely in between. It's as if your great-great-aunt—the one who worked for National Geographic and went on assignment to Borneo and the Arctic—had just left the room.

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Restaurant review, Mediterranean Diet at Kopiaste Taverna.

If Turkey were a skull facing west, the island of Cyprus would be tucked well under its chin, a scant 60 miles off both the Turkish and Syrian coasts. A sizable portion of the Cypriot population is Turkish, but the majority is of ancient-Greek descent, and the two ethnicities have been going at it for centuries. Control of the island now seems beyond the reach of any single government, yet this apparently intractable schism has led to quite the opposite effect when it comes to food: Cypriot cuisine represents a mellow merging of both Attic and Anatolian, producing a delectable hybrid.

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Restaurant review, A Little Francophone Corner at Cole's Greenwich Village.

For 30 years this space hummed along as Café de Bruxelles, occupying a West Village building shaped like a wedge of brie. Back then, the interior was stark white, decorated with jagged Constructivist artworks. Lace curtains hung in the windows, allowing customers at the bar to see a filmy version of passersby while downing a Duvel and savoring what was the restaurant's most profound contribution to the neighborhood: the city's best french fries. Served with homemade aioli and not quite crisp, they glistened in a shiny metal cone lined with white filter paper. The restaurant probably sold more of those wonderful fries than all the rest of the menu combined.

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Restaurant review, Williamsburg's Sweet Chick Revives an Iconic Harlem Favorite.

Fried chicken and waffles seem like an odd pairing, as if somebody were trying to cram dinner and breakfast into a single meal. Which is just how it originated in the late 1940s at Wells' Restaurant in Harlem. At this celebrated wee-hours hang for jazz musicians after their gigs, jam sessions were inevitable, but a bigger challenge was deciding what to eat. It was too late for supper and too early for breakfast, so the hepcats and hangers-on decided to chow down on chicken and waffles as a best-of-both-worlds compromise. The dish soon embedded itself in the popular imagination, spawning imitators as far away as Los Angeles.

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Restaurant reviews, Saiguette Tells A Tale of Two Soups.

While New York has hardly been racing to close the pho gap, we are slowly catching up. Where in the U.S. are there better examples of this Vietnamese street-food staple? Well, Houston, New Orleans, Atlantic City, Falls Church (Virginia), and California's Silicon Valley, to name just a few locales. All have pho of startling quality, better than anything here. Last year, I reported on a game-changing example found at Sao Mai in the East Village, but more recently stumbled on another great version in the Manhattan Valley, at a carryout called Saiguette.

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Restaurant review, From Brooklyn to Bayona and Back Again.

If the Underground Gourmet were to suddenly lose his mind and open a restaurant, the first thing he’d do is post an ad on Craigslist, which seems to be the trick to unearthing superb kitchen talent these days. It worked at Tía Pol. And it’s what brought chef Paul Williams, fresh off a long cooking stint in New Orleans, to the stove at Sweetwater, the Williamsburg punk bar turned cozily lived-in gastropub. Williams’s arrival hasn’t garnered as much notice as when the bar first became a restaurant a year ago with a different chef and owners. But he’s started making a distinctive culinary statement with a big, brawny, butter-crazed style informed in part by his Big Easy gigs at Bayona and Lilette, and in part by his Brooklyn childhood. There’s a bit of Bay Ridge in the saffron rice balls, or arancini, but unlike the supersize specimens dehydrating under heat lamps at your average slice joint, these are built for human consumption, stuffed with provolone and set adrift in a delicious sausage-and-mushroom ragout. Potato gnocchi are lavished with butter, Parmesan, and a touch of truffle oil.

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Restaurant review, Seasonal, Effective.

The doctrine of seasonal correctness is as ingrained in the collective restaurant psyche, these days, as linen napkins, pre-dinner cocktails, and superfluous baskets of bread. Modern big-city diners expect a bounty of ramps on their early springtime menus, sweet peas and shellfish in summertime, and plenty of hand-foraged mushrooms and humanely slaughtered pork products in the fall. Now the owners of the newish establishment Park Avenue Autumn have taken these fashionable orthodoxies and turned them into a uniquely kitschy, singularly New York experience. Their restaurant (which was originally the Park Avenue Café) isn’t a restaurant in the usual monochromatic way. It’s a kind of revolving, seasonal diorama, replete with menus that change every three months or so, rotating waitstaff outfits (although the waiters themselves remain more or less the same), and even a changing décor, courtesy of the fashionable downtown restaurant-design firm AvroKO.

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Restaurant review, The New West.

Restaurants are as susceptible to fashion as anything else in this fashion-obsessed city, although news of the latest trends tends to reach some parts of town slower than others. This is famously true of the Upper West Side, of course, which is to the more stylish downtown dining precincts of New York what Canada’s vast, ice-bound Yukon Territory is to, say, Montreal. In recent years, however, practiced downtown chefs like Tom Valenti (Ouest) and Didier Virot (Aix) have had success peddling their versions of trendy cooking in this formerly stark environment.

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Restaurant review, Uptown Downtown.

The Lower East Side has been a restaurant destination for nearly a decade now, which is more than enough time for a region to develop its own unique sense of dining “terroir.” These days, I’ve noticed, many of the fashionable restaurants in the neighborhood are decorated like private Edwardian smoking rooms. There are dark oil paintings on the walls and shelves of literary books scattered here and there. Candles supplement the lighting in the dim tenement spaces, and you might even see a stuffed animal or two, in imitation of the famous stuffed-animal displays at the popular, seminally scruffy Lower East Side restaurant Freemans. Bartenders aren’t bartenders anymore; they’re “mixologists” who specialize in retro cocktails like the Manhattan and the gin rickey. The menus are filled with retro items, too (sliders, pork terrines, curry soups served British Ye Olde style), although chances are that your dinner will be perambulated to the table by at least one food runner wearing a nose ring.

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Restaurant review, The New West.

Restaurants are as susceptible to fashion as anything else in this fashion-obsessed city, although news of the latest trends tends to reach some parts of town slower than others. This is famously true of the Upper West Side, of course, which is to the more stylish downtown dining precincts of New York what Canada’s vast, ice-bound Yukon Territory is to, say, Montreal. In recent years, however, practiced downtown chefs like Tom Valenti (Ouest) and Didier Virot (Aix) have had success peddling their versions of trendy cooking in this formerly stark environment.

Now comes Bill Telepan, whose eponymous restaurant opened several weeks ago on a quiet stretch of West 69th Street. Telepan, who made his reputation at the once-popular and now-defunct JUdson Grill in midtown, turns out to be an avowed Greenmarketeer, which means Upper West Siders, at long last, can enjoy the kind of preciously highbrow seasonal cooking that has been on display for several years now at fashionable downtown establishments like Blue Hill and Craft.

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Restaurant review, Uptown Downtown.

The Lower East Side has been a restaurant destination for nearly a decade now, which is more than enough time for a region to develop its own unique sense of dining “terroir.” These days, I’ve noticed, many of the fashionable restaurants in the neighborhood are decorated like private Edwardian smoking rooms. There are dark oil paintings on the walls and shelves of literary books scattered here and there. Candles supplement the lighting in the dim tenement spaces, and you might even see a stuffed animal or two, in imitation of the famous stuffed-animal displays at the popular, seminally scruffy Lower East Side restaurant Freemans. Bartenders aren’t bartenders anymore; they’re “mixologists” who specialize in retro cocktails like the Manhattan and the gin rickey. The menus are filled with retro items, too (sliders, pork terrines, curry soups served British Ye Olde style), although chances are that your dinner will be perambulated to the table by at least one food runner wearing a nose ring.

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Restaurant review, Baroque Italian.

After working his way through a few of Fabio Trabocchi’s ornate compositions on the new menu at Fiamma, the high-end showpiece of Steve Hanson’s vast and profitable restaurant empire, one of the voluble gastronomes at my table put down his fork and knife and made the following grave declaration. “I consider this to be a French restaurant,” he said. A few years ago, that might have been high praise, even for an Italian joint like Fiamma. Not anymore. As Alain Ducasse and Gordon Ramsay have learned, New York has become a fickle place for out-of-town, Eurocentric chefs peddling really expensive meals. In this era of artisanal purity, the appetite for showy auteur cooking has declined, especially among younger, well-heeled diners. A good farm-raised pork chop is the new haute dish of choice (replacing filet mignon), and no one wants to wear jackets to dinner the way their parents did. French is a watchword for the busy, the excessive, the needlessly baroque.

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Restaurant review, Building a Better Coffee Bar.

A year and a half ago, when the Underground Gourmet adapted this magazine’s five-star restaurant-rating system to our own purposes (eating every inexpensive thing in sight) and applied said stars to various falafel shacks, taco carts, and pizza joints, the thought of ranking coffee bars never crossed our minds. And for good reason: How do you review a coffee bar? Or rather, why would you? Although the Joes, the Jacks, the Ninth Street Espressos, the Gimme!s, and the Grumpys have raised the level of coffee connoisseurship in this town, even the most exacting bean fiend might find the process futile. A barista either knows what he’s doing or he doesn’t. The beans are either sustainably grown, fair trade, and freshly roasted or they’re not. Beyond that—and the presumptive niceties, like free Wi-Fi, refill policy, blueberry-muffin source—what else is there?

Well, as of six weeks ago, there’s Abraço. To call the minuscule East Village storefront a coffee bar is both an overstatement and an understatement. It’s smaller than a Starbucks bathroom. There’s nary a table or chair, never mind Wi-Fi. With two slender ledges and mere inches to maneuver, Abraço is a coffee bar in the strictest sense. But it’s also much, much more. Factor in relatively ambitious food, some congenial barista banter, and a design so bright and sunny it could cure seasonal affective disorder, and you’ve got an instant neighborhood institution and the U.G.’s favorite new hangout.

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Restaurant review, A Pintxo of This.

Anyone familiar with the Underground Gourmet’s normally spotless lair would be in for a shock these days. It’s been strewn with clothing of late, to almost Oscar Madisonian proportions, but with good reason. Repeated visits to Bar Carrera, the sleek and snug East Village tapas bar that has sprung up next to its equally sleek and snug sister establishment, Bar Veloce, have suffused our winter wardrobe with the pungent aroma of garlic and smoky pimentón, but a little airing out is a small price to pay for such gratifyingly simple, eminently affordable rewards.

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Restaurant review, Bavarian Rhapsody.

Austrian food, in contrast, is perceived by the cognoscenti as almost spalike—not only lighter, but subtler and more sophisticated. It’s Captain von Trapp versus Augustus Gloop in the popular culinary imagination. While German cookery seems destined to live forever in kitschy, oompah-thumping, lederhosen-wearing infamy, Austrian cooking has managed to achieve grand status at places like the long-gone Vienna ’79, David Bouley’s Danube, and Kurt Gutenbrunner’s Wallsé. Gutenbrunner, in fact, has parlayed his Wallsé success into a mini Austro-American empire with the elegant Café Sabarsky and Thor at the Hotel on Rivington. So, imagine the Underground Gourmet’s surprise to learn that the Austrian-born chef was billing his latest venture, Blaue Gans, as a “German-Austrian” bistro of sorts.

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Restaurant review, The Graduate.

Restaurant kitchens are famously hidebound, authoritarian institutions, which function, even in this egalitarian era, like medieval guilds. Within this strict hierarchical framework, there are masters and there are apprentices, and an apprentice’s work can go on forever. Witness the impressive résumé of Alex Ureña, who took his first job in restaurants washing dishes at the River Café at the age of 16. After working his way up through a series of menial and ever-more-demanding jobs, he caught the eye of David Bouley. He spent nearly a decade at the famous chef’s eponymous restaurant, eventually running the kitchen. He did the same at Blue Hill, which, along with Dan Barber, he helped open. For a brief time, Ureña was the executive chef at Marseille, in midtown, and, more recently, he spent several months dabbling in the experimental cooking techniques developed by the mad-scientist Spanish chef Ferran Adrià at his famous restaurant El Bulli. Ureña has done it all, in other words, with the exception of one thing. Until now, he has never had a restaurant to call his own.

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Restaurant review, Hello, Moto.

I have written before in this space about the curious, creeping gigantism of Japanese restaurants in New York City. It used to be these restaurants were much like they are in Japan, which is to say small, neighborly, and terminally quaint. Not anymore. Now they are grand Godzilla-size dining palaces filled with dripping Buddha ice sculptures (Megu), paper lanterns as big as blimps (Matsuri), and multiple, garishly appointed cocktail bars (Ono, Matsuri, Nobu 57). The rooms are as big as your local Costco and cost ten times as much to build. The menus run for pages and hinge on gimmicks like “robata-style” grilling (Ono), artisanally made tofu (EN Japanese Brasserie), or ridiculously expensive Kobe-beef recipes from the kitchens of imperial Japan (Megu). You would think these monsters would eat each other alive after a while, but the opposite seems to be true. They keep coming, one after another, turning Manhattan’s restaurant landscape into a great Japanese battleground, with each new venue straining to be more garishly entertaining, more massively glitzy than the next.

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Restaurant review, Let Them Eat Quiche.

It’s not something one readily admits, but having spent his formative feeding years as a pimple-faced stripling tucking into Chick-Fil-A sandwiches, Mrs. Fields cookies, and Cinnabons, the Underground Gourmet considers himself something of an expert on mall food. Nothing from one’s Orange Julius–gulping past, however, can prepare one for Thomas (Per Se) Keller’s Bouchon Bakery, the long-awaited, almost egalitarian addition to the Time Warner Center—and the only piece of the TWC’s so-called Restaurant Collection puzzle that’s plopped down, somewhat ignominiously, right out in the open mall corridor, like an airport Au Bon Pain.

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Restaurant review, Chinatown This Is Not.

"I feel like I’m being led to my safe-deposit box,” someone muttered as we navigated our way through the cavernous, cement-walled rooms at Buddakan, the latest and by far the largest mega–dining palace to open in New York City this year, or possibly ever. Gleaming Mercedes Maybach limousines (okay, one gleaming Maybach limousine) idled outside on the corner of Ninth Avenue and 16th Street, along with assorted other Town Cars and big-money automobiles. By the entrance of what used to be a Nabisco cookie factory, groups of women waited for their dates, their faces illuminated by the firefly glow of open cell phones. Inside the immense (16,000 square feet) space, people congregated around a hotel-style reception desk to “check in” at their tables. Beyond the reception desk is the bar area, as big as the waiting room in a good-size train station, and twice as crowded. Down below the bar are the dining rooms, in an area so vast and potentially confusing that the slinky hostesses had to guide parties of diners down to their tables, like Sherpas on an expedition.

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Restaurant review, Redux, Don’t Do It.

Food scholars have long puzzled over the etymology of the term brasserie. They began, apparently, as venues where beer was made, and the term came to encompass a certain kind of casual French diner, a place with mirrors and a zinc bar, featuring hearty, beer-friendly favorites like pig’s knuckles and choucroute garni. But these days, in this restaurant-mad city, it seems anything can be a brasserie. Witness the arrival, several months ago, in the old Time Cafe space on Lafayette Street, of Chinatown Brasserie. At this spangled nightclub of a place, tasseled lanterns and partitions made of lacquered wood have replaced the usual potted palms and acres of brass railing, and the specialties of the house are dim sum and a gourmet version of General Tso’s chicken. Then there is Brasserie Ruhlmann, new in Rockefeller Center, which has an almost-too-predictable brasserie menu and an elaborate décor devoted to the style of the Art Deco designer Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, making the room look like a swank Parisian hotel lobby circa 1922.

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Restaurants review, Ssäm Kind of Wonderful.

Since we’re at the tail end of a long and dreary winter, and since I’ve been grumpily attempting to do what no restaurant critic should ever do, which is go on a diet, let me start by noting just one or two of the very minor things that I don’t like about David Chang’s much-debated, much-hyped, and now perpetually mobbed restaurant in the East Village, Momofuku Ssäm Bar. I don’t like paying $8 for bread and butter, even if the butter is made from the milk of organic goats in England. I don’t especially like effete $10 tastings of noble, decidedly un-effete Kentucky ham. I don’t like the fact that a place serving grilled veal sweetbreads and the finest sea urchin from Maine can’t be bothered to serve coffee or tea. But mostly what I don’t like about the newest Momofuku (Chang also operates his first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, around the corner) is the unseemly way in which Chang’s inventive, deeply flavored cooking can reduce even the sturdiest, most jaded eater to weak-kneed paroxysms of glee.

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Restaurants review, Not-Sub Prime.

Nothing in the restaurant world lends itself to over-the-top self parody quite like a steakhouse. To stand out amid the thundering herd of artisanal chophouses, Peter Luger knockoffs, and Kobe-beef parlors, restaurateurs resort to all kinds of gimmicks. They hang samurai swords from their ceilings (Kobe Club), advertise their cattle’s pedigree to a ridiculously effete degree (Craftsteak), and lard their hamburgers with Kobe beef (Old Homestead). So you have to admire Stephen Hanson for at least choosing his gimmicks carefully. You will find no weaponry dangling from the rafters of Hanson’s new steakhouse, Primehouse New York, and the menu is mercifully free of Kobe or Wagyu beef. There is, however, a discreet “Himalayan Salt Room” where special cuts of “limited availability” are set to age. And as far as I know, Primehouse is alone among local steakhouses in having its own Black Angus stud bull, named Prime, who lives on a farm in Kentucky, where he works tirelessly to sire choice beef cattle on the restaurant’s behalf.

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Restaurants review, Run of the Mill.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Danny Meyer should find a good deal to be flattered about at Irving Mill, a new restaurant in his old Union Square neighborhood. Not very long ago, the tall, gothically imposing space on East 16th Street housed a mostly deserted New American establishment called Candela. Now bales of hay and a wooden trough filled with pomegranates grace the entrance. The interior is covered in folksy shades of brown (brown rafters, brown wood floors, brownish dried-flower arrangements) and infused with the warm sense of bonhomie Meyer has cultivated so successfully in so many of his restaurants. An ancient millstone in the center of the room acts alternately as a bar and a platform for a decorative collection of gourds. The relentlessly mirthful waiters sport jaunty suspenders. Pink-cheeked locals swill frosty microbrews at the Tap Room up front, and a quick scan of the menu reveals a familiar multitude of rustic country favorites, like short ribs, braised rabbit, and stone-ground grits.

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Restaurant review, Precious Cargo.

More than ever, in their quest for the increasingly fragmented, ever-elusive consumer dollar, restaurateurs need a specific target demographic in mind. Or so it occurred to me as I wedged myself into one of the stylish, pygmy-size black-top banquettes at Smith’s, Danny Abrams’s stylish, pygmy-size new venture on Macdougal Street. I’d already enjoyed a cocktail at the bar, a diminutive jewel box of a space containing only eight bar stools, a tasteful Oriental throw rug on the floor, and walls covered with crushed sky-blue velvet. Out in the mini dining room, the mini-tables were filled with animated parties of diners, many of them female, happily chatting in the soft, carefully calibrated light. At one of the banquettes sat a magazine food editor, a regular judge on the reality series Top Chef. And across from her sat the living embodiment of possibly the most desired demographic of all. “Do you know who that is?” said one of the hulking gentlemen at my table. “That’s Anna Wintour’s personal assistant.”

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Restaurant review, Ciambottini, Baby.

The Underground Gourmet can’t blame Jody Williams for refusing to call Gottino a wine bar. After all, New York is practically awash in wine bars these days. So instead, the Morandi chef has christened her pet project, the elegant slip of a West Village space she opened last month with partner Michael Bull, a “gastroteca—my made-up word for an Italian gastropub,” she says. And when, precisely, is a wine bar not a wine bar, according to Williams? When great food, great wine, and thoughtful service add up to something much more than a cookie-cutter marketing plan.

At first glance, the casual observer might not be able to tell the difference. Gottino embodies rusticity, with all the Old World Wine Bar signifiers in place: the long marble bar and the standing ledge behind it, the Ferrari-red Berkel meat slicer, the piles of seasonal fruit (quince, pomegranates, blood oranges) that are a telltale Williams touch. Wine bottles, cookie jars, and anchovy tins line the walls; baskets of complimentary nuts are arranged along the bar for customers to crack open at will. But beyond the romantic “’teca” atmosphere is a terrific “gastro” restaurant, one that adapts the familiar small-plate wine-bar format to its own Slow Food–inspired, seasonally dictated, often idiosyncratic ends. If there’s a wine-bar playbook, and there must be by now, Gottino isn’t going by it.

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Restaurant review, Run of the Mill.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Danny Meyer should find a good deal to be flattered about at Irving Mill, a new restaurant in his old Union Square neighborhood. Not very long ago, the tall, gothically imposing space on East 16th Street housed a mostly deserted New American establishment called Candela. Now bales of hay and a wooden trough filled with pomegranates grace the entrance. The interior is covered in folksy shades of brown (brown rafters, brown wood floors, brownish dried-flower arrangements) and infused with the warm sense of bonhomie Meyer has cultivated so successfully in so many of his restaurants. An ancient millstone in the center of the room acts alternately as a bar and a platform for a decorative collection of gourds. The relentlessly mirthful waiters sport jaunty suspenders. Pink-cheeked locals swill frosty microbrews at the Tap Room up front, and a quick scan of the menu reveals a familiar multitude of rustic country favorites, like short ribs, braised rabbit, and stone-ground grits.

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Restaurant review, Raising the Bar.

Bar Blanc, which opened just before the New Year in a narrow little space on 10th Street in the West Village, seeks to be two restaurants in one. As the name suggests, it is a bar, a place designed, in accordance with the casual, downsize fashion of today, for cocktails and intimate chatting and the appreciation of fine though not overly pricey wines. But as the name also suggests, this is a bar with certain stylistic and culinary pretensions. Call for a reservation and chances are you will get a brisk French accent on the other end of the line. The salmon on the menu is described as “gently cooked,” and the pork isn’t just pork, it’s “milk-fed porcelet.” The actual bar is made of polished white marble, and the banquettes are upholstered in disco-style white leather. More than a few patrons are dressed in jackets, or stiletto heels, and as they sip their sophisticated Brunellos in the soft, clubby gloom, they’re treated to the low, incessant thrum of Euro club music.

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Restaurants review, Daniel Disappoints.

Of all the celebrated superstar chefs who rose to prominence in the nineties, Daniel Boulud is arguably the most cautious, the most deliberate, the one who holds his cards closest to the vest. Until the opening of his new venture, Bar Boulud, he operated a mere three restaurants in Manhattan, compared with six (and counting) for Jean-Georges Vongerichten and for those boisterous fine-dining entrepreneurs Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich. Unlike Jean-Georges, or the omnivorous Batali, Boulud has never deviated very far from his culinary roots. He is the last of this city’s great classical chefs, a Frenchman who traces his lineage back through the glory days of Le Cirque to the celebrated regional cooking of his hometown, Lyon. Yes, Daniel has outlets now in Vegas and Palm Beach, but in this country, his real terroir has always been that traditional bastion of New York fine dining, the Upper East Side. And his bedrock clientele are the bankers, lawyers, and assorted fat cats who, once upon a time, set the standard for the style of dining we used to call haute cuisine.

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Restaurant review, Now, That’s Mex-Italian.

As anyone who’s ever peeked inside a New York City restaurant kitchen knows, the majority of meals, from high French to low delicatessen, are cooked by Latin Americans. And as anyone who’s ever flipped through a Zagat guide knows, Italian is everybody’s favorite flavor. So it’s surprising that it’s taken this long to encounter the collision of Italian and Latino on the plate. The Underground Gourmet, no stranger to peeking past kitchen doors and flipping through Zagats, has noticed the stirrings of this new culinary cross-pollination at two similarly named, like-minded restaurants, Miranda, in Williamsburg, and Matilda, in the East Village.

The two-month-old Miranda is a mom-and-pop shop done up in the simple style of a neighborhood trattoria. Sasha Rodriguez, the Queens-bred daughter of a Dominican father and Irish-American mother, runs the kitchen, while her fiancé, Mauricio Miranda, of Guerrero, Mexico, works the dining room like a young Silvano Marchetto—greeting guests as if they were long lost relatives, recommending bottles of (often organic) wine, and occasionally breaking into a little cha-cha-cha dance whenever the joy of owning and operating a restaurant with the woman he loves becomes too much.

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Restaurant review, Ducasse Lite.

If cooking, at its highest levels, is an intuitive, almost musical art, then so is putting together a great restaurant. No one knows this better than the great Michelin-decorated chef and restaurateur Alain Ducasse, whose much-anticipated New York debut, eight years ago, was an extravagant, tin-eared flop. The first Ducasse venture, Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, opened a year before 9/11, at more or less the precise time New Yorkers lost their collective taste for Continental haute cuisine. The walls were covered with paint-splattered tubas, among other assorted Eurotrash frippery, and dinner was attended by all sorts of bizarre rituals. Women were given stools on which to place their handbags, certain dishes (the squab, I recall) came with a choice of little knives presented in a leather case, and patrons were even offered a choice of pens with which to sign their outrageously inflated check. Ducasse eventually tried adjusting to local tastes on the fly, but it was too late; before the doors ever opened, the joint was doomed.

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Restaurant review, Into Africa.

Whether it’s the latest faux barbecue shack in Chelsea or a new Shanghainese joint in Queens, restaurants in this restless immigrant city are always in the business of assimilation and translation. No one has been more adept at this, over the years, than Marcus Samuelsson, the talented chef and co-proprietor of the great Scandinavian establishment Aquavit.

But with the opening of his latest venture, Merkato 55, Samuelsson has set himself quite a task. As every devout chef-groupie knows, Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia but grew up with his adoptive parents in Sweden. And now, having explored one side of his culinary heritage, he is turning his attention to the other. But Merkato 55 isn’t an Ethiopian restaurant, exactly; it’s an “African” one. And it’s not opening on some distant corner of the Lower East Side; it’s on Gansevoort Street, in the epicenter of the meatpacking district. Samuelsson’s reckless, slightly loony ambition, it seems, is to bring the jumbled palates and cuisines of an entire continent together under one roof and simultaneously to make them cool.

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Restaurant review, Haute West.

Superfluous truffle-strewn dinners are the first thing to go during times of economic distress, along with the personal shopper and those extra six pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes. But this year in restaurant-land, this age-old pattern seems, curiously, to have been reversed. As the economy heads inexorably south, grandiose new restaurants have been proliferating around town like rabbits. Alain Ducasse and Daniel Boulud have both recently opened high-profile, high-end dining establishments. The old Oak Room, in the new Plaza condos, is scheduled to come back on line soon, and with John Fraser’s fine restaurant, Dovetail, it’s possible, for the first time in modern memory, to enjoy a three-star meal on the West Side above 64th Street. The latest arrival to the party is Eighty One, which has opened off the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel, on West 81st Street. As with many of the fancy new joints around town, there is a name chef in the kitchen—in this case, Ed Brown, who toiled most recently at the Sea Grill, in Rockefeller Center. Seven of the eight entrées on the menu cost over $30. And for an extra $42, you can scatter the finest black truffles on anything you choose.

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Restaurant review, Passion for Pizza.

It’s a sad but pretty well-established fact that a good slice is hard to find. Maybe that’s why the recent opening of Artichoke Basille’s Pizza, an unassuming little storefront hard by Stuyvesant Town, has stirred up such febrile excitement on food blogs and in the persons of practically drooling, slightly dazed customers (the Underground Gourmet included). First came the comparisons to the great Brooklyn slice joint Di Fara, on sliceny.com. Then came Keith Richards: “He got a regular slice, and I gave him a piece of spinach-and-artichoke to sample,” says Artichoke co-owner Francis Garcia. “He started doing something with his hands. Playing air guitar and jumping around; it was cool.” If that wasn’t enough of an endorsement, what followed was the culinary equivalent of a papal blessing— a visit from Dave “Momofuku” Chang, who, unlike Keith Richards, did not jump around or play air guitar but, according to a blogger on line behind him, tootled off with three pies.

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Restaurant review, Four to Ko.

According to the exacting code laid down by the original food mandarins at Michelin (and normally adhered to by this critic), a reviewer isn’t supposed to pass judgment on a restaurant after just one visit. But then the newest addition to David Chang’s white-hot East Village dining empire, Momofuku Ko, isn’t a restaurant in the normal sense of the word. You could call it a semi-exclusive dining club, but that wouldn’t be quite accurate either. The murmuring, deferential patrons who manage to find a spot at the modest, twelve-seat bar are chosen at random, by a computerized system that seems designed not to entice people to dine at Momofuku Ko but to drive them away. These seats can be booked only a week in advance, and only by logging on to the Momofuku Website. The computer begins taking reservations each morning at ten o’clock, and thanks to the legions of devoted and increasingly frantic Chang groupies (the 30-year-old chef was just nominated for his third James Beard award, and has been the subject of many glowing profiles in many glossy magazines), they’re gone not in minutes but in seconds. Under these trying conditions, getting in the door once, let alone the three times most critics prefer, could take months or even years.

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Restaurant review, Greek Revival.

During the course of my gastronomic wanderings, I’ve exposed my debonair, Upper East Side mother to all kinds of strange and unsettling restaurant trends. Over the years, she has endured dinners at countless cavernous discos/dining palaces, puzzled over bizarre fusion creations in endless bizarre fusion joints, and gamely dined on everything from haute-barnyard duck eggs to stewed tripe. So it’s no wonder that when we met for dinner at a new Greek restaurant on East 60th Street called Persephone, she seemed a little surprised. There were only fifteen tables in the small room, each one topped with white linen and set with a bouquet of coral-colored roses. No aggravating club music played over the stereo. The whitewashed walls were decorated with black-and-white Matisse prints, and the cover of the simple menu was colored a deep, Aegean blue. “How nice it is,” my mother said, as she settled into her chair, “to be in a restaurant of the old-fashioned kind.”

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Restaurant review, Commercial Appeal.

Any practiced restaurant flâneur will tell you that when it comes to dining out, first impressions are almost always correct. The look of a room often telegraphs the intentions of a place, even the contents of its menu, before you’ve even been ushered to your seat. Crystal chandeliers and waiters in tuxedos mean a caviar dish or two, as surely as the smell of hickory smoke means pork barbecue. In New York, where dining genres evolve in endless permutations, this phenomenon is even more pronounced. A red felt rope outside the door usually means the room inside is big and dark, Asian-fusion food is being served, and you won’t be able to hear yourself think. The color red on the walls presages stolid Italian pasta, while hand-cut mirrors and yards of brass rails practically scream “steak-frites.” Which may be why the weary restaurant veteran to my right hadn’t been inside Commerce, the newest hot, hot restaurant in the West Village, for more than 30 seconds before she rendered her verdict. “This place is exhausting,” she said.

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Restaurant review, Not Franco, American.

Just two and a half months old, the New French, an unassuming little spot in the West Village, cannot fool the Underground Gourmet, who, having studied the language in junior high, is pretty astute about these things. New though it may be, French it is not. By way of its menu, its unpretentious cooking, and especially its superfriendly (some might say anti-French) service, the New French is an American bistro, and a good one at that. Yes, it’s possible to consider a dish like pho kind-of-French since the noodle soup originated in the former French colony of Vietnam. Steak-frites and moules-frites? Sure. But then there is vegetable curry, pulled pork with mustard raita, and a brisket sandwich on ciabatta to consider.

So what’s with the name? Partner Philip Hoffman, who ran the Soho restaurant Nick and Eddie in the eighties and nineties, says that he borrowed it from the Minneapolis boho-hippie-artist restaurant the New French Café, which closed seven years ago. When a former Hoffman colleague opened a Minneapolis restaurant last year and named it Nick and Eddie, Hoffman got the idea to pull what he describes as “a sort of karmic switcheroo” and call his place the New French.

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Restaurant review, Italian Two Ways.

As the name suggests, Olana, which opened two months ago among the sooty gray office buildings along lower Madison Avenue, is a place of lofty, even romantic, ambitions. The restaurant is named for the Hudson River home of the nineteenth-century landscape painter Frederic Church, and so the windowless room is decorated with murals, some of them backlit, of bucolic Hudson River scenes. There is a round bar up front, circled with chairs covered in red mohair, and the tall wingback chairs in the dining room are covered in red mohair, too. I don’t know how many attentive waiters, sommeliers, and bread boys I encountered during my visits, but if you dine at an off hour, you might find yourself outnumbered ten to one. All of which contributes to a slightly strained stuffiness at Olana, a sense that this overpolished, overembroidered restaurant might be trying a little too hard.

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Restaurant review, Not-So-Grand Hotel.

Ambitious five-star hotels have been showcases for grandiose cooking ever since the great chef Auguste Escoffier took up residence at the Grand Hotel, in Monte Carlo, over a century ago. In the old days, this meant French food of the highest distinction, along with plenty of caviar and Champagne. But as the age of quenelles and Grand Marnier soufflés has given way, with frightening speed, to the era of the artisanal pork chop and the hand-foraged mushroom, the top hoteliers have been left grasping at straws. Last year, the former haute cuisine chef Laurent Tourondel opened a “farm driven” outlet of his BLT chain in the Ritz on Central Park South (BLT Market), and at Alain Ducasse’s new restaurant in the St. Regis (Adour), the chef is peddling a muted, Greenmarket version of his famously baroque French cuisine. In both cases, the hoteliers and chefs are confronted with the same dilemma: How do you convey a sense of pomp and grandeur to a generation that doesn’t own tuxedos? And how does a first-class hotel serve fancy haute cuisine food that’s not supposed to be fancy at all?

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Restaurant review, Milan in Manhattan.

In a business filled with random, elliptically named establishments (Ago, Elettaria, and Olana, to cite just a few recent ones), Bar Milano is one restaurant that looks almost exactly like its name sounds. Step inside the sleek two-room space, which opened six weeks ago in an innocuous gray building on lower Third Avenue, and you might actually think you’re in one of the more stylish precincts of Milan. Or if not Milan, exactly, then a well-imagined facsimile of the kind of casually elegant, darkly fashionable place—part upscale coffee bar, part first-class Alitalia dining lounge—found in many world capitals and frequented by Kate Moss groupies and crowds of pencil-thin gentlemen in Brioni suits. The café tables are set with packets of sugar like the ones you find in Italy. The bar serves shots of amaretto and grappa late into the night, and cups of espresso and macchiato in the morning. And if you wish to linger for a while over your coffee, you can even enjoy an egg-white frittata for breakfast.

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Restaurant review, Pizza, New-Brooklyn Style.

As Brooklyn’s long and storied pizza tradition continues to attract new practitioners of the doughy art, the question arises in the mind of the Underground Gourmet: What is Brooklyn-style pizza? Is it the lumpen and glistening slice, as perfected by Di Fara? The tender Neapolitanish pie at Totonno’s? The cheese-under-sauce slab of L&B? There is no easy answer, as Domino’s discovered a year and a half ago, when its attempt to channel the borough’s crust-loving culinary spirit was met with the kind of loathing and contempt usually reserved for serial killers and dogfight impresarios.

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Restaurant review, Barbecue Is on Fire.

Not so long ago, the generic Coney Island hot dog was this town’s preferred summer snack. But these days in the big city, summer means barbecued ribs and smoked brisket, just as it does in the hills of North Carolina, say, or the backwoods of Tennessee. In June and July, the local food calendar is filled with pig cook-offs and rib festivals, and every week, it seems, a new joint opens for the growing rabble of big-city barbecue hounds to inspect. I spent last week shuttling between two of the prominent new barbecue houses in town, each of which attempts to profit from this unlikely phenomenon in its own way. One is located in a stark, modish space in the West Village, the other in a faux-honky-tonk barn on Park Avenue South. One is a nakedly commercial venture, replete with stacks of dry-rubbed ribs and greasy brisket and a pit boss named “Big Lou.” The other is a small, gourmet Asian-fusion operation, and not very traditional at all.

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Restaurant review, Faux French.

Is there room for one more cookie-cutter French brasserie in this brasserie-addled town? That’s the question I wearily asked myself as I sat down to dinner at Benoit, the latest addition to the city’s vast, relentlessly expanding herd of escargot-serving, profiterole-peddling ersatz steak-frites joints. With me were a group of leather-stomached brasserie veterans, bilious curmudgeons who’d consumed bargeloads of frisée salad and whole oceans of onion soup during the course of their dining careers, and were as heartily sick of the genre as I was. I’d been able to coax them out of their caves for one reason, and one reason only. Benoit is Alain Ducasse’s latest New York restaurant, and Ducasse is the most decorated French chef in the world. The space, on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 55th Street, once housed Jean-Jacques Rachou’s very good brasserie, LCB, and, before that, Rachou’s fabled monument to haute cuisine, La Côte Basque. So here at last was a brasserie conceived by Parisians for Parisians. Here, at last, was the real thing.

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Restaurant review, Southern Italian.

Although world-class chefs don’t move history, as a rule, they do share certain characteristics with world-class prophets. Like prophets, star chefs tend to be intuitive figures, with grand egos. They scribble their teachings in fussed-over books, collect legions of worshipful acolytes, and are known, occasionally, to speak in tongues. Also like prophets, chefs sometimes disappear for periods of time to wander introspectively in the desert. Joël Robuchon famously took a sabbatical from cooking, then returned with the haute bar-dining concept he’s since popularized around the globe. Thomas Keller bombed with his first big New York venture, Rakel, languished for a time, then resurfaced a changed man at his great French Laundry, in Napa. Now comes Scott Conant, who rose to prominence as the chef and co-owner of the fine midtown Italian restaurants Alto and L’Impero. Last year, Conant abruptly quit, and now, after wandering for a time in his own wilderness (actually, the Hamptons), he is back in a new location, with a brassy, appealingly reconceptualized restaurant called Scarpetta.

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Restaurant review, Best of Breed.

New Brooklyn Cuisine, or NBC, as the Underground Gourmet has asserted before in these pages, is a very specific subgenre of the more familiar New American Cuisine. It flourishes in the bucolic hinterlands of Boerum Hill and Prospect Heights, the low country of Carroll Gardens and Williamsburg, and the great plains of Park Slope, and has as its common denominator a very New York culinary sophistication melded with a wistfully agrarian passion for the artisanal, the sustainably grown, and the homespun. Good examples of the genre are Applewood, iCi, and especially Franny’s, which is essentially a classic NBC restaurant masquerading as a pizzeria. Practitioners tend to be mom-and-pop shops, in fact or feeling, and they cater to a clientele of idealistic gastronomes who quote Michael Pollan and split shares in the local CSA.

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Restaurant review, Green Cuisine.

As the urban barnyard craze continues to roll inexorably across the restaurant landscape, owners of aging pasta joints and formerly fashionable French bistros face some tricky decisions. Where do you obtain a steady supply of fresh summer peas, not to mention enough rusting farm implements to decorate your city dining space? And where do you find a properly rustic name that doesn’t sound faintly ridiculous in this metropolis of 8 million nonfarmers? Vicki Freeman and Marc Meyer have settled on Hundred Acres as the name for their new Macdougal Street venture, which once upon a time was a bistro called Provence. Frisée salad has been replaced on the menu by dandelion greens, and instead of plush banquettes diners now perch on rickety chairs and hardwood benches. Devotees of the venerable French restaurant may also be saddened to hear that the lovely garden room in the back is now lined, like a greenhouse, with a row of hastily assembled potted plants.

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Restaurant review, Southern Italian.

Although world-class chefs don’t move history, as a rule, they do share certain characteristics with world-class prophets. Like prophets, star chefs tend to be intuitive figures, with grand egos. They scribble their teachings in fussed-over books, collect legions of worshipful acolytes, and are known, occasionally, to speak in tongues. Also like prophets, chefs sometimes disappear for periods of time to wander introspectively in the desert. Joël Robuchon famously took a sabbatical from cooking, then returned with the haute bar-dining concept he’s since popularized around the globe. Thomas Keller bombed with his first big New York venture, Rakel, languished for a time, then resurfaced a changed man at his great French Laundry, in Napa. Now comes Scott Conant, who rose to prominence as the chef and co-owner of the fine midtown Italian restaurants Alto and L’Impero. Last year, Conant abruptly quit, and now, after wandering for a time in his own wilderness (actually, the Hamptons), he is back in a new location, with a brassy, appealingly reconceptualized restaurant called Scarpetta.

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Restaurant review, Turning Japanese.

Who knows what causes normally composed, well-adjusted, sane people to become quietly (or in some cases, not so quietly) unhinged in certain dining establishments? Most often, of course, it’s the food. Sometimes it’s the noise level, or the prices, or the presence of a jabbering waiter. Or maybe, as happened the other evening at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s latest experiment in international cuisine, Matsugen, it’s pretty much everything. “Where’s their design consultant?” whispered my normally composed, well-adjusted, sane wife as we sat sipping our after-dinner tea. “You couldn’t hear yourself think when the place was 66, and you can’t hear yourself think now.” She took another sip of tea. “Cold, gummy soba noodles for dinner? That’s not going to work. And what was that Bunsen burner on our table?” (It was part of the Japanese hot-pot dish shabu-shabu.) “This is supposed to be a dignified restaurant. You can’t charge New Yorkers a hundred bucks ($160, actually) for some cold Kobe beef (Wagyu, actually), and ask them to cook it. I’ll go to Koreatown for that!”

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Restaurant review, The Mario of Midtown.

During times of bounty on the great, wide restaurant savanna, the animals get fat. In lean times, they adapt to the harsh conditions or expire slowly in the heat. With food costs sky-high and Wall Street payrolls being slashed, big-money New York restaurateurs are beginning to seek shade wherever they can find it. An unlucky few are going out of business, others are trimming menus and canceling grandiose expansion plans, and many more seem to be retooling tired old operations in an attempt to make them look new. The art of the makeover is an ancient tradition in the restaurant world, but these days, many of the “new” high-profile restaurants in town seem to have former lives. In Soho, the old French bistro Provence was recently reintroduced to the dining public as Hundred Acres, and Jean-Georges’s star-crossed dim sum parlor, 66, has returned as the glorified soba joint Matsugen. Now comes Convivio, the ambitious reimagining of an upscale Italian restaurant in Tudor City that not so long ago was called L’Impero.

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