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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Restaurant review, Plein Sud Plain Sucks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Restaurant review, Testaccio Tackles the Taste of Rome.

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

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

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Restaurant review, Lu Xiang Yuan Serves Some Tasty Astroturf.

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

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

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Restaurant review, Bab al Yemen Wields Daggers and Cauldrons.

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

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

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

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Restaurant review, Vandaag Tries for a New New Amsterdam.

I've always believed there's no such thing as Dutch cuisine. As a Dutch-surnamed American, I've had to live with that. Especially if you don't include the cooking of former colonies such as Indonesia, Surinam, and South Africa, the food of the Netherlands is basically just rubbery cheeses, boiled potatoes, meat stews, and pickled fish. Which explains why, even though the Dutch have had a profound effect on modern New York (just drive through Bushwick and read the names of the streets), one of the ways is not gastronomic. If you're going to start a Dutch restaurant, you can go one of two ways: play up the bland, starchy, comfort-food aspects, or mutate the hell out of it till it's barely recognizable. Vandaag ("today" in Dutch) has chosen the second route. As if trying to reclaim lost territory, the bistro recently bivouacked at the corner of East 6th Street and Second Avenue, just down the road from St. Mark's Church (built by Dutchman Petrus Stuyvesant in 1799).

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Restaurant review, Tu Do's Pho Needs Re-Education.

There are no great Vietnamese restaurants in Gotham, so we have to settle for places that are merely good. One of those is Tu Do ("Freedom"), formerly known as Pho Tu Do. Until recently, it was located across the street from its present location on the west side of Bowery, south of Grand Street. The new restaurant occupies a larger space, with two long rows of tables on either side of a low wall, and so many kinds of bright and distracting lighting, you may want to wear a blindfold as you eat. But, in a slap in the face to modernity, the décor also fakes a village, with rustic overhangs and hut-like decorations. Get over the annoying ambience, though, because the food is often worth it.

While northern California's Bay Area glories in its tiny pho shops, which do only one thing and do it exceedingly well, our restaurants tend to dabble in pho, mounting random menus hundreds of items long, featuring Chinese as well as Vietnamese recipes. Sure, our joints throw the same inscrutable combo of beef cuts into the soup—flank steak, tendon, omosa (tripe), fatty brisket, navel (lean brisket), and eye of round (thin-sliced raw steak)—but Bay Area cafés offer broths that totally blow ours away.

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Restaurant review, An Early Peek at Manzo, Eataly's New Restaurant.

Beef is a relative rarity in Italy. Though steaks made from the famous Chianina cattle are a passion in Tuscany, and carpaccio and tagliata are popular in Piedmont, pork is overwhelmingly the favorite flesh throughout the boot-shaped peninsula. Yet Manzo ("beef" in Italian) has chosen to obsess over beef, making it one of New York's most unusual Italian eateries. But while the food at the new Batali/Bastianich restaurant in the Eataly shopping complex will probably thrill you, the premises definitely won't.

The first thing you'll come across as you approach the greeter's podium is a long bar pointing toward the fish counter opposite the restaurant. The rest is a boxy room barely walled off from the complex, with super-graphic posters showing row upon row of green terraced fields and, high up, a lofty Lidia Bastianich flogging her cooking classes. Attack of the 50-Foot Woman! In between, find a vista that looks toward Eataly's rotisserie station, where knots of shoppers stare into the restaurant, their mouths agape. It's impossible to sit in Manzo and not feel like you're part of a diorama at the Natural History Museum.

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Restaurant review, Sohna Punjab Shares the Fare of Five Rivers.

Punjabi was the first Indian food we fell in love with. Not only was the cuisine relentlessly rich and meaty, but it actually seemed to improve as it sat on the steam table in the narrow greasy spoons where it was served, with gravies colored every shade of coffee brown from "lots of cream" to "none at all." And there was a parallel universe of strictly vegetarian dishes, which—when they didn't feature frozen mixed vegetables—were alluring enough to distract us from the meat, flaunting rectangles of fresh cheese and strange veggies like snake gourd and loofah.

As Southern Indian and Gujarati appeared, and later a dozen other regional cooking styles, we were temporarily distracted from Punjabi, which originated in a region of northwestern Indian known as the Punjab ("Land of Five Rivers"). This fertile alluvial plain is where much of India's wheat is grown, resulting in a lush collection of flatbreads, often extravagantly stuffed with herbs or minced meat. While the earliest Punjabi steam-table joints were aimed at cab drivers and other budget diners, a new sort of establishment has arisen in the farthest corners of Queens, tendering a refined version of the cuisine meant for a Punjabi-American middle class.

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Restaurant review, Hill Country Chicken Goes Low in the Pecking Order.

I'm a Texas barbecue fanatic, and Hill Country is my favorite place to grab the luscious slow-smoked ribs and fat-rimmed brisket that epitomize the genre. Which is why I was so stoked to try its new offshoot, Hill Country Chicken. One might assume that the titular poultry would also be barbecued, but when news of the place started leaking out, it proved to be just another fried-chicken joint, capitalizing on the battered bird's current brushfire popularity, which originated in Brooklyn. But even before I went, my Houston friend Justin offered a word of caution: "Fried chicken? That's not really very Texas, is it?"

While the original Hill Country is made up to resemble a Lone Star barbecue, Hill Country Chicken has no such design antecedents, except perhaps Popeye's and Kentucky Fried Chicken. The place is cunningly located at the corner of 25th Street and Broadway, in a neighborhood being remade as a foodie destination through the combined efforts of Danny Meyer and Eataly. The interior is painfully fast-foody: eye-searing yellow, tempered with powder blue and beige—an ungainly color scheme intent on convincing you to eat and run. Tables surrounded by dinette chairs offer a down-home touch, and there are also high counters that invite you to perch, like a laying hen in a coop. (More photos of Hill Country Chicken.)

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Restaurant review, Henan Feng Wei—a Rare Henan Restaurant—Offers Unfussy Food.

When was the last time you looked up from the plate and proclaimed to your friends, "This food is amazing!" I had the pleasure recently at Henan Feng Wei ("Henan Flavors"), a newish northern Chinese restaurant hidden on a side street in downtown Flushing. Before me sat "fatty beef casserole" ($6), a rather ho-hum name for the reservoir of angry red oil that burbled in a metal chafing dish. Floating on top were wads of paradoxically lean brisket, bright green baby bok choys, cloud-ear 'shrooms undulating like brown jellyfish, and orange jujubes—not the Western candy, but miniature Asian dates. A further surprise awaited us: Concealed below the surface were seaweed-like masses of yuba, a rubbery fettucine made from bean-curd skin and more fun to eat than you can imagine.

The restaurant presents food from Henan, a small-but-populous province that lies northwest of Shanghai just south of the Yellow River, regarded as the cradle of Chinese civilization. You'd never suspect Henan Feng Wei was so good just by gazing down at the basement premises from the street. Situated in a vertical mall of five stories populated by importers and massage parlors, the establishment occupies a painfully well-lit space approached from an exterior stairway. The dining room is boxy, with a counter than runs along two walls, behind which women in hairnets pat small thick flatbreads, prepare oil-slicked vegetable and offal salads, noisily slap noodles on the counter, and assemble soups and dumplings. That's the totality of the menu, which is refreshing if you're accustomed to plowing through the hundreds of dishes on most Chinese menus.

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Restaurant review, Donatella--Noted Glamour Hound--Coaxes Excellent Pizzas.

Like a secret destination deep in the forest of Narnia, the gold-tiled oven glows behind a low wall at the end of the room. Emblazoned across its convex surface is "DONATELLA." Magical unicorn? Queen of the Underworld? No, just the restaurateur Donatella Arpaia, whose relentless publicity machine has kept her in the public eye ever since she opened her first place, Bellini, in 1998. But when she slinks past her new oven in person, she looks haggard and a bit frumpy, nothing like her publicity stills.

Which is OK, because the pizzas that fly from that gilt dome at her new self-named Chelsea pizzeria are fantastic. Of all the places in town making the laughable assertion that they're re-creating "the true pie of Naples" (some even have a certificate from Verace Pizza Napoletana to prove it!), Donatella's comes closest. The crust is pillowy, charred here and there, but not enough to make it bitter. The ingredients are pure and simple, like innocent fawns in the forest, and the tomato sauce remains spare and uncontaminated by strong flavors. Thankfully, the one-person pies come cut in quarters, which isn't done in Naples. The interior is soggy, but not too soggy, and when finishing a slice most diners can't resist the "bone," or circumferential arc of the crust. The dough is that good.

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Restaurant review, Szechuan Chalet Does Uptown Chinese Darn Well.

The conquest of the city by Sichuan restaurants is nearly complete. When the earliest eateries from that remote region of China first appeared on the Upper West Side in the '70s, they were palaces of the pallid, with a sticky-sweet stir-fry of baby shrimp in a barely spicy red sauce as their marquee dish. Later, as actual Sichuan immigrants trickled into the city, and the chains Wu Liang Ye and Grand Sichuan arose to spread the gospel, we've had real—and really hot—Sichuan food in many Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens neighborhoods, "mah-lah" (numbing-spicy) peppercorns and all. Our portfolio was completed by the appearance of stalls at places like Flushing's Golden Mall, where the offal-intensive cuisine was showcased at its working-class level.

Not long ago, an upscale Sichuan restaurant materialized in Yorkville. Five years ago, when good Sichuan in that neighborhood was unthinkable, my knee-jerk reaction would have been that the place was probably awful, but now I'm eating my toupee. Despite the comical name—suggesting a Sino-Swiss ski lodge—the food at Szechuan Chalet is exemplary. (Don't let the spelling of "Sichuan" bother you, either—it's an Upper East Side dialectical affectation.) The place has the usual uptown Chinese restaurant vibe—a certain cheesy elegance that includes white napery, modern art, and waiters in waistcoats who coddle their customers but are prone to crazy malapropisms.

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Restaurant review, Umi Nom Brings Filipino, Pan-Asian Fare to Pratt.

It's a Thursday evening well into the first semester of the school year, and Umi Nom is half-empty. Which is a shame, since nearly everything I've tasted there has been superb. The restaurant is berthed on Myrtle Avenue on the eastern edge of the Pratt campus, in a Sargasso Sea of a neighborhood between Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant—where trash often clogs the gutters and the nearest liquor store (three blocks east near Franklin Avenue) defends its booze with Plexiglas. You have to purchase your wine via a little sliding box, which I did—a bargain bottle of Chianti for $10. Despite a moniker meaning "Drink" in Tagalog, Umi Nom is still BYOB after being open 15 months. Don't hold your breath that the liquor license will ever arrive. In the meantime, the place is struggling along without it.

The joint occupies a narrow storefront with a refreshingly plain, bare-brick interior and lots of dark polished woods. Lighting is provided by a series of nifty fixtures implanted in bamboo logs. Umi Nom is an offshoot of the Lower East Side's Kuma Inn, where a playful take on Philippine food forms the centerpiece of a pan-Asian menu in tapas-size portions. The chef, King Phojanakong, is the American-born child of Philippine and Thai parents, and his résumé includes Bouley and other high-end refectories. Filipino fare has been the hardest of Southeast Asian cuisines to popularize, since its wild diversity of influences (Spanish, Chinese, Polynesian, and American) and startling combinations of ingredients (white vinegar, fish sauce, and pig blood, for example) resist adaptation.

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Restaurant review, Kin Shop--Harold Dieterle's Second Restaurant Goes Thai.

The most annoying aspect of Top Chef is the underlying implication that the show is creating the great chefs of the future. In my experience, the reality is quite different. Most meals I've eaten at restaurants helmed by former contestants have been lackluster, as evidenced most recently by the cooking of last season's runner-up, Ed Cotton, at Plein Sud, where he bumbled such obvious standards as pissaladière and beef bourguignon. Anyway, many of the most successful cheftestants end up not running restaurants, but being recycled in subsequent editions of the show. The shining contradiction is Harold Dieterle, the first season's winner. Lacking a crazy haircut or an annoying personality affectation, he radiated calmness and competence as a chef—which, it turns out, doesn't make for very good TV. When he debuted Perilla in 2007, it wasn't a marquee assignment, but a small West Village bistro that gradually attracted a fervent following. Now, after a measured period of time, he's opened a second place a few blocks distant, and it's every bit as good. Located right on bustling Sixth Avenue, just north of 11th Street, Kin Shop seats fewer than 50 and has a calming décor that runs to bone white, light green, and pale wood tones. On each of my three visits, Dieterle himself stood doggedly at the pass-through, inspecting every dish that went from kitchen to customer.

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Restaurant review, Exploring the Montreal-New York Food Connection.

A dozen years ago, Montreal’s most famous chef, Normand Laprise, arrived here to launch a restaurant in the Flatiron District. Cena didn’t last long, but it garnered three stars from Ruth Reichl in the Times. Since then, what was once a drip has turned into a flood, as influences and chefs have migrated in increasing numbers from our frosty French-Canadian counterpart 329 miles to the north. Recently, I visited the city to analyze New York’s culinary debt—and see what else may be in store for us.

Currently, poutine is Montreal’s greatest gustatory contribution to NYC, a tangled mass of French fries, brown gravy, and semi-molten cheese curds. This quintessential working-class tuck-in debuted a few years ago in upscale form at The Inn LW12—a gastropub that, through lavish application of maple syrup, tried to be the Canadian Spotted Pig. It failed. Now, poutine is readily available in many Brooklyn and Manhattan neighborhoods, at boîtes as diverse as Sheep Station, Hotel Griffou, Dive Bar, Pommes Frites, Corner Burger, Shopsin’s—the list goes on and on. We’ve even had a restaurant devoted to it, the Lower East Side’s now-defunct T Poutine, which filled its menu with off-the-wall variations such as “treehugger” (mushrooms, vegetarian gravy, and curds).

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Restaurant review, Polonica Fights Winter, Polish-Style.

At 19, Bay Ridge's Polonica is no spring chicken, even among long-running Polish restaurants. In fact, in restaurant years, it's sliding into a comfortable middle age. But in a cuisine rarely celebrated for its range or poignancy, Polonica stands out. The place is beyond cozy, with seven tables, a buff-and-green color scheme, and a noise level that permits quiet conversation. Glass tops on the tables allow easy Windex-ing of the gravy spills that are sure to occur, and patrons can become drunk on gravy alone. If that's not enough, a BYOB policy allows you to carry in Polish beer from the Russian bodega across the street. You may think of Polish food as relentlessly heavy and meaty, but Polonica is prepared to refute that assertion—at least partly. In fact, a whole slew of meal-size soups are marked "vegetarian" on the menu, of which the best goes by the discouraging name of sauerkraut soup ($3.70). Contrary to your worst fears, it doesn't taste like sour tin cans. Rather, an agreeably mild broth floats shreds of carrot and cabbage like bathers in a rural swimming hole, and there's a patch of fresh dill "weeds" providing the scent of freshly mown grass. Other soups in the same featherweight vein include barley, tomato, chicken noodle, mushroom, and cucumber—and many of the boiled pierogis make nice light meals, too, especially the unusual spinach-and-potato or sauerkraut-and-mushroom varieties (seven for $6.25). Of course, they taste better if you get them fried.

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Restaurant review, Lotus of Siam Rolls the Dice.

In 1994, when chef Saipin Chutima took over at Renu Nakorn—located in a strip mall 20 minutes south of downtown L.A.—it was already one of the best-regarded Thai restaurants in Southern California. Responding to its spicy Isaan cooking, Jonathan Gold noted enthusiastically that "a trip to Renu Nakorn can be a little like taking your tongue to the Leather Castle," referring to a notorious s/m bordello. Surprising everyone, Chutima left L.A. for Las Vegas in 1999 to found Lotus of Siam in a plebian commercial space remote from the strip. Writing in Gourmet, Gold called it "the single best Thai restaurant in North America."

Now, Chutima and her husband, Suchay, have opened the first offshoot of their award-winning establishment, but the budget-dining profile has evaporated: Our Lotus is situated not in Elmhurst or Sunset Park, but in a luxurious Greenwich Village space once occupied by Cru. Dinner—including wine from a fiendishly expensive list—can easily top $80 per person. Still, I couldn't wait to find out not only if the food was as good as that of its Vegas precursor, but if the restaurant put our own Sripraphai and Chao Thai to shame. The short answer is: The provender at Lotus NYC can be breathtaking—but don't stop trekking to Queens just yet.

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Restaurant review, L'Artiste--A New Reason to Visit the Arrondissement of Astoria.

The slogan for French bistro food should be, "Why change it when we got it right the first time?" Indeed, no matter where you go, the menu choices are always the same and probably identical to dishes served 50 years ago. Maybe a hundred. This is not a bad thing, either, since the cult of the new so sways today's food culture. Sometimes you simply want the good old standbys. And luckily the classics really shine at L'Artiste, a recently opened French restaurant in Astoria. You won't mistake the restaurant as being in Paris—the windows in the intimate space look out onto the row houses and squat brick apartment buildings emblematic of Queens. Yet a crock of French onion soup ($8), under a heavy shroud of oozing cheese pocked dark brown, is as good as any version in France.

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Restaurant review, Lima Limon Brings a Citrusy Addition to Little Latin America.

Fifteen years ago, Roosevelt Avenue—the border between Elmhurst and Jackson Heights from the BQE east to Junction Boulevard—was mainly Colombian. But as successive waves of Mexican and Ecuadorian immigrants arrived, the complexion of the street changed. Now, with the further appearance of Argentine, Uruguayan, and Venezuelan businesses along the commercial strip, the moniker "Little Latin American" can be justly conferred. Stroll along the lively thoroughfare in the deep shadow of the elevated 7 train, and feel like you're in Quito or Caracas. Street vendors fry blood sausages and pork skins, stalls flog discount ropas and zapatos with a merchandising style distinctly un-Wal-Mart, lunch counters vend tongue tacos and hot dogs topped with ham and pineapple, and Spanish is the sole language spoken. There are low-life bars and strip clubs, too, along with family-style restaurants of many nationalities—though, as midnight approaches, the street assumes a slightly more menacing aura as late-evening shoppers scurry for the train.

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Restaurant review, Caliu Thinks Small.

Next to wine bars, the most popular category for start-up restaurants the past few years has been tapas bars, and the two have lots in common. Offering small morsels of food at inflated prices, both manage to make alcohol the center of attention. Drinkers like it, but then so do foodies, because, in their concentrated goodness, the petite plates often feature big flavors. The modest portions could help you lose weight, too—if only you didn't drink so much. Among tapas bars, the game changers were Casa Mono (2003) and Boqueria (2006), which boosted the institution's image from that of an antediluvian Spanish taverna with fraying bar stools, painfully red décor, and old men wearing berets, to that of a noisy modern canteen, where younger patrons of both sexes snack lightly while drinking expensive glasses of wine. Full meals were an option at those two modern tapas bars, too, if you could only figure out how to assemble dishes of unpredictable size into a repast. But whether snacking or dining, you inevitably ended up with a check larger than you expected.

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Restaurant review, Junoon--the Fancy and the Beige.

Some people must actually enjoy the anonymity of airport and hotel restaurants, or there wouldn't be so many of them. Ryan Bingham, George Clooney's character in Up in the Air, comes to mind. Guys like Bingham put up with bland décor and unrealistic prices as a marker of their high-flying lives. If the food's OK, so much the better. But that's hardly the point. Bingham would probably have a ball at Junoon, a new, upscale Indian restaurant in the Flatiron District, which has about as much character as an executive lounge in the New Delhi airport.

"Junoon" means "passion" or "obsession" in Hindi, and attention to detail certainly comes through in the service. If only so much enthusiasm had gone into the monochromatic beige décor. Yes, there's the "Junoon walk," a 50-foot passage anchored by a reflecting pool (which has since been filled with rocks, perhaps because the scum atop the water was unseemly). But couldn't the management have at least situated the unique glass-encased "spice room" in the spacious dining room? Instead, the chamber containing all the restaurant's seasonings and spice blends is located next to the restrooms downstairs. Skimp on the drinking and you might miss it completely.

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Restaurant review, Lievito Does Frank Pizza.

Lievito is an Italian restaurant. No, I mean a real Italian restaurant, as if it had been picked up by a spaceship in the mid-calf part of the boot and deposited right on Hudson Street, with no concessions to American sensibilities or tinkering with the menu to make it more Yankee. This attitude (or lack of one) begins with the décor: tables topped with very plain blond wood, dark-veneered walls, a diffuseness of light that creates a feeling of spaciousness even though the dining room is actually cramped. The even illumination allows you to inspect everything on the table in front of you as if in a microscope, yet so flattering that your dining companions resemble zit-free movie stars. A picture window looks into a finger-shaped kitchen with a white-tiled hearth, and there's a bar to one side with a pair of metal cocoons overhead cradling wine bottles from a devastatingly good and relatively low-priced Italian wine list. An excellent bottle of Vino Nobile di Montepulciano costs just $33.

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Restaurant review, Cholulita Sells Smut Under the J Tracks.

Many of our best Mexican restaurants morphed out of bodegas. There on the shelves sat ripe avocados, cactus paddles, deep-red chilies, sacks of masa, rubbery Oaxacan cheeses, fragrant papalo leaves, piles of pinto beans, and freshly made white-corn tortillas—why not turn them into a full-blown Mexican menu? And that's what the bodegas did, in locations as far-flung as Hell's Kitchen, Sunset Park, West Farms, Stapleton, and Corona. One of the newest to vault the fence from grocery to café is Cholulita on Brooklyn's Broadway, right on the border of Bed-Stuy and Bushwick. The name refers to Cholula, a town on the outskirts of the city of Puebla that was a center of Toltec civilization prior to the arrival of Cortés, and has a great pyramid to prove it.

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Restaurant review, Delmonico's: Ye Olde School Restaurant.

Delmonico’s can never live up to its history or its hype. The creation of Swiss brothers John and Peter Delmonico, the restaurant was founded on William Street in 1827 as a pastry shop selling “small cakes” (probably cupcakes). It soon turned into a dining room with six tables, then hopscotched around William Street until the Great Fire of 1835 razed the entire block—and most of the young city with it. A much grander restaurant arose at the smoldering corner of William and Beaver streets in 1837. By that time, the menu had ballooned to 11 pages, including 47 different veal dishes. Delmonico’s is considered the city’s first real restaurant, replacing the table d’hôte dining rooms, eating houses, and coffee shops of earlier generations, embracing French cuisine while many Americans were still wearing fringed leather jackets and carrying flintlocks. The further history of the restaurant is too complicated to recount, but suffice it to say that various iterations of Delmonico’s moved steadily northward (at one time, there were four), even though the present location—the same as in 1837—has been home to one evocation or another for 151 discontinuous years. Most recently, the Bice Group revived the brand in 1998, returning the décor to something like its 1891 state—the year the current building was constructed.

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Restaurant review, Mary Queen of Scots Is Nothing to Lose Your Head Over.

Plaid and whiskey. The main loves of two seemingly disparate tribes—Scots and hipsters. So what better place for them to converge than at Mary Queen of Scots, a new Lower East restaurant whose banquettes and lampshades are decked out in tartan glory, and where the liquor comes neat in crystal tumblers. Subtlety wasn't a decorating instruction—portraits of the doomed queen cast their shadows from the brick walls. But would the crowd at this dimly lit Victorian-Gothic restaurant know that Mary was sentenced to death for conspiring against her cousin Elizabeth I? Doubtful—the restaurant caters to the cool, young folk (also swaddled in plaid) who drink more than they eat. But they're no worse off for it, since the food bores more than it delights.

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Restaurant review, Andre's Cafe Has a Hungary Heart.

The Hungarians could teach us a thing or two about comfort food. Take turoscusza tepertovel, even if you can't pronounce it: a towering platter of glistening egg noodles, shards of bacon, and random gobs of sour cream and farmer's cheese. The noodles slip and slide inside your mouth, the dairy products melt and further lubricate, while the bacon explodes in the bland, buttery mass with all the power and smoke of a land mine. You'll stumble from the table overdosed on carbs and enormously blissed-out, and live to feed another day. Andre's Café is an informal refectory that hides behind a Hungarian bakery on the Upper East Side, a place where all manner of luscious strudels, babkas, beiglis (poppy-seed rolls), and flodnis (layers of nuts, apples, and poppy seeds between two sheets of pastry) cavort in the front window. There's no hint that a first-rate eatery lurks within. To make matters more confusing, while the baked goods are kosher, the rest of the vittles—containing pork products and meat-dairy combos—are emphatically not. Skip the baked goods for now, and traipse past yards of display cases to find a narrow dining room. The ceiling is bronze stamped metal, and the left wall is hung with antique kitchen implements and strings of red peppers—from which Hungary's signature spice, paprika, is ground. The right features modern and historic views of identical scenes in Budapest. It's like visiting the Hungarian capital today, then hopping into a time machine. Don't forget to come back for dinner.

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Restaurant review, Edi & the Wolf Invites You to Waltz on In.

Schnitzel is as basic to Austrian food as boob jobs are to Playboy Playmates. But like fake breasts (as we women tell ourselves), schnitzel can leave a lot to be desired. Usually the cutlets are dry as cardboard and taste of oily breadcrumbs. Fortunately, Austrian cuisine is made up of more than just fried cuts of meat—not that New Yorkers would know it. The city boasts only about a dozen restaurants focused on that country's grub, all serving essentially the same menu of schnitzel, sausages, and stew. Edi & the Wolf, a new Alphabet City eatery, offers these staples, too, and while the fare is generally impressive, the quirky décor and fun ambience are the real draws. Think farmhouse tavern (or heuriger, as the Viennese would say) meets crazy grandma's attic. A long, wooden communal table spans the brick-walled room, while curios like Victorian boots filled with dried flowers and mismatching candlesticks grace the tables and shelves. A 40-foot-long rope, meanwhile, has been fashioned into a chandelier of sorts above the distressed copper bar. Set designer Philipp Haemmerle staged the interior. It's undeniably theatrical, but actually pretty cool—the sort of spot to impress a first date who likes to keep up on the trends.

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Restaurant review, Red Rooster—the Swede Smell of Success.

There's a new brightness and lightness to Marcus Samuelsson's cooking, unlike anything he's done before. Not at Riingo, not at Aquavit, not even at Merkato 55, where he dabbled in the cuisines of Africa. Perhaps celebrity chefdom came too early for him: With his slender good looks, winning smile, and captivating born-in-Ethiopia/raised-in-Sweden backstory, he was famous before he had a chance to fully come into his own culinarily. At Red Rooster he finally has, effortlessly blending East African, Scandinavian, and North American influences in a wacky fusion that somehow works. That light touch is shown as soon as the starters hit the table. From the list of bar snacks (which could also serve as apps, shaving dollars off your tab) comes the dish simply labeled "nuts" ($4). Cashews, almonds, and peanuts—each with its own fascinating spice rub—duke it out with dried sour cherries and crisp swatches of injera, the Ethiopian flatbread. This trail mix is so good, you'll want to keep a bag of it in your desk drawer. African, too, are the miniature beef patties ($5), resembling sambusas found on the streets of Addis Ababa. But a surprise is in store—the dipping sauce of pale green tomatillo would do a Mexican mama proud. This is international fusion at its most effortless and apt.

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Restaurant review, Breuckelen in Cobble Hill Does the King County Fare.

No longer just a borough, Brooklyn is now a brand, an ideology, a way of life. And Breuckelen, a new Cobble Hill eatery, certainly embraces what has become known as Kings County cuisine: local, seasonal, new American fare that champions the ideals of farm living within a decidedly urban environment. The menu changes often, though chef Andrew Karasz thankfully does not spout a holier-than-thou organic dogma or write out the name of farm, farmer, and pig that have provided your dinner. The restaurant, however, doesn’t execute food as deftly as some of its pioneering neighbors, such as Carroll Gardens’ Prime Meats or Williamsburg’s Marlow & Sons. Breuckelen is a decent local spot, but like most neighborhood joints, it falls short of being a destination—especially when entrées come tagged with Manhattan prices.

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Restaurant review, Bensonhurst's Dai Wah Yummy City Ain't So Itty-Bitty.

Despite its happy-go-lucky name, Dai Wah Yummy City is a very serious place. No red dragons with glimmering eyes sprawl across the wall. No potted plants perch on pedestals. There are no futuristic light fixtures, nor wildly uniformed waiters in pastel waistcoats, either—just a big, boxy room with white walls, made to seem even barer by maximum wattage. The only decorations are a floral mural on the rear wall that seems like the artist ran off after half executing it, and a giant plasma TV dangling from the ceiling. Rather than showing chop-socky videos, it follows international events. On our first visit, President Obama was receiving Chinese president Hu Jintao at the White House as we ate, which lent gravitas—if not gravy—to a superlative meal. The patrons of Yummy City tend to be well-off immigrants who have moved out of Chinatowns into the front-yarded swaths of middle-class housing in Dyker Heights and Bensonhurst. The restaurants they patronize aren’t concentrated in one area, but scattered throughout the neighborhood, and they tend to be high-quality, but bare-bones. The tables at Yummy City are mainly gigantic round affairs, and the waiter had some difficulty finding a place for our tiny party of four. All around us sat extended families, the parental generation chattering in Chinese, while the fully assimilated kids amused themselves with computing devices in apparent disdain of what their elders were saying and eating.

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Restaurant review, Graffit and the Cubist Foodist.

Is there a more polarizing food than foam? Maybe tripe or liver, but what is it about a mound of tiny, flavored bubbles? Perhaps what incites groans and eye rolls isn't the froth itself but what it embodies—overly precious and theatrical cooking that makes a spectacle out of dining and leaves the customer perplexed. Those dirty words: molecular gastronomy. At Graffit, a new eatery near Lincoln Center, foam decorates many plates, alongside "olive oil texture," "bell pepper caviar," and "Tio Pepe Fino air." The restaurant, run by Madrid's enfant terrible Jesús Núñez, takes a Modernist approach to Spanish fare. While not everything is a smash success, the food is playful and visually compelling. If you don't like experimental cuisine, though, stick to eating boneless, skinless chicken breast elsewhere.

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Restaurant review, Hats Off to Greenwich Village's Fedora.

Montreal's Au Pied de Cochon (APDC) has had an inordinate influence on Gotham gastronomy lately. Its hog-happy, lard-intensive menu transforms every part of the pig into mousses, grills, croquettes, roasts, salads, terrines, sausages, tarts, and fry-ups. Vegetables, fish, and poultry are kept to a minimum, while tongue, marrow, sweetbreads, and trotters from an ark's worth of animals form another of the restaurant's fatty obsessions. Famously, a huge lobe of foie gras settles like a storm cloud over the craggy landscape of the restaurant's poutine. (Insert your own cardiology joke here.) Locally, the Breslin's April Bloomfield isn't our only chef to have knocked off an APDC dish or two, but more recently two Quebecois gastronomes—who both cheffed under APDC's culinary director, Martin Picard—carry the tribute further. At Long Island City's M. Wells, Hugue Dufour has regrooved several of the Montreal restaurant's dishes during the nine months the diner's been open, while Mehdi Brunet-Benkritly has lately been installed in the West Village with a similar agenda. His new restaurant, Fedora, is situated just north of the intersection of West 11th and West 4th streets—if you don't live nearby, you might have to hire a street urchin to help you find this paradoxical corner.

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Restaurant review, Cocoron--On the LES in Noodle York City.

Watch out, ramen—your days of soupy supremacy in this city are numbered. Cocoron, an excellent new restaurant whose name means "heartwarming" in Japanese, is poised to change the city's noodlescape, bringing soba into the culinary limelight. See ya, places with three-hour waits and ceaseless hype (Ippudo, cough, cough). Sure, New York already hosts a few worthy spots selling the strands—like Soba-ya, Sobakoh, and Soba Totto—but soba has never been celebrated like its cup-o-noodles cousin. Maybe because buckwheat evokes bland, hippie-commune cuisine (now there's an oxymoron!).

Japan transplants Mika Ohie and Yoshihito Kida will hopefully change that. They've brought a little piece of Tokyo to a particularly dismal stretch of Delancey Street. And the key word is little—the zenlike space holds only three tables that each seat two, while a bar overlooking the kitchen accommodates eight. But what it lacks in size, the place makes up for in flavor.

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Restaurant review, Heartbreak in the East Village Imports Some Alsatian Gustation Elation.

Once upon a time in the East Village, there was a restaurant called Roettele A.G. Located just off the southwest corner of Tompkins Square, the interior was cramped and labyrinthine, jam-packed with gilt cherubs, chandeliers, and dancing bears, the walls creepily painted in dark hues. Yet it opened up into a lovely backyard swagged with grape vines, which quickly became the haunt of literary types when the place first appeared in 1990. The menu, too, was unique to the neighborhood and the city, offering a combo of unfussy Swiss, German, and Italian food. There was nothing better on a balmy summer evening than a simple plate of viande des grison (Swiss air-dried beef) or a crock of melted raclette, served—rather oddly, we thought—with cold boiled spuds rather than bread.

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Restaurant review, The John Dory Oyster Bar Resurrection.

I'm fantasizing about the Naked Cowboy. In my dream, I bend down and purse my lips and begin sucking all the goodness from within. I tilt my head back, letting the briny juices glide down my throat. I close my eyes and swallow. Yes, the Naked Cowboy is a damn fine oyster. Naked Cowboys (named after the Times Square performer) are one of the many bivalves offered at the John Dory Oyster Bar, Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield's new seafood emporium adjacent to the Ace Hotel. Technically, this NoMad (that's North of Madison Square Park) location marks the second incarnation, the original having lasted less than a year on a desolate stretch of Tenth Avenue in Chelsea. Foot traffic isn't a problem here—the space buzzes nightly with trendsetters and foodies. Not surprisingly, Friedman and Bloomfield also run the popular Breslin on the other side of the hotel.

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Restaurant review, Eating the Putz at Flushing's Main Street Imperial Taiwanese Gourmet.

To outsiders, Taiwanese food can be challenging—which is why most Taiwanese-owned restaurants in Flushing serve food from other parts of China. And why not? Mainland migration to the island over the past century has furnished Taiwan with cooks well-versed in the cuisines of nearly every region. Though the Taiwanese have dominated Flushing since the '80s, now their grip is loosening due to a massive influx of northern Chinese immigrants. This has pushed newer Taiwanese restaurants to the fringes of the neighborhood. Since most patrons are now former islanders—rather than downtown Flushing's pan-Asian mix—it has also freed them to focus on their own home-style cooking. But if you're an outsider, it may be difficult convincing a Taiwanese waitress to let you try her favorite dishes. With a name more prepossessing than the small, spare premises would indicate, Main Street Imperial Taiwanese Gourmet lies just north of the Long Island Expressway, a mile south of downtown Flushing. At a recent meal, my crew and I had trouble getting our waitress to serve us "stinky tofu" ($5.95). She insisted, "No more, no more," sounding like the raven in the Edgar Allan Poe poem. The tofu's intense odor is traditionally the result of soaking curd for weeks in a solution of dried shrimp, vegetables, and fermented milk—one of many unexpected ingredients you'll find in Taiwanese cooking.

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