Restaurant review, Pies-N-Thighs Returns!

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

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

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

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.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

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.)

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

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.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com

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.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

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.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

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.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

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.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

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.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com

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.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

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.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

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.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

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.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com

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.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

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.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

Restaurant review, Sol de Quito Helps You Get High in Bushwick.

For a first-timer, the best way to explore Ecuadorean food is with one of Sol de Quito's combo platters. The montanero ($13.99) features a thick hank of way-garlicky sausage; a heap of meat chunks fried to super-concentrated porkiness; a bowl of plain brown beans; a pounded and breaded beefsteak; two comical cocktail franks that never saw the inside of a can, quizzically forked at both ends like snake tongues; a mesa of rice, sculpted by a pint plastic carryout container; and a pair of poached eggs that, when you cut into them, spill liquid gold over everything else. The "mountain climber" (as the name translates) is way more food than one person can eat, but two can scale its heights quite comfortably. Sol de Quito refers to the sun of Ecuador's capital, which nestles between mountain peaks in a valley nearly two miles above the ocean, an altitude that leaves visitors perpetually out of breath. Though the magnificent colonial city is only a few miles south of the Equator, the high temp hovers around 65 degrees all year. By contrast, the boxy Bushwick restaurant is warm and filled with good smells from the kitchen at the far end of the room, just beyond the small bar, where fruit shakes in exotic flavors and Corona beers are dispensed. An absurdly large crystal chandelier descends on the room like a spaceship, polished granite wainscots the walls, and heavy red curtains shroud the windows. This décor—and the location just south of Ridgewood, Queens—suggests that the place might have been an Italian restaurant in a former incarnation.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

Restaurant review, Saro Bistro Seeks Out Grandma's Lost Empire.

Maybe I'm being unfair to the culinary legacy of a region marred by centuries of strife. But even my waitress at Saro Bistro, a new Lower East Side restaurant, agreed. She explained that the bright green peppers in the glass in front of our mismatched antique plates weren't just decoration, but should be chomped on with the meal. "The cuisine isn't highly spiced," she said. "So they help add some heat."

At Saro, chef Eran Elhalal celebrates the "lost empires" (Austro-Hungarian plus Ottoman equals Balkan, get it?) while championing the home cooking of his grandmother Sara, the restaurant's namesake. The cozy dining room would have impressed her. A soft glow from hanging pendant lights envelops the dozen wooden tables. Brocade-patterned wallpaper adorns the walls, and a small bar tucks into a corner. Charming, informed waiters canvass the space, checking on the hip locals who've happily left their pretensions at the door.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

Restaurant review, Brushstroke: The Feast From the East.

Think Alice Waters and Dan Barber were the original artists of the locavore movement? Try again. It arguably started centuries ago with the Japanese. With ornate ceramic tableware as canvases, their craft took shape in the kaiseki meal. This procession of dishes aimed to capture Japanese cuisine's five tastes (salty, bitter, sour, sweet, and umami, or savory) and showcase foods from the mountains, sea, rivers, and fields. All while deploying only the most seasonal of ingredients.

Brushstroke, a noteworthy new collaboration between David Bouley and the Tsuji Culinary Institute of Osaka, marks one of the few spots in New York City where you can enjoy such feasts. Located in Tribeca—as if D.B. would shack up anywhere else—the restaurant occupies the former digs of his Austrian hot spot Danube (and briefly Secession). Stripped of their former gilt and opulence, the environs are now decked out in reclaimed timber, stone, salvaged steel, and a muted color palette designed to keep your eyes transfixed on the plates. But make sure to steal glimpses at the chefs perfecting their craft while you sit at the long L-shaped bar—a real treat, given the nearly unnatural serenity pervading the open kitchen.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

Restaurant review, The Astor Room Noshes on Nostalgia.

Why do certain foods fall out of fashion? That's the question posed by the Astor Room, a new restaurant located in the former commissary of the still-active Kaufman Astoria Studios. The spot is a throwback to the moviemaker's glory days, when Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, and the Marx Brothers trolled these grounds. The menu is intriguing conceptually, and the staff is both friendly and knowledgeable (you'll undoubtedly learn that J.J. Astor became the neighborhood's namesake after investing $500 there—but never actually stepped foot in it). Unfortunately, owner Chris Vlacich fails to re-create the unbridled bliss of the Roaring '20s. The main problem: the décor. Some natural light filters in, but the subterranean space borders on depressing. While architectural elements like the original multihued tiled walls and an early-20th-century fan add quirky charm, the office-like, exposed-grid drop ceiling and drab, patterned carpet scream hotel dining—and we're talking Ramada, not Ritz-Carlton.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/

Restaurant review, Phayul: Up You Go!

Mention Jackson Heights, and Indian boutiques and restaurants instantly spring to mind. But gradually the neighborhood has been changing, as businesses from Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet have moved in. Latest to arrive is Phayul ("Fatherland"), a Tibetan café that occupies a second-story space at the corner of 37th Road and 74th Street, a yak turd's throw from the subway stop. Though the banner flapping high up above is easy to spot, finding the restaurant is more of a challenge: An obscure door on 37th Road leads past computer-repair and beauty-product stalls, up a steep, cluttered stairway that bends acutely to the right. Having completed the upward trek, you find yourself in a veritable Shangri-La, where tables vertiginously peer down upon the colorfully dressed shopping throngs below, as a framed photo of the Dalai Lama beams benevolently from the wall above the cash register.

Read more at http://www.villagevoice.com/