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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