Restaurant review, Avast Ye Saltie Williamsburg Mateys!

Entering Saltie for the first time one crisp fall afternoon, I overheard the following conversation between two sandwich makers: "I like curly parsley better than any other kind," observed one. "It has loft and volume." "No," replied the other. "Flat-leaf parsley is more earthy and chewy, and in a sandwich, chewy is good." At Saltie—a serious new restaurant masquerading as a sandwich shop—you get the idea that this sort of discourse goes on all the time.

The founders are three women (Caroline Fidanza, Elizabeth Schula, and Rebecca Collerton) who once worked at Marlow & Sons, a Williamsburg temple of locavorism and sustainability. Each brings her unique personality to the mix, and elements of those personalities worm their way into the very unusual sandwiches. The place is small, with fewer than 10 barstools, and a big chalkboard also lists baked goods, homemade ice creams, one daily salad, one daily soup, and beverages (the most refreshing: mint iced tea). The prize seat looks out through the front window onto Metropolitan Avenue. From that perch, you can watch the Williamsburg populace prance by.

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Restaurant review, Tribeca's Trattoria Cinque Has That '60s Campari Glow.

Lately, we've seen a spate of restaurants seeking to imitate Roman trattorias. Obika re-created a famous mozzarella-themed wine bar in the soaring lobby of Midtown's IBM building, while Quinto Quarto built out a small storefront in the West Village, getting the rustic look just right and offering authentic Roman pastas. Now along comes Trattoria Cinque ("Bistro Five"), invading a rambling space on Tribeca's Greenwich Street. The 250-seat restaurant features two small outdoor seating areas, a front-of-the-house dining room, a barroom with seating on stools and at tables, a humongous dining room that parallels the bar, and a pair of glassed-in private dining rooms, one at the rear of the main floor, the other downstairs with the bathrooms. As the website brags: "The dining room mimics a 1960s trattoria"—though "mimic" is a loaded word, isn't it?

"This lighting is great, if only the bulbs were aimed better," said a friend who works as a lighting designer. Indeed, a wealth of overhead fixtures and spots that stream upward through red bottles of Campari set the tone for the main room, which is filled with long blond-wood tables surrounded by red chairs, as if waiting for the hordes to arrive. Trattoria Cinque is clearly a project that hit the drawing boards before the economic downturn, when eager restaurateurs decided that bigger was better when it came to minting money. The businessman in this case is Russell Bellanca, who operates two Alfredo of Rome restaurants, one in Rome and the other in Rockefeller Center. Both are aimed at tourists and reportedly not very good.

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Restaurant review, There Will Be Blood (Sausage) at the Vanderbilt

Starting at Vanderbilt Avenue and running west along Bergen Street, 10 times deeper than it is wide, the newly opened Vanderbilt first presents an extensively windowed front room, given over to a few raised tables and a long bar. This area is strictly for tipplers, since a snack menu constitutes the only food available. Luckily, the snacks are excellent: More Malaysian than American, the sticky beef jerky pokes out of its coffee cup, an impressive quantity for $6. I also recommend the trio of crisp croquettes, their squishy insides flecked with Serrano ham; hard-boiled eggs pickled yellow, served in a slush of dark chutney; and, best of all, a new take on brussels sprouts ($5), wherein the small cabbages are roughly chopped and then sautéed, so that the crisp outer leaves fall off and become coated in sweet sesame sauce.

An extended row of tables marches deeper into the restaurant along an unbroken banquette—punctuated by lavish flower arrangements—toward the darkened rear dining room, which is clad in what look like railroad ties. But mid-restaurant, opposite the banquette, discover a beautiful counter of white Carrera marble. As if the focus of some Renaissance masterpiece, the counter is brilliantly illuminated. Perch on one of the stools and you can be Jesus, blessing the well-organized tumult of the open kitchen, as soups are poured and garnished, salads tossed, and entrées carefully positioned on their schmear of squash or potatoes.

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Restaurant review, The Best Dining and Drinking Trends of the Decade.

If Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in the former Dutch settlement of Bushwick in the year 2000, and awakened today, he'd be rubbing his eyes in astonishment at the startling developments in the demimonde of restaurant dining over the last 10 years.

Pies from Naples: While the city's hallowed neighborhood slice—once available on every corner in town—has seen some decline, innovative new pizzas have covered the city like melted mozzarella. Our range of choices alone is amazing, but the single greatest addition to our pizza collection has been semi-authentic Naples-style pies, twirled at such places as Motorino, Franny's, Baci & Abbracci, Fornino, Pizza Fresca, Keste, Saraghina, and Roberta's, as well as Una Pizza Napoletana, which closed this year, showing that the trend may already be subsiding. These pizzerias serve single-person pies, yanked from smoky wood-burning ovens and featuring finely milled flours that render the crusts glove-like, with toppings that include imported tomatoes and Italian cheeses. Waking up in Bushwick, our sleeper doesn't have very far to slog to taste one, either. How about Motorino or Roberta's, Rip?

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Restaurant review, Woo-Hoo for Ruhu at Sunnyside's Sonali Cuisine.

Imagine for a moment a trio of silky lamb chops just yanked smoking-hot from the tandoori oven, deeply brown on the outside, but still a faint juicy pink in the middle. Now deposit them in a cream sauce laced with such spices as coriander, cinnamon, clove, cumin, and fenugreek, rendering the gravy dark and fragrant. Finally, fling a handful of crushed almonds into the swamp—making lamb pasanda ($9.99), one of the richest and tastiest dishes ever to grace a stainless-steel salver in a South Asian restaurant.

With a name meaning "golden" in Bengali, Sonali Cuisine is the latest small dining establishment to arrive on the Sunnyside stretch of Queens Boulevard, which has gradually developed into one of the city's best food neighborhoods. It's also the most recent Bangladeshi café to hit west-central Queens, following in the footsteps of Spicy Mina and Deshi. I'm pleased to report that Sonali is less quirky and cantankerous than the former, and less obsessed with mustard oil than the latter. (Although the intemperate use of mustard oil isn't such a bad thing, I guess.) The Sonali premises may be tiny—just a couple of unadorned tables, a counter, and a door leading into the kitchen—but the flavors are big, big, big.

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Restaurant review, Enjoy the Fish Stomach at Best Fuzhou Restaurant.

I'd zoomed past the gleaming new restaurant a couple of times on my bike, but it wasn't till the third occasion that I noticed the name: Rong Hang. "What a hook to hang a review on," I blurted out. So the next week, I dragged a crowd of avid Sino-diners to the location, a couple of blocks north of Canal on Eldridge Street, in the heart of Chinatown's Fujianese neighborhood. But when we tried to get in, the manager waved us away, asserting in shaky English that all the tables were reserved—even though the place was more than half-empty.

To make a shaggy-dog story short, I went twice more with groups of friends at various odd hours—in one case, dragging along a fluent speaker of Cantonese ("I can only understand every sixth word," she lamented of the Fujianese dialect). But each time, the story remained the same: No room at the inn. Luckily, on the first occasion, there'd been a helpful local lurking outside; he pointed at a restaurant on the next block and said, "Owned by the same man." Best Fuzhou did indeed have a similar sign and a nearly identical menu, though it was minus some of the more arcane seafood we'd admired in the tanks at Rong Hang.

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Restaurant teview, The Breslin's Little Britain.

I've been following April Bloomfield since she cooked Tuscan at the River Café in London. Six years ago, the English chef weighed anchor and crossed the Atlantic to helm the Spotted Pig in the West Village, whipping up an odd but effective combo of Central Italian fare and Brit pub grub. Late in 2008, she added the John Dory to her list of culinary successes, a posh Chelsea seafood spot that closed unexpectedly a few months ago for reasons that still remain shrouded in mystery.

The Breslin is her latest vessel, and, while the Spotted Pig was decorated with dozens of pig statuettes, and the John Dory with entire schools of multi-hued fish, the Breslin features pastoral paintings of cows, framed as if they were long-lost relatives. Located cheek-by-jowl with the wildly popular Stumptown Coffee, the restaurant nestles next to the lobby of the Ace Hotel, a former SRO hostelry turned trendy playground in Manhattan's gritty wholesale district. The Breslin comprises a darkened warren of rooms with an open kitchen gleaming at one end, casting light on the upturned faces of foodies who can't wait to graze on Bloomfield's latest inventions, and foreign travelers who seem frankly confused by the menu choices.

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