Wednesday Food News: Early Edition

Julia Moskin sits in for Bruni again this week, gives two stars to the new dining room at the Morgan Library. It's eccentric, she says--open only during museum hours, which means that it only serves dinner on Friday nights, and even then only until 9pm. But "there's no institution that joins a menu and a museum as seamlessly."

Also in the Times, Sarah Lyall's got an update on food in British school cafeterias, and the impact of Jamie Oliver's healthy eating campaign. Not surprisingly, many don't like it, though one parent took this dislike to an extreme. She and another mom sold fast food meals to about 50 kids a day through the school gates, until the media caught on and they were vilified as the "meat pie mums." The program seems more successful at schools that introduced the dietary changes gradually. We wonder how his campaign would go over in New York?

Regina Schrambling writes a dispatch from New York for the LA Times, starting with her take on Hawaiian Tropic Zone (worth visiting, she says, because David Burke is doing the cooking and he's worth following anywhere). From there, it's on to the big restaurant trend: "Everything about [it] should feel wrong," she says, "but somehow it connects in this changing city." For Schrambling, it merits attention because it's about the food, not just the scene.

Speaking of big restaurants, Stephen Starr, who opened Buddakan and Morimoto this year, tells Page Six that he's planning to open two more restaurants in downtown NY. One will be tapas-style; the other, another Asian-influenced restaurant.

Also in the Post, Cuozzo visits Lonesome Dove Western Bistro and Ted Turner's Montana Grill, hates both. Of Lonesome Dove, he says, "For a place where you expect straightforward, vivid flavors redolent of Big Sky Country, almost everything is seasoned for convalescents." Overall, he finds this fall "a dismal season for new restaurants."