Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup

As if offering a final coda (or is it?) to the suspenseful Momofuku Ko reservation saga, the Times’s Frank Bruni has officially opined on the breathlessly hyped, 12-seat restaurant from rock star chef David Chang. Bruni extols it with three stars, calling it “noteworthy beyond its addling all-computer reservation system and the intense, revelatory pleasures of its partly Asian, partly French, wholly inventive food… Ko in its early months serves a few dishes that merely intrigue along with others that utterly enrapture.”

Nigerians are the second-largest group of West African immigrants in New York, but peripatetic gourmands like the Voice’s Robert Sietsema bemoan the dearth of “user-friendly, full-menu” restaurants serving their cuisine. So he’s thrilled to have found Festac, in East New York near Atlantic Avenue. The food is “awesome,” and his pal Lenny, back from six months in Lagos, declares it “even better than the food I ate in Nigeria."

The Sun’s Paul Adams says I Sodi, yet another Italian restaurant in the West Village, is not only “crowded and loud” but marred by a “frustratingly limited” menu: “I tried spaghetti with clams ($18) when the restaurant was busy, and the result was a plate of undercooked noodles, resistant to the tooth and to the thin sauce they resolutely refused to absorb.”

Writing for the Daily News, Danyelle Freeman resists the temptation to stop at Shake Shack on her way to Danny Meyer’s haute French restaurant Eleven Madison Park, where she has “one of the most spectacular meals in recent memory. New Yorkers should be pitching tents outside Eleven Madison Park for executive chef Daniel Humm's cooking.” Freeman's pitched tent is sequined with five out of five stars.

Photo of Ko courtesy EssG.