Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup
Today the Times’s Frank Bruni relates his multiple visits to West Village Asian barbecue restaurant Bar Q, and by the sounds of it you’d never guess print media is in any kind of financial trouble – an initial trip with one group of ungrateful friends prompted so much "grumbling" he had to "unruffle their feathers" by being “especially profligate with the wine” on his paper’s expense account. The hangers-on who shared his second visit tasted a better side of Bar Q; after passing over chef Anita Lo’s “cloying” baby back ribs for her “gorgeous” steamed lobster, he decides that Lo’s “triumphs, more than her wobbles, stayed with me.” Two stars.
In NY Mag, Adam Platt also visits Bar Q, where “the elf-size tables are set with chopsticks, and a few of the hulking, barbecue-ready gentlemen at my table considered some of the portions to be elf-size, too.” But Platt's grumblers don't get placated with wine because his wife likes the place, and it gets two stars out of five. Platt also lines up Wildwood Barbeque in his crosshairs and fires away at the “nakedly commercial venture,” though sparing it a kill shot because his 8-year-old daughter liked the chicken wings. One star, and a mental note for restaurateurs to post photos of Platt’s family in the kitchen.
And apparently it’s barbecue week for the MSM critics, because the Daily News also reviews Wildwood; Danyelle Freeman says it’s “like eating at a theme park called Barbecue Land” but concedes that “anything with brisket works.” The Sun's Paul Adams skips the BBQ beat in order to pan Mexican restaurant Cabrito, calling it "a Caliente Cab Co. for the dining-conscious New York of this millennium, a Tortilla Flats for 2008."
In the Voice, the peripatetic Robert Sietsema heads out to Bath Beach, Brooklyn to try the popular Malaysian restaurant Redang Island. He declares the Hainanese chicken – "cold, poached poultry deposited in a rich soy sauce, decorated with fronds of cilantro and slivers of green onion" – to be “astonishingly good.” And his favorite fishead stew (a Malaysian delicacy) is the curry asam fishhead, which is chock full of “collars, tails, and other odd parts of various fish… lending a wonderful glueyness to the broth.”
Photo courtesy Ryan Charles.
