Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup

This week finds the Times's Frank Bruni rhapsodizing about Matsugen, the new haute soba restaurant in Tribeca from chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who's kind of a big deal. Actually, as Bruni makes clear, only half the place is Jean-Georges; the other half, which includes the kitchen, is run by Taka, Yoshi and Masa Matsushita, brothers who also operate Matsugen restaurants in Tokyo and Honolulu. "Their soba, condiments, dips, broths and interlopers... are so clearly and cleanly flavored that you feel, as you use your chopsticks to drag the next tangle of soba through them or to twist it around them, that your senses have been sharpened, that your palate is more alert. Superior Japanese food has that effect."

For the Village Voice, Robert Sietsema enthuses about James, "an unremarkable-looking bistro set among the handsome turreted townhouses of Prospect Heights, an eatery more gastronomically ambitious than its location or modest prices would suggest... The asparagus salad proved incredible—a compost heap of green and white fragments, cooked but still crisp, soused with a fondue of creamy Boucheron cheese. The vegetarians at my table fought over it like carnivores." The Daily News also adores the place, insisting that "if we were all really lucky, we'd all live right around the corner from a place like James."

Also for the Voice, Sarah DiGregorio opines on the snack food served at some of the fancy cocktail lounges around town; she's "happy to find the bar snacks [at Clover Club] entirely unpretentious, and both more generously portioned and more affordable than those at Pegu Club." But damn those "uncomfortable wooden chairs, which seem to have been designed to make you want to get up and leave." Meanwhile Paul Adams at the Sun is pleasantly surprised by the "complex, vigorous pan-Latin food" at Yerba Buena on Avenue A.