Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup

This week the Times's Frank Bruni has a mouth-watering rave for Southern Italian restaurant Convivo (pictured), chef Michael White's revision of the stuffy L'Impero in Tudor City. He declares that Convivio has emerged from the transition "as a pasta lover’s dreamland...soulful and unpretentious...Mr. White can do it all...and is doing even better work with pasta at Convivio than he has done at Alto." Skip the seafood, though: "Roll-ups of fried swordfish with a yogurt sauce tasted too much like some tarted-up refugee from Long John Silver’s."

Also in the Times, Matt Gross works the fish taco beat at three Manhattan restaurants. Pinche Taqueria, Toloache and Mercadito Cantina all score big. At the latter, the bartender declares: “The fish taco’s going to change your life, man!” Gross concurs, "He was right. I was back a few days later for more." At the Village Voice, Robert Sietsema "goes through hell chasing muffuletta," the Sicilian-American sandwich invented in New Orleans. He finds "magnifíque" muffuletta at Dive Bar, and his (vegetarian!) date declares the meatless ruben, made with sautéed mushrooms instead of pastrami, with sauerkraut-embedded provolone oozing out the sides, to be "the best vegetarian food I've ever had in a bar." The rest of the menu, however, is "Blech!"

The Voice's Sarah DiGregorio says the "seasonal New American" restaurant Apiary in the East Village is "the bee's knees." It doesn't hurt that her waiter is "adorable." While she concedes the place is "overpriced," Chef Neil Manacle's cooking is "unfussy and completely pleasurable." Danyelle Freeman at the Daily News is disappointed by Braai, the South African BBQ restaurant in Hell's Kitchen that "looks like an African date-hut...I skipped lunch and all of my mid-afternoon snacks because I planned to take down a barbecued ostrich that evening. And what did I get? I got one dainty skewer of overcooked ostrich, domestically raised. I didn't want domestically raised. I had my heart set on ostrich right off the veldt. And where's the antelope? I came for antelope."

And The Post's Steve Cuozzo slams uptown newcomer Bloomingdale Road with brio: "It might sound petty picking on a $6 item, but the chicken lollipop's pre-pubescent spirit pervades Bloomingdale Road's menu...Mac and cheese "with all the fixins" was beyond fixing, a mush so liquid it could moonlight as actual baby food. Goo, goo! A menu seemingly aimed at adolescents hardly bodes well. One recent night, a hostess unwittingly suggested what ought to be done with it. She was methodically tearing up copies of the menu and throwing them in the garbage."

Photo of Convivio courtesy Melissa Hom