Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup
Candle 79, the fancy vegan restaurant on the Upper East Side, "takes a limited larder and stages an impressive show, reminding the pork-stuffed, duck-spoiled diner how much else is out there, and how much of it has never relied on animals or fish in the first place," according to Frank Bruni at the Times. He's no vegetarian, so he's thrilled to discover that the place is "largely satisfying, leaving an omnivorous interloper with a sense not of deprivation but of relief. Can an experience this meatless really be this painless?" Could they speak, most animals would say, "Yes!"
Also in the Times, Pete Wells files a great '$25 and Under' dispatch from No. 7 in Fort Greene. It's mostly a rave: "No. 7 is a comfortable restaurant with comfortable prices, but it is not doing comfort food. It is doing big-city, night-on-the-town chef food. The economy may be regressing, but that doesn’t mean our diets have to." Adam Platt at NY Mag is not impressed by Allegretti. The pastas are "disappointing" and "those of you not privy, in these tenuous economic times, to deep expense accounts or vast baronial fortunes, might find the cost of dining at Allegretti an issue. But you shouldn’t be surprised. 'Thou shalt charge top dollar' has been one of the central tenets of the ancient haute cuisine doctrine going all the way back to Escoffier."
Back in Brooklyn, Danyelle Freeman has a blast getting bombed at Char No. 4 for the Daily News. She says the Carroll Gardens tavern, with its 300-plus bottles of booze, is like "an interactive whisky museum...When times are tough, drink cheap whisky. There is an alternative theory: When times are tough, drink the best whisky you can afford." Also, the "Southern-inflected menu is as serious as the whisky list."
And after deeming big shot French chef Alain Ducasse's Benoit "irredeemably dull" when it opened last spring, the Post's Steve Cuozzo is persuaded by the publicist to give it another chance. During appetizers, who should he see but Ducasse himself "unshaven and shirt half-buttoned, as if he'd just been roused out of bed - burst in out of the blue and race like a firefighter in a blazing tenement to the kitchen" in order to personally cook the critic's meal. The resulting entrees are "grand," but Cuozzo is unpersuaded: "There's trouble in Benoit's kitchen that can't be fixed by sending in the boss when a pesky writer walks in."
