Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup

This week Frank Bruni at the Times bestows two glittering stars on Allegretti, where one of his dining companions swoons for the fish soup, sounding like an absolutely insufferable food snob: "'It tastes exactly the way it should," she said, rushing the words out as soon as the soup was down. She wanted the rest of us to know. She wanted to crow. She wanted to be done with talking and get back to the soup. She was even making those mm-mm noises...What she meant, as I learned when she passed the soup to me, was that it tasted of Mediterranean waters — scorpion fish, rouget — and of Mediterranean sunshine, the tomato flavor robust and true...Watching and nodding as I myself made joyful sense of it, she said, 'Are we in the south of France or what?' Actually, we were in Chelsea, though it was easy to be confused."

NY Mag's Adam Platt opines on Apiary in the East Village, and says it's "cheery and also slightly claustrophobic, like dining inside a modish, intricately appointed blast shelter. But no one else at my table seemed to mind these close quarters, particularly the women, who, in what was perhaps another sign of the times, began knocking back glasses of the house white-wine sangria like drunken pirates. Their mood was further improved by the food, which is overseen by Neil Manacle (for years, he served as the right-hand man to Bobby Flay) who manages to take the usual roster of standard small-restaurant dishes and imbue them with a spicy, eclectic punch." As an afterthought, Platt piles on Soho tool HQ Delicatessen: "Most of the faux deli dishes (beef stroganoff without any beef, salt-saturated matzo balls) are pretty grim."

At the Village Voice, which is taking forever to load this morning, Robert Sietsema breaks from the pack with an endorsement of Bar Milano, the expensive Italian place in Murray Hill that Bruni memorably likened to "a cellphone with constantly bad reception” after it opened five million years ago, i.e. April. Anyway, Sietsema says, "the pastas are uncontestedly brilliant," and the cheese plate is, "the perfect ending to a wild subway ride of a meal."