Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup
This week Frank Bruni double-fists it with a review of two sushi places: Kanoyama, in the East Village, and Sushi Azabu (pictured), in TriBeCa, that both "stand out in part because they’re navigable in ways that aren’t too financially wounding." Kanoyama’s "brimming, glistening combination platter...is first-rate, and doesn’t give you the sense you sometimes get at other restaurants that what you’re saving in money you’re sacrificing in freshness." The clandestine Sushi Azabu, accessed via a secret staircase in the meh Greenwich Grill, is "erratic. Get the scallop sushi or the spicy tuna roll, lavished with sesame and a chili-spiked mayonnaise, and you’re in heaven. Get the crispy fried squid and you’re in a strip-mall sports bar."
Also in the Times, $25 and Under columnist Betsy Andrews surveys three sandwich shops which, for crying out loud, better be under $25. At swine mecca Porchetta, "a small sandwich sells for $9, but the pork is so extravagant, it’s just big enough." Dogmatic is uneven, and the oddly named New York Hot Dog and Coffee is a fine outpost of the Korean chain that "sounds like a meal in a police action film." In the Village Voice, Robert Sietsema schleps out to Tierras Centro Americanas in Jamaica to get some Guatemalan soup made with chipilín, the shoots and leaves of a flowering weed "regarded as a soporific, with peasants who eat it reportedly becoming calm, spacey, and sleepy...I pulled up a big greenish gob and chewed it thoughtfully. Suddenly, I pitched forward into the soup, purple dinosaurs swimming before my eyes."
Sarah DiGregorio at the Voice reviews Dosa Garden: "I'm going out on a very wobbly limb and declaring that Staten Island has a restaurant worth trekking to—the forgotten borough has just scored its first South Indian eatery, and it's among the very best in the city." NY Mag's Adam Platt has a mixed review for Bobo in the West Village, where "the proprietors have gone to obsessive lengths to capture the 'Faux Speakeasy' style...This look has been a hit from the beginning (for the record, Mrs. Platt is a fan), but thus far, the food at Bobo has been a disaster." Platt also slams Bloomingdale Road, where chef Ed Witt is "foiled by a combination of bizarro conception and spotty technique."
And Lauren Collins at the New Yorker has fun dismissing haute soba house Matsugen, which she calls "chic, austere, and ultimately a bore; the staff is attentive, knowledgeable, and almost uncomfortably obeisant. The furniture suggests an office (a really nice one), and the kindly jitteriness of the waiters (they are big on speed-clearing) may make one less consumed by the food than by the sense that the bankers and traders a few blocks down might not be the only ones whose job security is uncertain."
