Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup

Of course, the big thing on everyone's minds this morning is Frank Bruni's review of Bobo, a Greenwich Village restaurant as maligned for its food as it is adored for its ambiance. Well, after a long night of suspense and speculation, Bruni has made his announcement: one star, and considerable praise for Patrick Connolly, the restaurant's third chef in a year. "In fact a few of his dishes — his appetizers, at least — manage to steal attention from the votive candles lining the dark, narrow staircase up to the main dining room and that room’s droopy lighting fixtures, which bring to mind gargantuan glass jellyfish." But when a waiter upsells Bruni into a $115 Burgundy, he finds himself "wishing that Bobo was a little less bourgeois and a little more bohemian."

In the Village Voice, Robert Sietsema enjoys but doesn't exactly swoon over No. 7 in Fort Greene: "The best dishes often feature pork...The alarming-sounding pig's head ($15) materializes, not as an assortment of rubbery pig parts like a classic tête de cochon, but in a soup bowl, featuring a mild saline broth, a few nubs of cauliflower, and some gluey porcine tidbits that, really, might have come from anywhere on the hog." The Post's Steve Cuozzo says Alain Allegretti's eponymous restaurant "rekindles your love affair with the sweetest kind of Manhattan-French dining...And forget attitude: The menu's entirely in English and there's good cheer all over the place."

Leo Carey at the New Yorker has fun at Yerba Buena in the East Village, writing that "the dark wood, potted palms, and slatted blinds give the place a certain Our Man in Havana feel. If the kitchen is a striking success, the bar is even more so. Familiar drinks, like the mojito, acquire a new botanical intensity, and the barman, Artemio Vasquez, has a number of creations that, unlike most specialty cocktails, deserve to be more widely known." And the Daily News's Danyelle Freeman has a thing for Bussaco in Park Slope, where "the crab chowder makes me wonder why chowder isn't more popular...Not that it's the only thing worth ordering at Bussaco. What makes this menu interesting is that [chef Matthew] Schaefer serves only food that he really likes to eat - Mom's sauerkraut, homemade gravlax, Yorkshire pudding and fried chicken."