Wife Tries To Abort And Poison Husband's Lovechild
Man Injured By Tree Limb Files Suit Against City
Charles Barron Will Run For Council Speaker
Alleged Tiger Mistress Is Unrecognizable To Dead Fiancee's Dad
New Jersey State Senate To Vote On Gay Marriage
This week Frank Bruni at the Times tells Zak Pelaccio (Fatty Crab) to get his shit together at the West Village's Cabrito: "On its best nights and judged by its best dishes, Cabrito is the Mexican restaurant so many of us dreamed about for so long. It has just enough sophistication and upscale trappings, manifest in the quality of its cocktails and length of its tequila and mezcal list, to be the plausible cynosure of a fun night out, not just a grubby refueling station where the price of dauntless, authentic flavors is a spartan atmosphere." BUT: "Cabrito is afflicted by an inconsistency that’s puzzling, even maddening. There are dishes that don’t seem, by nature, to rise to the caliber of others, and dishes that aren’t dependable from one visit to the next."
The Village Voice's Robert Sietsema is "dazzled" by Ayada, a new Thai restaurant in Elmhurst, where the beef tendon soup ($4/$7) is "spectacular, loaded with jelly-like bits of bovine connective tissue and plenty of veggies. The menu asks you to specify 'light' or 'dark,' and I'd ordered the light before my friend Francis arrived...He noted when the soup appeared: 'Dude, you should've gotten the dark. They pour pig blood in that.'" And Sarah DiGregorio at the Voice promises that the ambiance and upselling at Shang in the Thompson LES Hotel will bore you until "your eyeballs hurt, but things get decidedly more interesting when you dig in to the disorienting, kaleidoscopic menu, which veers from endive salad to turnip cake to jerk chicken."
The Post's Steve Cuozzo also files on Shang, which serves "one of the most thrilling dishes I've had in the past year," and two other places: health-conscious yet reportedly delicious Rouge Tomate (photos) and the gargantuan Latin-Fusion restaurant At Vermilion (photos). About the latter, Cuozzo seriously begs to differ with the Gray Lady: "The Times seems intent on putting it out of business; it ran a wicked review by a writer who is not the paper's actual critic and a hard-times 'news' story built around a dining room that was, unsurprisingly, empty at 5:37 p.m. At Vermilion deserves a chance with two cuisines that actually have a limited affinity through shared use of spices and starches."
Andrea Thompson at the New Yorker reviews the rustic yet sophisticated Braeburn in the West Village, where, "above all, there’s an attitude of respect—for the diner, for the cooks, for the ingredients...Unfortunately, sometimes respect can feel a lot like restraint. The duck breast, for instance, was perfectly cooked, succulent without being indulgently fatty, and surrounded by shredded Brussels sprouts. You’d be hard pressed, though, to remember the dish the next day." The Daily News's Danyelle Freeman has three (out of five) stars for Buttermilk Channel in Carroll Gardens: "You feel like you're eating at a small-town bed-and-breakfast...Just don't order fish. The herb-crusted hake was practically raw, and the bacon-wrapped trout tasted like, guess what, bacon."
At NY Mag, Adam Platt bestows two stars (out of five) each on 10 Downing in the West Village and West Branch on the Upper West Side. At the former (photos), "in accordance with the fashions of the day, the menu is filled with rustic specialties, like pork rillettes served with a spoonful of delicately minced apples on the side, and the vinegary cocktail-size cassoulet studded with tiny duck meatballs." The latter is chef Tom Valenti’s "slightly more accessible, down-market version of his flagship establishment, Ouest."
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
I love beef tendon soup, but I'll hold the pig's blood, thank you.
Slap a huge pink dong on that donkey, throw in a nude Sarah Palin and then let me watch American politics at its FINEST.