NY Mag's Adam Platt coughs up one star (out of five) for both Bar Breton and Txikito. At the former, "The scallops I ordered one night were dank and bland, and the sea bass was unsettlingly fishy." As for the latter: "The menu of exotically spelled Basque finger snacks and drinking foods (the restaurant’s name means little in Euskara, and is pronounced 'chick-KEE-toe') is impressively diverse without being overstuffed. It’s also informative (did you know the Basque name for pig trotters and tripe was 'txarripatak'?) and fairly modestly priced, provided you don’t order fourteen things at once and many glasses of good, inky Tempranillo, like I did."

Jay Cheshes at Time Out NY slaps a big FAIL on the UWS Compass, which has reinvented itself as a seafood restaurant in its "latest bid to fill the bland, institutional dining room... And what of the lobsters behind the marketing scheme? The poor beasts—stuffed into bland ravioli, chopped up with far too much breading in a vapid out-of-the-shell version of a classic Thermidor, drowning in salty beurre blanc in an otherwise passable butter-poached treatment—gave their lives for no good reason."

And Steve Cuozzo at the Post, always good for a laugh, skewers the bar menu trend in his column this week: "Probably because they're traumatized over losing so much dining room and party room business, some joints are acting defensive or just plain weird about [bar menus]. A publicist for Anthos, for example, informed me that its small, new, second-floor room called Anthos Upstairs is an 'entirely separate restaurant' with 'no bar menu.' Well, excuuuuuuse us - $10 to $15 dishes from the same kitchen that turns out $38 entrees, and a booze menu touting cocktails, beer and wine by the glass, qualifies as a 'bar menu' even if it's served on the roof." But the Daily News's Danyelle Freeman loves wearing her dungarees to try the bar menu at Le Cirque.