Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup

The raw bar at Fishtail. (Hugh Merwin)

This week Frank Bruni at the Times bestows one star upon David Burke's Fishtail on the Upper East Side. He finds it both "exasperating" and "amusing...While several lines of type on the restaurant’s elaborately segmented, deeply fatiguing menu trumpet its commitment to sustainable seafood, there’s at least as high a premium on silliness, and exuberance is everything. With Mr. Burke, the trailblazing inventor of the cheesecake lollipop, that’s often the case... He’s as much showman as chef, though he’s a particular kind of showman, happy to act the clown, eager to play the prankster. You get the sense that if, at some pivotal juncture in his past, he had been handed a microphone instead of a spatula, he’d be doing stand-up now."

Having presumably covered every outer borough food stall, halal cart, and Nepalese hole-in-the-wall to the point of exhaustion, peripatetic Village Voice critic Robert Sietsema files from Newark this week, where he finds fried calamari with "rings the size of hula hoops" at seafood restaurant Sol-Mar. Back in Brooklyn, his colleague Sarah DiGregorio enjoys ZuZu Ramen, where she sits by the open kitchen and "marvels at the choppy ballet of two chefs in a small space—the sous chef takes a blowtorch to the pork-belly charshu to caramelize the edges; Moroto carefully eases a soft-boiled egg out of its shell and into a hot bowl of soup. The glass divider gives the proceedings the feel of a zoo exhibit—staring through the glass, I felt there ought to be a sign: 'Don't tap on the glass. It stresses the chefs.'"

NY Mag's Adam Platt finds Harbour mostly refreshing; the Hudson Street seafood restaurant with an interior that mimics a yacht earns two out of five stars: "It’s not until the entrées, however, that the cooking at Harbour begins to come alive. [Chef Joe] Isidori pairs his fresh sea scallops with soft chunks of caramelized cauliflower, and finishes them with a foamy, invigorating emulsion flavored with lobster stock and paprika." Danyelle Freeman at the Daily News grants it three stars out of five, but does wonder, "What's with all the foam?"

Chef Susur Lee's restaurant Shang, in the Thompson Hotel LES, hasn't gotten such great reviews, but The New Yorker's Andrea Thompson has given it a dissenting rave: "The fact that most of what arrived was delicious became a double-edged sword—it took an iron will to try to save room. It was worth it, though, since by far the best dish on the menu came late: rosy lamb chops that could be cut with a butter knife, with a peanut sauce good enough to spoon up by itself... Even if there’s a sense that many of the diners are hotel guests, it’s still a pretty chic crowd—girls with eyelid-skimming bangs, men with kaffiyehs wrapped around their necks. Only the odd towheaded toddler gives the game away."

And Jay Cheshes at Time Out NY has mixed reviews for Scuderia and Da Silvano Bistecca, two newish ventures from restaurateur Silvano Marchetto and his daughter (the father's original, Da Silvano, has been a West Village institution for decades). He says Bistecca, a steakhouse, "is a restaurant still in search of its soul," while Scuderia serves "better than average pastas—a starter (or light supper) portion of fresh black-pepper pappardelle comes bathed in a hearty beef-cheek ragù. The minimalist mains by Claudio Cristofoli (Cipriani Downtown) are satisfying—and reasonable—enough if you happen to be in the 'hood, but not worth making a special trip for."

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