Today Frank Bruni at the Times bestows two out of four stars on the Upper West Side Fatty Crab (photos/menu), an impressive rating for a casual restaurant. But Bruni just can't get enough of "the Fatty spirit, the culinary equivalent of a stoner’s foggy contentment...Are its flavors in fact too big, too unrelenting? What qualifies as a bold deployment of chilies and aiolis, and what’s just indiscriminate overkill? Many a meal at Fatty Crab raises those questions and walks a fine line, but pretty much every time I began to doubt the kitchen’s care and skill, something came along to restore my belief."

In the Village Voice, Robert Sietsema hips us to the new location of A Taste of Seafood in Harlem, where "the whiting sandwich ($4.50) remains the core of the menu—three perfect fillets breaded with a combo of flour and cornmeal, trapped between slices of white... The chicken wings remain superlative, crisp-skinned and served with chips and sides...The wings are so big that I'd hate to run into the chickens that produced them in a dark alleyway." His colleague Sarah DiGregorio files a mixed review of wood-burning, Neapolitan pizza restaurant Keste, which "is less pizza joint than pizza temple... Kesté's pizzas are, on the whole, tasty—as long as you're not expecting a crisp, thinnish New York-style crust. Pizza in Naples is usually eaten with a knife and fork; the crust is puffy and bread-like, and the middle is often sodden with olive oil."

Leo Carey at the New Yorker has penned the definitive take-down of obnoxious Soho tool magnet Delicatessen, whose owners have tried to reverse the general critical derision by bringing in a new chef. Whatever: "As soon as the government has finished with the banks, a stress test for restaurants might be in order, and the ones in east Soho and on the Lower East Side, which have burgeoned roughly in step with bank branches, should be first in line. Some may turn out to be engaged in the productive and viable business of feeding people, but it will emerge that many, based on blind optimism and unacceptable levels of risk, are stuck with assets (and food) that are undoubtedly toxic. Delicatessen isn’t the worst of them, but it demonstrates many of the faults of the neighborhood: style over substance, a poorly designed menu, and indifferent execution."