Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup
If you follow along with this sort of thing, you'll know how earth shattering it is that outgoing Times dining critic Frank Bruni has bestowed three out of four precious stars on Keith McNally's casual-yet-elitist reboot of Minetta Tavern. That's a lot of stars for a place like this, especially considering Bruni's past ambivalence to the restaurateur, who famously accused Bruni of sexism after the critic gave his restaurant Morandi (which had a female chef) a tough review. Anyway, Bruni hearts McNally's Minetta, which he declares "the best steakhouse in the city." Meanwhile, the Post's Steve Cuozzo has some thoughts on Bruni's depature. (The take away's basically, Who cares, the Times is now a paper tiger.)
Usually this is where we pull-quote the Village Voice reviews, but their website's haywire at the moment. Reviewing chef Cyril Renaud's Bar Breton for the New Yorker, Mike Peed says the "menu is packed with marvelous, intricately rendered things, popping with clever ingredients and fresh flavors... Recently, a patron described the arugula-and-mushroom salad, dressed just right with lemon vinaigrette, as 'summer in a bowl,' while the gorgeous banana profiteroles took everybody’s eyes off the TV."
NY Mag's Adam Platt is quite fond of midtown's Seasonal, run by two Austrian graduates of the Vienna Culinary Institute: "Fresh diver scallops, not an ingredient you normally associate with the rainy streets of Vienna, are plated with a tangle of sweet beet tagliatelle and chunks of sautéed maitake mushrooms. My friend the Steak Loon tasted a seasonal special of white asparagus served with hollandaise sauce and a twirl of Tyrolean speck, then put down his fork in surprise. 'How rare is it that I like a vegetable?' he asked."
Jay Cheshes at Time Out has a mixed review for Smith's on MacDougal Street, where he finds the new chef Doug Psaltis "getting increasingly lost in the shuffle...There's a fine line between homey cooking and home cooking. The entrées I tried, while tasty enough, seemed more appropriate to a dinner party in a Manhattan apartment than a restaurant helmed by a chef who's worked under Alain Ducasse. Braised pork belly, properly tender and fatty, came with a generic heap of Chinese-takeout-style vegetable fried rice."
And Danyelle Freeman at the Daily News has a mixed review for Williamsburg's Vutera, the romantic subterranean restaurant under Rose Live Music: "The table favorite was a tender, red wine-braised lamb shank with baby carrots and polenta. But twice I tried the parsnip gnocchi, and twice it was a bust. It sounded good—homemade gnocchi with beet green 'pesto,' shiitake mushrooms and Valdeon blue cheese. No dice. The gnocchi arrived undercooked in a curiously bland 'pesto,' made from sauteed beet stems, beet greens, pine nuts and caramelized onions."
