Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup

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Aldea (Katie Sokoler/Gothamist)
This week Frank Bruni at the Times, approaching his last month with the Gray Lady, goes gaga for Aldea (photos), where "the cooking is precious, lusty, ultramodern, rustic and a host of other adjectives that don’t normally squeeze together but find themselves in a tight, mostly happy clutch here. Although Aldea has a clean, sleek and relatively spare look, it has a much more complex taste. One minute you’re nibbling on crisp pig’s ears. The next you’re carefully maneuvering your spoon under a translucent, quivering orb of concentrated mushroom broth—one of those liquid ravioli that the Spanish alchemist Ferran Adrià made famous—in an avant-garde consommé." Bruni also takes a look at artisanal pizza parlors this week.

The Village Voice's Robert Sietsema is mostly satisfied by Watty & Meg in Cobble Hill: "French doors have been installed and flung open to catch summer breezes, while lines of outdoor tables litter the sidewalk like ants at a picnic... Though the proud decorator compares the interior to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, that's a bit of a stretch....Yogic influences add a maverick tilt to the menu, because chef and co-owner Sosie Hublitz—who arrived here not long ago from Virginia—is reportedly an enthusiast." His colleague Sarah DiGregorio philes on Pho Sure, where "the menu wisecracks, offering noodle soups called pho sure, pho real, and, best of all, mo pho—a bowl replete with beef tendon, tongue, and peen, better known as good old bull penis."

NY Mag's Adam Platt bestows three out of five stars on chef Michael White's fancy new seafood restaurant Marea, "but as the meal proceeds, you can’t help feeling that the exuberant, intuitive chef is not entirely at home in the precise, finicky realm of fish... Is it really necessary, in this era of self-conscious austerity, to cook a perfectly good piece of salmon in duck fat? Possibly not. But then, Marea is to Mike White’s great restaurant, Convivio, what Mario Batali’s Del Posto is to Babbo. For all its impressive, even dazzling qualities, it feels less like a labor of love than like one of ambition and duty."

Danyelle Freeman at the Daily News is wholly beguiled by Locanda Verde, the reboot of Robert DeNiro's failed Tribeca restaurant Ago: "Ago was dreadful, but the new incarnation, an Italian trattoria called Locanda Verde, is excellent. This was quite an exorcism." Time Out's Jay Cheshes thinks Cooper Square Hotel restaurant Table 8 (photos) isn't so great: "Californian Govind Armstrong, a Spago veteran well known for his matinee-idol looks—he made People’s 50 Most Beautiful list in 2004—slipped into town recently with a surprising dearth of media hype. The second outpost of his Table 8 brand—the others are in Miami Beach and Los Angeles—commits so many sins against good taste, the West Coast star may have been hoping critics would somehow overlook his arrival."

And coming full circle, Alan Richman at GQ also raves about Aldea, which he deems "one of Manhattan’s best new restaurants. I admire everything about it, except the wine-by-the-glass prices. (They should be a couple dollars less.) I understand perfectly why I feel this way, but I don’t understand why everybody else does. I thought chic New Yorkers wanted to sit at a counter, face a plywood wall, wear flip-flops, and contemplate menu offerings of pork belly and charcuterie. This sure isn’t that—although charcuterie is available, and there are six counter seats facing a vividly lit open kitchen."

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