Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup

This week Frank Bruni at the Times files a one star review of Monkey Bar, "a big-city big-game reserve for the lions, gazelles and jackals of the urban veldt.... They’ve come because Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair and one of the principal architects of this experience, summoned them. On top of everything else the Monkey Bar is his social pulpit, affirming his ordination as the high priest of a certain fame-focused, power-obsessed sect of Manhattan society... And he fashions a fantasy New York where arrivistes bask in mutual recognition and reciprocal adoration, each mirroring the others’ sense of triumph, the unruly city edited down to one preposterously romantic room for the most unromantic of pursuits: back scratching and social climbing."

The review chronicles Bruni's frustrating attempts to score a reservation under a pseudonym, and while the process is humiliating, he ultimately decides it would "be less forgivable if there wasn’t actually something to savor on the far side of the velvet rope, along with signs that Mr. Carter and his crew truly care about that. There’s no denying that this is one of New York’s best-looking restaurants and that the food has improved markedly since the first weeks."

The Village Voice's Robert Sietsema reviews Hell's Kitchen restaurant La Kabbr, which specializes in cuisine from Iraq and the Mediterranean: "You won't find the true spirit of Iraqi cuisine among the grilled items. Instead, direct your attention to the Traditional Favorites section of the menu, where you'll find quzi ($16.95)... a massive boiled lamb shank, reclining atop a mattress of rice, concealed behind wads of juice-soaked vermicelli like a wild animal behind the bushes." Meanwhile, his colleague Sarah DiGregorio files a fiery manifesto against the cupcake craze, plaintively wondering, "When will we finally be rid of the little bastards?"

The Post's Steve Cuozzo goes grouchy old man on the Tim Hortons hype: "The new Hortons joints will have the same problem as the Dunkin' ones—they're franchised to the Riese Organization, the restaurant-management outfit that consistently succeeds in making horrible national brands even worse. I tasted a bunch of the Hortons products and, thanks to the company's reputation, I expected to write that they were an improvement over Dunkin' on the order of a .190 hitter stepping in for a .180 hitter. If anything, though, I found them even lousier than Dunkin'—gummier in the mouth and with no discernible flavor improvement. Hortons, schmortons—the upstart doughnut shops might have grease—whoops, "Riese"—written all over them. Caveat emptor.