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The Village Voice's Robert Sietsema has big problems with Anella, the new Italian restaurant that replaced the beloved but bitchy Queen's Hideaway in Greenpoint. In Anella's "gem" of a backyard, "sitting outside in the summer is like an instant vacation to Italy. Well, minus the excellent food... The menu has no point of view, as if accountants had conceived it with the idea of creating an establishment that would be a sure-fire cash cow. The apps and salads are a jumble of things that you've had better versions of elsewhere. The chicken-liver crostini ($7) resembled brown toothpaste with cardboard bacon on top, and no one had bothered to toast the stale bread underneath. And the pastas tend to be awful. An amatriciana sauce made with bacon instead of guanciale clotted the spinach papardelle like blood on a corpse ($15)."
And Sietsema's colleague Sarah DiGregorio is similarly displeased with Table 8, the slick new restaurant in the controversial Cooper Square Hotel: "Table 8 might have peddled skillful, sunny California cuisine to warm our blackened, crusty New York hearts. But the restaurant offers nothing but mediocrity, in a showy, shiny package... When the hotel was being built, I gaped at it from our Voice offices across the street. The white-ish glass tower, bulging from the center like a sail in the wind—or a potbelly—looms over the old brick apartment buildings and low rows of shops in the neighborhood. At street level, the yawning entryway looks like the jaws of Mordor, without the charm."
Leo Carey at The New Yorker sails happily through Harbour, that west Soho seafood restaurant designed to look like the interior of a yacht: "Near the restaurant, several swank condo and hotel developments, including the gargantuan Trump SoHo, are nearing completion, and you get the sense that if these buildings are ever filled Harbour’s future will be secure. For now, a lively youngish crowd seems to be drawn by the reasonable prices. A sprinkling of older folk, some heavily tanned, seemed harder to place. Perhaps, relying on the restaurant’s appearance, they were tricked into thinking it really was a cruise." Time Out's Jay Cheshes gives four stars to Aldea, the Portuguese-influenced restaurant from Chef George Mendes, who "has a line on some exceptional seafood. The sea scallops he serves in an entrée with farro risotto are among the most enormous in town."
Steve Cuozzo at the Post is head-over-heels for SHO Shaun Hergatt, the new "neo-Zen pleasure palace with a vaguely Asian air and a zillion dollars well-spent worth of mahogany, mother-of-pearl, Brazilian walnut, Tibetan fabrics, bronze, terrazzo and red Thai silk...If SHO doesn't light a fire under the dining millions, the terrorists will have won... [Hergatt's] best dishes on Broad Street are possessed of the same deceptively simple clarity of presentation and lightness of bearing that inform Thomas Keller's work at Per Se."
And Danyelle Freeman at the Daily News gives four out of five stars to chef Michael White's new seafood restaurant Marea, asking, "Ever slurped the sea? I don't mean an accidental mouthful of salty ocean water. I mean the briny fruits of the sea before being plucked from their underwater habitat and tossed on the grill. I imagine it would taste like the seafood stew, called brodetto di pesce, at Marea."
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Sietsema's review of Anella is damn hilarious. The accountant designed the menu thing is fantastic!
Dude! That Village Voice review of Anella is old! It’s also a bit biased and over the top. Read like something out of a high school newspaper. Couldn’t you have used a more current review? If I am not mistaken the Gothamist gave it a good review, not too long ago. I live around the corner from Anella and have become a regular. I eat there about one to two times a week. The place is consistent and always working to improve its menu - and it now has booze. You guys do a major disservice to an excellent restaurant by rehashing that trash review from the Voice. From personal experience I can say it is a fantastic place to eat. I have had some amazing meals both for brunch and dinner. Greenpoint has been in need of a restaurant like this for a long time. I do miss Queen’s Hideaway, but don’t take what happened to them out on Anella. You do everyone a disservice.
I don't think you realize you're commenting on something that was published in July.