Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup

Adam Platt at New York is ultimately won over by the luxuriously atavistic SHO Shaun Hergatt (photos) near the Stock Exchange. He warns that "if you’ve been subsisting, these last few years, on a diet of pork products and righteously farmed, locavore-approved restaurant fare, everything about SHO Shaun Hergatt feels stuffy and slightly passé, as if it happened decades ago, in a strange, gastronomic galaxy far, far away. But as the food begins issuing from the kitchen, it quickly becomes apparent that this is not such a bad thing...Is there a market for this kind of flowery, dated auteur-style cooking in lean, recession-era Manhattan? Judging from the sparsely filled white tops on the evenings I dropped by, possibly not. But the three-course prix fixe dinner at SHO Shaun Hergatt costs a relatively recession-friendly $69."

The New Yorker's Mike Peed files on The Brooklyn Star, the cozy Williamsburg Southern-comfort restaurant helmed by David Chang cohort Joaquin Baca. He admires Baca's ambition, but wonders about "the bacon lobby’s influence on Baca. A waiter, dressed in a plaid shirt and bolo tie, advocates that you add bacon to an otherwise perfect skillet of corn bread. A wedge of iceberg lettuce is drizzled with bacon-buttermilk dressing. The topnotch half chicken is served with peaches, pea shoots, and bacon. The mac and cheese is bacon-flecked (a pleasant dash of salt and smoke amid all that goo). Even the meat in the hot meatloaf sandwich comes wrapped in, yes, bacon. (There are impending plans to serve brunch, and one can only imagine the monumental role bacon will play there.)"

And Time Out's Jay Cheshes raves about chef Ryan Skeen's moment at gorgeous LES restaurant Allen & Delancey (Skeen replaced Kyle Bailey): "This is serious food—as ambitious and accomplished as Ferguson’s work here—so precise, Skeen could never have pulled it off on a larger, more populist stage. The chef likes to play with extremes of temperature and texture but does so without resorting to molecular trickery. Instead, he relies on the hardest trick of all—perfect timing."