Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup

We recently interviewed chef Saul Bolton, whose eponymous restaurant in Boerum Hill just celebrated ten years in business. Today Pete Wells at the Times bestows two stars on the place, where the elegantly understated atmosphere provides a modest frame for Bolton's culinary ambition: "One of the first restaurants to bring a contemporary sensibility to Brooklyn when it appeared on Smith Street in 1999, it has neither faded, nor stood still, nor sought a personality transplant. Instead Saul Bolton, the chef and the owner with his wife, Lisa, has upgraded just about everything in their modest storefront. Saul is the same restaurant, but better."

Meanwhile, the Times's Ligaya Mishan reports "pork vertigo" at Engeline’s Restaurant and Bakeshop, a Filipino restaurant in Woodside, Queens: "Advertised as pork knuckles, it turned out to be a whole pig hoof—again, deep fried—with a steak knife stabbed in, standing straight up. It was enormous. (You wouldn’t want to meet this pig in a dark alley.) The pork, when scraped off the bone, had a lush creamline of fat. It was the meal’s crowning glory." At the Village Voice, Robert Sietsema savors the pleasures of pork jowl at Quinto Quarto and says he hasn't had "such killer bucatini amatriciana ($11) since the last time I was in Rome."

The New Yorker's Lauren Collins files a truly inspired review of opulent Financial District latecomer SHO Shaun Hergatt, where her dinner is "fraught with awkwardness. First, there’s the name—better to pick another place than to have to mutter those clunky syllables on the phone to a date. Entering the restaurant, or trying to, is another exercise in embarrassment. A doorman at the Setai condominium points to an elevator. You get in, punch the button, nothing happens. Eventually, you may find yourself wandering the dark halls of the hotel, looking for another way up. At the restaurant’s reception, the unease persists. Why is the place both so vast and so empty?...The good news: while you’re wallowing in transitive anxiety, you can eat exceptionally well."