Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup
This week Sam Sifton at the Times files a two star review of A Voce Columbus. This slick Italian-influenced restaurant is the Time Warner Center incarnation of the Flatiron district A Voce, which was made successful by chef Andrew Carmellini (now at Locanda Verde). Chef Missy Robbins (Chicago's Spiaggia) is running the kitchen now, and Sifton agrees she's "an excellent chef. She didn’t come here to mess around. But make no mistake. A Voce is a corporate enterprise, part of a master plan, and feels like it. Save for swiveling yourself around in the Eames-y leather chairs that appoint both restaurants, there is very little room for improvisation. Service is clinical, almost silent, beyond language... This restaurant could yield more A Voces in other cities, in other malls, all over this land."
Sifton also chimes in on the critical backlash to food blogger-hyped Bill's Bar and Burger: "The burger is amazingly both crusty and underdone, underseasoned; it soaks its supermarket bun into a pulpy submission. It has no flavor. It is deeply uninteresting."
The Village Voice's Robert Sietsema finds brilliance and missteps at non-stereotypical Greek restaurant Ovelia Psistaria in Astoria: "Missing are the iced displays of fish, barnyard animals rotating on spits, 3-D pictures of the Parthenon, and rustic taverna décor that have long characterized the neighborhood's Hellenic eateries... The menu tries to tempt you with something called 'Greek tapas.' Don't be seduced! Sardines topped with jalapeños and cured beef doused with mandarin vinaigrette are things better left in the chef's imagination." His colleague Sarah DiGregorio recommends two downtown Mex-Cal restaurants (Los Feliz and Dos Toros) to shut up the Californians.
The New Yorker's Lauren Collins says Aureole in midtown is "all very corporate, in the best sense—smooth, genial, humming. This is T.G.I. Friday’s, the midtown way. The fig-thyme Martini, delicious and embarrassing, is our Mudslide... Charlie Palmer, by now, is more C.E.O. than chef, and his food has a sugared, edgeless aspect that is maybe a little too lulling... Besides being sweet, the dishes can be awfully busy. The skate comes out with an absolutely perfect sear, but who notices when you’ve got red grapes and green olives on the same plate? (There’s also broccoli rabe, pine nuts, and fregola pasta.) You wish that Palmer’s food, before it went out at night, would take off one piece of jewelry."
New York's Adam Platt tosses one star each to Abe & Arthur's and SD26. At the former, "the bi-level dining room is appointed with smoky mirrored walls, bland linen-covered lampshades, and rows of steel girders painted gray, which make it feel like you’re dining deep inside the vault of a very loud, underdecorated bank." And SD26, the downtown reboot of San Domenico, has lost its way: "Like other venerable gourmet establishments that have been bravely attempting to reinvent themselves on a much larger, more accessible scale (the new Oceana in midtown, Charlie Palmer’s Aureole), SD26 has a problem with consistency."
And Time Out's Jay Cheshes is also irritated with Abe & Arthur's, handing it two out of five stars: "On a recent Tuesday night, the bar at Abe & Arthur’s was manic with cougars on the prowl and graying lotharios. We fought our way to the hostess stand, where a lithe trio would decide our seating fate. Would we be relegated upstairs to Siberia—far from the action on the second-floor balcony? Or escorted downstairs to the most deafening dining room in New York? These are the prevailing concerns at Abe & Arthur’s, a Meatpacking meat market whose aging scenesters may have frequented its red-hot precursor, Lotus—another restaurant where the party came first and the food was an afterthought."
