Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup

This week Sam Sifton at the Times files a twofer on impresario Jeffrey Chodorow's restaurants Tanuki Tavern and Ed's Chowder House. This is exciting because Chodorow famously bought full page ads in the Times after Sifton's predecessor, Frank Bruni, slammed his ventures Kobe Club and Wild Salmon. But instead of publishing separate reviews (and raking in twice the ad revenue), Sifton's consolidated, one star critique issues merits and demerits to both restaurants. At Tanuki Tavern, a plate of corn and white miso tempura cakes are "like something out of a fantasy high school cafeteria: sweet, crunchy and addictive." But Ed's Chowder House serves skate that tastes like ammonia and "a rubbery dish of 'moist grilled lobster' with 'spaghetti vegetables & lemon butter sauce' that might as well have been shipped direct from a grim summer wedding in a beachside catering mill." Daaaaamn! You gonna take that, Chodorow?

The Village Voice's Robert Sietsema enthusiastically reviews Saul Bolton's excellent Prospect Heights bar/restaurant, The Vanderbilt, where, "mid-restaurant, opposite the banquette, discover a beautiful counter of white Carrera marble. As if the focus of some Renaissance masterpiece, the counter is brilliantly illuminated. Perch on one of the stools and you can be Jesus, blessing the well-organized tumult of the open kitchen, as soups are poured and garnished, salads tossed, and entrées carefully positioned on their schmear of squash or potatoes." His colleague Sarah DiGregorio, meanwhile, "prowls the city sampling today's take on the most classic cocktail," the martini.

"Wouldn’t it be awesome, this East Village restaurant posits, to have bacon—five kinds!—for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?" writes the New Yorker's Shauna Lyon in her deliciously cynical review of Permanent Brunch. "Actually, everyone does that these days. So add in fluffy pancakes, seared steak and eggs sunny-side-up, smoked salmon layered with avocado on seven-grain, and French toast stuffed with Hatfield ham and Five Spoke Creamery Tumbleweed cheese. And, to make it even more fun, how about letting customers show off their downtown couth by picking Hall & Oates and Barry Manilow tunes via network using their own iPods or iPhones or, in the case of the poor unsavvy saps without, the restaurant’s device? Awesome? Well, perhaps."

New York's Adam Platt is refreshed by Le Caprice in the Pierre Hotel, "part of a group of swank London restaurants (including the Ivy and the original Le Caprice in Piccadilly), which may explain the patina of old-fashioned Euro snootiness that permeates the operation...If you have cash in your pocket and wish to rekindle the joys of boom-era Manhattan, you could do worse than the sautéed foie gras I enjoyed one evening, which the kitchen serves on a buttery tart crust, mingled with caramelized apples."

Meanwhile, in Cobble Hill, Betsy Andrews at the Times loves Henry Public, which "feels like Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn circa 1848, earlier than the Prohibition-era speak-easies that nearby JakeWalk nods to, earlier than the turn-of-the-20th-century Clover Club after which Julie Reiner named her Cobble Hill bar, and earlier, even, than the Victorian vibe of the new Prime Meats in Carroll Gardens. If this trend continues, we’ll be ordering grog from bartenders wearing breeches and tricorner hats."

Steve Cuozzo at the Post is surprised to find that Casa Lever, the reboot of Lever House, is serving classic Italian food "with great integrity... While Casa Lever is anything but cutting-edge, it makes a strong case for what it is: a higher-end, well-oiled Fiat of a restaurant amid racier Ferraris and Lamborghinis, even if some customers wouldn’t be caught dead driving less than a Maserati Quattroporte." And Time Out's Jay Cheshes gives Chelsea's Southern-fried tavern Tipsy Parson three out of five stars. While the food "may not rival your Southern grandmother’s cooking," Cheshes posits that "with the temperature plunging outside, the place makes for an awfully cozy retreat."

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