Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup

Strip House

This week Sam Sifton at the Times upgrades Strip House, the swank Greenwich Village steak house, to two stars. (The paper last reviewed it in 2000.) "William Grimes, in a review for Times that year, wrote that Strip House 'wasn’t so much a steakhouse as a catalog of hip references to the idea of a steakhouse.' He awarded the restaurant one star. Now it deserves two," Sifton declares. "Age has given David Rockwell’s design for the room a kind of gravitas, and with it the restaurant has gained some of the clubby appeal you used to be able to find at places like Gino, on Lexington Avenue, which has a similar layout, or in the bar room at 21. (As at 21, there is great fun to be had in snooping about the place. In addition to portraits of Viennese strippers, torch singers and ancient celebrities on the walls, there is a signed portrait of Thurgood Marshall near the bar.)... And the food is generally marvelous, the steak often superb."

In the $25 and under column, Times critic Betsy Andrews has positive things to say about several Lower East Side and East Village restaurants: Carteles, Kinski, and This Little Piggy Had Roast Beef, where the sandwich dubbed "This Way ($4.50), which I’d call Philly style, has roast beef in an oniony jus beneath a tangy ooze of Cheez Whiz. Its trio of flavors plays a funky riff on the palate, and its soft, eggy roll does the place’s nursery-rhyme handle right: it’s delicious adult-baby food. You just might cry, “Whee, whee, whee!” all the way home."

The Village Voice's Robert Sietsema files on Northern Spy, the locally-minded restaurant that replaced the beloved Old Devil Moon on East 12th Street. "The prices on the menu often seem two or three dollars cheaper than you might have expected, encouraging you to become a regular," writes Sietsema. In addition to the entrées, leaf salads, and composed salads of grains and doughty root vegetables, there's a sandwich menu that knocks down the price point even further. The mushroom sandwich ($10) is a particular joy, depositing sautéed 'shrooms, potato confit, and 'clothbound cheddar' (what, no paperback yet?) in a goodly length of baguette." Meanwhile, his colleague Sarah DiGregorio digs Kuai An Hand Pull Noodles in Chinatown.

Andrea Thompson at the New Yorker is disappointed by Colicchio & Sons, which the titular celeb chef opened in the former Craftsteak space. "Unfortunately, Colicchio seems to have become a bit sloppy in the kitchen," writes Thompson. "Most everything was fine, but only that. A first course of gnocchi offered succulent doses of bone marrow but was unevenly seasoned, giving the middle of the dish a peppery burst and leaving the outer fringes bland." Time Out's Jay Cheshes opines, "Sometimes, small-plates restaurants, attempting to unshackle diners from the tyranny of a three-course dinner, end up creating an even more oppressive regime of unsatisfying meals and inflated bills. That, in short, is the problem with Recette, an ambitious West Village newcomer that replaces appetizers and entrées with too-small plates."

And the Post's Steve Cuozzo is "bedeviled by Faustina," the "crazy-hot" new "shared plates" restaurant from Scarpetta chef Scott Conant, located in the Cooper Square Hotel. Though he concedes Conant's brilliance, this place isn't for Cuozzo: "Call me a relic, but I dread 'small plates to share.'" And yet: "Most choices are fine for the price, and several would be bargains at any price. Warm and buttery, herbed Castelvertrano (green) and Alfonso and Gaeta (black) olives might be the world’s best $6 palate-opener. The same pittance buys ciabatta for dipping and stirring through a blissful blur of poached duck egg and fonduta. Beef short ribs on a bed of spaetzle were a mouth-melting, $16 miracle; porcini ravioli drenched in parmigiano cheese ($16), pillows of woodsy pleasure. Toothsome spaghetti drenched in octopus ragu evoked Scarpetta’s elemental flavors."