This week Sam Sifton at the Times pens a muted love letter to Chin Chin, an upscale Chinese restaurant on East 49th Street that's been in business since 1987. And although "a certain roughness to the plating of the food makes the place a little more casual than perhaps was the idea in the original business plan," Sifton says the old dowager's still got it: "Order a dry martini and allow the pressures of the city to recede in its glow. Chin Chin is as American as pork dumplings and sticky spareribs, cold noodles with sesame sauce, three-glass chicken and fried rice." In the Times's $25 and Under column, Ligaya Mishan enjoys "an all-star lineup of soups" at Pilar, a tiny Cuban restaurant on the border of Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy.

"The world has never known a more perfect meatball hero," declares Robert Sietsema at the Village Voice, in his review of The Meatball Shop on the Lower East Side. "While the $9 price tag may seem excessive, especially with a similar-size hero available at every pizza parlor in town for $5 or $6, note that this one comes with a baby spinach salad topped with lemon vinaigrette and thinly sliced apples, transforming your hero into a balanced meal." His Voice colleague Sarah DiGregorio files from Jackson Heights, where she reports, "There's only one place I know where you can get Bangladeshi trotter stew and Tibetan spiced tripe in the same room, and that's Merit Kabob and Dumpling Palace, an accurately named compound restaurant in Jackson Heights."

The New Yorker's Lauren Collins finally gets around to A Voce Columbus in the Time Warner Center, which just isn't punk enough for her. "As corporate as it gets... A Voce has its pleasures: light, space, cheery if scripted service—'I’m sorry to be inhospitable,' a host said, before refusing to seat an incomplete party, and, then, hospitably, thinking the better of it. It’s a Fresh Air Fund of a restaurant, inducing in New Yorkers the comfort and boredom they would feel in Scottsdale or Charlotte."