Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup

Kenmare

Elite scenester sanctuary Kenmare gets an unsurprising drubbing today from the Times's Sam Sifton, whose bullshit detector wiggles in the red zone. "The dining room is pretty enough, dark and cool, with white marble tables and a vaguely Mediterranean feel enhanced by big sprays of flowers," says Sifton. "It is crowded nightly, first with dinner parties that seem pulled from rejected “Sex and the City” scripts and then with a late, late, late show of models and people with incredible collections of music and sneakers and phone numbers, accompanied by the people who went to college with them who now work on Wall Street. But the food is inconsequential." Sifton also checks in on drunken late-night Chinatown oasis Wo Hop, where he finds "great comfort in eating such food, at a restaurant with seven decades in Manhattan, still going strong."

Woodside restaurant Katmandu Spice "may be the only Brazilian-Nepalese restaurant in the world," writes the Village Voice's Robert Sietsema. "The Brazilian portion of the menu... includes the brilliant Bahian signature bobo de camarao ($16), a wealth of shrimp in a rich sauce laced with herbs, coconut milk, and dende, the orange oil that underpins much of northern Brazilian and West African food. I haven't tasted better, even in Newark's Ironbound."

"Why should a place as funky, posh, and oddly friendly as the Crosby Street Hotel (the latest outpost of London’s high-end Firmdale chain) have such middling food?" wonders Shauna Lyon at The New Yorker. "Cocktails are clearly the point here. But can they possibly be worth eighteen dollars? Compared with the bar snacks, maybe. A few weeks ago, bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with olives had an odd medicinal twang, while crab rangoons, usually high on the guilty-pleasure list, had the unmistakable essence of Long John Silver’s."

The Commodore's front room. (John Del Signore/Gothamist)

The Commodore, a Williamsburg restaurant/lounge serving Southern comfort bar food in the old Black Betty space, gets a rave from New York this week. Chef Stephen Tanner, a "Georgia native and fried-chicken virtuoso" who co-founded the original Pies-N-Thighs and has worked the kitchen at Diner and Egg, is "somewhat of a seminal figure in his adopted Williamsburg. In a manner akin to Kenny Shopsin, Tanner’s a brilliantly intuitive cook... Down-home and delicious, melding southern, Mexican, and (though he might shudder at the term) New Brooklyn Cuisine, Tanner’s cooking raises the bar-food bar."

And Time Out's Jay Cheshes gives Aquavit two out of five stars, concluding that an absentee celebrity chef is better than no celebrity chef at all. "Under Aquavit’s new chef, Marcus Jernmark, the food falls well short of the standards [Marcus] Samuelsson set. On a recent weeknight, the nearly empty dining room, with gray banquettes in wood booths, was as depressing as a corporate boardroom." The review also features a 3-D photo of Swedish meatballs—we don't have our 3-D glasses handy, so it just looks revolting!

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