Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Reviews
In his most well-written review to date, Times dining critic Sam Sifton files a nuanced one star review on The Lion, a see-and-be-seen restaurant from chef John DeLucie, formerly of the Waverly Inn. This place is so disgustingly fashionable you might assume the food's an afterthought, but Sifton says DeLucie's still got it, and the critic has a fine time despite "a shouty crowd with corkscrew necks looking to see who will be next into the dining room, who next on the stairs... Only a Berkshire pork chop with fermented black garlic and what the menu calls 'applewood smoke' really disappoints. It arrives at the table on a wooden cutting board, beneath a glass dome filled with acrid smoke. The flavor it imparts seems to be that which might have been achieved if someone had simply stubbed out a glowing Marlboro on the meat."
New York's Adam Platt also reviews The Lion, and he's not having it. "The service on my visits was generally exemplary," Platt opines, "But the wait between courses routinely stretched on for too long, during which time the noise bouncing around the little Hobbit Hall dining room grew from a low murmur to a hysterical din. 'Put it in your article: This is the most obnoxious restaurant in America,' shouted one of my debonair uptown guests as she took possession of her $25 Amish chicken, which consisted of a single well-prepared breast cut in half to make it look slightly larger than it actually was."
The "most off-the-wall thing" on the menu at Buka, a Nigerian restaurant in Clinton Hill, is isiewu ($14), "a goat-head stew typical of the cooking of the Igbo tribe of eastern Nigeria," writes Robert Sietsema at the Village Voice. "Strips of face flesh are mired in a thick, brown sauce at once creamy and spicy, flavored with onions, lemon, palm oil, and utazi leaves, which are dark green and bitter; one can buy them dried in most West African groceries here. The dish is unspeakably rich, and you can play a game with the rest of your table trying to identify each individual facial feature. 'Here's a piece of lip,' crowed a dining companion. 'I think this must be forehead,' roared another. But I won the prize when I pulled an eyeball out of the sand-colored goo."
Sietsema's Voice colleague Sarah DiGregorio reviews Korean-esque restaurant Mrs. Kim's in Greenpoint. "At Mrs. Kim's, if you want banchan—the array of small dishes that usually come complimentary at Korean restaurants—you must order and pay for them," reprots DiGregorio. "This momentary annoyance is quickly assuaged by the quantity and quality of its kimchi selection. For $6, you receive a stone slab bearing five different kinds of pickled and cured vegetables that vary day to day, save the always available napa cabbage classic. We particularly admired the sesame leaves softened in an incendiary chile-garlic paste, tasting herbal and faintly of cinnamon."
The Commodore
The New Yorker's Lila Byock says Torrisi Italian Specialties, the instantly popular little Italian-American restaurant in Little Italy, "offers a convincing diorama of the dwindling neighborhood. Salamis dangle in the window, Coke comes in miniature glass bottles, and men in paper hats slice lunch meat behind a counter... The entrées... displayed excessive force: a skate filet was so drenched in butter as to obviate any other flavor; a pork chop tasted mostly of vinegar from the marinated peppers heaped on top. As for the pastry course, it recalled the ubiquitous parcel of sweets left behind at a wake. You might nibble absently at a rainbow cookie before waddling out to join the other mourners on Mulberry Street. Little Italy is dead. Long live Little Italy."
And Time Out's Jay Cheshes gives four out of five stars to Bay Ridge's Tanoreen and its "almost-narcotic" Middle Eastern fare: "Palestinian-born Rawia Bishara, who runs the restaurant with her daughter Jumana, prowls the dining room nightly, a maternal hostess generously handing out hugs, handshakes, and big party platters lavishly garnished in tomatoes, parsley and za’atar dust. Her cooking—Middle Eastern soul food, you might call it—is based on tradition but not enslaved by it. While many dishes are just like what her mother made, plenty of others chart their own course. Attention to detail distinguishes all of them."
