East Village restaurant Vandaag is "a comfortable restaurant of vaguely Dutch inflection," writes Sam Sifton at the Times. "Large and airy, high ceilinged, uncrowded and clean, Vandaag (the name is Dutch for 'today') is the sort of dining room you could move into with a couple of tattered leather armchairs, and sit all day, bare feet on the polished concrete floor, reading novels." He loves the cocktails, finds the pork chop too "tough," but adores the chilled cucumber soup that "comes tasting of ginger, mint and gin, with hints of pickled cantaloupe and smoked eel. Sounds awful? It is the opposite." Two stars out of four.

With 24 beers on tap, Strong Place in Cobble Hill "may be the perfect Postmodern bistro" declares Robert Sietsema at the Village Voice. "The menu favors seafood, including a shrimp cocktail with head-on specimens large enough to scare scuba divers, a sautéed skate wing surmounted by those same sea monsters (regrettably slicked with science-chef foam)... and an excellent fried oyster sandwich mounted on a New England lobster-roll bun. To distinguish it from the umpteen other versions you've encountered, there's a battered and fried lemon slice sticking out of the top, which a couple of friends eagerly ate, pronouncing it like nothing they'd ever tasted." The Voice's Sarah DiGregorio, meanwhile, enthuses about Gourmet Sweets and Restaurant, a new South Asian place in Jackson Heights.

Time Out's Jay Cheshes enjoys his preview of David Bouley's existentially delayed Japanese restaurant, which may or may not be named Brushstroke. You know, the place he told us about in 2008! For the time being, the twice-weekly restaurant is called Bouley Studio, and Cheshes writes, "For most of the week, the space is in pretty bad shape—a last sad attempt to keep cash rolling in—with a bare-bones staff doling out a limited menu of sandwiches, burgers and salads. But on Thursdays and Fridays, the second-floor dining room becomes much more exciting, offering a taste of some of the most accomplished Japanese food in New York."

On the heels of Sam Sifton's very mixed review, New York's Adam Platt files on Neula, the flashy new pan-Latin restaurant on West 24th Street. He gives it one lousy star out of five. "With its impersonal lounge area and flaming-orange color scheme," writes Platt, "the room feels less like a first-rate restaurant than a randomly decorated nightclub in Caracas or Rio. But the eclectic, overstuffed menu contains edamame salads shaved with queso blanco, and yakitori-like anticucho skewers stuck with octopus and soft bits of pork belly... Nuela seems to have been designed both as an ambitious gourmet destination and as a scene restaurant, although what that scene might be, at this early date, is not entirely clear."

Bloomberg's Ryan Sutton is not pleased with Tribeca's Plein Sud, "a southern French spot that’s neither entirely southern nor French. I ate there so you don’t have to." He's also outraged about the expensive, "awful bouillabaisse at the otherwise impressive La Mangeoire. The $120 botch preceded my sampling of the same Marseillaise seafood stew at Plein Sud, whose version was awfully boring." And Oliver Strand goes $25-and-Under for the Times at the 24-hour New Wonjo in Koreatown, where "there’s a new energy in the kitchen, and you can taste it on the plate."