Iron Chef contestant and unapologetic bouncer Marc Forgione gets a glowing and well-deserved review of his eponymous Tribeca restaurant in the Times today. "There are elements of Italian cooking on the freewheeling and often-changing menu, and French and Southeast Asian notes as well," writes Sam Sifton. "You might start with a hiramasa tartare with avocado and Sichuan buttons, flower buds with a fiery, numbing taste, then move on to scallops in a Thai curry, and finish with pumpkin pie. Really, you might. Mr. Forgione’s food is sometimes sweet. Other times, it is salty, sour or spicy. Sometimes it is all four — and loudly so. The brashness is deeply and above all American: an augmentation of international cuisines in a land of plenty."

"There are no great Vietnamese restaurants in Gotham," declares Robert Sietsema at the Village Voice. "So we have to settle for places that are merely good. One of those is Tu Do ('Freedom'), formerly known as Pho Tu Do... Getting Western diners to bother with the foliage is always a problem, even though enfolding the meat in little packages of greenery totally changes the eating experience, and also helps carry more of the thin, fishy-smelling dipping sauce known as nuoc mam cham up to your mouth. Don't dare spill cham on your pants, or cats will pursue you down the street as you exit the restaurant." And Sarah DiGregorio says the Venezualan restaurant Guayoyo is a worthy alternative to the perpetually packed Caracas, because it offers "a larger, more diverse menu of Venezuelan specialties, and it's much more spacious than Caracas, making it a friendly, unfussy place to eat with a group."

New York's Adam Platt drags his daughter along to brave the lines and the pandemonium of Eataly, the 50,000 square foot Italian megacomplex. " 'I wouldn’t call this a real restaurant, Dad,' said Jane, when we finally found a seat in the milling crowd. 'It’s more like a circus, with lots of food.' This is high praise coming from a 10-year-old, of course. And there’s a lot about this sprawling big-top production that seems to have been designed with a deliberately simple, even childish sensibility in mind... On busy evenings, the angular layout can feel so overcrowded and confused that the staff hands out 'How to Eat at Eataly' flyers, complete with detailed instructions and a tiny diagrammed map. But once you’ve acclimated yourself to this quirky environment, you’ll find all sorts of unexpected pleasures."

Time Out's Jay Cheshes dismisses Eddie Huang's Xiao Ye as drunk food. "Poontang Potstickers. Cheeto Fried Chicken. General Poke-Her-Face Prawns. That the menu at Xiao Ye reads like a juvenile prank makes perfect sense," writes Cheshes. "Eddie Huang, the young Taiwanese-American behind the endeavor, is a sort of gastronomic Dennis the Menace... Huang, who grew up in the restaurant business in Florida, is a self-styled food rebel—the “OG Iron Chef,” as he described himself in one early post—a cocky pretender to the David Chang throne. But while Chang is a genuine prodigy, Xiao Ye proves that Huang is just a kid with outsize ambitions—and a remarkable knack for grabbing the spotlight."

And Ligaya Mishan goes $25-and-Under for the Times, raving about Bab al Yemen in Bay Ridge. "It is a rare dish that transports you to not only another place, but also another time," writes Mishan. "Such is Bab al Yemen’s aseed ($13), which dates to the 10th century. It is described as a dumpling. And a porridge. It can’t be both, you reason, and then it arrives at your table: a dune of gray alluvium, slumping into a murky broth... The texture is somewhere between gnocchi and cookie dough, well suited for soaking up the intense broth, with notes of cumin, cinnamon and tamarind. It is, against all expectations, delicious, albeit ponderous. A few mouthfuls will do, unless you’re carbo-loading for a trek across the desert."