Peels, the cooler-than-thou Bowery restaurant from the team behind Freemans, gets a mixed review in the Times this week. Sam Sifton calls it "a two-story restaurant located at the axis of punk and prep, a Vampire Weekend house... The menu at Peels is vaguely Southern — fried chicken appears, along with shrimp and grits — but the South the restaurant invokes is really the one below Route 27 in Suffolk County, where identity is a matter of bank balance and there is no effective difference between artifice and fact. If you happen to be looking for somewhere to sit beside sleepy-eyed models not eating their oatmeal, or to talk over hamburgers and bourbon about how, if these wave reports are correct, you are definitely going to surf Montauk tomorrow, Peels is your restaurant. Just chain your Dutch bike to a streetlamp outside and stride on in for breakfast, lunch or dinner." In other words, fuck this place.

The main attraction at Hill Country Chicken is "severely flawed" says Robert Sietsema at the Village Voice. "I'm not a fan of any fried-chicken recipe involving buttermilk, since it contains a protein that blackens as the chicken cooks. Indeed, the Hill Country Classic is often fried too dark and has an annoyingly sweet aftertaste."

The Post's Steve Cuozzo fares better at Lowcountry, which replaced the failed Bar Blanc in the West Village. The name refers to the seafood-driven cuisine of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, which is quite different from that of the rest of the South," Cuozzo explains. "There’s barely a black-eyed pea’s worth of truly fine Southern cooking of any kind in the five boroughs, and still less of actual Lowcountry cooking. Lowcountry isn’t really Lowcountry, either. But its menu, persuasively Southern-influenced, has the spirit. Butter, spice and sugar proudly stand up for themselves. And prices are, well, delightfully low."

Bloomberg's Ryan Sutton is also on the Southern beat, filing favorably on Carroll Gardens restaurant Seersucker. Chef Robert Newton, "an Arkansas man... cooks up some of the city’s most satisfying Southern fare, which, due to the resurgent demand for fried chicken and bacon, is suddenly the city’s new 'it' cuisine. Again... Such heavy fare needs bourbon to keep the food moving through your pipes. And that leads me to my chief gripe about Seersucker: Beer and wine only."