This week Sam Sifton at the Times awards just one star out of four to hotshot chef Michael White's Osteria Morini. White, whose Marea and Convivio both got three stars from the Times, has been rapidly expanding this year, with another restaurant debuting this week in the Setai hotel on Fifth Avenue. Sifton thinks he's spread too thin. "When Mr. White was present at Morini this fall, the restaurant hummed," Sifton says. "On nights when he was not, trouble could ensue. Pastas that had been brilliant once arrived at the table slightly overdone, or wildly salty, or insanely slick with butter or cream." And in general, "White’s pastas glisten with pork fat, with butter, with cream, with oil. They are aggressively salted. They hang around on the outskirts of Too Much."

Time Out's Jay Cheshes also chimes in on Morini, and it sounds like he dined when White was in the house. "The focus here is on rich meat and pasta from the Italian heartland, the Emilia-Romagna region, where White spent seven years cooking," says Cheshes. "His personal connection to the area surfaces in the decor (the wood beams on the ceiling were rescued from an old barn owned by his wife’s family in Imola, Italy) and in the bold, rustic food. But even the most traditional dishes bear his cosmopolitan touch. Intense... Morini is another coup from a chef on an expansion tear "His next undertaking, Ai Fiori, in midtown, debuts this month—here’s hoping Batali can run in those clogs."

Robert Sietsema at the Village Voice raves about Umi Nom on Dekalb Avenue in Brooklyn, where, on "a Thursday evening well into the first semester of the school year, Umi Nom is half-empty. Which is a shame, since nearly everything I've tasted there has been superb... Umi Nom is an offshoot of the Lower East Side's Kuma Inn, where a playful take on Philippine food forms the centerpiece of a pan-Asian menu in tapas-size portions... The wildest dishes are found among the specials, and thus it was that I tasted balut, a fertilized egg that's been incubated 14 days and then boiled, gestating fetus and all."

Kin Shop, a new contemporary Thai restaurant featuring both traditional Thai and Thai-inspired dishes, a 75-bottle wine list and Thai-inspired cocktails, gets the New York Magazine treatment from Adam Platt, who says, "There’s something about a proper curry-fueled feast that promotes a sense of well-being and general bonhomie. Maybe that’s why Dieterle’s little restaurant was jammed, on the evenings I visited, with a boisterous mix of local revelers, food nabobs, and off-duty chefs." Platt also drops two stars on the sci-fi looking restaurant Bar Basque, where the menu is "tightly focused and surprisingly well executed by a young Hawaiian chef named Yuhi Fujinaga. If you have $34 in your pocket, you can taste a representative sample of glisteningly rich, acorn-fed 'Ibérico de Bellota' ham."

And Steve Cuozzo at the Post is the latest critic to poop in Lincoln's punch bowl. Naturally, it's a fun read. "On my fourth visit to the wannabe-Italian restaurant Lincoln, merely enjoying pasta I wished I could love, I wondered: Had 'Nutcracker' mice run off with the magic we expected of a place newly sprung from Lincoln Center earth?" asks Cuozzo. "By my sixth visit, I accepted defeat... Built from the ground up to coincide with the center’s 50th birthday, it promised to 'interpret' Italian cuisine in a daring, glass-wrapped synthesis of architecture and culinary art. But the knife I needed to get through $32 merluzzo (yes, a knife for cod) can’t be the cutting edge they had in mind. So much has gone wrong — from the $20 million pavilion that looks like an accident to a kitchen still finding its way after two months to a floor crew displaying about as much excitement about the product as bored Metropolitan Opera House ushers."