This week Sam Sifton at the Times reviews the highly-buzzed about Thai restaurant Kin Shop in Greenwich Village. "But it isn’t a Thai restaurant, really, even if there’s a magical food stand somewhere in Phuket serving squid-ink and hot sesame-oil soup featuring brisket-stuffed squid rings," Sifton explains in his two star rave. "Kin Shop is instead an American restaurant that serves food prepared using Thai flavors, a restaurant that nods at Thailand respectfully and uses its cuisine to fine effect... [Chef/owner] Harold Dieterle is as Thai as John Boehner. But he cooks from the Thai larder as if he had stepped out of a novel by John Burdett, a farang who can see ghosts, who knows that the mind is Buddha’s seat, who bleeds fish sauce."

"Osteria Morini, the first downtown venture from the team behind Central Park South's magnificent Marea, is 'fine dining' below-age-30-style—cramped, painfully loud and so zoo-like on weekends, it employs a bouncer to keep order," chafes Steve Cuozzo at the Post. "But behind the crush that can leave you bruised, there's a damn good, fat- and butter-friendly Italian restaurant helmed by protean chef Michael White. It has the Emilia-Romagna chops (both literal and slang). It draws as many mature, pinstriped types as young slobs with their shirts hanging out of their pants. All ages should leave their arteries, and ears, at the door."

New York's Underground Gourmet gushes about Hung Ry, a hand-pulled noodle joint in NoHo. "If you take the noodles out of Chinatown, do you take Chinatown out of the noodles?" the magazine asks. "Happily, in the case of the winningly low-key Hung Ry, the answer is a resounding No. Despite suspicious amenities like comparatively palatial surroundings, uniformly warm and gracious service, and a well-priced, appealingly offbeat wine list, Hung Ry is serving righteous Lanzhou-style hand-pulled noodles that are as good as any within slinging distance of Confucius Plaza—maybe even better."

Time Out's Jay Cheshes has mixed feelings about Bar Basque, the slick new restaurant designed by Syd Mead, the visionary designer behind such iconic sci-fi films as Blade Runner, Aliens, and Tron. He's not so crazy about the space (which we happen to be suckers for) but loves the food, for the most part. "The dining room’s awful acoustics—conversations roaring off its many hard surfaces—are an affront to Yuhi Fujinaga’s great work in the kitchen," writes Cheshes. "The chef, who last cooked under Ed Brown at eighty one, mixes the sort of avant-garde techniques pioneered at Spain’s El Bulli with the traditional cooking the Basque region’s known for. Rioja wine, agar-agar and sugar combine to create tiny red “caviar” bubbles, sprinkled—in a delicate pass around pintxo—over tuna tartare perched on serrano ham toast."

Oliver Strand at The Times has a $25-and-Under review of Elizabeth Street restaurant Tacombi @ Fonda Nolita and Cascabel Taqueria, where food is served from a vintage Volkswagen van that used to be parked in the Yúcatan. "You exchange cash for casino chips at a counter, line up at the van, then take your food to one of the hand-painted folding tables or counters scattered around the cavernous space. It works. The experience is supposed to evoke beachside eating in the Yúcatan... and it’s more evocative than gimmicky. Lights are strung up as if you’re sitting outside, and potted plants give some tropical greenery to the former garage. But scan the footwear in the room, and there’s no doubt that you’re in one of New York’s more fashionable neighborhoods."

Village Voice's Robert Sietsema files from Montreal this week, where he "explores the Montreal-New York food connection." And Bloomberg's Ryan Sutton offers up his 2010 dining roundup, wherein The Breslin is deemed the city's best new restaurant, while The Lion, John DeLucie’s celebrity hangout, is declared the worst.