This week the Times's Sam Sifton adores the lovely and delicious Anella in Greenpoint, where "the food is a wonder: a tight and focused menu of simple, seasonally appropriate food from Joseph Ogrodnek, a talented chef who has been in the kitchen for almost a year... Mr. Ogrodnek is a skilled practitioner of the vegetable arts. Like Midas, who turned everything he touched into gold (and like Dave Pasternack at Esca in Midtown, who achieves similar results with fish), he elevates the simplest greens and tubers into realms more celestial than those we are generally used to in wintertime in New York City... This is dirt wizard food of high caliber, cooking that leads people to join community-supported agriculture programs and fill their homes with parsnips and kale. But Mr. Ogrodnek does not ignore the pleasures of the flesh."

Robert Sietsema at the Village Voice is "smothered under a warm blanket of food" at Bay Ridge Polish restaurant Polonica. "You may think of Polish food as relentlessly heavy and meaty, but Polonica is prepared to refute that assertion—at least partly," says Sietsema. "In fact, a whole slew of meal-size soups are marked ''vegetarian' on the menu, of which the best goes by the discouraging name of sauerkraut soup ($3.70). Contrary to your worst fears, it doesn't taste like sour tin cans. Rather, an agreeably mild broth floats shreds of carrot and cabbage like bathers in a rural swimming hole, and there's a patch of fresh dill 'weeds' providing the scent of freshly mown grass."

Bloomberg's Ryan Sutton reviews Lavo, "a Midtown Manhattan nightclub that calls itself a restaurant, serves spaghetti with Kobe beef meatballs. It costs $34. It tastes precisely like spaghetti with meatballs at any Old World grandma’s house, anywhere in New York. Typical cost: One hug, one kiss. And yet Lavo is as improbably packed as its closest culinary peer, the Times Square Olive Garden... Lavo’s forte isn’t making food. It’s making money. The owners run Tao in Las Vegas, reported as the country’s highest grossing restaurant ($59 million in revenue), a few spots ahead of their New York Tao ($20.7 million) and the original Lavo in Sin City ($22 million). The latter serves pizzas six-inches longer than the ones in New York."

And Time Out's Jay Cheshes dismisses the Fat Radish on Orchard Street as "just another pretty face... You’ll never look better than when you’re seated inside, surrounded by votives at a distressed farmhouse table. But the shabby-chic space, as meticulously curated as an Anthropologie store, lacks warmth and personality. The same can be said of the earnest, Anglo-leaning cooking. It’s painfully on-trend—homespun, multicultural, Greenmarket, low-fat—but so short on innovation, this place might as well be an H&M knockoff."