"Some of the food is excellent," says the Times's Sam Sifton of Lyon, a très French bouchon in Greenwich Village. "It is a marvelous place to eat. The tables are set with red-checked napkins, the waiters and waitresses dressed to match. Each one is better looking than the last, worse at English, charming for that. They serve Beaujolais quickly, with gruff friendliness in tough little glasses, cold as a child’s morning cup of milk... The entrees need work, however... There need to be a few more things on the menu you’d want to eat again and again, more you’d return for with glee."

"Lievito is an Italian restaurant," declares Robert Sietsema at the Village Voice. "No, I mean a real Italian restaurant, as if it had been picked up by a spaceship in the mid-calf part of the boot and deposited right on Hudson Street, with no concessions to American sensibilities or tinkering with the menu to make it more Yankee... In the early days (we're talking two or three months ago), it seemed to be trying to turn out the True Pie of Naples—an idiotic pursuit if ever there was one. But lately, a new pizza style has been evolving. The crust is more like what we used to call a Neapolitan crust in New York: the 'bone,' or circumferential edge, nicely browned but not charred, the undercrust relatively thin but not sopping, the toppings generous but not overbearing."

The Post's Steve Cuozzo is the latest to weigh in on the "big, beautiful Riverpark" over on far east 29th Street, "in the lonely gulch between NYU Medical Center and Bellevue." Sadly, he likes the place, so there's an absence of entertaining Cuozzo crankiness in this one. Chef Sisha Ortuzar "attempts no daring experiments, but most everything is nicely executed, and many dishes come with enough twists and riffs to make them new." At least Cuozzo saves room to gripe about the location: "Getting to and from Riverpark can be a pain."

Time Out's Jay Cheshes has mixed feelings about hand-pulled noodle spot Hung Ry, and concludes that the composed starters are more of a draw than the noodle soups. "The oddball combinations—cavolo nero with Long Island duck breast cured like Chinese pastrami in Szechuan pepper and fermented red tofu; slivers of beef tongue with hickory-smoked pork belly kissed with ginger and soy; Long Island lobster and monkfish with big hunks of sunchoke—all work well," says Cheshes. "But the weak broths, made with duck and veal bones or lobster shells, are a bland letdown."

Jeffrey's Grocery gets a nod from Oliver Strand at the Times. "Gabriel and Gina Stulman, Jeffrey’s owners, are also the couple behind Joseph Leonard (across the street) and Fedora (close by)," Strand explains. "The context helps. Jeffrey’s is a role player, not a star... In the fantasy of New York, every neighborhood has a Jeffrey’s Grocery, a corner market with pressed-tin ceilings that carries the kind of peanut butter you like. Jeffrey’s also calls itself a 'Luncheonette & Oyster Bar.' Which is to say, it’s a restaurant—there are rillettes, braised meat dishes and a wine list 35 bottles deep. It’s as if Mr. Hooper joined Slow Food, took a charcuterie class and developed a taste for Willamette Valley pinot noir."

And Bloomberg's Ryan Sutton officiates the competition between popular Thai restaurants Kin Shop and Lotus of Siam, which are within four blocks of each other. "Usually devotees of high-end Thai curries have had to make pilgrimages to Sripraphai in Queens with wads of cash," Sutton says. "I’ll stay in Manhattan, at least for Harold Dieterle’s Kin Shop, a very good place to eat that could double as a homeopathic clinic dedicated to sinus-clearing." Lotus of Siam, on the other hand, is just an "overpriced takeout joint."