The Fat Radish on Orchard Street resembles, in the eyes of Times critic Sam Sifton, "a handsome young golden Labrador, camera-ready, hard not to like... To sit in its dining room as light plays off the huge mirror in back, candles flickering everywhere, eating rillettes and drinking wine, is to experience a small part of the New York that leads people here inexorably and always will. They get jobs and meet people at parties where they don’t know the host, start flirting with someone and end up talking about whether to go to dinner at the Fat Radish on Saturday night." Sifton doesn't quite hate these successful skinny young things, but you sense he doesn't feel quite comfortable there, even though "the cooking is good, the bill isn’t crazy, and you’d be a regular if you could." One star.

The Village Voice's Robert Sietsema, meanwhile, takes a time machine back to Delmonico's, which is generally considered to be NYC's first restaurant. "My method was to test those dishes that Delmonico’s made famous long ago," Sietsema explains. "Returning from South America, ship captain Ben Wenberg told the chef about a dish he’d tasted overseas featuring lobster in a sauce composed of butter, cream, sherry, and paprika. Ranhofer knocked it off and named it after his informant—until Wenberg got into a fistfight one night in the restaurant and had to be ejected. The name was soon changed to Lobster Newberg by reversing the order of the first three letters... The contemporary rendition ($49, now spelled “Newburg”) remains impressive."

New York's Underground Gourmet loves Porsena, the East Village spot recently opened by Sara Jenkins, "a seasoned chef who’s bopped around New York kitchens and found fame at Porchetta, a mecca of roast-pork sandwiches. The lesson in success-through-specialization apparently wasn’t lost on her, as Jenkins has christened Porsena a 'pasta restaurant,' despite the undeniable presence of appetizers and entrées... The pièce de résistance is a dried tubular pasta called anneloni, a fashion-forward shape that dares to wear its sauce-clinging ridges on the inside of the loop instead of on the outside. Imagine a fat, slightly lopsided, and inside-out rigatoni, and you get the idea."

Writing for Time Out, Jay Cheshes is guardedly pleased with Lotus of Siam, the new NYC outpost of the revered Las Vegas Thai restaurant. "While the New York offshoot might not be quite so extraordinary—the menu is far shorter (in Vegas it includes 132 items) —from the moment it opened it was already producing the best Thai cuisine in Manhattan," writes Cheshes. "Just how long it will hold that distinction is anyone’s guess. Last week, in one of the fastest restaurant-world divorces in memory, the new Lotus of Siam split with the old one. The Chutima family, which runs the Las Vegas venture out of a strip mall, withdrew from the project, citing irreconcilable differences with New York partner Roy Welland—the financier-wine collector who also owned Cru in this space."