Chef Marco Canora is having a good morning; Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni says “there may not be any dish I’ve enjoyed more in recent months than the pork blade steak” at Terroir (pictured). His column this week looks at how chefs at wine bars like Terroir and Gottino have transcended the “glorified snacks” that used to be de rigueur, to “exemplify a wine-bar evolution so thorough that nomenclature can’t keep up.” Less criticism than......

This week the Times’s Frank Bruni awards two stars to Eighty One (pictured) in a decidedly mixed review. He thinks the “dizzying” Upper West Side restaurant in the Excelsior Hotel has “attention deficits” and needs Ritalin: “It provides an especially clear example of a kind of culinary preening – call it ego food – that may speak less to the satisfaction of customers than to the self-regard of proprietors.” Nor does Bruni care for the......

As if offering a final coda (or is it?) to the suspenseful Momofuku Ko reservation saga, the Times’s Frank Bruni has officially opined on the breathlessly hyped, 12-seat restaurant from rock star chef David Chang. Bruni extols it with three stars, calling it “noteworthy beyond its addling all-computer reservation system and the intense, revelatory pleasures of its partly Asian, partly French, wholly inventive food… Ko in its early months serves a few dishes that merely......

This week the Times’s Frank Bruni hands down his verdict on Commerce (pictured), the trendy new inhabitant of 1911 West Village carriage house formerly occupied by Blue Mill Tavern, among others. Overall, he deems the new tenant fussy and cacophonous; chef Harold Moore’s “polyglot menu and intricately wrought dishes let him strut his stuff in a way that a more archetypal bill of fare might not. In doing so he creates a rankling dissonance, his......

Today Frank Bruni reviews Adour (pictured), the four-month-old St. Regis Hotel restaurant conceived by extravagant French chef Alain Ducasse. While it’s not “rapturous” enough to merit the Times’s highest four star rating, it’s still “first-rate: polished service, a knockout wine list, beautiful oil-poached cod, gorgeous roasted lamb and exquisite desserts.” And Bruni does confirm our earlier speculation about some kind of haute bagel on the menu. On the other side of the spectrum and the......

The Village Voice’s Robert Sietsema stops by Soba Totta (pictured), the fourth addition to the Yakitori Totto mini-chain. He loves some charcoal shish kebabs and says “the sight of three yakitori chefs skewering morsels of chicken with military precision behind a hanging sheet of glass intended to forestall spatters is one of the great sights of midtown dining.” Eat your heart out Frank Bruni; New York Magazine’s Adam Platt is the first critic to score......

Today Frank Bruni files a second review of Mas (pictured), the organic, locally-sourced West Village eatery he bestowed with one star four years ago. Today he bumps the cozy French-inflected restaurant up a star, noting that Mas isn’t “for diners with big, blunt appetites. It’s for those who revel in little surprises and unexpected nuances, like the smoked celery root purée that came with grilled turbot.” Meanwhile, Alex Witchel enlists cookbook author Arthur Schwartz in......

This week in the Times, Bruni three-stars Le Cirque, bumping the restaurant's rating up from the two stars he awarded it in 2006. Executive chef Christophe Bellanca’s menu “nimbly straddles the line between predictable decadence… and creative flair,” he says. He also says that you’ll pay—a lot—for what you get, and that Le Cirque isn’t quite as reliable as other three star restaurants. In $25 and Under, ">Peter Meehan is at Soba Totto, where he......

This week in the Times, Bruni one-stars Lebanese Ilili, saying “Ilili is probably the atmospherically grandest excursion into Middle Eastern cooking that New York has ever seen.” While much of the menu is inconsistent, he loves the kebabs and kaftas. Says the service is “occasionally confused.” And get the essmalieh for dessert. In Dining Briefs, Peter Meehan goes to Abraço Espresso (pictured), says “it’s tiny, it brews excellent coffee, and the little food that it......