Mercadito Cantina: This is newest advance in the expanding Mercadito empire; besides the original Alphabet City Mercadito there’s also Mercadito Grove. This one is not far from the original, on Avenue B, and packs a lot of Mexican fixings into a dainty space that stays open ‘til 1 a.m. The main action here is at the make your own taco bar, where heavy rollers can choose from eight guacamoles and ten salsas, all made from......

This year’s Fourth of July blockbuster, Hancock, opens today. The quasi-comedy stars Will Smith as an angry homeless man with superhuman powers who causes massive property damage whenever he clumsily tries to save the day. The media has it in for him, but after he (tragically) rescues a publicist from an oncoming train, the grateful flack (Jason Batemen) helps him with an image makeover. The Times’s Manohla Dargis, of all people, calls it an......

A week after the Sun declared that “disappointment is deeper” at Bar Milano, the Denton brothers’ (Lupa, 'ino, and ‘inoteca) trendy and noisy northern Italian place (pictured) in Gramercy, the Times’s Frank Bruni has seconded the emotion by quipping that “an Italian restaurant that bungles its pasta dishes is like a Las Vegas resort that doesn’t let you gamble. There’s still plenty to enjoy, but you’re likely to feel that the essential point and signature......

If you’ve ever watched acting so bad it made you want to shove the performer offstage and play the role yourself, Suspicious Package is for you. The creators of this clever little production have spared themselves the headache of dealing with actors by casting the audience and turning them loose on the streets of Williamsburg. It happens for just four people at a time, and when you buy your ticket online you cast yourself in one of the roles, choosing either the producer, the showgirl, the heiress, or the private detective....

Alloro: Green Lantern, party of seven? The photo above depicts Alloro, a new 50-seat Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. The chef is Salvatore Corea, a native Calabrian, who’s leaving front-of-the-house duties to his wife Gina, just like a real-life Artie and Charmaine Bucco. Let’s just hope the mob doesn’t torch their place. Per the press release, the menu features “classic Italian specialties transformed into gastronomical creations,” such as loin of lamb in a fresh mint reduction with eggplant purée and pecorino cheese foam. And Alloro has the additional virtue of granting diners invisibility on St. Patrick’s Day. 307 East 77th Street, (212) 535-2866....

Looks like Pixar’s hit another home run with Wall•E, a movie about robot love on post-Apocalyptic earth. Jeffrey Wells calls it “a masterpiece of its type” but can’t stand the way director Andrew Stanton has been downplaying the movie’s ecological context in interviews. Wells writes, “It's a lie, of course – dis-informing of pig-trough moviegoers who might think twice about going to a ‘green’ movie that satirizes their lie-around, fat-ass lifestyle.” For those who......

Northeast Kingdom sits on the southwest corner of Wyckoff and Troutman streets in Bushwick, a block from the L train's Jefferson stop and myriad one-story warehouses and industrial spaces. Native Vermonters Paris Smeraldo and his wife, Meg Lipke, have invoked a funky ambiance with taxidermy and vintage wallpaper alongside a bar backed with orange and yellow stained glass. Throw in the flickering candlelight and you've got a place to linger for hours after dark.......

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......

Photo of Hecate (Danuta Stenka) and Macbeth (Cezary Kosinski) courtesy Pavel Antonov. It’s hard to imagine a production of Macbeth with more sound and fury than the outré adaptation currently battering audiences on the Brooklyn waterfront in DUMBO. Two parts Shakespeare and one part Ridley Scott, this visionary spectacle is the work of Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna and the TR Warszawa theater company; it’s being staged outdoors in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge with......

Judging from Get Smart’s first remarkably unfunny trailer, you might assume this $80 million remake of the late-‘60s sitcom, starring Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway and Alan Arkin, would be a guaranteed flop, but it’s actually getting some decent reviews. (It’s a mixed bag, of course.) The Village Voice’s avant garde film buff J. Hoberman, of all people, deems it a “pleasant surprise… an all-purpose (and often quite funny) goofball action comedy.” Or maybe critics......

Today the Times’s Frank Bruni relates his multiple visits to West Village Asian barbecue restaurant Bar Q, and by the sounds of it you’d never guess print media is in any kind of financial trouble – an initial trip with one group of ungrateful friends prompted so much "grumbling" he had to "unruffle their feathers" by being “especially profligate with the wine” on his paper’s expense account. The hangers-on who shared his second visit tasted......

Hollywood, 1940. As Hitler devours Europe and America inches toward war, a remarkable technology that could prove invaluable to the U.S. Navy is invented by… a sexy movie star and an avant garde composer? Though it sounds more than a little far-fetched, it’s actually a true story, and the subject of Elyse Singer’s multimedia play Frequency Hopping. Staged at 3 Legged Dog, the elegant production deploys a small army of robotic instruments (drums, gongs,......

Shalizar: Bangladesh native Parvez Eliaas and his Iranian partner Kaz Bayati have just opened their second Persian restaurant on the Upper East Side, not far from their original venture, Persepolis. According to Thrillist, the new bistro is distinguished by exposed brick and a spacious bar, where old world wines, pomegranate cocktails and wild berry-infused vodkas can be savored. The Middle Eastern menu includes delicacies like baby lamb stew and salmon kebab. 1420 Third Avenue near......

Hoping to reverse the curse of Ang Lee’s The Hulk, director Louis Leterrier and Edward Norton have teamed up to unleash The Incredible Hulk upon the masses. Their take on the franchise keeps the origin story brief and cuts to the chase, as the Army tries to neutralize their experiment run amok. A.O. Scott at the Times writes, “Let’s not get carried away: The Adequate Hulk would have been a more suitable title... If......

Since he began his fruitful collaboration with Walter Becker back at Bard College in 1968, Grammy award-winning musician Donald Fagen has steadily distinguished himself as one of the smartest and most imaginative contemporary songwriters. As Steely Dan, the innovative duo lays claim to an impressive catalog of hit singles that somehow manage to stay fresh despite their everlasting ubiquity on classic rock stations across America. For whatever reason, people still can't help cranking up the......

Today the Times’s Frank Bruni destroys Ago (pictured), the new Italian restaurant in Tribeca’s Greenwich Hotel owned by Robert De Niro. It’s a savage burn, and way more entertaining than any movie De Niro’s been involved with during the last decade. Things go sideways immediately when the bartender unleashes “the Poseidon Adventure of wine spills” on Bruni’s lady friend and his party of four has to wait almost an hour for their table, which is......

Do you enjoy ingeniously crafted rock tunes, with brilliant lyrics and arrangements for accordion, keyboard, ukulele, guitar, bass and drums? Do you like pirates? How about puppets? Rum based drink specials? Laughing until your sides hurt? If you answered yes to even one of these questions, you’re ready to set forth on the dread ship Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, the rollicking “pirate puppet rock odyssey” that’s currently docked at Ars Nova....

Red Egg: The glittering new Chinatown restaurant pictured above had its share of hassles before finally opening this week – something to do with the construction company failing to get the right permits – but after a six week delay, Red Egg’s staff is finally ready to get cracking. Executive Chef Mei Kun Chen was previously the State Chef for Guangzhou (not exactly a lightweight); second in command is Yu Hua Wu, who did......

In You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Adam Sandler affects an Israeli accent to play a Mossad commando turned sex-crazed NYC hairdresser. The script, co-written by Judd Apatow, Robert Smigel and Sandler, works hard to coax laughs out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, throwing in plenty of gross-out humor and comic stylings from Rob Schneider, who plays a dumb Palestinian. Need further discouragement? Variety’s Brian Lowry calls it Schneider’s “most relentlessly unfunny appearance under heavy......

The Times’s Frank Bruni reports “a mix of exciting, intriguing and frustrating moments” in his review of Elettaria (pictured), the haute-Indian restaurant in the Village. BYO rimshot because one liners abound: “Elettaria describes itself as ‘spice-driven.’ (I’m waiting for the restaurant that’s driven by Morgan Freeman.)” But seriously folks, he loves the fluke in a sauce of coconut and tapioca pearls, while other entrees prove disappointing. Still, it gets a star for the “definite peaks......

Biryani is classified as any number of spiced South Asian rice dishes, heavily spiced, and layered with meat—often chicken, lamb, or beef. The biryani at Sangam, a new hole in the wall spot on Bleecker Street just east of 6th Avenue, receives what owner Ishrat Ansari calls “an authentic royal haute cuisine preparation.” The description is definitely merited when it comes to his wife Rafat’s homegrown recipe, which is served all vegetable, with chicken,......

Mike Bartlett’s modest drama Artefacts, in town as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, peers into the abyss of post-war Iraq society through the eyes of the aptly named Kelly, an indifferent English teenager played with nervy brio by Lizzy Watts. Kelly’s ordinary life with her single mom (Karen Ascoe) is upended by the sudden appearance of the father she never knew, an erudite Iraqi named Ibrahim (Peter Polycarpou) who runs the National......

We knew it would one day come to this, it’s fallen upon us at last, there is no escape. Reviews for Sex and the City have been generally derisive, ranging from Rolling Stone: “Some dudes say they'd rather light their dicks on fire than endure this movie version of the ultimate in TV chickcoms. Snap out of it, guys, you just might learn something.” To the Daily Mail: “In years to come, I suspect......

Nestled away on a romantic little bend of Commerce Street in the West Village is Commerce, the newish bar and restaurant from chef Harold Moore and restaurateur Tony Zazula. Operating out of a carriage house dating back to 1911, the place was formerly a Prohibition-era speakeasy, then Blue Mill Tavern for 50 years, then the neighborhood favorite Grange Hall. You might assume that its new iteration is a fussy stab at resuscitating the past, but......

Today the Times’s Frank Bruni reviews The Harrison (pictured) in Tribeca; the paper gave it two stars in 2001 and Bruni maintains status quo with two stars today. There’s a different chef in the kitchen, Amanda Freitag, and Bruni digs the restaurant’s “populist bent, its awareness that breaded or fried objects are a sure path to many a diner’s heart.” But don’t get him started on the ambiance: “The Harrison’s visual evocation of a country......

Photo of The Matchbox Shows by Laura Heit courtesy of the artist. While moviegoers pack theaters for summer blockbusters like Iron Man and Indiana Jones, it’s refreshing to find big crowds flocking to an entirely different spectacle, one celebrating the Victorian-era phenomenon of do-it-yourself “toy theater” kits. The cavernous St. Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO was packed on Saturday night for the eighth annual Toy Theater Festival, presented by Great Small Works, a company dedicated to......

Scarpetta: Chef Scott Conant (L’Impero, Alto) has opened a new restaurant on West 14th Street called Scarpetta (pictured), which is an Italian expression meaning “little shoe” – or the shape bread takes when used to soak up a dish. The 70-seat restaurant features a retractable roof in the main dining room, alfresco dining out front, and a long mahogany bar offering a separate menu and some “wine-inspired” cocktails. Conant’s ingredients here are, of course, seasonal......

So a little movie called Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has opened at last. Fan-boys have live-blogged during the premiere, physicians have written open letters of protest deriding the movie’s myriad junk food tie-ins, Russian Communists have been offended, and archaeologists have condemned Dr. Jones for his “unethical” violation of international treaties. But is the long-awaited (by some) $185 million fourth installment of the George Lucas/Steven Spielberg franchise any good?......

On West 10th Street next door to his eclectic restaurant P*ong, Pichet Ong sells takeout cupcakes, cookies, and other sweets at Batch. True to the shop’s name, desserts are made in small quantities and are featured until they run out; this gives Ong the opportunity to cook whatever he wants. The chef currently features a variation of tiramisu made with mangoes and Thai tea, and plans to offer it for the entire summer. The base......

Next week some of the best films from this year's Sundance Festival will unspool at BAM during their third annual Sundance Institute takeover. The ten day mini-fest features 10 dramatic features, 12 documentaries and 36 shorts. Most of these selections screen just once or twice, and not all of them have distribution, so you've got to stay on your toes if there's something you want to see. The screenings kick off May 29th with the......