Results tagged “avocecolumbus”

This week Sam Sifton at the Times files a two star review of A Voce Columbus. This slick Italian-influenced restaurant is the Time Warner Center incarnation of the Flatiron district A Voce, which was made successful by chef Andrew Carmellini (now at Locanda Verde). Chef Missy Robbins (Chicago's Spiaggia) is running the kitchen now, and Sifton agrees she's "an excellent chef. She didn’t come here to mess around. But make no mistake. A Voce is a corporate enterprise, part of a master plan, and feels like it. Save for swiveling yourself around in the Eames-y leather chairs that appoint both restaurants, there is very little room for improvisation. Service is clinical, almost silent, beyond language... This restaurant could yield more A Voces in other cities, in other malls, all over this land."

This week Sam Sifton at the Times files an unenthusiastic one star review on the flashy Bryant Park location of Charlier Palmer's Aureole. Palmer, a restaurant impresario who made his bones in the kitchen of the River Cafe, relocated his well-liked restaurant from the Upper East Side to the new Bank of America building this summer.

For his third review as the chief dining critic for the New York Times, Sam Sifton strays far from the usual fine dining galaxy occupied by first-string critics, keeping his street cred with an enthusiastic review of Imperial Palace, in Flushing, Queens. Sifton insists, "The Palace is riding high, at the zenith of Cantonese cooking in New York City... it is possible to eat brilliantly there, in the manner of an improvised Cantonese banquet. It is not a formal restaurant nor in any way a perfect one; service can be slapdash, particularly if you speak no Chinese. But the cooking is extremely sophisticated." Sifton also blows the cover on Rocky Sullivan's Friday night lobster feast in Red Hook, catered by the Red Hook Lobster Pound, calling it "worth a detour."

       

Opening "softly" tomorrow, A Voce Columbus is the new big sister location of the cozier A Voce in the Flatiron District. The original location made a big name for chef Andrew Carmellini, who is currently saving Robert De Niro's restaurant reputation at Locanda Verde in the Greenwich Hotel. Then came chef Missy Robbins, who joined A Voce after her tour as Executive Chef at the Obamas' favorite Chicago restaurant, Spiaggia.