Results tagged “best”

       

Click on the images for details on newcomers Spot Dessert Bar, Obao, Lucy's Cantina Royale, and the latest at Emporio and Death & Co, which just introduced their fall menu.

This week Sam Sifton at the Times re-reviews the new location of Oceana for the paper; it previously received an impressive three stars from Frank Bruni, but the seafood restaurant recently moved from a cozy townhouse space to a big new home on the ground floor of the McGraw Hill building, in the theater district. New York's Adam Platt deems the reboot "a cavernous expense-account joint," and Sifton also downgrades the new Oceana to two stars.

    

Click on the images here for more details on The Vanderbilt in Prospect Heights, Bill's Burger in the Meatpacking District, Corsino in the West Village, and Giano in the East Village.

   

Click on the images for details on Scarpetta's new five course tasting menu, The JakeWalk's new fall food and cocktail menu, and Dokebi's Korean tacos and weekend brunch.

This week the new chief dining critic at the NY Times, Sam Sifton, debuts with a rave for DBGB, Daniel Boulud's casual sausage/beer/etc. joint on the Bowery. The first review from the former NY Press reporter boasts references to The Ramones, Talking Heads, and a declaration that "[Boulud's] food game, as they say in rap precincts, is tight... one bite of the crispy lamb ribs that were served in the bar area when the place first opened — sweetly glazed, grassy meat, with a dab of creamy mint-flecked yogurt sauce — ended all snark: Boulud has opened a very good restaurant. The lamb was sublime, earthy and spicy and rich, evidence of superb technique, the sort of snack that separates his empire from others in the celebrity firmament."

After earning the adoration of the hipster masses with his killer Neapolitan-style pizza, Belgian-born chef Mathieu Palombino has recently opened his second Motorino location across the river in Manhattan. The East Village spot (49 East 12th Street) is cozy compared to the spacious original, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in charm and legend: It's the former home of beloved Una Pizza Napoletana, and with the lease Palombino got his hands on the restaurant's prized Acunto wood-burning oven, handcrafted in Naples.

After two entertaining yet vicious slams on Hotel Griffou and Gus & Gabriel, interim Times dining heavy Pete Wells throws a one-star bone to The Standard Grill, which has been winning over critics despite the grotesquely exclusive velvet rope scene at the door. Wells declares that "it is not the place I would send friends who want to study the latest contortions of the yoga masters of haute cuisine. But it is exactly where I would direct anybody who needs to recharge by plugging straight into the abundant, renewable energy source that is downtown Manhattan." And yet! "The tiled, barrel-vaulted ceiling makes for treacherous acoustics. At times conversations across the room are beamed directly to your table. Sitting by the open kitchen one night, we heard an expediter shouting out orders as if he were communicating with cooks in Jersey City." Still, "with 100 seats in this room, another 100 in an even noisier antechamber, and 85 more on the sidewalk, it is a marvel that the kitchen reliably bangs out solid, flavorful food."

Just when we thought we'd have to go all the way to New Haven for the best slice of pizza pie, the 5 Borough Pizza Tour declares the best slice can be found right over in Staten Island. Salvatore of Soho (of Staten Island) came out on top; however, our resident pizza and Staten Island expert, John Kuhner, tells us "My favorite is Nunzio's, but the most famous is probably Denino's." Either way, it sounds like a good amount of our city's top slices are over there, so let's steal their recipes before selling the borough off to New Jersey.

This week the Times's interim chief dining critic Pete Wells takes a hammer to deservedly acclaimed chef Michael Psilakis, whose latest venture, Gus & Gabriel, is inspired by the culinary tastes of his son, TGI Friday's, and whiskey. Wells's review is disastrous, which means it's a fun read: "When three children under age 10 leave their milkshakes almost untouched, you know there’s trouble." The restaurant's "colossal misfires are almost impossible to believe and harder still to explain." Specifically: "Almost every chef in town is experimenting with techniques for building a better burger. Mr. Psilakis may be the only one to have perfected a new technology that magically strips out all the taste. The skin on what is advertised as 'crispy chicken' was as crisp as a balloon, and the biscuits on the plate were wet and doughy, as if the cook had decided halfway through that he would rather make dumplings."

Noooo! When the old sheepfold occupied by Tavern on the Green is taken over by a new operator in January, the notoriously mediocre tourist trap will lose the one thing that justified its existence: immaculately maintained public restrooms. The alternative, for the uninitiated, is the gross public restroom in Sheep Meadow, but since the '70s Tavern's facilities have served as a idyllic alternative. A spokeswoman for Tavern tells the Times, "We’ve always had the position we’re on public land, so certainly the bathrooms are open to the public." The new leaseholder, Dean J. Poll, who runs the Central Park Boathouse, isn't such a populist, but he actually spins the upcoming privatization as a thoughtful gesture for the bathroom-starved rabble: "Going past the bride or groom or people dressed to go to dinner, maybe that’s not what someone wants to do, and feels uncomfortable about it." Also, he adds, "the people in the restaurant feel uncomfortable." Good Heavens, Thurston, hoi polloi are in the powder room wearing short pantaloons! As a sop to the masses, Poll promises to construct a food concession stand outside the building with public restrooms, but nothing will ever, ever replace the satisfaction of using Tavern for its toilets.

Times dining critic Frank Bruni has finally left the building in a fusillade of publicity, and his replacement Sam Sifton didn't file this week. But in the "Dining Briefs" section, Betsy Andrews reviews the Brooklyn Star, a cozy Southern comfort restaurant in Williamsburg run by Joaquin Baca, a former partner in the Momofuku empire. She says Baca "excels at making veggies fattening, and good. His casseroles ($8) — garlicky summer squash and mushroom-rich green bean with slivered almonds — are toasted to gooey goodness in his open kitchen’s 100-year-old brick oven. Creamed corn with smoked trout ($4) and earthy black-eyed peas and rice ($4) are spoonful-by-spoonful delicious. Surprisingly for the former Momofuku partner, meats are a mixed bag."

The "who has the best pizza in town" debate could, and likely will, go on forever. It'll be the End of Days and we'll all be sitting around, like, "Grimaldi's!" "DiFara's!" "Totonno's!" "Patsy's in East Harlem!" Anyway, there's a new blogger in town with an insatiable hunger for pizza pies, and he declares his mission is to "eat a slice of pizza at every pizzeria in New York City. I'm going by neighborhood, starting in Manhattan, getting a plain slice at every place." And just to clarify, he is not interested in your shark fin truffle oil flatbread gourmet non-pizzas, he simply wants to sample "every single plain slice in New York City to scientifically determine which is the absolute best one." This sounds amazing, but it'll be so sad when he finally finishes up with his 5-borough survey only to find his winning pizzeria has since shut down, and 150 more have popped up. This blog, like the debate, has the potential to never end... but it already has us craving a slice from Frank Pepe (yeah we said it: the best slice might just be found in New Haven). [via Slice]

Who among us can sit comfortably for longer than 90 minutes without urinating? Okay, maybe adults under 30 and sober people, but we're neither, and our path to utter incontinence keeps depriving us of pivotal Hollywood plot points. Thankfully, a new technology is giving moviegoers with disadvantaged bladders an alternative to unsightly catheters and adult undergarments: the website RunPee.com, which is now available as an iPhone application, compiles the best opportunities to race to the restroom during motion pictures. The app gives you a cue for your exit, tells you how long you've got and even summarizes what you missed. It's the work of 42-year-old Flash developer Dan Florio, who tells 1010 Wins he got the idea while watching Peter Jackson's three-hour-plus King Kong remake. (Funny, we couldn't wait to go to the bathroom during that.) Florio's currently raking in about $800 a month with RunPee, and he spends his days watching movies to take notes. So basically, he's living the dream. But if he really wants to cash in, he'll get a RunSmokeJoint app ready in time for Tron Legacy.

This week Frank Bruni at the Times, approaching his last month with the Gray Lady, goes gaga for Aldea (photos), where "the cooking is precious, lusty, ultramodern, rustic and a host of other adjectives that don’t normally squeeze together but find themselves in a tight, mostly happy clutch here. Although Aldea has a clean, sleek and relatively spare look, it has a much more complex taste. One minute you’re nibbling on crisp pig’s ears. The next you’re carefully maneuvering your spoon under a translucent, quivering orb of concentrated mushroom broth—one of those liquid ravioli that the Spanish alchemist Ferran Adrià made famous—in an avant-garde consommé." Bruni also takes a look at artisanal pizza parlors this week.

       

Here's Bar Luna, the casual Upper West Side wine bar that opened recently in the space formerly occupied by the Neptune Room on Amsterdam Avenue. There was a bit of a delay last month when owner Turgut Balikci, who cut his teeth twenty years ago with Bella Luna on Columbus Avenue, sent out an email canceling the opening because of a liquor license issue. But a source tells the Village Voice that the opening was actually pushed back because the chef, Sean Chudoba (who ran the kitchen at Balikci's restaurant AYZA) quit at the last minute. Bar Luna is now up and running with chef Jacque Belanger (West Branch), whom Balicki says is "better suited for the style of restaurant, and more experienced in the neighborhood."

Photographer Katie Sokoler went shopping for a sympathy card at a 99 cent store in Williamsburg today but she says all she found were "tons" of "Congratulations on Your New Condo" cards. Does this mean more people are buying condos than dying? We thought condos were dying; according to The Real Deal, 1,841 condos are expected to enter the Williamsburg market by the end of this year.

              

Click on the images above for details on 13 other sweet spots for al fresco drinking, including the Extreme WOW (Presidential) Suites in Midtown East, Ortine in Prospect Heights, Spuyten Duyvil in Williamsburg, T.B.D. in Greenpoint, Studio Square in Long Island City, The Diamond in Greenpoint, LIC Bar in Long Island City, Nita Nita in Williamsburg, Huckleberry Bar in East Williamsburg, The Hotel Gansevoort in the Meatpacking District, Vutera in Williamsburg, 5 Ninth in the Meatpacking District, and The Brooklyn Ice House in Red Hook.

The Village Voice's Robert Sietsema discovers South Indian restaurant Southern Spice in Flushing, and files a rave review that begins, "Sometimes a restaurant makes such an impression that it changes your way of thinking about an entire cuisine...Dish after dish was astonishing in the power and immediacy of its flavors." His colleague Sarah DiGregorio checks out two East Village cured-meat "specialists," Cure and Ballaro. The former "looks like a boudoir—a boudoir stocked with meat and cheese...Stick with the meat for best results. Even the most successful salad is made mostly of meat—a mess of a half-dozen kinds of chopped charcuterie, rendered even less healthy by the addition of sliced fresh mozzarella, all on top of a portion of mixed greens. The quiches, unfortunately, are heated to sogginess in a microwave." And over at Ballaro, "the proprietors are more serious about their food."

Brooklyn Star: Former Momofuku partner Joaquin Baca has gone solo in Williamsburg, with this handsome little restaurant a few blocks from the L train. The Southern comfort menu includes options such as corn bread ($4), Dr. Pepper Ribs ($16), Fried Pig Tails ($11), BBQ Catfish with grits and fried cucumbers ($13), and Smothered Porkchop with scalloped tomatoes and string beans. Inside the open kitchen, a 100-plus-year-old oven, a relic from when the place used to be a pizzeria, imbues the food with the appropriate degree of smokiness. NY Mag finds out how much money Baca spent to make his dream a reality, and here's the menu from Brooklyn Star's website. No liquor license yet, but they do have plenty of cool, refreshing ice tea and root beer! 33 Havemeyer Street, Brooklyn; (718) 599-9899

If you follow along with this sort of thing, you'll know how earth shattering it is that outgoing Times dining critic Frank Bruni has bestowed three out of four precious stars on Keith McNally's casual-yet-elitist reboot of Minetta Tavern. That's a lot of stars for a place like this, especially considering Bruni's past ambivalence to the restaurateur, who famously accused Bruni of sexism after the critic gave his restaurant Morandi (which had a female chef) a tough review. Anyway, Bruni hearts McNally's Minetta, which he declares "the best steakhouse in the city." Meanwhile, the Post's Steve Cuozzo has some thoughts on Bruni's depature. (The take away's basically, Who cares, the Times is now a paper tiger.)

       

Here's a look at Entwine, a new wine bar and small plates lounge over on the far side of West 12th Street. Perhaps you're thinking, "Finally! Another wine bar in the Village." But Entwine has some attributes that make it worth a trip west (or east, if you want respite after roaming Hudson River park). There's the tranquil back yard garden, for one thing, as well as the creative cocktail menu, which includes bartender Duane Fernandez's delicious twist on the Rusty Nail; dubbed the Scotland Yard, it sports Dewars, Drambuie, fresh ginger, lemon juice and basil.

Today Frank Bruni at the Times bestows two out of four stars on the Upper West Side Fatty Crab (photos/menu), an impressive rating for a casual restaurant. But Bruni just can't get enough of "the Fatty spirit, the culinary equivalent of a stoner’s foggy contentment...Are its flavors in fact too big, too unrelenting? What qualifies as a bold deployment of chilies and aiolis, and what’s just indiscriminate overkill? Many a meal at Fatty Crab raises those questions and walks a fine line, but pretty much every time I began to doubt the kitchen’s care and skill, something came along to restore my belief."

This week Frank Bruni at the Times bestows one star upon David Burke's Fishtail on the Upper East Side. He finds it both "exasperating" and "amusing...While several lines of type on the restaurant’s elaborately segmented, deeply fatiguing menu trumpet its commitment to sustainable seafood, there’s at least as high a premium on silliness, and exuberance is everything. With Mr. Burke, the trailblazing inventor of the cheesecake lollipop, that’s often the case... He’s as much showman as chef, though he’s a particular kind of showman, happy to act the clown, eager to play the prankster. You get the sense that if, at some pivotal juncture in his past, he had been handed a microphone instead of a spatula, he’d be doing stand-up now."

Hudson Terrace: After operating as a private event space last year, this gorgeous bi-level aerie with the commanding Hudson River views opens to the public for the first time tonight with a Cinco de Mayo bash. Tented on rainy nights and featuring a heated floor to ward off any early-season chills, Hudson Terrace will now be doing happy hour parties on Tuesdays through Fridays, as well as Sunday brunch (from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m.) with a menu from Vintage Irving's executive chef Jason Bunin. The happy hour deal is good for 2-for-1 specialty cocktails, and an extensive nightly appetizer menu includes duck confit quesadillas, crab and artichoke croquettes, and smoked salmon nachos. A rooftop BBQ grill will also round out the edible options (tempura chicken skewers, anyone?), while beverages run the gamut from wine and sangrias to margaritas, mojitos, and caipirinhas. Or just get two Jim Beams and Coke for the price of one and savor the sunset. 621 West 46th Street, (212) 315-9400

This week Frank Bruni at the Times keeps his stars to himself and goes trendspotting, opining on four haute restaurants doing alternative, recession-minded menus. He raves about a couple dishes at Anthos Upstairs, located in "the second-floor room previously dedicated to large private parties — you know, those suddenly anachronistic events at which corporate generals larded their bonus-primed lieutenants," but has "better luck and a better time" at DFF, the re-appropriation of the private-party room adjacent to Craft, in the Flatiron district. "Semantically cuter but otherwise less appealing than DFF" is Halfsteak, where Bruni "got half service." And the à la carte Per Se lounge is "superb — and yet utterly ridiculous." GQ's Alan Richman also visits Per Se lounge twice, spending $454 on dinner for two, and is "unimpressed."

Campbell Terrace: Summer's here (in spirit) and the time is right to relax outside in mahogany rocking chairs and drink. Campbell Terrace, run by the same folks who operate the clubby Campbell Apartment in Grand Central Terminal, have just re-opened for the season in the Vanderbilt Avenue portico between 42nd and 43rd Streets. Boasting 1,500 square feet of shady, open-air imbibing, the terrace's myriad rocking chairs are a homage to the furniture provided in the ladies' waiting rooms in the early days of Grand Central Terminal. This year Campbell Terrace reopens with a new and expanded spirits menu, featuring vintage cocktails such as the Strawberry Southside (Gin, fresh muddled strawberries and mint topped with Champagne), and signature cocktail The Terrace Punch (Cane rum, orange liqueur, ginger liqueur, mango nectar, fresh lemon juice and a pinch of allspice). The food menu is the same as the inside bar, and includes club sandwiches, quesadillas, and cheese plates. Open Monday through Friday from 2 p.m. until 10 p.m. 15 Vanderbilt Avenue, (212) 980-9476.

       

Undeterred by their Kafkaesque struggles with the local community board over the stellar cocktail lounge Death & Co., two of that bar's owners have boldly branched out with a second establishment on the very same street. Named Mayahuel after the Aztec goddess of fertility, this cozy, bi-level temple to tequila and mezcal is unofficially open now. The menu by cocktail craftsman Phil Ward consists of almost two dozen mezcal and tequila cocktails ($13 each), plus a few beer cocktails, some punch, and sangria.

This week Frank Bruni at the Times has nice things to say about two new Spanish restaurants: La Fonda del Sol (photos) in the Met Life building, and Chelsea's Txikito (pronounced cheek-ee-toe). Upon the former, Bruni bestows two stars, a crucial break the restaurant and for chef Jay DeChellis, as reviews have been mixed: "Although the menu has weak spots, with a few too many dishes not from the heart but from a marketing plan, [DeChellis's] cooking here feels less forced and more exuberant." The diminutive Txikito is a mixed bag: "Across many meals here I had wonderfully memorable food (suckling pig as fine as any in New York beyond Eleven Madison Park’s); ridiculous food (a rib-eye so excessively fatty and undercooked it was almost inedible); food that fell somewhere in between... and food that never tasted the same twice."

              

The festival continues through May 3rd, and while this year boasts less films than usual (approximately 150, down from roughly 200 last year), that also means it's a slightly more manageable festival. Last week Executive Director Nancy Schafer talked us through some of the fun events happening during the festival, which include free stuff like the drive-in movies and the fair street fair, the post-screening Q&A's with directors such as Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh, and a "work in progress" premiere screening of the documentary, Bon Jovi: When We Were Beautiful.

Num Pang: Though it just opened Friday, this unpretentious Cambodian sandwich joint is already packing 'em in, as evinced by lines ten-deep stretching out the door. (It seems the place is closed today as the owners figure out how to keep up.) We popped in last week before the rush and were immediately won over by their hearty-but-not-too-filling coconut tiger shrimp sandwich with toasted coconut flakes ($7.50). We also hear the peppercorn catfish sandwich ($7.25) and the grilled duroc honey glazed pork ($6.75) sandwiches are worth the wait.