This week Robert Sietsema at the Village Voice reviews Motorino, the wood-oven pizza place in Williamsburg named after a Vespa-like scooter. He says the prices are reasonable and the pies first rate: "Stippled with char, smoky, and slightly doughy, the marguerita ($10) stands up to any other I've tasted...Even more amazing is the Pugliese pie, name-checking the southern Italian region where many Brooklynites came from. This pizza deploys broccolini and sweet sausage, and who'd imagine bitter greens would make such a fab topping? These pies might be called 'back constructions' by a linguist: They re-import the true pies of Naples to New York 120 years after they first arrived, and then slap Italian-American ingredients on them." more ›

This week Frank Bruni at the Times criticizes Corton, the new Tribeca restaurant helmed by enfant terrible chef Paul Liebrandt. Others at Time Out and NY Mag have raved, and Bruni's praise isn't exactly muted either: "At Corton [Liebrandt] calms down and wises up, accepting that an evening in a restaurant shouldn’t be like a visit to a fringe art gallery: geared to the intellect, reliant on provocation. It needn’t demand raptness. And it must, in the course of whatever else it means to accomplish, leave a person eager for the next bite and intent on the one after that." Makes sense, three stars. more ›

This week Frank Bruni at the Times reviews Double Crown, the new bi-level restaurant and bar in the East Village that, in his words, "ponders the glories of culinary cross-pollination, making a promise of 'British-Indio-Asian' fusion that sounds more like a threat, given that it’s a two-hyphen fusion and that one of the words bumping up against one of the hyphens is 'British.' And isn’t India in Asia? Note to self: bone up on world geography... Its take on British imperialism goes something like this: Sure, foreign lands were plundered and indigenous peoples oppressed, but think of the snacks!" Bruni bestows two stars for not taking "its pledged fusing too seriously or executing it too strenuously." more ›