The Times's Sam Sifton is back on the beat this week, and rather than look at a new restaurant he's gone and revisited an old one. A very old one. But even after 85 years, the Palm doesn't disappoint... assuming you don't look at the menu (which has calorie counts) and just order the steak or the lobster. Avoid those rules and you are on your own. In the end Sifton gives the restaurant and its sibling, Palm Too across the street, one-star (which is what it got in 1992). "Palm may be a chain restaurant," he says. "But not on Second Avenue, no matter where you sit." more ›

Bloomberg's critic Ryan Sutton has seen Top Chef's Sam Talbot's restaurant Imperial No. Nine and he is not impressed. He calls it "a pretty restaurant filled with pretty people eating pretty lousy seafood." Also, the help sucks, Talbot's fish is "spongy, mushy, as if fetched from the same back corner of a refrigerator where the dodgy milk sits," the beef culotte has "the tang of liver or kidneys gone bad," the rhubarb pie "contains no pie," the place makes five kinds of gin and tonic (with flat tonic), and so on and so forth. It is safe to say that Ryan Sutton will not be getting a Christmas card from Sam Talbot this year. more ›

Andrew Carmellini's SoHo insta-hotspot The Dutch gets not one, not two, but three major reviews this week and—though faults can be found with the service, the noise and the cramped seating—the "American cuisine" there is reportedly worth writing home about. "So here is where you want to be right now, all of you who care about good food and the theater of eating it," The Times's Sam Sifton purrs in his glowing two-star review. The restaurant has the atmosphere of "A Balthazar for Generations X and Y, a “21” Club for post-Reagan youth," and even the "clunkers" in the food department soar to "better than decent" heights. It is a scene, but "it is exciting." more ›

"Fish sticks for the sophisticated" is how Sam Sifton describes the Dover sole at Desmond's, but it also seems to sum up his take on the one-starred Upper East Sider. Think of the restaurant as "a Caprice where you might actually wish to eat dinner," a place where "the mandate to comfort the comfortable while avoiding the afflicted entirely" is taken quite seriously. The food ("pensioner food for those who run pension funds") is consistent, the art is boring, the service is good but the prices are high and the restaurant "is not for everyone." more ›

After Ryan Sutton gushed over it last week, Timesman Sam Sifton heads to the unattractive restaurant Tenpenny in the Gotham hotel and comes out with the same opinion. While it "is not the prettiest restaurant, nor does it offer diners a compelling reason to visit beyond the promise of good food in a weird environment," you want to go and and eat there so you can "imagine yourself telling friends how you used to eat the chef Chris Cipollone’s food back when he was cooking in that grim hotel space in Midtown." If Tenpenny were "in Brooklyn or on Avenue A, you might have already heard about it from your coolest friend, and you would probably have to wait in a long line to get in and pay for your meal in cash. Here in dead-at-night Midtown, at the heart of the city’s grid, you can simply call for a reservation." more ›

Books for walls? Now we've seen everything! And so will you if you step inside David Bouley's long-delayed Japanese restaurant Brushstroke, which puts 12,000 boring old (recycled) paperbacks to good use as the walls in the bar/lounge. Who will be the first sake-bombed customer to idly pull out one of the books and bring the entire restaurant crashing down? Well, first it has to open; after years of anticipation, the restaurant (menu below) is finally expected to officially debut on April 20th (thought it's in "soft-open" mode now). more ›