This week the Times’s Frank Bruni awards two stars to Eighty One (pictured) in a decidedly mixed review. He thinks the “dizzying” Upper West Side restaurant in the Excelsior Hotel has “attention deficits” and needs Ritalin: “It provides an especially clear example of a kind of culinary preening – call it ego food – that may speak less to the satisfaction of customers than to the self-regard of proprietors.” Nor does Bruni care for the......

The Village Voice’s Robert Sietsema stops by Soba Totta (pictured), the fourth addition to the Yakitori Totto mini-chain. He loves some charcoal shish kebabs and says “the sight of three yakitori chefs skewering morsels of chicken with military precision behind a hanging sheet of glass intended to forestall spatters is one of the great sights of midtown dining.” Eat your heart out Frank Bruni; New York Magazine’s Adam Platt is the first critic to score......

Olana: The internets are doomed to failure unless someone invents a way to click on a photo at the end of a wet, snowy day and be immediately teleported to the desired location – like those plush chairs clustered around the bar, where one of Olana’s specialty cocktails would be presented at once. A recent visitor to the new upscale restaurant and bar had kind words for a drink called the Corpse Reviver: a “smooth”......