We've got updates from bars and restaurants all around the city. This week, The JakeWalk unveils its winter fondue menu, Mama's Food Shop is starting brunch, there's new space coming to the already massive Radegast Hall, and today there's snow day champagne at Fishtail. more ›

If nothing's cooking with your family on Thanksgiving, or if you'd just rather not slave away in the kitchen all day, there are plenty of restaurants from Astoria to the East River which will be happy to serve you. Click on the images for details on special Thanksgiving menus around town, including Trattoria Cinque in Tribeca, Commerce in the West Village, The Classic Harbor Line yacht (on the river), Counter in the Wast Village, Da Franco in Astoria, Brother Jimmy's BBQ, Ed's Chowder House on the UWS , Fishtail on the UES, The Sea Grill at Rock Center, and Casimir in Alphabet City. more ›

For too long bacon lovers have cursed both the darkness and their deceptive, maddeningly inedible, bacon-scented candles. Who hasn't raised a bacon-scented candle to their lips and tried to drink the savory-smelling wax, only to be badly burned by the meretricious aroma and nauseating flavor? more ›

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." more ›

Following a string of mediocre reviews, particularly a one-two punch from Adam Platt, fancy uptown restaurants Fishtail and The Oak Room have both lost their top toques. At the Oak Room, acclaimed Atlanta-based Joël Antunes has left; today rumor has it that executive chef Eric Hara will leave David Burke’s “sustainable-friendly” seafood restaurant Fishtail. Now it seems Hara will replace Antunes. The recession has created a tighter-than-normal feedback loop between poor reviews and business as usual at high profile restaurants, in part because business as usual no longer exists (read: no more expense accounts). Meanwhile, Post critic Steve Cuozzo yesterday called out a “whining” Anita Lo, blaming absentee chefs for bad reviews and recent closings. “Stop treating customers like we're idiots,” he wrote. Bad food is bad food, sure, but perhaps Cuozzo would also encourage Lo to stop cooking at charity events around town that do things like feed homeless people, which seems more important than ever. more ›