Results tagged “juliamoskin”

This week in the Times, Bruni one-stars Lebanese Ilili, saying “Ilili is probably the atmospherically grandest excursion into Middle Eastern cooking that New York has ever seen.” While much of the menu is inconsistent, he loves the kebabs and kaftas. Says the service is “occasionally confused.” And get the essmalieh for dessert.

This week in the Times, Bruni two-stars Blue Ribbon Sushi Bar & Grill (the new one, at Columbus Circle). After a few rocky meals immediately after the opening, “the food has been consistently first-rate,” says Bruni. “Much of it also reflects the [owners’, Eric and Bruce] Bromberg’s winning playfulness.” He also says that while the sushi isn't the best in town, the fried chicken may be.

Ever since we read about osechi-ryori in the Times last week we’ve become a tad obsessed with this traditional cuisine that the Japanese whip up for the New Year. Stacked jubako, a more elegant take on the bento box, are filled with delicacies deriving from an age-old taboo forbidding women from cooking during the first three days of the New Year. In addition to sweet potato and burdock root and bits of grilled meat or fish, the boxes often include kamabako, or fish cake, whose red and white color are synonymous with festivals in Japan and kuro-mame or black soybeans. Mame means "health," symbolizing a wish for health in the New Year. Although Julia Moskin’s piece included several recipes, Gothamist decided to purchase a premade jubako or go to a restaurant for this festive fare. We quickly ruled out Kai, the elegant Upper East Side kaiseki spot, which was offering a 30-item jubako for $350. Also out of the running was Hakubai's $80 brunch.

This week in the Times, Bruni one-stars Sam Mason’s Tailor. Loves the design of the place, and—along with everyone else—the pork belly, the arctic char and the drinks. Overall? “[Mason’s] infatuation with his own imagination doesn’t leave room enough for a self-appraisal of the results… a duck-and-eel terrine in a chocolate consommé tastes like cat food splashed with Yoo-hoo.” Hee. In Dining Briefs, Bruni goes to Toloache. Calls the upscale Mexican restaurant a “welcome addition”...

Bruni visits Park Avenue Autumn this week, giving the seasonal restaurant, which changes name (Park Avenue Spring, Summer, etc.), décor and menu every three months to suit the season, two stars. Says that executive chef Craig Kotesku’s cooking here is much more interesting than at Quality Meats, the other restaurant he oversees. “Park Avenue Look-at-the-Weather-and-Fill-In-The-Blank has more than a striking gimmick,” he says. “It also has some terrific food.”

Julia Moskin sits in for Bruni again this week, gives two stars to the new dining room at the Morgan Library. It's eccentric, she says--open only during museum hours, which means that it only serves dinner on Friday nights, and even then only until 9pm. But "there's no institution that joins a menu and a museum as seamlessly."

This week in the Times, Julia Moskin fills in for a vacationing Bruni, one-stars Francois Payard's In Tent. "In too many cases, I could see where the chef was going, but the food hadn't arrived there yet," she says. But the desserts she liked, no surprise.

Truth be told, this past season of America's Next Top Model hasn't been doing it for us, because it pales after Project Runway (and we think most of the wannabe models are not that good-looking). So we're super excited that on Thirteen tonight, there will be a program that goes undercover into the world of cat shows: The Standard of Perfection "Show Cats". It's supposed to show "the training, pampering, bathing, grooming and fussing that go into preparing a 'campaign cat' for the biggest event on the cat calendar" - plus all the backstabbing and dirty tricks! And today's NY Times feature/review says that "The most interesting moment is when one cat freaks out in the middle of a competition and leaps into the audience." Awesome - it's like Moscow Cats Theatre gone mad! And at 9PM, we can watch Veronica Mars back on the UPN, since the Nets game preempted last night's airing.

For the past eight hours, we've been thinking about macaroni and cheese, in no small part due to Julia Moskin's mac and cheese odyssey in the Times' dining section. Even though this will seriously cripple our annual New Year's resolution of losing weight, Gothamist is determined to sate our craving for some cheesy pasta. We might head to City Bakery, but upon reading the article, we really want to try Daphne's Caribbean Express. What are some other places to hit up for mac and cheese? We've liked Cafeteria's, and Petite Abeille in Tribeca has a really rich and creamy pasta and cheese with jambon (perfect comfort food, even if it brings you one step closer to needing an angioplasty).

Where is your favorite non-American BBQ from? And did anyone else find it interesting that Moskin found the Second Annual Big Apple Barbecue too crowded, so she and her crew hightailed it for Chinatown? We're thrilled that Moskin is focusing on the less sexy but equally delicious Asian styles of cooking pork ribs (perhaps because Gothamist grew up with these kinds of spare ribs, we never really thought of them as BBQ, we just considered them "char siu"), we're surprised that a Times reporter is so wimpy. Gothamist is a huge wimp, and we, like thousands of other New Yorkers, managed to fight our way for some 'cue at the block party. We imagine Danny Meyer is calling up the Times right now.

Here at Gothamist, Jake is partial to Marie–Belle's hot chocolate whereas Jen loves the puddingy hot choclate at @SQC.

Holy headrush, the Times has a feature on the cupcaking of New York! Reporter Julia Moskin calls the sight people toting cupcakes around, the way one would a hot dog, a sign of a trend that entrenched itself, and covers how NY bakeries are making bank off teeny little cakes. Cupcakes analyzed come from Magnolia, Cupcake Cafe, Buttercup, Amy Sedaris, Polka Dot, William Greenburg, Yura, Kitchenette, Crumbs, and Downtown Atlantic, and who better to analyze them but food critics Eric Asimov and William Grimes (though Grimes admits "A 10 year-old should be able to handle the assignment"). The best cupcakes? Mitchel London, Amy's Bread, and Sage Caterers (pictured above, left to right) won out, but as Gothamist knows, if you eat your cupcakes cake first, then frosting, you're not thinking perfect marriage of cake and frosting, you're thinking "Mmm...sugar and butter..."

Gothamist is so jealous of the Times' Julia Moskin, as she gets to write an article about how real pit barbecue has made its way to New York. The vagaries of what barbecue is are touched upon (even a statement like "barbecue is meat cooked by indirect heat and smoke" causes a lot of debate) but the focus is on the New York restaurants that do offer pit barbecue. According to Moskin, Daisy May's, Blue Smoke and the upcoming Pearson's Texas BBQ on the Upper East Side are the only BBQ restaurants that cook "exclusively" with wood. And while barbecue authority Robb Walsh says, when asked if NY's barbecue can go head to head with Texan 'cue, "Let me put the question in New York terms: If you filtered Houston city water so it was the same as New York tap, and used the same flour, and brought in the same ovens, could you make authentic New York bagels in Texas? Yes, and no," we say, who cares - we'll take what we can get!