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......

On all counts, Michael Psilakis has been on quite a roll. Though his two-starred Dona was shuttered due to a real estate snafu, he went on to earn a Michelin star at Anthos, one of only two Greek restaurants with this honor, his to-die-for gnudi recipe was featured on the cover of Bon Appetit, was named Esquire's chef of the year, and opened up Mia Dona, which just yesterday earned two stars from Frank Bruni.......

Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni awards two stars to Mia Dona (pictured), the best rating that a somewhat casual place like this could hope for: “The food is robust, often rustic and sometimes proudly unsubtle, hammering away at its intended effect.” The East 58th Street Italian restaurant is a remix of Michael Psilakis and Donatella Arpaia’s shuttered restaurant Dona, and compared to Anthos, Psilakis’s haute Greek place, Mia Dona rolls like “a Buick, a more......

Today Frank Bruni files a second review of Mas (pictured), the organic, locally-sourced West Village eatery he bestowed with one star four years ago. Today he bumps the cozy French-inflected restaurant up a star, noting that Mas isn’t “for diners with big, blunt appetites. It’s for those who revel in little surprises and unexpected nuances, like the smoked celery root purée that came with grilled turbot.” Meanwhile, Alex Witchel enlists cookbook author Arthur Schwartz in......

Wildly successful young chef and restaurateur Michael Psilakis – whose Anthos is one of only two Greek restaurants in the world with a Michelin star – refined his talent not in culinary school but in the kitchen beside his Greek mother during his childhood on Long Island. After earning a business degree, he found himself drawn back to the food world, where he worked his way up from waiter to owner of the Long Island......

tre dici STEAK: The second floor of Chelsea’s Italian restaurant tre dici has been transformed into an intimate, 50 seat dining room (pictured) designed in the style of a sexy New Orleans speakeasy, circa 1920. Heavy fabrics covering the windows evoke a feeling of timelessness in the candlelit room, which is lined with luxuriant claret leathers and sensual artwork under an antique silver tin ceiling. The food arrives via dumbwaiter from chef Giuseppe Fanelli’s kitchen......