For this week's New York Times restaurant review, Sam Sifton goes deep into the heart of Manhattan's Chinatown, emerging victoriously with something that's actually quite useful: 456 Shanghai Cuisine, a cheap, convenient Chinese place with solid, non-scary Shanghainese food. more ›

At the Lambs Club, an atavistic upscale hotel restaurant recalling the old days of clubby Broadway celebrity, you'll find "men and women of letters and soft fabric drinking strawberry gimlets and celebrating lives that allow such pleasures," writes Sam Sifton in his one star review. "The scene at the Lambs can recall those days, the room filled with editors and artists, writers, models and hangers-on, along with Broadway actors and in-town rock stars and friends of Sant Singh Chatwal, who with Vikram Chatwal, his glamorous son, owns the hotel. They gather in contentment and good clothes first to drink old-school cocktails from Sasha Petraske, and then to eat Mr. Zakarian’s carefully prepared, wealth-friendly, vaguely internationalized comfort food, just as if it were 1989 all over again." more ›

Sam Sifton at the Times really wants to love Xiao Ye, the "midnight snack" joint on Orchard Street that spins Taiwanese cuisine into eyebrow-raising dishes like "Trade My Daughter For Fried Chicken." The restaurant's proprietor, Eddie Huang, is good at making waves in the dining world with his blog Fresh Off the Boat, and he recently wrote, "I’m interested in the culture of eating. I am not a chef." Sifton says that "sounds about right and is really too bad. Because if Mr. Huang spent even a third of the time cooking that he does writing funny blog posts and wry Twitter updates, posting hip-hop videos and responding to Internet friends, rivals, critics and customers, Xiao Ye might be one of the more interesting restaurants to open in New York City in the last few months more ›

"Nuela is a large and garish new pan-Latin restaurant on West 24th Street that seems at first blush about as welcoming as a Miami nightclub," writes Sam Sifton in today's Times. "People with shiny hair and incredible heels predominate, followed by people in Prada suits and Kanye West-style sneakers, followed by a lot of people wearing sunglasses and carrying fashion-label bags the size of sofa cushions. In the minority: the unbeautiful." And yet, despite a "rambling menu... there is good eating at Nuela, if only you can allow yourself to revel in, or ignore, the scene." more ›

The NY Times' Sam Sifton bestows two stars on TriBeCa's Il Matto, possibly a first for a restaurant that has teacup banquettes and a painting of the chef as an octopus. Sifton loves chef and owner Matteo Boglione's eccentric cooking and style, "Il Matto is an outlier in what sometimes seems to be an increasingly codified Manhattan restaurant scene... You cannot order a plate of finishing-school fried chicken, nor a black-truffle pizza. There is no dish of foraged mushrooms sitting beneath a poached organic egg from a chicken with a yoga teacher and a place upstate. No Caesar salad. No peekytoe crab or paddlefish caviar." more ›

Balaboosta, the Mulberry Street Israeli restaurant from the owner of West Village falafel joint Taim, gets the Times treatment today. It's a one star rave. "[Chef/owner Einat] Admony smiles sometimes," writes Sam Sifton. "She can definitely cook.There is that semi-completed hummus to start, whole chickpeas rising out of a tahini bath in a marble mortar, crushed chickpeas beneath them, ready to be finished with an accompanying pestle. Dip warm, herb-laden pita into the mixture, sparkly with lemon juice, fragrant with roasted garlic. Consumed, it provides a taste of an Israeli idyll, the feeling of a warm breeze off the Mediterranean to ruffle your hair. (If you have hair.)" more ›

Celebrity chef Mario Batali has a bit part in the new indie film Bitter Feast, about a snarky, influential food blogger who gets kidnapped by a chef who gets fired after a scathing review described his food as "vomitious." (Batali plays the restaurant owner who cans the chef, informing him that he's being replaced with a sous chef from Marlow & Sons.) So the chef, played by James Le Gros (AKA Mr. Sensitive Ponytail Man in Singles), flips out and locks the blogger in his basement, forcing him to perform "a series of deceptively simple food challenges—from preparing a perfect egg over easy, to grilling a steak precisely medium rare—punishing him sadistically for anything less than total perfection." more ›

After a string of setbacks—including a kitchen fire that burned down her acclaimed restaurant Annisa last year—chef Anita Lo is back on top, winning raves from critics who've checked out Annisa's reboot. Today the big dog weighs in. "The food Ms. Lo is cooking there is as good as any she has made in her career," writes Sam Sifton for the Times. "Ms. Lo is not by any means a flashy chef. She does not stalk the dining room in gleaming whites, glad-handing patrons and accepting praise. She simply stays in the kitchen and works, cooking as the Puget Sound novelist David Guterson writes: precisely, with earth in closest proximity to sea." And Time Out's Jay Cheshes says Annisa, "as sparely appointed as a Japanese rock garden... isn’t any flashier than it used to be, but the food is more exciting than ever." more ›

This week Sam Sifton at the Times files a two star rave on Torrisi Italian Specialties, a little $50 prix fixe Italian-American joint that recently received a rave from New York, as well. "During the day, Torrisi is a sandwich shop modeled on those of the neighborhood old school," writes Sifton. "You can get a good chicken parm or an excellent turkey hero there, some flavorful contorni, a can of beer, a small bottle of Coke. The dishes are all smart upgrades on classics, beautifully cooked, humble Italian-American lunch fare for an era that respects the form. At night, though, the room is transformed into a restaurant of around 20 seats, in which artists make work and customers consume it." more ›

Now that hotshot chef Michael Psilakis has left Mia Dona (and his former partner Donatella Arpaia) far behind, Sam Sifton at the Times barrels through to strip the place of the two stars originally bestowed by Frank Bruni when it opened in 2008. "Arpaia declared that she would run the restaurant alone, training the remaining kitchen staff to cook the peasant food of Puglia, the cucina povera of the Arpaia family’s Italian past," writes Sifton. " 'There is no chef,' she told The Times in an interview at the time. 'Sometimes it’s hard to do what I want, working with a talented chef-partner. I wanted the food I grew up with and not have it reinterpreted.' more ›

While acknowledging that Scott Conant (Scarpetta) is a "phenomenally talented chef," Times critic Sam Sifton is frustrated by Faustina, Conant's new venture in the Cooper Square Hotel. It's not the food—which is "excellent"—it's the space, which formerly housed the defunct Table 8. Faustina "offers what may be the city’s best pork chop, a shoebox-size Berkshire behemoth currently recommended for two or more diners; it might serve four, and happily," says Sifton. "You can find a wealth of interesting raw-bar small bites and bread-dippers, delicate salads and ridiculously hearty, delicious pastas... But no matter the meal, you will eat it uncomfortably, in a tough concrete dining room that juts off a large bar crowded with tall tables, in what is unmistakably an institutional setting, down to the space on the check where you can sign the bill to your room." more ›

Chef Jesse Schenker "is 27, bearded, wildly tattooed, with time spent in Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen," writes Times critic Sam Sifton in his glowing review of the recently-opened Recette, in the West Village. "For a while last year he ran Recette out of a Harlem bakery as a kind of private supper club." In other words, Schenker's got street cred and he's a little punk, qualities Sifton values above all. "Schenker's foie gras terrine is revelatory, a single slice revealing a kind of glistening mosaic, perfect in its form, each lobe of the liver unmolested by the process: luscious, creamy, with a faint mineral tang," Sifton rhapsodizes. "It’s a meat painting, an organ sculpture; like most complicated French cooking, it tastes utterly complete, perfect in the way a ripe strawberry is, or a fresh-shucked oyster." more ›

Frank Bruni heads to Williamsburg to check out Rye, the South 1st Street joint from chef Cal Elliott (Dressler, Dumont). The NY Times restaurant critic admires the former bodega decor, where the "woodwork and pressed tin ceiling look like lovingly restored" and its "long, gorgeous mahogany bar," but ultimately offers one star: "Rye needs to be more consistent... when Mr. Elliott hits his mark, the cooking appealingly complements that atmosphere. It’s mostly a mix of bistro stalwarts and of-the-moment comfort foods like a side of macaroni and cheese, the non-slider sliders and the meatloaf sandwich, wet and wild enough to qualify as a sloppy Joe — an enormous, fantastic one at that. The mix of meats in its crunchy embrace included beef, veal, duck and pork." more ›

This week Frank Bruni at the Times opines on really, really, ridiculously good looking Tribeca restaurant Macao Trading Co., which serves fancy Employees Only cocktails and two versions (Portuguese and Chinese) of every dish. It's a fun read, replete with descriptions of phalluses in locked cages and the waitress who's "trying not to think about what working here is doing to my psyche." In his generous one star review, Bruni says one of his companions "put it best. 'This... is a deeply silly restaurant.' more ›

Adam Platt panned star chef Alain Ducasse’s Benoit (pictured), declaring it an “ersatz” brasserie and concluding that “French cuisine, as we used to know it, is deader than we think.” Now the Times’s Frank Bruni takes his turn, and while he disagrees that it’s “a throwaway restaurant,” he does concur that “Benoit is selling a dining experience so familiar it’s almost a cliché… And what of the ‘Parisian salad’? The city it’s referring to must be Paris, Tex. That’s a more likely cradle of this humdrum, deli-caliber mix of chicken, ham, cheese and lettuce.” But the veal appetizer (poached tongue and foie gras) “is worth the trip.” more ›

Even though winter’s barely a week old, many folks in the city have come down with a doozy of a cold, perhaps due to the sharp temperature drop that marked the end of an otherwise moderate fall. Our nasty respiratory bug is finally on its way out, largely because we’ve been treating it with a variety of potent soups available in Queens. Whether you're sick as a dog or just in need of a warm up, solace can be found in these hearty soups and stews. more ›

Hey, have y'all been using our new "Recommend this" feature at the bottom of each post? This week we're bringing you the "Most Recommended" posts from across the -ist world, as well as recommending some of our own. more ›