Marcus Samuelsson, an Ethiopian-born chef who learned to cook from his adoptive Swedish grandmother, was an instant hit at Aquavit when he was just 24. Some say he ascended too fast, and his celebrity status led to a proliferation of projects that received less than his full attention (cf. Merkato 55). But his new endeavor, Red Rooster in Harlem, may bring it all back home for the chef. New York's Adam Platt calls it a "big-city dining destination right now... but Samuelsson clearly knows that in the long run, his new enterprise will only go as far as the neighborhood takes it... The thing I couldn’t get off my mind was the apple pie, which is baked with a hint of Cheddar in the crust, served in Gulliver-size wedges, and designed, like lots of things at this elegant neighborhood restaurant, to exude the comforts of home." (Metromix also has a detailed review.) more ›

The Fat Radish on Orchard Street resembles, in the eyes of Times critic Sam Sifton, "a handsome young golden Labrador, camera-ready, hard not to like... To sit in its dining room as light plays off the huge mirror in back, candles flickering everywhere, eating rillettes and drinking wine, is to experience a small part of the New York that leads people here inexorably and always will. They get jobs and meet people at parties where they don’t know the host, start flirting with someone and end up talking about whether to go to dinner at the Fat Radish on Saturday night." Sifton doesn't quite hate these successful skinny young things, but you sense he doesn't feel quite comfortable there, even though "the cooking is good, the bill isn’t crazy, and you’d be a regular if you could." One star. more ›

The second coming of The John Dory—Chef April Bloomfield's and Ken Friedman's The John Dory Oyster Bar at the Ace Hotel—wins plaudits from Sam Sifton at the Times. "The John Dory Oyster Bar is in all a much better restaurant than its forebear, more fully realized in its open, clattering space behind giant windows, with excellent service and a marvelous wine list," Sifton says. "And the food is more sophisticated despite its simplicity: elegant and focused. Ms. Bloomfield is cooking well enough to hold her own against any seafood-centric kitchen in the city." However, a third of the review is devoted to his issues with their no-reservations policy, which results in wait of at least an hour. "All this greatness comes at a cost, which is the time and dignity lost waiting for a table... That tariff rankles. It leads here to exclusivity disguised as populism. Manhattan in a nutshell." more ›

"Some of the food is excellent," says the Times's Sam Sifton of Lyon, a très French bouchon in Greenwich Village. "It is a marvelous place to eat. The tables are set with red-checked napkins, the waiters and waitresses dressed to match. Each one is better looking than the last, worse at English, charming for that. They serve Beaujolais quickly, with gruff friendliness in tough little glasses, cold as a child’s morning cup of milk... The entrees need work, however... There need to be a few more things on the menu you’d want to eat again and again, more you’d return for with glee." more ›

Ciano, the East 22nd Street Italian restaurant helmed by chef Shea Gallante (Cru) gets an enthusiastic two star review from Sam Sifton in the Times this week. Sifton says Gallante's food "is ambitious, beautiful and flavor packed, a kind of Italian home cooking made grand and attractive, rich as Berlusconi, not as oily. It is less precious, less purposefully fancy, less aggressively upscale than what he was putting forth at Cru, where he cooked until 2009 and which closed last year...He isn’t trying so hard. And Ciano is exciting for that." Sifton also notes that the restaurant's policy of selling half bottles of wine "offers exciting possibilities. It is a tricky business, though, like getting a deal on a car. It does not favor the amateur or the neophyte. Those half bottles sold, after all, lead to half bottles that need to be sold." more ›

This week Sam Sifton at the Times drops two out of four stars on Carlton Hotel restaurant Millesime, a fancy seafood restaurant that, to enter, visitors "must first walk down a staircase, then through one or both of these spaces, to find themselves, perhaps confused and hesitant by this point, at the start of another staircase that leads up... But, holy cats, is there a beautiful, even exciting brasserie up there at the end of the journey, a restaurant devoted to the pleasures of the sea that manages to be luxurious and humble, ambitious and rustic, all at once. Eat, Eat!... The restaurant serves as a swell reminder of why this city fell in love with brasseries in the first place, and as a hopeful sign that there could be a resurgence in that affair. See if you can find your way there." more ›

This week the Times's Sam Sifton adores the lovely and delicious Anella in Greenpoint, where "the food is a wonder: a tight and focused menu of simple, seasonally appropriate food from Joseph Ogrodnek, a talented chef who has been in the kitchen for almost a year... Mr. Ogrodnek is a skilled practitioner of the vegetable arts. Like Midas, who turned everything he touched into gold (and like Dave Pasternack at Esca in Midtown, who achieves similar results with fish), he elevates the simplest greens and tubers into realms more celestial than those we are generally used to in wintertime in New York City... This is dirt wizard food of high caliber, cooking that leads people to join community-supported agriculture programs and fill their homes with parsnips and kale. But Mr. Ogrodnek does not ignore the pleasures of the flesh." more ›

This week Sam Sifton at the Times reviews the highly-buzzed about Thai restaurant Kin Shop in Greenwich Village. "But it isn’t a Thai restaurant, really, even if there’s a magical food stand somewhere in Phuket serving squid-ink and hot sesame-oil soup featuring brisket-stuffed squid rings," Sifton explains in his two star rave. "Kin Shop is instead an American restaurant that serves food prepared using Thai flavors, a restaurant that nods at Thailand respectfully and uses its cuisine to fine effect... [Chef/owner] Harold Dieterle is as Thai as John Boehner. But he cooks from the Thai larder as if he had stepped out of a novel by John Burdett, a farang who can see ghosts, who knows that the mind is Buddha’s seat, who bleeds fish sauce." more ›

Sam Sifton at the Times devotes the first 350 words of his review of Riverpark to the craaaazy location, all the way "on the far eastern shore of Kips Bay... occupying a chasm between the New York University Medical Center and the sprawling wards of Bellevue Hospital Center, tucked away at the far side of the lobby floor of the Alexandria Center, a new medical building at the dead end of the street... Explosions and fire would look cool against all the glass and emptiness, with the darkness of the East River in the distance... It supports a feeling of transience and anonymity, almost as in a dining room in a city far from your own. Jason Bourne, table for two." Good stuff, but what about the food? A solid two stars. "Certainly you can eat well," Sifton decides. "(Drink, too: The bar serves a wicked take on the Manhattan, with rye wisped through with single-malt Lagavulin, a smoky delight.)" more ›

This week Sam Sifton at the Times awards just one star out of four to hotshot chef Michael White's Osteria Morini. White, whose Marea and Convivio both got three stars from the Times, has been rapidly expanding this year, with another restaurant debuting this week in the Setai hotel on Fifth Avenue. Sifton thinks he's spread too thin. "When Mr. White was present at Morini this fall, the restaurant hummed," Sifton says. "On nights when he was not, trouble could ensue. Pastas that had been brilliant once arrived at the table slightly overdone, or wildly salty, or insanely slick with butter or cream." And in general, "White’s pastas glisten with pork fat, with butter, with cream, with oil. They are aggressively salted. They hang around on the outskirts of Too Much." more ›

This week Sam Sifton at the Times shares his disappointment with Lincoln, the ambitious and expensive new restaurant in Lincoln Center from Jonathan Benno (Per Se). In a review headlined "Because the Fat Lady Has to Eat," Sifton awards two stars to a venture that clearly had four star dreams. "That Mr. Benno can cook is hardly in question," Sifton says. "But such success in the kitchen does not mean Lincoln yet works well as a restaurant. On that score, Mr. Benno and the Patina Group still have some distance to go. They have built a restaurant that lacks a center — a restaurant in which it is possible to eat well without really having a good time... A single scallop, perfectly cooked alongside sunchokes and almonds, makes up an appetizer dish that costs $24." more ›

This week Sam Sifton at the Times takes a paddle to the low-hanging frat fruit at Lavo, a flashy midtown east clusterfuck inspired by the big Lavo in Las Vegas. He describes the sound level thus: "And Duke beats Notre Dame in overtime to win the N.C.A.A. lacrosse title!" The atmosphere is: "The E-Trade baby gets a Balthazar all his own." And the clientele is summed up by the satiric opening paragraphs, penned by one "A. Broheim": 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 ›

The NY Times' Sam Sifton goes to two restaurants situated in hotels: Plein Sud at the Smyth Hotel in TriBeCa and Wall & Water at the Financial District Hyatt. Plein Sud, whose chef is Ed Cotton, currently appearing in this season of Top Chef, has "camera ready" food, "beautifully composed and ready for its close-up," with a "handsome crowd" and a "not unpleasant" decor. But the food itself seems ready for the chopping block: Sifton finds it "lacking in flavor, texture, temperature or interest: room-service fare that leads to increased loneliness, raiding of the minibar, sleepless hours staring at the television in blue light, thinking about home." One dish was a "mushy skate wing with a brown-butter sauce that ran very close to scorched, defining the taste of inattention." more ›

This week Sam Sifton at the Times surveys the Theater District's overpriced dining wasteland, finding refuge in Toloache, a Mexican bistro on 50th Street off Eighth Avenue. "It opened in 2007 and looks terrible from the street, a cube-shaped restaurant under spectacular green-and-purple neon signage," says Sifton. "You could easily walk by the place chuckling at the awning reading 'Bistro Mexicano.' But nothing on Broadway is ever what it seems... One of the great pleasures of the summer season in New York is to sit at its comfortable tiled bar, drinking a fine house margarita or a tequila off the restaurant’s long and luxurious list, while eating a bowl of guacamole with the assistance of some tortilla chips, fresh, warm and salty." more ›

This week Sam Sifton at the Times is pleasantly surprised by Tamarind Tribeca, the capacious upscale Indian restaurant in Tribeca. "Tamarind is an extremely pleasant place to dine, and despite the size of the room, it is possible for a group to have a conversation there as if in a private home," Sifton marvels. "So, have a drink and consider some curry-laced crab cakes and crisp pomegranate samosas, and the promise beyond them of a menu that can take diners across India in the name of flavor, and represent that nation’s varied cuisine with pride and great skill." more ›

In his most well-written review to date, Times dining critic Sam Sifton files a nuanced one star review on The Lion, a see-and-be-seen restaurant from chef John DeLucie, formerly of the Waverly Inn. This place is so disgustingly fashionable you might assume the food's an afterthought, but Sifton says DeLucie's still got it, and the critic has a fine time despite "a shouty crowd with corkscrew necks looking to see who will be next into the dining room, who next on the stairs... Only a Berkshire pork chop with fermented black garlic and what the menu calls 'applewood smoke' really disappoints. It arrives at the table on a wooden cutting board, beneath a glass dome filled with acrid smoke. The flavor it imparts seems to be that which might have been achieved if someone had simply stubbed out a glowing Marlboro on the meat." more ›

Aquavit, the 23-year-old Scandinavian restaurant in midtown, has replaced the always-absent name brand chef Marcus Samuelsson with his 28-year-old second in command, Marcus Jernmark. This occasions a fourth review from the NY Times, and current chief critic Sam Sifton keeps the status quo, letting the underpopulated restaurant keep the two stars left behind by a previous critic. "Aquavit’s dining room can be somewhat lonely these days, only a little more than half full at peak hours," writes Sifton. more ›

Elite scenester sanctuary Kenmare gets an unsurprising drubbing today from the Times's Sam Sifton, whose bullshit detector wiggles in the red zone. "The dining room is pretty enough, dark and cool, with white marble tables and a vaguely Mediterranean feel enhanced by big sprays of flowers," says Sifton. "It is crowded nightly, first with dinner parties that seem pulled from rejected “Sex and the City” scripts and then with a late, late, late show of models and people with incredible collections of music and sneakers and phone numbers, accompanied by the people who went to college with them who now work on Wall Street. But the food is inconsequential." Sifton also checks in on drunken late-night Chinatown oasis Wo Hop, where he finds "great comfort in eating such food, at a restaurant with seven decades in Manhattan, still going strong." more ›

This week Sam Sifton at the Times bestows two precious stars on Carroll Gardens charmer Prime Meats, and you get the sense he would have tossed in an exceedingly rare third star if it weren't for a couple of annoying policies at the restaurant: they don't take reservations or plastic. Meals are "executed with a rare degree of excellence, from the salad with its silky nap of dressing and perfect, peppery greens to the complementary textures and deep flavors of the chicken," writes Sifton. "Cash only, though? At a restaurant where a dinner for four might run a considerate host more than $400?... Forget to line your pockets in the manner of a Biggie Smalls impersonator and you’re going to need to leave your guests before the end of it all, and walk to a bodega A.T.M. to rustle up enough cash to pay your bill. This is a grim feeling for a grown person to experience, right up there with walking around all day with a large knot of $20 bills in your pocket only because you’re going to dinner someplace that doesn’t take credit cards." Sifton also says Bobby Flay's Bar Americain "is still quite on top of its game." more ›

The Village Voice's Robert Sietsema is worried about chef Scott Conant, who is currently following up his deservedly popular Scarpetta with Faustina, an ambitious restaurant in the Cooper Square Hotel. "The chef finds himself at a crossroads in his career, and he's clearly chosen a Batalian path, which means helming a restaurant empire of global proportions—and maybe losing his soul in the process," frets Sietsema. "The core of the menu, though, is a playful and innovative take on Italian cuisine, in a way that reminds me of Batali's best days at Babbo, and Conant's more recent work at Scarpetta, proving that the chef is trying to retain at least part of his well-deserved reputation in this project." more ›