Results tagged “shang”

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."

This week the Times's Frank Bruni piles on Shang, a restaurant in the Thompson LES Hotel helmed by the acclaimed, formerly Toronto-based chef Susur Lee, whose first mistake is making Bruni exercise: "The staircase was the first befuddlement and miscalculation I encountered — and a clue that the evening and restaurant might not be all I’d hope for. It’s a long, drab, foreboding rise of steps from the sidewalk to the host station, an entrance less inviting than aerobic. I’ve gone on runs that didn’t leave me as winded." As for the menu, some dishes are "intensely pleasurable," but overall it's "inconsistent and uneventful. The magic that Mr. Lee reputedly made in Toronto hasn’t followed him here."

Frank Bruni at the Times really wants to love the newly renovated Oak Room (photos), but the food is so erratic that dining there amounts to a very costly coin toss. His review is nothing like Steve Cuozzo's recent excoriation, but in this economy, it's not what the Oak Room needed: "It has been meticulously and gorgeously restored. An acclaimed French-born chef was recruited to supervise the kitchen. And those developments combined, on the best of the nights when I dined there, to produce a lovely experience of a rarefied sort.

This week Frank Bruni at the Times tells Zak Pelaccio (Fatty Crab) to get his shit together at the West Village's Cabrito: "On its best nights and judged by its best dishes, Cabrito is the Mexican restaurant so many of us dreamed about for so long. It has just enough sophistication and upscale trappings, manifest in the quality of its cocktails and length of its tequila and mezcal list, to be the plausible cynosure of a fun night out, not just a grubby refueling station where the price of dauntless, authentic flavors is a spartan atmosphere." BUT: "Cabrito is afflicted by an inconsistency that’s puzzling, even maddening. There are dishes that don’t seem, by nature, to rise to the caliber of others, and dishes that aren’t dependable from one visit to the next."

    

Last night Gourmet magazine held a big party at the soon-to-open Shang, a new restaurant helmed by the acclaimed, formerly Toronto-based chef Susur Lee. In an uncharacteristically non-restaurant world domineering move, Lee closed his Toronto flagship restaurant (called Susur) in May in order to concentrate fully on his New York opening. Shang, which means growing upwards, will open next month.