Today's review roundup includes Café des Artistes, 360, Dumonet, Chennai Garden:
NYTimes Restaurants William Grimes gives Café des Artistes 2 stars (1 West 67th Street):
If ever a restaurant had fine, aristocratic bone structure it is Café des Artistes, with its zigzag floor plan, intimate booths and romantic bar. Diners have only to take one step inside, and the tumultuous New York world outside disappears in a flash, replaced by lush floral displays, flattering lighting and Howard Chandler Christy's pastel murals of naked beauties prancing through romantic landscapes. It's an erotic dream straight from the id of the Arrow Shirt Man. Diners still stare, transfixed.
The clientele does not look for experimental food, and the menu does not force the issue. In an odd way, Café des Artistes functions as a kind of neighborhood restaurant for Manhattan's upper crust.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Country pâté; pot au feu; lobster in basil-Sauternes sauce; John Dory with corn and chanterelles; squab with garlic flan; Ilona torte, banana torte.
NYTimes $25 and Under Eric Asimov reviews 360 (Van Brunt Street (Wolcott Street), Red Hook, Brooklyn) -- a $20 three-course prix fixe sounds like an affordable and worthwhile adventure:
By many definitions, one would call 360 French. The daily menu is written in French, in a blurred, overstruck font reminiscent of a clattering manual typewriter, and the wines are almost all French. There is a cheese course, and one of the owners, Arnaud Erhart, is from Alsace, though his English contains only phantom cobwebs of an accent. Yet every dish on the menu would be as at home in an American restaurant as in a French one.
. . . .The food is intensely seasonal, like a chilled corn soup that captures perfectly its late-summer sweetness and yet is never one dimensional. The chef, Alexander Tchistov, excels at pairings, serving sea scallops roasted to where they are about to explode with flavor together with crisp sautéed cauliflower and peeled cherry tomatoes, which look like orange and red baubles.
. . . .You will not find a rib-eye steak and French fries at 360; too ordinary. But you may find an astonishingly flavorful chicken breast with a pleasingly crisp exterior, puréed potatoes flavored with garlic and rosemary, or a dorade with green and yellow wax beans, the fish sautéed just enough to coax out its reticent flavor.
BEST DISHES Chilled corn soup; sea scallops; steak tartare; seared Spanish mackerel; field greens; spaetzle with braised chicken; roasted chicken breast; sautéed dorade; sautéed cod; banana and plum crepes.
NYPost Steve Cuozzo reviews the relaunched Dumonet (Carlyle Hotel, 35 East 76th Street):
Except for an inelegant but satisfying plate of fresh mackerel, I'd skip all the $14 first courses, which seem drawn from a 1960 resort menu.
I'd splurge instead on $19.50 "in season" starters built around fresh morels, as earthy and sensuous as black truffles. They are divine, none more so than cream-laden baked duck egg served in a cocotte.
Most entrees are worth $32, even when they're basically bistro dishes. Dreamy tarragon-hollandaise sauce could turn me off to sissy vegetable reductions - but it couldn't bail out dull poached halibut. On the other hand, a glorious cut of Pacific salmon is even better with "light" sorrel butter cream that more honestly is "extra heavy."
Village Voice Robert Sietsema reviews Chennai Garden (129 East 27th Street): First, what's a "dosa"?
These delectable vegetarian crepes are made from a batter of ground rice and urad dal (a tiny beige bean) that's allowed to ferment into frothiness over a period of a day or two. With a vigorous swirling motion the batter is spread on a griddle, heaped with a potato mixture, then rolled into a thick blunt. It's served with a dense coconut chutney for scooping, and a thin soup called sambar for dipping and drinking. Though the pancake part has been around southern India since the 10th century, the idea of stuffing and rolling probably came from the French, who plied the Coromandel Coast south of Madras in the 17th century.
Chennai Garden, a new and elegant walk-down café named after the modern moniker of metropolitan Madras, specializes in dosas and snacks—such as iddlies (ricey dumplings) and utthapams (thicker pancakes with vegetables mixed into the batter)—created by similar means. There are 14 types of dosa alone ($6.45 to $8.95). To the untrained eye they are barely distinguishable. Masala dosa is queen mother of all, as long as a baseball bat and toasty brown in color, invariably evoking oohs and aahs from Indians and non-Indians alike as the waiter bears it in like a retainer carrying a pasha's crown. Take away the potato stuffing and call it a paper dosa. The unfilled variety demonstrates that to its most ardent fans, the real payoff is not the filling but the crispy pancake. For the cost-conscious diner, however, that wad of starchy stuffing also containing cashews, dal, onions, and cilantro in a mild masala makes the treat a full meal.
