Today's review roundup includes: Balthazar, Gumbo Cafe, Vento, Megu, Cricketer's Cafe.
NYTimes Restaurants Amanda Hesser gives Balthazar two stars (80 Spring Street; 212-965-1414):
After seven years in business, Balthazar has reached that stage in the life of a restaurant when diners' eyes soften as they call to mind memories of meals past, memories of Lillet and oysters and crisp, peaked croissants and the evenings of carefree youth. A married friend recently gave me a sentimental tour of the many tables at which she had had dates.
Balthazar is no longer hip, but it's still bustling. . .
The menu is much the same as always. Most of the best dishes are still there, and so are the less successful items. . .
But the Balthazar salad, romaine, frisée, asparagus, ricotta salata and truffle oil all mashed together, is as good as ever in its slick and wilted way. The escargots drew my companions' attention, large brown coils filled with juicy snails with plenty of the most important part — the butter, garlic and parsley at the bottom of the baking dish.
I adore the brandade, which is coarse and rustic, a mound of potatoes and salt cod marked with rivulets of olive oil, and topped with thin shards of toast. You spread a patch of brandade on the toast, and the delicate toast shatters in your mouth. And the crisp, salty French fries, which are served with the steak and a few other dishes, are still the best in the city.
The menu maintains a backbone of classics throughout the year, as well as an ample infusion of seasonal dishes. Right now, for instance, there is navarin d'agneau with baby turnips and carrots, and asparagus spears, which are warm and come blanketed with a tangy hollandaise and small fragrant morels.
One reason the food has held up so well is that Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, the co-chefs who started when the restaurant opened, are still here.
NYTimes $25 and Under Eric Asimov reviews Gumbo Cafe (950 Columbus Avenue near 107th Street; 212- 222-2378):
Nonetheless, if you want to experience fundamental, home-style New Orleans cooking, Gumbo Cafe is worth the trouble. Perhaps, because it really is a family operation, run by the husband-and-wife team of Dexter and Keiko Stewart, something earnest and homey rubs off on the food. Mr. Stewart grew up in New Orleans but has been in New York for a decade. Like any immigrant — New Orleans being well known as the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean — he longed for the flavors of home. Without any prior restaurant experience, the Stewarts opened Gumbo Cafe about three months ago.
The inexperience makes itself felt in several important ways, but not in the food. Red beans and rice ($8) is one of those dishes that are easily taken for granted, but Mr. Stewart's version, made with smoky beef sausage, is so earthy, with layers of spice that build up to a mouth-pleasing glow, that you want to inhale every last grain of the fluffy rice. And then you remember that no matter how simple this dish is, Louis Armstrong built a career on it, with "Red beans and ricely yours" being his traditional sign-off on correspondence.
Jambalaya ($9) is equally smoky but more complex. As in a paella, the rice forms a crucial basis for sausage, chicken and vegetables, and is amplified by a blend of garlic, peppers, tomato, basil and other spices. If the rice is too mushy or too dry, the dish falls apart. But Gumbo Cafe's rice is just right.
Last and most important among the menu's three important dishes is the gumbo ($10). Restaurant gumbos are often drab affairs, lacking the spark of liveliness necessary to galvanize the dish into something more that an inconsequential soupy stew. But one can easily imagine Mr. Stewart's family at home, fighting over the last slurps in the bowl.
The roux is medium dark, and the gumbo is thickened with okra and full of chicken, shrimp, sausage and crab legs too thin to hold much meat but able to impart a rich, crabby flavor.
NYPost Steve Cuozzo reviews Vento (675 Hudson Street; 212-699-2400):
Think of Vento as Fiamma Lite — a cheaper cousin to owner Stephen Hanson's three-star smash in SoHo. Although Fiamma executive chef Michael White is chef-partner at Vento, don't expect Fiamma's precious raw materials or exacting execution.
But Vento reinvents rustic Italian as grown-up party cuisine smartly and without pretension. Executive chef Martin Burge turns out a slew of satisfying, simple, vivid pan-Italian dishes harder to pull off than they seem.
The kitchen has its frying and roasting down pat. Olive oil and herbs are applied liberally. Rosemary and garlic ravish Mayan prawns ($12) grilled to a wondrous, sweet turn. Crisply battered calamari and zucchini frito misto ($8) emerge greaseless.
When red sauce makes an odd appearance, as with scrumptious veal-and-pork meatballs ($6), it eats Mama Rocco's for lunch. Thin-crust pizzas ($10-$12) are equally comforting. Not every starter clicks, though: Jalapeno wreaks cluster-bomb havoc on raw tuna ($9).
House-made pasta is admirably al dente, but sauces vary. Creamy, earthy tortelli ($19) stuffed with ricotta and morels fill you prematurely. Duds are represented by braised-duck fettuccine ($17), an oversalted blur.
The Hanson empire boasts fine, reasonably priced seafood from Atlantic Grill uptown to Dos Caminos in SoHo. At Vento, swordfish ($22) is persuasively Tuscanized with olive tapenade and tuna ($23) smartly embellished with artichoke caponata.
Chicken ($17) sporting a rosemary-oregano flourish and rosemary-scented veal porterhouse ($28) splash in generous pools of their own juices. Steer clear of fatty lamb sausage ($16).
NYMag reviews Megu (62 Thomas Street; 212-964-7777):
All I could see before me was Megu’s daunting, nearly incomprehensible, thirteen-page menu. Trumpeting more than 100 dishes characterized with such florid descriptions as “exquisitely composed masterpieces of rare extravagance,” plus a 63-item glossary and a map pinpointing locations for the best ingredients in Japan (next time you’re in Rishiri, be sure to stock up on kelp), this tome exemplifies exactly what I loathe most when dining. Taking a crash course in culture and geography before getting fed makes me cranky. I don’t want to work this hard. I already have a job.
Happily, having spent three months prior to the restaurant’s opening studying the intricacies of each dish, Megu’s servers are some of the most graciously knowledgeable folks ever to guide you through a menu. So, you don’t have to work, as long as you’re willing to relinquish control. Hard as that is, follow their lead and you’ll soon discover those ornate menu descriptions aren’t idle boasts. Megu offers so much distinctively magnificent food, often presented with such staggering beauty, that, though your initial disorientation never fully subsides, you wind up too exhilarated to care.
To complicate matters further, appetizers and entrées don’t exist. The menu is divided into eleven unilluminating categories (Crown Jewels, Gems From Japan), and though everything is presented for sharing, portion sizes vary wildly. But you quickly discover that size doesn’t matter. Each memorable cube of Kobe beef, whether topped by wasabi-soy, Gempei miso, Rikyu sesame, or garlic chips, is a small wonder. Ditto for six firm but rich sake-steamed slices of grilled abalone in a soothing ganseki sauce. Fast eater? The beef is $60 for four skewers; the abalone is $100. That should be incentive enough to take your time.
Village Voice Robert Sietsema reviews Cricketer's Cafe (465 Lincoln Place, Brooklyn; 718-230-3930):
The menu includes the sorts of sandwiches found at any corner deli, plus such Pan-Caribbean specialties as curry chicken, jerk pork, oxtails, pepper steak, and fish escovitch, mostly priced at $6 for the small size and $8 for the large. These entrées come with rice and peas or white rice, boiled vegetables, fried green plantains, and a crisp romaine-and-tomato salad that seems rather newfangled in context.
But uniquely Antiguan cooking emerges on Saturdays, including two playfully named soups: goat water and conch water. One weekend we compared a bowl of each side by side. Both are dark broths that can be eaten by themselves or used to moisten rice. Seasoned with thyme, the goat water is rich and tasty, but the conch version is even better. Instead of cutting the beast up fine and concealing it in fritters, or marinating it raw as a ceviche, Antiguans stew conch in giant hunks in a broth as dark as bittersweet chocolate, with a flavor we couldn't quite put our fingers on. But dredging up woody fragments we quickly discovered what it was—cloves. Tossed in by the handful, they add a bitter undertaste and an almost anesthetic property to the conch water.
