Today's review roundup includes: Ixta, Chinese Mirch, En Plo, Sun Ming Gee, 5 Ninth.
NYTimes Frank Bruni gives Ixta one star (48 East 29th Street; 212-683-4833):
Much of the nominally Mexican cuisine at Ixta, named for a volcano near Mexico City, is appealing. Some of it is even better than that, a sign that the executive chef, Linda M. Japngie (pronounced jap-EN-gee), has imagination and good ideas. If you order the right dishes, like the scallop appetizer and the lamb entree, you can wind up extremely happy.
Drinks are important here. The restaurant offers more than two dozen kinds of tequila and promotes complex, cutely tagged concoctions like the Tears of a Cloud, a kind of piña colada, and the self-explanatory Daiquiri in the Dark.
In terms of food, Ms. Japngie's menu plays with two pronounced and recurring themes. One is to tweak the fare of the city's more economical Mexican restaurants by giving it upscale twists. Taquitos are stuffed with lobster and quesadillas with squash blossoms. Chalupas come with aged goat cheese.
The other theme is to take staples of the city's more expensive, non-ethnic restaurants and give them a south-of-the-border swing. This approach translates into unexpected seasonings and colorful or crunchy accompaniments that seem designed to make the dishes look broader, taller and more bountiful.
. . . But perhaps the best dish in this bold-but-not-bullying vein is the scallops. The salsa borracha in which they luxuriate — an amalgam of tomatoes and tomatillos, garlic and onions, tequila and beer — has a punch and complexity that keep you coming back for more.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Squash blossom salad; scallops; roasted shrimp and corn tamale; coriander charred lamb; crab-stuffed shrimp; salmon; churros; cajeta sundae.
NYTimes $25 and Under reviews Chinese Mirch (120 Lexington Avenue; 212-532-3663):
Chinese Mirch is the first Manhattan restaurant to serve this strange but satisfying hybrid of two of the city's favorite cuisines. Chinese-Indian food, like Chinese-Cuban and Chinese-American, took shape when a community of Chinese immigrants had to stretch its home cooking to accommodate a new environment and new ingredients. (The most notable adaptation on the menu at Chinese Mirch is its omission of pork and beef, which are forbidden, respectively, to Muslims and Hindus, the two dominant religious groups in India.)
Vik Lulla, the chef and owner of Chinese Mirch, whose family owns two Chinese restaurants in his native Bangalore, said that "Chinese food is what most Indians eat when they want a change from what they eat every day." Mr. Lulla's family is not of Chinese descent, but in India, he said, "like in New York, everyone loves Chinese food."
The dishes that blend Indian spices into Chinese dishes are the most successful — for example, the chili garlic noodles. Noodles are rarely seen at New York's Indian restaurants, but at Chinese Mirch, skinny lo mein is stir-fried with turmeric, tossed with garlic and red chili and — in what would be heresy in a Chinese restaurant — cut into convenient short lengths for serving. (It is considered unlucky to cut Chinese noodles, which are associated with longevity.)
The "gravy" dishes wallow in sauces that have a certain brown sameness, though some are spicier, some more garlicky.
But the "dry" dishes — especially crispy Sichuan lamb, chili fish, chili chicken and Chinese Mirch potatoes — have clearer flavors, and are usually tossed with fresh scallions, garlic and ginger to wake up the flavors even more.
BEST DISHES Lemon coriander soup; chicken lollipop; crispy okra; fried cauliflower; chili chicken; Sichuan prawns; crispy Sichuan lamb; chili garlic noodles.
NYPost Steve Cuozzo gives En Plo one and a half stars (103 W. 77th Street; 212-579-7777):
The whole point of restaurants like En Plo — latest of a half-dozen lesser imitations of pioneering Estiatorio Milos — is to beat the curse of Greek places that overcook seafood to oblivion. If you remind them of that, you may eat pretty well.
By now the formula is almost monotonous: whole fish priced by the pound, simply grilled and seasoned only with olive oil, lemon and herbs, then smartly fileted. The catch, a mix of local and European specimens flown in fresh, is prominently displayed on ice, like the ones that conversed with Tony Soprano a few seasons back.
. . . But a place like this lives or dies on the strength of its grilled seafood entrees, and so far, En Plo is batting around .500. In its favor is the fact that, unlike other Milos clones, it offers cuts small enough for an individual diner.
As anyone who's been staggered by a $39 entree tab elsewhere knows, size matters — the smaller, the better. Satisfying one-pounders of Arctic char, black sea bass and lavraki, among others, cost in the low $20s each.
Oddly, they came to the table in much better shape — gleaming and moist, firm on the tongue yet flaky under the fork — on nights when the house was busy than when it was quiet. (Or not so oddly: Isn't pizza always better when the line is long?)
Just make sure the kitchen knows you want it medium-rare; otherwise, the result can remind you of the bone-dry specimens of Astoria tavernas.
Village Voice Robert Sietsema reviews Sun Ming Gee (618 62nd Street, Brooklyn; 718-492-4301):
When it arrived at our big, round table, dropped unceremoniously on the glass lazy Susan, E-Fu noodles with crab ($13.95) didn't look like much, a heap of uneven strands enmeshing crab chunklets and wobbly button mushrooms. But the minute the first diner knocked back a forkful and her face lit up, we pitched in like farmers in a hay-baling contest. There were other dishes that disappeared just as fast that evening, including a chicken Hong Kong–style ($10.95 half, $20 whole) with skin as crisp as a potato chip, and a whole flounder ($15.95), magnificent in size and coated with a crunchy rice flour batter, marred only by a few undercooked areas.
The next weekend found us scurrying back to check out the dim sum. Seated in the L-shaped downstairs, we relished the fresh bean curd spooned from a wooden tub, a shrimp har gow in which each diaphanous pocket enfolded a huge crustacean, and soft pincushions of sweet-potato starch stuffed with pork and water chestnuts. This farinaceous foray was preliminary to launching a final assault a few days later, bringing with us a local Hunter College student whose parents are regulars. After a cell call to his mom, he turned and inquired, "Do you like raw seafood?" After our enthusiastic assent, he motioned the waiter over, and ordered a $29.50 off-menu specialty after an animated conversation in Chinese. Soon, a platter of ruffled sashimi swatches on crushed ice appeared, accompanied by a smaller serving of fried tidbits. One bite and we knew it was geoduck (pronounced "gooey duck"), a gargantuan shellfish that looks like a clam but droops an alarming hairy protuberance like an elephant's trunk, eight feet long in the largest specimens. The raw flesh was sweet and chewy; the cooked meat something like fried squid.
NYMag reviews 5 Ninth (5 Ninth Avenue, at Gansevoort Street; 212-929-9460):
What distinguishes 5 Ninth from its raucous neighbors, however, is the work of its young chef, Zak Pelaccio. Like a highly touted minor-league pitcher, Pelaccio comes to Manhattan from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he earned a sizable underground reputation at a now-defunct restaurant called the Chickenbone Café. Pelaccio specializes in the dark art of fusion cooking (coconut chicken soup, panini filled with sweet, crumbling Vietnamese sausage), and at 5 Ninth, he’s expanded his repertoire to include proper big-city dishes (côte de boeuf, John Dory, duck), an impressive roster of daily specials, and a variety of steamy Southeast Asian–style soups. The soups reside on the appetizer list, and the best of them is something called “Noodles Raja Chulan.” It’s made of flat rice noodles and a creamy coconut broth, shot through with bits of lobster and galangal flowers. Galangal is a gingery, peppery spice favored in Southeast Asian cooking, and it gives the soup an exotic kick, like a delicate, Malay version of lobster chowder.
The food at 5 Ninth seemed to improve with each visit. If it’s pork you like, Pelaccio has reprised his famous Chickenbone dish, peas and bacon, which consists of plump, braised slices of pork belly laid over a healthful mound of pea shoots and fava beans. My appetizer portion of soft-shell crab was almost too dainty (the tiny crabs are muffled in spicy Chinese crab sauce, mustard greens, chorizo, and bits of tofu), but the lobster in a dish called “Lobster 5 Ninth” was nicely poached, touched with a beurre blanc flavored with ginger, and covered in a light tempura crust. The other seafood I sampled was similarly inventive, particularly the John Dory (served in a green garlic sauce, with turmeric, shallots, and a touch of mustard) and the fresh steamed loup de mer, which comes to the table with the bones in and covered, in the classic Thai style, with a chili paste and a bristling green-garden assortment of cilantro sprouts, green papaya, and ginger.
