Today's review roundup includes: Devi, Una Pizza Napoletana, Fornino, Onera, EN Japanese Brasserie.
NYTimes Restaurants Frank Bruni gives Devi two stars (8 East 18th Street; 212-691-1300):
Devi works its exotic magic through its take on Indian food, more varied, multidimensional, nimble and surprising here than at the scores of samosa factories throughout these vindaloo-bewitched precincts, where a tandoor and delivery menu are sometimes all that a culinary entrepreneur needs to get by.
It casts its spell visually, by making you feel as if you have been lifted — lofted really — to a realm more enchanted than any blue or red state could offer.
... Best of all, Devi has chefs, Suvir Saran and Hemant Mathur, who do not feel bound by your expectations for Indian food. Yes, there is chicken tikka masala on the menu, but you have to hunt for it, and if you ask your server for suggestions, he will steer you in less tired directions.
Toward the crispy fried okra, for example, which is dusted with ground mango peel, pomegranate seed and toasted cumin, for an effect so tangy and salty that this dish could easily oust potato skins or nachos as the new appetizer sensation at a T.G.I. Friday's. (I mean that as an unfettered compliment.)
Or toward the cauliflower with ketchup. That is not, to be truthful, how Devi advertises the dish in question, but that is essentially what it is, and there is positively no shame in that. Manchurian cauliflower, to use the proper tag, pairs firm, crunchy florets with a tomato ketchup that has been spiked with garlic and chili peppers. It is entirely simple, crazily good and a fine example of Mr. Saran's laudable pragmatism: what matters is the bigness and seductiveness of the taste achieved, not the method for achieving it.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Stuffed baby eggplant; crispy fried okra; tandoori prawns; halibut cooked in banana leaf; tandoori lamb chops; Manchurian cauliflower; minced turkey; "falooda" parfait of sorbets and coconut-lemon-grass milk.
NYTimes $25 and Under reviews Una Pizza Napoletana (349 East 12th Street; 212-477-9950):
When a friend knowledgeable about both baking and Italy caught wind of Una Pizza's mission, he commented on how odd it seemed that a pizza guy from Jersey (last month Mr. Mangieri moved Una Pizza from Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., where he had been a local legend) is taking pains to create Neapolitan-style pizza more "authentic" than most of the pizza in Naples.
Mr. Mangieri pounds out balls of dough, flattening them into circles with repeated open-palm slaps. The pizzas are dressed lightly and slid into a wood-fired brick oven.
He constantly fuels the fire with split logs, kindling and an occasional pizza peel full of wood shavings that bump the oven up to nearly 900 degrees, the temperature required to cook a pizza in what he says is the proper amount of time: two minutes.
The pizza is on your marble-topped table a second later, too hot to eat. When you do dig in with the fork and flimsy serrated knife provided, you may notice that the pizza's charred bottom leaves a dusting of soot on the plate. The crust is crisp in spots, tender in others, with an appealing elasticity and a reassuring saltiness. The long fermentation imparts the dough with a subtle sourness that gives the pie a well-rounded, complex flavor.
Una Pizza serves four pizzas, period. They are variations on a theme: crushed San Marzano tomatoes color the marinara; real buffalo mozzarella adorns the bianca, and the classic margherita boasts both of those as well as basil. My hands-down favorite is the filetti, essentially a margherita made with a pinch of garlic and fresh cherry tomatoes standing in for the canned. There is nothing else on the menu except bottled water, Italian sodas and a picture of St. Anthony.
Village Voice Robert Sietsema also visits Una Pizza AND Fornino (187 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn;
718-384-6004) and concludes:
If good intentions guaranteed perfect pizza, these parlors would be among the city's best. Unfortunately, both suffer from uneven crust quality, and among the 11 pies that I've tasted, too many have been doughy and damp. Both places need more experience with their dough and ovens. Only then can they turn out an approximation of the true pizza.
NYPost Steve Cuozzo gives Onera two and half stars (222 West 79th Street; 212-873-0200):
Onera ("dreams") is the year's most gently priced surprise, serving up vividly flavored, Greek-inspired cooking with a modern-Manhattan spin in the smartly brightened room that was once 222.
Many Greek restaurants do little more than slap Aegean herbs on overcooked fish and meat. Others do better with seafood sold by weight but slenderize your bank account.
Onera chef Michael Psilakis mines the cuisine's pleasures without undermining your nest egg. He applies modern-American flair to the dishes he grew up with in a Greek-American household, with dazzling results.
... Psilakis combines tradition with restless, sometimes impetuous inventiveness. He suavely contemporizes crisp baccala ($10) by dusting it in tempura-like egg-and-olive oil batter. He goes overboard, though, topping rice and meatball soup ($10) with avgolomeno lemon-dill foam.
Pastas convincingly differentiate themselves from their Italian cousins. Pastistio, often reduced to a kind of Greek lasagna, sports eggy, Greek-style béchamel whipped to a pillowy cream ($16).
Some dishes stretch the envelope to the breaking point. You'd comb the Greek coast to find butternut squash broth poured over John Dory ($25), but it's a must-have. More authentic but bony and dry red mullet ($21) is a must-avoid.
Underpriced venison ($25) was served in an unusual loin, sausage and cheek combo with warm lentils and pancetta. The bacon-crisp cheeks bore a dusky, mysterious whiff of the forest primeval.
NY Mag reviews EN Japanese Brasserie (435 Hudson Street; 212-647-9196):
The latest Big Box Japanese establishment to land in town is called EN Japanese Brasserie, a great aircraft carrier of a place, which opened two months ago on Hudson Street. The owners of EN run a chain of restaurants in Japan specializing in a homey, pub style of dining called izakaya. Izakayas, typically, are small, neighborly places where groups of gruff gentlemen sip sake and eat local, rustic dishes like grilled beef tongue or boiled burdock root. You can actually get a good bowl of boiled burdock root at EN, but the experience isn’t exactly neighborly, and there’s nothing very rustic about it.
Not that this is a bad thing. The food is often very good at EN, and the way the proprietors have taken a specific, even obscure, form of Japanese cooking, and blown it into a high-volume, bridge-and-tunnel extravaganza, is a study in clever rebranding.... It turns out that tofu, in various fresh-made forms, is central to EN’s culinary identity. Tofu is to this peculiar style of restaurant what frites are to a French brasserie. It’s skimmed into thin sheets of tofu skin called yuba, or steamed in clay pots with yams and bits of crab, or scooped into lacquer boxes and served warm or chilled, with different varieties of soy sauce. All the tofu I sampled was good, but the most interesting was the yuba sashimi, composed of cool, milky strips of freshly made yuba compressed into squares and served with a mound of shaved radish and a single shiso leaf. You can also get yuba stuffed in the traditional manner with unagi (freshwater eel), sunk in a bowl of warm bonito broth, or fried with anago (sea eel). For miso fiends, there are thick, nutritious varieties (sesame, peanut butter, spicy) of handmade miso, presented in Japanese teacups, with a big pile of fresh cabbage for dipping. There’s also an esoteric sashimi made from a root-vegetable paste called konnyaku, which is infused with bits of seaweed and served on crushed ice. Dipped in miso, it has a sweet, jellied, curiously dissolving quality, like some exotic form of vegan candy.
Ideal Meal: Fresh yuba sashimi, creamy avocado with baby-shrimp salad, sautéed duck breast, and shiso sorbet.
Note: Like authentic baguettes, the tofu at EN is made fresh, five times per evening.
