Today's review roundup includes: Little Giant, Brown, Bottega del Vino, Bouillabaisse 126.
NYTimes Restaurants Frank Bruni enjoys the tunes at Little Giant, and gives it one star (85 Orchard Street; 212-226-5047):
... I waded into a bowl of brussels sprouts, roasted with a maple syrup glaze, and as I marveled at how much I liked them, I marveled as well at the smoothness and logic of an aural segue from Squeeze to Wilco. I chewed and hummed, hummed and chewed. Little Giant is rigged to twin these activities, which yield a great deal of pleasure in tandem.
I dwell on the music because it accounts for so much of Little Giant's easygoing atmosphere and because this restaurant is all about vibe. I don't mean to overlook or shortchange the food, which can be great when all the gears click in the restaurant's intermittently overtaxed kitchen.
The duck confit ravioli, the salad of baby beets, the sticky toffee pudding with poached quince and that chicken liver mousse, which is seasoned with restrained measures of cinnamon, clove and allspice, are reason aplenty to wander in and reward enough for having done so. Their appeal is basic and its potency sneakily intense, affirming an oxymoron beyond this restaurant's name. Little Giant's dishes speak in a loud whisper.
But the degree to which a diner will enjoy Little Giant ultimately hinges on his or her compatibility with its particular spirit. That spirit explores a territory between homey and hip that's likely to be appreciated most by people who flash on Winslet, not Hepburn, when they hear the name Kate and find merit in debating whether "Desperate Housewives" is a sort of sequel to "Melrose Place."
... Although it's difficult to pigeonhole the restaurant's concise menu, two of its recurring themes are refined comfort food — upscale riffs on downscale standards — and plenty of seasonal produce. In terms of its motifs and target audience, Little Giant comes across as the whimsical love child of Prune and 71 Clinton Fresh Food.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Sausage and onions; ham and cheese; chicken liver mousse; beet salad; duck confit ravioli with seared duck breast; sautéed scallops; quince sticky toffee pudding; milk and cookies.
NYTimes $25 and Under visits a different corner of the Little East Side at Brown (61 Hester Street; 212-254-9825):
... Brown is a place for those disposed to lingering, and its menu offers plenty worth lingering over, even for breakfast. There's a range of baked eggs ($6.50 to $11), and the Tuscan breakfast platter ($9), an ample spread of creamy herbed ricotta, prosciutto, and wildflower honey with a tangle of lightly dressed greens.
The restaurant mixes its own mesclun, using greens from Satur Farms on Long Island and Chino Farms in Southern California, one of the country's top growers of boutique vegetables.
But despite marquee suppliers, the menu makes no mention of the provenance of its produce or sandwich meats (some of which Mr. Alcocer imports from Umbria and sells in the shop next door). Brown just isn't that kind of place. The restaurant is clearly more concerned with balanced, interesting sandwiches and simple, well-executed main courses at dinner than with prestige.
BEST DISHES Tuscan breakfast platter; baked eggs; charcuterie; all sandwiches; pan roasted chicken.
NYPost Steve Cuozzo gives Bottega del Vino one and a half stars (7 East 59th Street; 212-223-3608):
A sure sign the local economy has its mojo back is the instant popularity of Bottega del Vino, apparently Italian for "empty your wallet's entire contents." How else to explain that it's selling $36 common grilled salmon to a full house?
You want to like Bottega del Vino, which airlifts a famed establishment of Verona into luxury-hotel land. Expectations are tweaked by a warm greeting and swelled by a front room achingly like the real Italy.
... Bottega presents itself as a wine-themed place, a kind of Italian Veritas or Cru. It has a grand list and splendid choices by the glass — large vessels custom-cut for owner Severino Barzan.But it's still mainly a place to eat. The food is not flagrantly inauthentic — in fact, anyone who's been to northern Italy will recognize it as the workaday fare of a zillion B-level urban trattorias from Rome to the southern Alps.
Bottega del Vino's prices are so out of line, though, as to nullify any fine distinctions to be made about the cooking — almost as high as Cipriani around the corner, where you at least might spot a B-list celebrity.
... Take a smallish portion of tortellini, served near-cold one night. The shells are first-rate and hand-cut, with scalloped ridges, and filled with tiny, delectable meatballs of ham and ground beef. The damage: $28 for pasta without a single luxury ingredient.
NY Mag reviews Bouillabaisse 126 (126 Union Street, Brooklyn; 781-855-4405):
Despite its name, Bouillabaisse 126 is purely a Brooklyn story, its hero, Neil Ganic, a Yugoslavian-born chef who made his name in the early nineties at La Bouillabaisse, a pioneering Atlantic Avenue bistro. In the dozen intervening years, Ganic reproduced variations of his winning formula in a half-dozen spots throughout the borough before disappearing from the culinary scene.
... Despite the abundance of worthy alternatives--including non-piscatory ones, like a winter-hearty lamb shank with rough-cut red-cabbage relish, and filet mignon au poivre--it's hard to resist the dish the restaurant's named for, no matter how much the recipe veers from tradition.
And it's bound to. Even the French can't agree on what should and shouldn't go into a proper bouillabaisse. As P. G. Wodehouse put it, "In bouillabaisse you are likely to find almost anything, from a nautical gentleman's sea-boots to a small China mug engraved with the legend 'un cadeau (a present) de (from) Deauville (Deauville)' ". While Ganic holds firmly to the belief that edible ingredients make for the tastiest bouillabaisse, his is a version unlikely to mollify a Marseillais. This is mainly because by adding only a few chunks of a single type of fish (cod, snapper, or bass), he avoids the delicate issue of what species should be substituted for rascasse, conger eel, and other bouillabaisse-approved components. But who really cares? By any name, it's still a delicious seafood stew overflowing with mussels, scallops, shrimp, and lobster all luxuriating in saffron-flavored broth.
Ideal Meal: Crab cake, bouillabaisse or poached cod, chocolate-souffle cake.
