Today's review roundup includes: Public, Acqua Pazza, Mandler's, Pearson's, Eat Inn, Oceana, Spicy & Tasty, Sui, Sumile, Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar, 50 Carmine
NYTimes Diner's Journal William Grimes visits Public (210 Elizabeth Street, NoLIta; (212) 343-7011):
When the pinot noir hails from Tasmania and the falafel comes with kangaroo meat, you know you're being taken to the far end of the known culinary universe. Public, the latest addition to the crowded and quirky assemblage of restaurants and boutiques in NoLIta, is an extreme example of Antipodean fusion cuisine, and it comes courtesy of two New Zealand chefs, Peter Gordon and Anna Hansen, who own the Providores in London. They've brought over Brad Farmerie, their head chef at the Providores, to form a triple team in the kitchen.
NYTimes Restaurants William Grimes gives Acqua Pazza one star (36 West 52nd Street; (212) 582-6900):
. . . It helps that Acqua Pazza has a clear point of view. The chef, Massimo Girardi, formerly of Felidia, is dedicated to seafood and holds firmly to this guiding principle. There is no meat on the menu, period.
He also emphasizes simple preparations with up-to-date ingredients and seasonings, which is to say, very traditional ingredients and seasonings that can seem modern because the restaurant has hung trendy, highly specific name tags on them. Thin slices of raw hake dressed with a creamy lemon sauce are sprinkled not just with salt but with red volcanic salt. The tomatoes in the restaurant's signature dish, acqua pazza, are pomodorini di collini, or cherry tomatoes from San Marzano.
The name acqua pazza means "crazy water," and it refers to the age-old practice around Naples of baking fish in a bath of seawater, wine, olive oil and tomatoes. True to form, the restaurant notes that the olive oil is from Liguria and the salt is from Sicily. The menu doesn't say it, but someone actually fetches the seawater from the Atlantic. The name is more interesting than the dish, which is pleasing but plain.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Charred octopus; raw hake with lemon cream; sedanini pasta with eggplant; pampanelle pasta with sea urchin and cherry tomatoes; fish of the day in acqua pazza broth; swordfish with orange and lemon rind; chocolate-coffee parfait; chocolate dome.
NYTimes $25 and Under Eric Asimov reviews Mandler's (26 East 17th Street, Union Square; (212) 255-8999):
Each order requires multiple choices. Aside from a dozen sausages, you must select from five kinds of bread, 11 toppings and seven sauces. Mr. Mandler says the sausages ($4.95 to $7.25), are produced by a local manufacturer who follows Mr. Mandler's own recipe. He says he is after "a nice soft bite with a smooth feeling," rather than the juicy snap more typical of American sausages. In terms of texture, Mr. Mandler succeeds; most of the sausages are almost delicate, gently but insistently flavored.
I especially liked the thin, bright bratwurst, the fine-grained, lightly smoked krainerwurst and the spicy chorizo. Smoky knockwurst and mildly flavored bockwurst are likewise pleasing.
Among the toppings, along with the conventional — decent sauerkraut, onions in a sweet tomato sauce — I was happy to discover a new condiment, Peppadew, which I had never heard of before. Peppadew is the trademarked brand name for a sauce made of South African peppers that are simultaneously sweet and spicy and seemed to improve most of the sausages.
I say most of the sausages because several were thoroughly unpleasant. A seafood sausage came perilously close to smelling like cat food, while the Mandler's Mix, which combines four different sausages in one roughly chopped serving, would seem to violate some sort of principle that prohibits turning sausage into more sausage.
BEST DISHES Bratwurst; krainerwurst; chorizo; bockwurst and knockwurst.
NY Daily News reviews Pearson's (170 E. 81st St. (between Lexington and Third Aves.); (212) 288-2700):
The menu is refreshingly simple (just as at Pearson's Jackson Heights location): barbecue sandwiches, barbecue platters and chili 'n' fixins'. Eat meat and weep, ladies - there's no green salad on this chuck wagon.
Sandwiches come on fresh Portuguese rolls, as opposed to the standard - pasty white bread. Nice. Fillings from chopped barbecued chicken to pork shoulder are slathered in a tangy sauce with a medium bite.
Most barbecue platters come Texas-style, sauce-free. But there's hot sauce on the table, though surprisingly, none so fiery it'll make you grip the Formica.
I'd like to say the beef brisket, the polestar of Texas barbecue, was so juicy and flavorful it passed the no-sauce test, but one bite made me think this steer had just ambled in from one long cattle drive across a parched plain.
The tasty pork ribs are lacquered black and slightly chalky on the outside, tender and pink closer to the bone. Beef short ribs, which two-stepped off a bone big enough for Marmaduke and Clifford, were moist and meaty and flavorful - especially with a shake of salt. (Oddly, Pearson seems stingy with salt. A dash on nearly every dish went a long way.)
NY Daily News reviews Eat Inn ( 42 Bowery south of Canal; (212) 571-3888):
. . . The food is delicious, whether you order seared pork chops with a mountain of white rice and a lemon-grass dipping sauce for $3.75, or Chou Zhou spareribs casserole-braised in black-bean sauce with bitter squash, ginger and white beans for $8.95.
But noodles rule. Dried squid with soy-sauce chow mein ($6.95) is a toss of thin noodles, scallions, onions, carrots and chewy bits of squid fragrant with garlic and soy sauce. Hong Kong-style chow fun ($5.95) has broader noodles, shrimp, ham, pork, onions and peppers in faint curry sauce tasting smoky from the hot wok. Both are big enough to share - making the price of a meal even lower.
NY Post Steve Cuozzo reviews Oceana (55 E. 54th St. at Madison Avenue; (212) 759-5941):
The $68 prix-fixe dinner (no à la carte) is less costly than at any restaurant remotely in its class. At lunch, the whole three-course menu is a miraculous $45, which also buys you the pleasure of warm service in the famously soothing dining room, playfully appointed like a luxury yacht.
What more can be said about a place that's long been popular with customers and critics?
Simply this: I haven't been so dazzled since Atelier revitalized modern French cuisine almost two years ago. I could have every meal for a month at Oceana and not get bored.
Gallagher refreshingly told New York magazine that his first thought in creating a dish is whether it will be "tasty." What, nothing about artisanal heirloom polycultural fusion?
His style blends intuition and inspiration, disciplined by classical technique. He combs the globe for raw materials - Japan for scallops, Canada for steelhead trout, an Ohio farm for stone-ground grits.
More on Oceana's Cornelius Gallagher.
Village Voice Robert Sietsema reviews Spicy & Tasty (939-07 Prince Street, Flushing, Queens; (718)359-1601):
. . . There were neat stacks of slender Chinese eggplants quartered lengthwise, de-seeded cukes cut into half-moons, accretions of steamed seaweed, heaps of honeycomb tripe, thin-shaved pork belly, tangles of baby eel, and two dozen other luscious ingredients. Our favorites on that first visit, ranging in price from $3.95 to $5.95, were the poetic-sounding bamboo shoots in aromatic oil, Chinese eggplant wadded with a mysterious green relish, and beef tripe in hot pepper sauce. Not limited to stomach, the tripe also featured thin-sliced tendon and connective tissue, often attached to tender fragments of meat. More important, the recipe sported enough Sichuan peppercorns to be an effective substitute for novocaine.
One can waste a lot of time trying to distinguish between dishes on the menu with overlapping names like shredded beef with spicy pepper, shredded beef with spicy sauce, beef in red chile sauce, and beef in BBQ sauce. Be assured they all contain vast quantities of chile and peppercorn, and they're all hot as hell. It might be useful to cite a couple of recipes that depart from the swimming-in-red-oil formula. Lamb Szechuan style ($10.95) deposits gobbets of bone, meat, and fat in a delicious brick-red broth, brought to the table boiling in a device called a wu-ching burner that looks like a small yacht. The apparently contradictory "mild spicy chicken Szechuan style" ($8.95) is dry cooked so that it's not drowning in scarlet oil. The "mild" part probably refers to the omission of Sichuan peppercorns, though the dish is still quite spicy.
NY Newsday reviews Sui (54 Spring St.; (212)-965-9838):
We were, indeed, happy with that prosciutto-wrapped spicy tuna and baby arugula sushi roll, which bore the name "fire." Another roll, called "ice" had an exterior of rice paper with a filling of Japanese soba noodles, lettuce and avocado, and an accompanying Asian peanut sauce. It was good, although not nearly as exciting as the "fire" roll. Another appetizer, pot-stickers stuffed with peekytoe crab, came with a lively citrus-sprout salad and orange-chile plum sauce. It was both delicate and forthright. There was nothing inherently inventive about the skewered and deep-fried peanut tiger shrimp, accompanied by a lively mango salsa. It was just delicious.
. . . Everyone liked the tempura-fried cappuccino cheesecake, a rather gooey and inelegant finale. Flan was light and refreshing, a counterpoint of sorts. The menu offers a wide selection of teas and - rarity of rarities - excellent coffee.
NYMetro reviews Sumile (154 West 13th Street; (212)-989-7699):
The first thing I sampled at Sumile was a wheel of Dungeness crab layered with a gelée made with green yuzu, and speckled with pearls of Sevruga caviar. As I sat pondering the textures of this sophisticated little creation, a platoon of kumamoto oysters arrived, each one touched with a drop of pineapple vinegar, followed by a bean-and-squid salad flavored with spicy X.O. sauce and decorated with a bright orange coulis made, as it turned out, with Japanese uni. A chef friend of mine, a veteran of many eating adventures, sat up in his chair as these dishes appeared. “I have witnessed many things,” he said in reverent, Yoda-like tones, “but I have never witnessed an uni coulis.”
NYMetro reviews Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar (246 East 5th Street; (212)-673-0338):
. . . The chef’s southern roots (she’s from Louisiana and trained at Brennan’s, in New Orleans) are evident in her choice of caviar, which comes from paddlefish on the Mississippi, and her fondness for crayfish, which are presented in a flavorful casserole. My exceedingly well-poached lobster (on the tasting menu only) was neatly arranged around a country biscuit, and it was followed by a helping of exceedingly tender pig cheeks, steamed in a cocotte pot with vinegar and collard greens. The only dessert at Jack’s is a single portion of warm baba au rhum cake, which manages to taste densely spongy and light at the same time. It’s set in a caramel foam, like a modernist bananas Foster, and garnished with whipped cream, which the chef serves herself, from a blue-and-white china bowl.
Citysearch reviews 50 Carmine (50 Carmine St.; (212) 206-9134):
Don't dream of setting foot in here without trying the pasta. The pappardelle with wild boar sauce sells out quickly, but there are plenty of worthy replacements, including the incredibly flavorful pennette with garlic sausage and broccoli rabe. Have a sweet tooth? Your best bet is the rich, chestnut-stuffed ravioli. Meat dishes--tender but underseasoned rabbit in tomato sauce, murky Colorado lamb--aren't quite as spectacular. Garlicky shell beans make a good accompaniment.
Citysearch reviews Bubby's Brooklyn (1 Main St., Brooklyn; (718) 222-0666):
Brunch is the biggest draw. Kids will love the fluffy sourdough pancakes with fresh fruit and the raisin french toast; parents should order the infamous lox scramble or the eggs Florentine. Comfort food--like a dreamy macaroni and cheese with excellent, crispy buttermilk fried chicken, as well as barbecue ribs, slow-cooked brisket and pulled pork--is what's for dinner. And though it's not easy to save room, a slice of the sour cherry, apple or strawberry-rhubarb pie is worth the effort.