A Full Belly

NYC: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: Convivium Osteria, Sweetwater, Kittichai, August.

NYTimes Restaurants Frank Bruni gives Park Slope's Convivium Osteria one star (68 Fifth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn; 718-857-1833):

Convivium Osteria is primarily a neighborhood restaurant, of the kind and level that every neighborhood wants. It does not force you to splurge, but it allows you to. You can eat conventionally or graze. Convivium accommodates different moods, and it changes with the seasons, opening up a lovely back garden with a wisteria-covered trellis during warm months.

. . . The pleasures for a carnivore on the Convivium menu are many. Tender slices of pork loin are accompanied by small coins of chorizo, which are meant to join the loin in each forkful, bringing a crispiness and a saltiness to the fleshy fun. A roasted baby chicken — succulent on the night that a friend and I tried it — was splayed on the plate in a way that all but demanded that it be picked up. Or maybe we thought so and heeded that call simply because we wanted to get to the meat closest to the bone.

. . . Among entrees, the most disappointing was a rack of lamb with a pine nut crust that was too thick and too intrusive. The most satisfying, in addition to the steak and chicken, was a dish of half-moon pockets of pasta that had been filled with duck, topped with shredded radicchio and speck and placed on a tawny, shallow pond of porcini cream sauce. A filling and pleasing salted codfish casserole with mashed potatoes and spinach tasted like a Portuguese spin on shepherd's pie.

RECOMMENDED DISHES String bean salad with egg; platter of cured meats and cheese for two; pasta filled with duck; whole baby chicken; pork loin; Portuguese seafood stew; rib-eye steak for two; apple tart; chocolate cake.

NYC: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: Petrosino, Freeman's, Pace, Sabry's, Kalustyan's Cafe, Ixta.

NYTimes Restaurants Frank Bruni gives Petrosino two stars (190 Norfolk Street; 212-673-3773):

In these crazy, carbohydrate-phobic times, many restaurants do not know what to do with bread service, which has come to approximate an apology: a few pathetic rolls on a distant corner of the table; a tentative server with outstretched tongs and a poignantly timid smile. Petrosino throws caution to the wind. It provides a brimming paper bag of ciabatta and focaccia and a bowl of tomato sauce for each diner, encouraging everyone to dip away.

In the process Petrosino sends the signal that is has no airs (or at least very few of them) and indeed cares first and foremost about sating you: perhaps with a plate of tissue-thin prosciutto or with a bowl of mussels or with a moist mound of braised beef over creamy polenta. Its decorative flourishes reflect not pretentiousness but a desire for prettiness. Why not tickle the eye as well as the stomach?

Petrosino is sensible that way: eager to please, intent on making special, thoughtful gestures within the context of moderate prices and a modest Lower East Side location. (The hot zone of Schiller's Liquor Bar and WD-50 is a few crucial blocks away.)

. . . And I really like the food here, especially in relation to its price. Most of the half-dozen pasta dishes cost $13, which buys a generous portion, and two-thirds of those dishes are terrific.

The garganelli with prosciutto, peas and cream leans just hard enough on the prosciutto and just easy enough on the cream to be pleasantly salty but not unpleasantly soupy. The rigatoni with Italian sausage and peas was another standout — also robust, also restrained. The trofiette with shiitake mushrooms, truffle butter and Parmesan is recommended primarily for diners who have just completed triathlons or a long grub-noshing stint on the latest "Survivor."

Petrosino's chef, Patrick Nuti, who grew up and learned to cook in Tuscany, does not really favor any region of Italy over another. He occasionally borrows ideas from elsewhere around the Mediterranean. He pairs a Greek yogurt and cucumber sauce with a fillet of wild salmon for an entree. He puts couscous in a colorful and delightful appetizer salad of octopus and grapefruit.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Octopus salad with grapefruit; walnut-encrusted scallops; prosciutto plate; cavatelli with veal ragout; rigatoni with sausage and peas; garganelli with prosciutto and peas; ricotta cheesecake with Nutella.

NYC: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: 5 Ninth, Tía Pol, Asaivam.

NYTimes Restaurants Frank Bruni gives 5 Ninth one star (5 Ninth Avenue; 212-929-9460):

. . .Its chef, Zak Pelaccio, did a brief stint at the short-lived Chickenbone Cafe in Brooklyn, where his culinary eclecticism and adventurousness generated more than a bit of buzz. He has brought those traits and that buzz with him to 5 Ninth, which opened in late May. Named for its address and avenue, 5 Ninth actually refuses to be fixed in any one place: even more than most restaurants in these boundary-blurring times, it defies simple categorization.

Asian-American? Malaysian-Mediterranean? Thai-Vietnamese-Italian? You could try a dozen geographical references, allow yourself three or four hyphens and still come up short. "Serious global dazzle" is how the publicity materials for the restaurant characterize Mr. Pelaccio's cuisine. That is a felicitous phrase with one serious flaw: at least at 5 Ninth, his food manages to dazzle only half of the time.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Garganelli with lamb hearts; steamed loup de mer; baby chicken with Malaysian marinade or white wine and rosemary; duck with foie gras and figs; banana pudding.

NYC: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: Donguri, Uminoie, Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, Bar Masa, Trippie's.

NYTimes Restaurants Frank Bruni gives Donguri two stars (309 East 83rd Street; 212-737-5656):

Donguri is an antihip Japanese restaurant, matter-of-fact and brightly lighted, with servers who briskly and almost wordlessly ferry dishes to and from the kitchen, their banter minimal as they strive to make sure your tabletop is never, ever barren.

It feels like a Japanese trattoria or bistro, to borrow terms from other dining traditions. It serves what some of its many longtime fans call Japanese home cooking or Japanese comfort food: lightly fried fish in addition to sashimi, simply grilled chicken with ponzu sauce as well as tempura. You do not come here to sit and pose. You come here to eat well.

Donguri was opened in 1998 by Shuji Fujita, who runs the kitchen, and his wife, Michiko, who presides over the dining room. Since then it has evolved into a Manhattan-restaurant oxymoron: the successful secret. It is not even listed in the current Zagat Survey. The people who know about it tend not to talk it up, lest they find themselves unable to get a seat.

. . . . You build a meal at Donguri through a succession of small and medium-size plates, proceeding in general from cold to hot and from fish to meat, and you throw in some vegetable sides and perhaps a bowl of noodles along the way.

All of this makes for a pleasantly paced experience in which the grazing almost never stops. But it also translates into a bill that can be higher than the generally restrained prices of individual items and the plainness of the atmosphere lead you to believe it will be. You can easily spend $60 a person on food, and much more if you order some wine, from an extremely short but judicious list, or sake, a much broader selection of which is available.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Kumamoto oysters; chutoro and otoro sashimi; kanpachi sashimi; shrimp tempura; boiled spinach with sesame sauce; broiled Chilean sea bass; grilled chicken with ponzu sauce.

NYC: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: Per Se, Mas, Extra Virgin, La Bottega.

NYTimes Restaurants Frank Bruni gives Per Se fours stars (Time Warner Center, Columbus Circle; 212-823-9335):

Per Se hunts down superior ingredients — turning to Elysian Fields Farm for lamb, Snake River Farms for Kobe beef — and lets them express themselves as clearly as possible. This is cooking as diligence and even perfectionism, not sleight of hand, and little fillips go a long way. That Kobe beef comes topped with a sliver of sautéed marrow that deepens the richness of the meat tenfold.

But Per Se also dares to be different, and insists, sometimes to its slight detriment, on departing from favorites like grouper or Dover sole for something like cobia, a game fish that, at least at Per Se, was too chewy to warrant the trouble.

Per Se wants to dazzle and sometimes to challenge you. I recall in particular what I came to think of as a Wizard-of-Oz course of four different dishes of organ meats, including calf's brain (as delectably molten as foie gras) and calf's heart.

Those were part of an extended chef's tasting menu that Per Se presented to three friends and me as a special option, something it does for a few tables during every lunch and dinner. The usual options are a nine-course tasting menu for $150 and a five-course prix fixe for $125. Each of these proceeds from appetizer to seafood to meat and tacks on a reliably superior cheese course, with cheese being defined liberally enough to include, say, ravioli filled with it.

I recommend the nine courses, and I recommend that you let Per Se do wine pairings, which cost about $120 per person for a meal of that length. (Many bottles here cost more than that.) Per Se can be trusted with such decisions.

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NYC: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: LCB Brasserie Rachou, Angon, Capital Grille, Poeta.

NYTimes Restaurants Frank Bruni gives LCB Brasserie Rachou two stars (60 West 55th Street; 212-688-6525):

For many of the four and half decades of its existence, La Côte Basque functioned as a richly sauced playpen for the rich and naughty, so evocative of money and mischief that it was where Truman Capote set a vicious roman à clef about the venomous ladies who lunch. LCB Brasserie Rachou tries for a more casual mien and contemporary mood, but not too hard. It has the same owner and chef, Jean-Jacques Rachou, who ran La Côte Basque from the late 1970's until the end, which in fact turned out to be a mere pause. It has much of the same clientele. And it has essentially the same classically Manhattan, classically French, eyelifts-meet-escargot soul.

On the night we ate near Mr. Taubman, the median age in the restaurant was perhaps 73. The jewelry was gaudy. The air kissing was vigorous. And both the roasted chicken in a creamy morel and Champagne sauce and the roasted, honey-glazed duck in a cherry Grand Marnier sauce were out of this world.

They arrived, along with the rest of the entrees, under silver cloches, which were removed in unison only after the plates touched the white-clothed table. Casual? Not really. Contemporary? No. LCB Brasserie Rachou — the LCB, as you may have guessed, stands for La Côte Basque — is the Old World in a new guise, an optical illusion of reinvention.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Steamed mussels; oysters; frisée aux lardons; seared foie gras or foie gras terrine; venison; roasted chicken with morels; roasted duck; beef tournedos; rack of lamb; cassoulet; chocolate mousse.

NYC: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: 71 Clinton Fresh Food, Yolele, Per Se, Pure Food and Wine, Brasserie LCB, Happy Family Restaurant.

NYTimes Restaurants Frank Bruni gives 71 Clinton Fresh Food two stars (71 Clinton Street; 212-614-6960):

[. . .] In March, Jason Neroni took over, boldly remaking the entire menu, save one dessert, to suit his own fancies and fascinations. He is 28 years old.

Guess what. He is also an impressive, resourceful cook, adventurous without, for the most part, being absurd. He does a riveting trout tartare appetizer, which comes in a densely packed puck of roasted pine nuts, mustard seeds, chives, chorizo oil and, as a final reach for richness, a quail egg. Among his entrees is a delicately fleshy skate wing with a foam that mingles flavors in a tantalizing way, rendering each of them almost discernible but not quite, like a word on the tip of your tongue. This combination, he told me on the telephone, is clove, cinnamon and cocoa.

Thanks in part to Mr. Neroni, who worked at the Tasting Room, 71 Clinton is still vibrant, still relevant. If it no longer packs the adrenaline of a new and unlikely affair, it offers the calmer, more constant bliss of an enduring romance. The foundation of its winning formula remains the same: It weds a contemporary, eclectic culinary sensibility to the scale and intimacy of a neighborhood place, then blesses that marriage with a decidedly downtown vibe. Its servers dress, neck to toe, in black and put an irreverent and often facetious spin on what is, in fact, earnest hospitality.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Trout tartare; diver scallops with pissaladière tart; wild greens and vegetable salad; poached foie gras in dashi broth; skate wing; chicken with morels; seasonal cheeses; warm chocolate cake with peanut butter ganache.

NYC: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: Kittichai, Li Hua, Trinity, Hummus Place, Dumpling Man.

NYTimes Frank Bruni gives Kittichai two stars (60 Thompson Street; 212-219-2000):

Protein as diorama, dessert as décor: Kittichai, in SoHo, is staking its claim on the same turf that other new restaurants — Megu in TriBeCa and Spice Market and Matsuri in the meatpacking district — inhabit. In that surreal and sexy place, which is more often than not downtown, upscale dining meets assiduously eccentric theater. The tantalizing seasonings of a distant land encounter the cheeky attitude of our own. The Manhattan economy may have its discontents, but an ebbing of pose-striking, scene-stealing Manhattan restaurants is not among them. That is very lucky for us, because the gustatory pleasures of Kittichai (pronounced kitty-chai) rise almost to the level of the visual ones.

The restaurant's Thai soul asserts itself through the recurrence, in dish after dish, of kaffir lime and lemon grass, Thai basil and Thai chili peppers, coriander and coconut. Its Thai chef, Ian Chalermkittichai, for whom the restaurant is named, grew up in Bangkok. But he worked and cooked in London and Sydney, Australia, and then, as the executive chef at the Four Seasons hotel in Bangkok, supervised not just a Thai restaurant but also Italian and Japanese ones. Small wonder, then, that boundaries blur in his kitchen and he readily makes concessions to the habits of New Yorkers and the culinary fads of the moment.

. . . Mr. Chalermkittichai also makes concessions to the whims of his own imagination. He uses cocoa powder, apple butter and A1 steak sauce for a glaze on baby back ribs, which he unabashedly advertises as "chocolate back ribs." Do not cringe: when I had them, they were delightful, because the meat really did fall from the bones and the hint of chocolate was just that, a hint, not an emphatic statement.

In fact, some of the best dishes on this broad menu, which emphasizes small plates by having both tapas and appetizer categories, reflect the chef's determination to find a balance of sweet, sour, salty and hotly spicy. Although he occasionally overemphasizes sweetness, he often hits his mark. Those curries are an example. So is this restaurant's exalted version of the chicken, lemon grass and coconut soup that almost every Thai takeout place offers. Here it is a gorgeous pale red, reflecting the inclusion of roasted red chili paste among other ingredients like galangal and kaffir lime.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Marinated monkfish in pandan leaves; galangal and coconut soup with chicken; crispy rock shrimp; steamed mussels; banana blossom salad; chocolate ribs; Chilean sea bass; loin of lamb; Cornish hen; short ribs in green curry; monkfish in yellow curry; kaffir lime tart; Champagne mango with sticky rice.

NYC: Review Roundup

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.

NYC: Review Roundup

Today's review roundup includes: Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Pacifico, Alain Ducasse, and three African restaurants in the South Bronx.

NYTimes Restaurants Frank Bruni gives Blue Hill at Stone Barns 3 stars (630 Bedford Road, Pocantico Hills, Westchester County; 914-366-9600):

The restaurant, which opened in Westchester County three months ago, is attempting something special — something more than its fairly thorough adherence to the ethic that a restaurant's food should, as much as possible, be seasonal, local and the result of sustainable agriculture. Blue Hill not only gets many of its vegetables and some of its meat from the surrounding land, which was part of the Rockefellers' Pocantico Hills estate. It also gets to exert control over how those vegetables are grown and how the meat is fed.

This reality, which goes beyond mere novelty, is one compelling reason for people near and far to pay attention to the restaurant, an offshoot of Blue Hill in Greenwich Village, where Mr. Barber also supervises the kitchen. But there is another, better reason: most of the food here is terrific, and some of it is flat-out wonderful. The premium that the restaurant places on immediacy has a culinary purpose, a hedonistic payoff.

On a recent visit, tomatoes were just coming into season. Mr. Barber and Michael Anthony, the chef who works by his side, had used them for a rough purée that, Mr. Barber explained later by telephone, was hung in cheesecloth, with a container beneath to catch the drip. This nearly clear liquid — the distilled essence of the fruit, closer in spirit to a potion than a juice — came to the table in tall glasses, as an amuse-bouche. If early summer could be said to have a taste, this was it.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Salad of 11 mixed greens and herbs with egg; green gazpacho; pea cannelloni with crab meat; white king salmon; wild striped bass; duck; roasted pig; chocolate bread pudding with caramel sauce.