Nicoletta - NYC- Restaurant Review. It all sounds rather quaint. Thanks to the rise of celebrity chefs, restaurant empires have as much need for a great product as they do for spittoons and a separate ladies’ entrance. To see this new model in action, you need only study Nicoletta, the pizzeria opened in the East Village in June by the chef and his business partner, Ahmass Fakahany. It was already clear in March that Nicoletta was to be the first of several places rolled out from the same batch of dough. “We are developing distinct brands where we can open multiple restaurants, lowering costs as we go,” Mr. Fakahany told a reporter at the time as he explained how practices from his former career as a high-flying executive at Merrill Lynch were helping him wring extra profit from his restaurants. Nicoletta had been in the works for some time. Marble tables were designed and fabricated, each with a spring-loaded socket in its top.
As for the product on the pedestal, apparently that could wait. Mr. Nicoletta. Atera in TriBeCa. That is his name for the flurry of little bites that kick off each of the tasting menus at Atera, the remarkable new countertop-dining restaurant in TriBeCa where Mr. Lightner is the chef. One of them looks like an engorged, rhinoceros-gray potato chip and tastes like something scraped off a rock. That’s what it turned out to be: lichen found in the woods near Bear Mountain, pulverized and reconstituted. Another night, there was a bitter and stringy clump of fried garlic roots, about as rewarding as eating a broom.
A facsimile peanut made with foie gras and peanut butter wasn’t as good as an actual peanut, and a facsimile egg shaped from aioli wasn’t as good as an actual egg. After a few more such mouthfuls, I decided that, if I were ever invited to a Super Bowl party at Mr. Yet, when snack time was over and the core of the menu began, something remarkable happened. Wonder is not on the menu at most restaurants in New York, nor is it much in demand in this relentlessly pragmatic city. A&G Diner’s “Best Burger in Tokyo” Hijacks Taste Buds, Takes Them for a Wild Ride. Everyone seems to agree that the best burger joint in Tokyo is A&G Diner in fancy-schmancy Jingumae. It tops the lists on Gourmet and B Gourmet blogs and gossip sites and is the first name out of the mouths of my restaurant critic friends.
I decided to check it out for myself to see if the taste lived up to the hype and glam of Jingumae. I went in to attack an A&G Diner burger with abandon, but, as it turns out, the burger attacked me . . . The first thing I noticed was the small size of the restaurant interior. There was probably enough space for four adults to sit and dine, but really only for one or two to sit comfortably. There were two chairs on the terrace overlooking the street. I made myself comfortable and ordered the most popular item on the menu, the bacon cheeseburger. The mountainous bacon cheeseburger bulged in every direction with super-juicy meat and toppings. The meat and toppings worked together in a perfect symphony of flavor and aroma. A&G Diner [ Read in Japanese ] Catch - NYC - Restaurant Review. This is early evening at Catch, a restaurant with a department store’s dimensions and a nightclub’s twitchy heart.
It opened in October in the meatpacking district, which seems to breed such leviathans. You will not find Catch at its official street address. (In its stead stands Sephora, the cosmetics emporium with LED backlighting and a go-go-bar soundtrack.) The entrance is around the corner, a bland door that leads to a nearly pitch-black hallway and unmarked elevators. Upstairs, the restaurant unfurls over two floors. Can you eat well at a restaurant with 260 seats, bored hostesses, incoherent décor and a party-platter-friendly menu primed for franchising?
Confoundingly, yes. But first you must navigate the menu. Somewhere behind all this is a chef: Hung Huynh, the winner of the third season of the televised cooking competition “Top Chef.” Helming a big-box restaurant is hardly a rebuttal. Pot stickers engorged with beef Bourguignon make you sigh for what might have been ($16). Catch. Neta - NYC - Restaurant Review. Michael Nagle for The New York Times An exterior view of the sushi bar Neta, located at 61 West Eighth Street. More Photos » Michael Nagle for The New York Times One of the two chefs who founded Neta, Jimmy Lau, was head chef at Bar Masa, where he was also in charge of international fish buying. The best view in the house is from one of the 20 seats at the long maple counter, and even then you face a kitchen in floor-to-ceiling stainless steel where eight or so cooks in white caps silently go about their business.
Soon it won’t matter. Since sushi good enough to bring on this malady can cost serious money, most of us do not suffer from it very often. You won’t notice the walls when you have before you a piece of sea urchin roe on a cylinder of rice wrapped in nori. Now here in front of you is toro in a milky shade of pink. Neta is a collaboration of two longtime disciples of the sushi master Masa Takayama. Such exotic items are rarely seen at Neta. In an interview, Mr. Blanca Is a Sleek Surprise Around Back of Roberta’s. Robert Wright for The New York Times At Blanca, the kitchen fills roughly half the space of the restaurant. More Photos » Located in an airy white loft built in the plaza behind Roberta’s sprawling compound of shipping containers and tents, across from an extensive, multilevel garden, Blanca might be a California beach-town garage renovated by just-retired professional skateboarders.
It has a high ceiling and is sparsely decorated. If Roberta’s is rustic and cluttered, Blanca is sleek. An immense kitchen fills roughly half the space. The service, style and ambition of Blanca recall that of a larger Momofuku Ko, the chef and restaurateur David Chang’s 200-square-foot dinner theater in the East Village, or a slightly more casual Brooklyn Fare, the chef César Ramirez’s stainless-clad temple to gastronomy, which serves 18 around a snug bar built into his kitchen in Downtown Brooklyn. As at both Ko and Brooklyn Fare, only a tasting menu is served. The pace was measured, relentless. Mr. Area Man Winded After Particularly Lengthy Wendy's Order. Restaurant Review - Le Bernardin in Midtown Manhattan. Daniel Krieger for The New York Times Eric Ripert, the executive chef of Le Bernardin. More Photos » Some of the thrills are the hushed kind, like the way black garlic, pomegranate and lime support the crisp skin and white flesh of sautéed black bass. Others are scene-stealers, as when a white slab of steamed halibut is slowly surrounded by a crimson pool of beet sauce that, with crème fraîche stirred in, will turn the delirious pink of summer borscht.
A few are flat-out luxurious, like a small boulder of caviar nested inside a heap of sea urchin on a carpet of little gnocchi. For a restaurant so determined to stay on top, keeping such a deep repertory and refreshing it so often would seem to be a risk. Not that I am reviewing the same restaurant, exactly. The old dining room was always compared to a corporate boardroom, but for some reason its monumental scale and profusion of framed canvases in an antiquated style made me think of the atrium of a minor art museum. McDonald's Around the World: Introduction - Bing Travel. The Chesterfield Bar & Restaurant | Return to the golden age of cocktails. Empellón Cocina in the East Village. Rachel Barrett for The New York Times A gordita with smoked plantains, chorizo and egg yolk. More Photos » Mr. Stupak first took up Mexican food last year, in a Greenwich Village restaurant he called Empellón. He added Taqueria to that first restaurant’s name when he opened Empellón Cocina in the East Village in February.
In both cases, Empellón means a push or a shove, as in the push you’d give a child who isn’t sure he is ready to swim. Mr. A 32-year-old former pastry chef, he has read the classic cookbooks and spent some time in Oaxaca and the Yucatán, but he hasn’t studied this intricate and endlessly complex cuisine with an anthropologist’s intensity, as Rick Bayless and Diana Kennedy have. But some beginning students of a language can wake up to discover they’ve been dreaming in it at night. When you slice into a gordita, does it always gush with warm egg yolk? Is the beef tendon in a bowl of menudo, the tripe stew, always as puffy and crisp as a snack chip? Mr. Watching Mr. Restaurant Review - Sotto in Los Angeles.
Gwynnett St. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Benjamin Petit for The New York Times Amish chicken, beets, rutabagas, potatoes and hay ash at Gwynnett St. More Photos » Until the first course, in fact, nothing about Gwynnett St. hinted at what the kitchen had in store for me. But now servers had silently flanked the table. To my right, somebody had just been given a mound of roasted maitakes draped in a glistening sheet of lardo. Across the table, two planks of brown-butter-roasted carrot lay alongside two strips of slow-cooked lamb breast, crisp and richly melting. Like almost everything at Gwynnett St., that lamb breast is not as simple as it looks, but its complications work together to build a marvelous sense of harmony. Back in New York, Mr. His smart-wallflower style is best displayed in the Amish chicken with potatoes, beets, rutabagas and hay ash. This chicken is soaked in a brine made with ash, then cooked with more ash rubbed into its flesh.
Mr. Cooking Becomes a Show, at Your Table. With all of those carts rolling around the room, it’s probably only a matter of time before Maloney & Porcelli, a 16-year-old Midtown chophouse, needs someone with a whistle to manage the gridlock. And that is but one example. Restaurants across the city are seeing a resurgence of that ooh-and-ah-inducing ritual associated with both haute cuisine and a fresh bowl of guacamole: tableside service. At Quality Meats, which is run by the same Fourth Wall Restaurants group that owns Maloney, a server can be summoned to make a cup of fresh steak sauce, while at the company’s Hurricane Club, a roasted suckling pig is presented for your drooling perusal. For Sunday brunch at Benoit, it’s crêpes Suzette.
NoMad, from Eleven Madison Park’s chef, Daniel Humm, and its restaurateur, Will Guidara, has a dessert trolley, rolling liquor service and a breakfast pastry cart. As Mr. The Reinvented Maloney & Porcelli - Slide Show. Bread Winners Cafe and Bakery and The Quarter Bar. RedFarm, in the West Village, Turns Up the Flavors. Villa Azur Restaurant & Lounge. SAVOUR Tasting Room and Social Club. Union Bear. How Waiters Read Your Table.
The Thirsty Bear | Pub Revolutionised. Shake Shack Struggles With Inconsistency. It is not every day that the mayor serves as midwife at the birth of a hamburger stand, but it is not every hamburger stand that achieves the prominent spot in the city’s consciousness held by Shake Shack. There are 14 of them now, uptown, downtown and out of town (Miami, Washington, Kuwait City). One respectable writer has spoken of the burger as life-changing. From its origins as a hot-dog cart that the restaurateur Danny Meyer set up as a kind of art project in 2001, Shake Shack has become one of the most influential restaurants of the last decade, studied and copied around the country. Its legacy can be seen not just in the stampede of good, cheap burgers, but in the growing recognition that certain fine-dining values, like caring service and premium ingredients, can be profitably applied outside fine dining all the way down the scale to the most debased restaurant genre of all, the fast-food outlet.
To answer two obvious questions right away: No, probably not four stars. Mr. The Chef Alex Stupak Opens Empellón Cocina. “I like the idea — the story — that someone wanted to question the establishment and was punished for it,” he said recently as he sat in his new East Village restaurant, Empellón Cocina, which opened Feb. 7 and is being watched closely by food lovers citywide. He made the statement with an intense stare (pretty much his default expression) and without any discernible sense of mischief, because he wasn’t trying to be cute. He was just explaining the tattoo covering his upper left arm, a swirl intended to evoke a heavenly creature with its wings torn off. He was also describing his lot in the culinary world, which regards him, understandably, with a certain measure of bafflement. A little more than a year ago, at the ripe old age of 30, Mr.
Then he quit making desserts. A Mexican joint. That’s admittedly too modest a description of Empellón Taqueria, which is to the everyday taco what Parm, in Little Italy, is to the common hoagie: a proudly elevated execution of the form. Tracie McMillan’s The American Way of Eating: Doing the hardest job at Applebee’s. Spike Mafford Nearly three years ago, Tracie McMillan left New York to go undercover within the American food system. McMillan had grown weary of lectures about local food that dismissed the importance of price to working-class people. At the same time, she knew from her work as a poverty reporter that poor families cared about the quality of their food, too. McMillan hoped to get a ground-level view of how Americans actually make decisions about their meals, especially when money and time are scarce.
After working in farm fields in California and a Wal-Mart produce section outside Detroit, McMillan returned to New York in the hopes of landing a kitchen post at one of the city’s 23 Applebee’s restaurants. Though she couldn’t find any openings in food-prep, McMillan fared well during her interviews with managers in one New York location and was offered a position as an expediter. Expediting, I am told at orientation, is the hardest job in the restaurant. What do you want me to do? Huh? The Dram : Eater Dallas. Norma's Cafe in Oak Cliff. [Photo: Garrett Hall/EDFW] OAK CLIFF/N. DALLAS/FRISCO—All Norma's Cafe locations will give away free grilled cheese sandwiches on Friday, April 11 from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m in observance of National Grilled Cheese Day. (Norma's is also now serving a mac and cheese grilled cheese, which is exactly what it sounds like with the addition of bacon.) HENDERSON AVE. HENDERSON AVE. Sip discounted cocktails during Cook Hall's happy hour.
Happy hour: two of the most glorious words in the English language, no? Recently opened Bowlounge is doing cocktails far better than you'd expect from a bowling alley. It's time for a fresh edition of the Eater Dallas Cocktail Heatmap. [Photo credit: Capitol Pub/Facebook] A large portion of Henderson Avenue property has changed hands, leaving Dallasites to speculate as to what the future holds for the restaurant and nightlife destination. Several beer-driven joints about town have been highlighting sessions this summer. Drammit! A clew!