- Lizzie Widdicombe: Bohemian, in NoHo.
paragraph class="noindent">New York does exclusivity well, but Tokyo does it better. There is a Japanese phrase, “Ichigensama okotowari,” that’s used by owners of certain discriminating restaurants and shops, and means, roughly, “We respectfully decline first-time visitors.” In other words: walk-ins . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Caffè Storico at the New-York Historical Society review.
paragraph class="noindent">A serious restaurant in a museum: what a good concept. Pioneered by MOMA, with the Modern, and spreading, with varying degrees of success, to the Whitney (Untitled), the Guggenheim (the Wright), and the Museum of Arts and Design (Robert), the formula, if executed well, can . . ....
- Silvia Killingsworth: Acme in NoHo review.
paragraph class="noindent">From the outside, thanks to the bronze lizard door handles, a neon sign in the front window, and an awning advertising Southern food, it might be easy to confuse Acme, an über-hip new NoHo brasserie, for the old Acme Bar & Grill, the Cajun restaurant . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Roberta’s, in Brooklyn.
paragraph class="noindent">This gourmet pizza place, located amid a desolate-looking stretch of warehouses in Bushwick, is often described as a D.I.Y. enterprise. The label is slightly ambiguous—aren’t a lot of other restaurant entrepreneurs doing it themselves, too? Carlo Mirarchi, the chef at Roberta’ . . ....
- Hannah Goldfield: Hung Ry, in NoHo.
paragraph class="noindent">If you like your macaroni and cheese drizzled with truffle oil, your French fries fried in duck fat, and foie gras in your banh mi, you might make a beeline for Hung Ry, an instantly popular new restaurant that contrives to elevate hand-pulled-noodle soup from . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: New York rallies for Haiti.
One of the effects that the earthquake in Haiti has produced in New York is the unfamiliar feeling of total geographic irrelevance: for the first few days, when damaged roads and ruined cell-phone towers made the island impenetrable, New York City seemed like a helpless, remote archipelago. And yet . . ....
- Leo Carey: Sushi Uo, on the Lower East Side.
paragraph class="noindent">It takes guts to open a serious sushi restaurant in a bad economy, all the more so if you’re not Japanese and are only twenty-three years old. But David Bouhadana, who grew up in Florida, of French and Moroccan parentage, clearly has plenty of . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Michael’s
paragraph class="noindent">New York is rich in culture, cuisine, and commerce. The suburbs have parking spots and fast food, and they also have Michael’s, the largest arts-and-crafts supply chain in North America. But as of October, New York became the first metropolis in the Northeast . . ....
- Leo Carey: Brushstroke, in Tribeca.
paragraph class="noindent">At David Bouley’s latest Tribeca venture, he does no cooking at all, but instead is a kind of non-executive producer for a Japanese restaurant devoted to kaiseki, which consists of a succession of tiny courses presented with exquisite intricacy. His partner in the venture . . ....
- Leo Carey: La Mar CebicherÍa Peruana in the Flatiron District.
paragraph class="noindent">Gastón Acurio is Peru’s most famous chef, with a TV show, some two dozen cookbooks, and more than thirty restaurants across the globe. This one, his first in New York, sets out to educate the local palate in the cuisine of his homeland . . ....
- Ariel Levy: The Highliner
paragraph class="noindent">The Empire Diner, which graced the corner of Twenty-second Street and Tenth Avenue for thirty-four years, was a New York superstar. Its Art Deco façade had a cameo in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” in 1979, it was depicted on the . . ....
- Andrea Thompson: Colicchio & Sons, in Chelsea.
paragraph class="noindent">Tom Colicchio closed his Craftsteak flagship in New York earlier this fall and vowed to make its revamp personal: he’d be there, behind the stove, doing what he loves to do. The other night, a waiter confirmed that Colicchio was indeed wearing his whites most . . ....
- Leo Carey: Gus and Gabriel
paragraph class="noindent">No more gastropubs! Originating in England, the gastropub heralded the arrival of edible, even sophisticated cuisine in drinking establishments whose culinary aspirations had previously risen no higher than the potato chip. Transplanted to New York, the genre now signals a lessening of ambition. Chefs who a decade . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Notes from Underground
paragraph class="noindent">The young New York director Ronald Bronstein’s first feature, “Frownland,” garnered an impressive and entirely justified array of critical encomiums during its all-too-spotty theatrical release in the past few years. Its appearance on DVD—one of the first releases by . . ....
- Mike Peed: Bark Hot Dogs.
paragraph class="noindent">Fitting that the New York hot dog should receive its latest refurbishment on this North Park Slope block, a strip that recently swapped its insurance agencies and nonprofits for half a dozen jarringly unscuffed storefronts, including a sex shop and a maternity boutique, each painted its own . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: How top chefs fly with their knives.
Here’s a travel story that will send you back: Some years ago, Eric Ripert, the executive chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, was returning to New York from Washington, D.C., where he’d cooked for a charity event. He put his carry-on bag through the . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Scott Stringer, Scarlett Johansson, and New York’s mayoral race.
One of the many collateral effects of Anthony Weiner’s political demise—besides immortalizing the direct-messaging function on Twitter—was to blow open the race to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York City. Officially, campaigning won’t start for at least another year . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Amelia Lester: RedFarm in the West Village.
paragraph class="noindent">“Your table is ready at RedFarm and will be held for five minutes,” reads the stern text message. You’ve been waiting for well over an hour for the chance to eat at what is undoubtedly New York’s trendiest farm-to-table . . ....
- Leo Carey: Má Pêche, in Midtown.
paragraph class="noindent">The name Momofuku—as in David Chang’s epochal East Village restaurant—means “lucky peach” in Japanese. And Má Pêche means not “my peach” in French, as you might suppose, but “mother peach” in Vietnamese . . ....
- Andrea Thompson: Roman’s, in Brooklyn.
paragraph class="noindent">This new spot, from the mini-moguls behind the Brooklyn restaurants Marlow & Sons, Diner, and Bonita (a branch of which formerly occupied this space), has a first-New-York-apartment affect: rickety-looking wooden chairs, with green padded seats; chipped, painted floors; the hothouse sensation of . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: The Leopard at des Artistes.
8220;If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change,” says a young aristocrat in “The Leopard,” the 1958 book by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and the 1963 Visconti movie, about the decline of the Italian ruling class during the Risorgimento. It . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: France’s First Lady takes a tour of N.Y.U.
The other day, students in New York University’s visual-arts program received an e-mail advising them to be in their studios the following Monday afternoon. “They said that somebody famous was coming,” Robert Leonardi, a senior, recalled, “and that anything could happen.” A . . ....
- Silvia Killingsworth: Gentleman Farmer, on the Lower East Side.
paragraph class="noindent">The gentleman farmer works for pleasure rather than financial gain; this minuscule French-inflected restaurant on the Lower East Side is serving farm-to-table fare and terroir-driven wines with the same apparent motivation. It’s not much bigger than your first New York apartment . . ....
- Goings on About Town: New-Time Religion
paragraph class="noindent">Until the crisis of modernism blew up the bridge that connected classical music and middle-class taste, a composer was expected to have a modicum of religious music in his catalogue; even the agnostic Brahms had his motets and Serious Songs. In contemporary America, most religious music . . ....
- Vince Aletti: “Moveable Feast,” at the Museum of the City of New York.
paragraph class="noindent">When the Aperture Foundation dispatched five young photographers—LaToya Ruby Frazier, Thomas Holton, Gabriele Stabile, Will Steacy, and Shen Wei—to make pictures of the city’s roving produce stands known as Green Carts, the project could have ended in dull documentary earnestness. Instead . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Russell Platt: “Venus and Adonis” and “Come to the River: An Early American Gathering” reviews.
paragraph class="noindent">Perhaps the refined tastes of Boston’s large academic audience account for its welcoming embrace of period-performance practitioners. Whatever the reason, New York has nothing to compare with the Boston Early Music Festival, which, for several years, has been releasing recordings on CPO that allow . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Defending the accused after a giant Mob bust.
It’s a common refrain, among the city’s armchair criminologists, that the Mob is dead in New York. So last Thursday’s giant federal Mob bust—a hundred and twenty-seven people, encompassing seven crime families—elicited a special fascination. It seemed almost nostalgic . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Defending the accused after a giant Mob bust.
It’s a common refrain, among the city’s armchair criminologists, that the Mob is dead in New York. So last Thursday’s giant federal Mob bust—a hundred and twenty-seven people, encompassing seven crime families—elicited a special fascination. It seemed almost nostalgic . . ....
