- Silvia Killingsworth: The Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare.
paragraph class="noindent">By day, on a deserted block in downtown Brooklyn, César Ramírez supervises the prepared foods for the gourmet grocery store Brooklyn Fare. By night, in a prep kitchen three doors down, the Mexican-born, Bouley-trained chef commands an audience of eighteen, seated . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- 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: 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 . . ....
- Andrea Thompson: Kaz An Nou, in Brooklyn.
paragraph class="noindent">If any neighborhood is in need of a morale boost, it’s the stretch between Flatbush and Vanderbilt Avenues, bordering the Atlantic Yards site. The last tenant took a multimillion-dollar payout, Forest City Ratner’s heavy equipment has moved in, and Freddy’s . . ....
- Hannah Goldfield: Umi Nom, in Brooklyn.
paragraph class="noindent">To the intrepid eater, there are few prospects more thrilling than venturing to some out-of-the-way place for the sole purpose of trying something exotic. Umi Nom, a new restaurant from the chef King Phojanakong, of the Lower East Side’s Kuma Inn, might . . ....
- Hannah Goldfield: Umi Nom, in Brooklyn.
paragraph class="noindent">To the intrepid eater, there are few prospects more thrilling than venturing to some out-of-the-way place for the sole purpose of trying something exotic. Umi Nom, a new restaurant from the chef King Phojanakong, of the Lower East Side’s Kuma Inn, might . . ....
- Nick Paumgarten: Brooklyn Bowl
paragraph class="noindent">“We suggest that you eat with your non-bowling hand,” a note on the menu at Brooklyn Bowl states, in a nod, presumably, to both aim and hygiene, if not to the traditional carelessness of ten-frame dining. This converted warehouse at the northern edge . . ....
- Katherine Stirling: Tanoreen, in Brooklyn.
paragraph class="noindent">In recent years, some scholars have suggested that the pomegranate is the likeliest candidate for the forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve sampled in Genesis. It’s fitting, then, that a giant painting of the pomegranate hangs over the dining area at Tanoreen, a place that . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- Silvia Killingsworth: Seersucker, in Brooklyn.
paragraph class="noindent"> Seersucker has all the trappings of a trendy Brooklyn eatery: mason jars, no reservations, and a menu centered on Southern fare—fried chicken, pickles, pimento cheese. The chef, Robert Newton, is from Arkansas by way of Tabla and Le Cirque, and his girlfriend and co-owner . . ....
- Leo Carey: Pies ‘n’ Thighs, in Brooklyn.
paragraph class="noindent">The first Pies ’n’ Thighs opened in the spring of 2006, a tiny kitchen in the back of a dive bar on Kent Street that produced no-frills barbecue for a scattering of picnic tables almost directly under the Williamsburg Bridge. The place closed in . . ....
- Andrea Thompson: The Vanderbilt
paragraph class="noindent">The name of this new Prospect Heights restaurant implies synonymy with its neighborhood, which, when you are opening up not far from several well-established joints, could easily misfire. Luckily, the co-owner Saul Bolton is a longtime presence in Brooklyn, possessor of one of the borough . . ....
- Mike Peed: The Brooklyn Star
paragraph class="noindent">In 2004, an out-of-work cook from Santa Fe named Joaquin Baca, tired of sleeping on his sister’s couch in the West Village, applied, through Monster.com, to be the deputy to a nobody chef—the No. 2 in a two-man operation. Thus . . ....
- Leo Carey: Prime Meats
paragraph class="noindent">A few months back, an earnest young man in Brooklyn explained how to eat a sausage. Bavarians, apparently, are brought their Weisswurst in a bowl of its cooking water; they cut it longitudinally, remove the meat, and discard the casing. Why not just cut the thing latitudinally . . ....
- Leo Carey: Ai Fiori, in midtown.
paragraph class="noindent">What is Setai? A kind of satay? A kind of settee? Actually, it’s a hotel brand whose lavish, sleekly bland properties are perhaps a dastardly plot to make the Mandarin Oriental look quirky. Now a Setai has landed incongruously on a scrappy stretch of Fifth . . ....
- Nick Paumgarten: Bab al Yemen, in Brooklyn.
paragraph class="noindent">The Romans called Yemen “Arabia Felix,” or Happy Arabia, after its relative hospitability. While few would now consider Yemen, for all its wonders and charms, uncommonly welcoming (or contented, to go by recent events), you can still get a taste of its enduring felicity at . . ....
- Patricia Marx: NewNew, a pop-up store on Governors Island.
paragraph class="noindent">Attention, New Yorkers who sit in traffic for hours every summer Friday on the way to your weekend house: Are you crazy? Eight hundred yards from Manhattan and four hundred yards from Brooklyn is Governors Island, a former military base that is now a hundred and seventy . . ....
- Mike Peed: “Edi & the Wolf,” in the East Village.
paragraph class="noindent">At this new Austrian tavern, wedged into an increasingly companionable stretch of Alphabet City, “Edi” is pronounced “Eddie” and “the Wolf” does not refer to Harvey Keitel’s character in “Pulp Fiction.” These are the nicknames of the . . ....
- Shauna Lyon: Beer Table, in Brooklyn.
paragraph class="noindent">When drinking beer—it’s the third most popular beverage in the world, behind water and tea—any old brand, for the most part, will do. But when drinking beer at Beer Table, a tiny, ambitious establishment in south Park Slope, any old brand . . ....
- Ben Greenman: Shirley Brown’s “Woman to Woman”: Review.
paragraph class="noindent">The soul vocalist Shirley Brown was discovered by Albert King in the early sixties, when she was a teen-ager singing at the Harlem Club in Brooklyn, Illinois. After a decade touring with King, Brown finally made her début as a solo artist with “ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lauren Collins: Tipsy Parson, in Chelsea, review.
paragraph class="noindent">There’s something about Julie Taras Wallach and Tasha Garcia Gibson’s restaurants. Their first, Little Giant, opened on the Lower East Side in 2004. It’s a place go to again and again, even though the food ranges from alluring (it helped launch . . ....
- Lauren Collins: Mari Vanna, in Gramercy.
paragraph class="noindent">Think of Mari Vanna as the setting for what the Russians call a skazka—a fairy tale. It is a place fit for a firebird or a frog princess, and fantastic even from the sidewalk. Daffodils and tulips, crowding birdcages, spill over plant tables draped with . . ....
- Silvia Killingsworth: Takashi, in the West Village.
paragraph class="noindent">It is an increasingly common practice for diners to look up obscure menu items on their smartphones, but at Takashi, a self-proclaimed “meat mecca” that serves only beef, phones can remain pocketed—two walls of the place are covered with an encyclopedic crib . . ....
- Silvia Killingsworth: Takashi, in the West Village.
paragraph class="noindent">It is an increasingly common practice for diners to look up obscure menu items on their smartphones, but at Takashi, a self-proclaimed “meat mecca” that serves only beef, phones can remain pocketed—two walls of the place are covered with an encyclopedic crib . . ....
- Ben Greenman: New albums from Allison Moorer and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
paragraph class="noindent">When Allison Moorer first appeared on the music scene, she was classified as a country artist, and a fairly conventional one at that. Moorer is the younger sister of Shelby Lynne, for starters, and the song that launched her, “A Soft Place to Fall,” was . . ....
- Shauna Lyon: The Crosby Bar, in SoHo.
paragraph class="noindent">Why should a place as funky, posh, and oddly friendly as the Crosby Street Hotel (the latest outpost of London’s high-end Firmdale chain) have such middling food? The restaurant certainly looks fabulous: stunning double-height French doors that open onto cobblestoned terraces; eclectic tongue . . ....
- Hannah Goldfield: The Beagle in the East Village.
paragraph class="noindent">It is firmly established on the Web site for the Beagle, an East Village restaurant and cocktail bar, that the place “is not named after the dog.” Lovers of the breed may find their crests falling; lovers of evolutionary theory, meanwhile, will be charmed by . . ....
