Review Recap: Tamarind Tribeca

Today, Sam Sifton gives a much deserved two-star review to Tamarind Tribeca, and you get the sense they were whiskers away from three:

So, have a drink and consider some curry-laced crab cakes and crisp pomegranate samosas, and the promise beyond them of a menu that can take diners across India in the name of flavor, and represent that nation’s varied cuisine with pride and great skill. . . . it is shaping up to be the best thing to happen to Indian food since Hemant Mathur and Suvir Saran opened Devi in 2004.

Unfortunately, this review marked the return of Sam the Incoherent, blessedly absent the last two weeks:

Here, too, is Gary Walia, the restaurant’s manager (nephew to Avtar Walia, the owner), directing his well-trained and helpful staff as if he were conducting an orchestra, greeting guests in the manner of a subcontinental Julian Niccolini, of the Four Seasons restaurant in Midtown.

Huh?

The bar serves an excellent gin and tonic, cold and tall.

Wow! What an accomplishment that is!

In London, where marvelous Indian food is as much a part of the culinary landscape as French restaurants or steakhouses are here, Tamarind Tribeca might rate a pleasant shrug.

Huh?

Families are scarce in the dining room — dates, friendships, too. Pressed shirts abound, and wide English ties. Suit jackets are thrown over the backs of chairs and bar stools.

So glad you told us that. You never see suit jackets thrown over the backs of chairs anywhere else. That’s so unusual. Just like those cold gin and tonics you’ve been drinking.

Review Recap: Aquavit

Yesterday, Sam Sifton demoted Aquavit from three stars down to two:

Aquavit is now 23. It has been in this location since 2005, when it moved east from the Rockefeller Townhouses, across Fifth Avenue. . . .

Gone are the fireworks of the Samuelsson era, the high-wire act of matching Scandinavian food to French technique and the flavors of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. (Ruth Reichl of The New York Times awarded the restaurant three stars in 1995. William Grimes did so again in 2001; in 1988, before Mr. Samuelsson’s arrival, the restaurant was given two stars by Bryan Miller.)

Aquavit’s dining room can be somewhat lonely these days, only a little more than half full at peak hours. There is a sour scent to some of the passageways, the sort that flowers cannot battle.

But Mr. Jernmark has moved the menu toward a quiet, seasonal intensity that is well worth investigating.

This was an unsurprising outcome for a restaurant no one ever seems to talk about any more.

We certainly do not assume that Sam Sifton is reading this blog, but we note that, for several weeks running, there has not been a “terrific” or a “delicious” in his reviews. Now he needs to drop the overwrought literary references:

It has been a Swedish summer here in New York. There seem to be Stieg Larsson novels on every fourth lap on the D train choogling over the Manhattan Bridge, on every third iPad glowing in the dark of the jitney driving east on the Long Island Expressway toward Montauk.

Remind me: the D train and the iPad have what to do with Aquavit?

Review Recap: Kenmare

Today, Sam Sifton lays a goose-egg (“FAIR”) on Kenmare, the restaurant chef Joey Campanaro probably wishes he could forget:

Joey Campanaro, the man behind a vest-pocket Greenwich Village gem called the Little Owl, and a partner in that neighborhood’s well-received Market Table as well, wrote Kenmare’s menu. He is acclaimed in press reports as Kenmare’s chef. Here’s hoping he is well paid for that. Mr. Campanaro is a serious and excellent cook. Kenmare is unlikely to enhance his reputation…

Entrees continued the trend of mediocrity, time after time. A Milanese-style veal cutlet, essentially a breaded and fried laptop case, was served with lemon, arugula, ricotta salata and a garish, oily salsa verde. (Credit where it’s due: It came this way twice, a month apart.)

Campanaro already had two deservedly successful places, The Little Owl and Market Table. He didn’t need Kenmare. Soon, he will probably be rid of it.

One thing this piece demonstrates is that pans are much easier to write: you just tee up the jokes and hit ’em out of the park. Perhaps this is why Kenmare is one of Sifton’s most entertaining and well-written reviews, despite the relative unimportance of the restaurant.

The fact that our own review arrived at the identical rating (“FAIR”) has nothing to do with it. Promise.

Review Recap: Annisa

Today, Sam Sifton of the Times awards two stars to Annisa:

Annisa reopened in April, scrubbed and clean and new. And the food Ms. Lo is cooking there is as good as any she has made in her career…

The ambitions of the kitchen are as quiet as they were a decade ago, but no smaller for the time elapsed since Ms. Lo first introduced us to them. There are the requisite Asian influences, as well as African ones, none of them overwhelming in taste or technique. Ms. Lo is not by any means a flashy chef. She does not stalk the dining room in gleaming whites, glad-handing patrons and accepting praise. She simply stays in the kitchen and works…

That’s not a bad description of Chef Lo, who nevertheless is probably a bit glum, as I’m sure she was aiming at something more than just the same two stars William Grimes gave her a decade ago. We gave Annisa 2½ stars, but if I didn’t have half-stars, I would round down, arriving at the same deuce that Sifton did.

Sifton seems to be obsessed with the civility of a dinner at Annisa, having apparently forgotten that what he calls “novel” used to be the norm:

Ms. Scism champions a service culture that is rare and noteworthy. It dictates that restaurants are about much more than eating, or ought to be. They serve a social purpose, as well.

And so here is something novel in New York City in 2010: You can hear every word of conversation at your table at Annisa, without hearing every word of the one going on at the table across the way. People act like grown-ups in the restaurant. They are polite….

Annisa…remains a destination for grown-up and serious restaurant-goers, both for its cooking and the experience of eating it.

A restaurant for adults! Who’d have believed it? How “rare and noteworthy” is that?

This was one of Sifton’s better-written reviews. Aside from the obscure reference to “Puget Sound novelist David Guterson,” you could actually tell what he was talking about. There was only a bit of Sifton’s tortured and lazy prose:

• A beautifully cooked piece of chicken breast, crisp on its exterior and stuffed with chanterelles and bits of pig’s trotter, was a marvelous second act…
• …fluke with caviar and beets brought the same happy laughter you hear drifting out of car windows at beach-town sunsets…
• …a marvelous dish of barbecued squid with Thai basil and fresh peanuts…
• …a creamy, perfectly cooked fist of halibut…

Not a single “terrific”!

Review Recap: Takashi

Today, Sam Sifton pens quite possibly the most ecstatic one-star review ever, which he bestows upon Takashi. It’s a West Village Japanese barbecue restaurant that celebrates the unmentionable cow parts that many people would shudder to eat:

Raw tripe with a spicy miso sauce follows, salt and fire set against the spongy flesh, and a dish of flash-boiled shredded Achilles tendon, the tendrils fantastic in texture and taste. These might be dried tofu or cooked pasta, long mushrooms or pieces of ear: a magic, nervous-making dish.

Cubed raw liver comes to the table as well, a chilled, lumpy stew dressed with salt and sesame oil. It tastes of lightning storms on the high plains, of fear and magnificence combined. It is faintly metallic, rich with blood.

Why only one star? He concedes the restaurant is “modest,” the food “simple,” the wine list merely “adequate.” Dessert is limited to soft-serve vanilla ice cream. And you might find the food a bit off-putting, but…

Takashi is probably not for everyone: too do-it-yourself and odd. But its eccentricity is honest, its atmosphere winning and its food quite good. So there is large intestine on the menu. You are not in New York to play on the junior varsity, are you?

As always, we conclude with our selection of Sifton’s lazy and exaggerated prose, of which there is more than usual this week:

• Cubed raw liver…tastes of lightning storms on the high plains, of fear and magnificence combined.
• In the thrall of its consumption, the whole dining room seems to pulse with life.
• A raw baby carrot taken after a bite of the marinated grilled tongue…is a terrific combination
• …a soft, fragrant ginger shoot after a piece of simply dressed rib-eye…may haunt your memory for days

Belated Review Recap: Torrisi Italian Specialties

This week, Sam Sifton gave the expected twospot to the miraculous hit restaurant, Torrisi Italian Specialties. We’ve not dined there—and with reports of two-hour waits and reservations not taken, perhaps never will—but the review was in line with everything else we’ve read:

During the day, Torrisi is a sandwich shop modeled on those of the neighborhood old school. You can get a good chicken parm or an excellent turkey hero there, some flavorful contorni, a can of beer, a small bottle of Coke. The dishes are all smart upgrades on classics, beautifully cooked, humble Italian-American lunch fare for an era that respects the form.

At night, though, the room is transformed into a restaurant of around 20 seats, in which artists make work and customers consume it. The prix fixe for this is $50. The food is still beautifully cooked, still aggressively Italian-American…

Sadly, we think this conclusion is absolutely on the money:

And how long can that last? The Torrisi project as it stands surely must run its course, the way any performance does, the way any combination of kinetic energy and art must eventually fall off its axis. (What happens if the money gets tight? No one counts on the tears.) Presumably Mr. Carbone and Mr. Torrisi will cook this way until it gets boring, and then will do something else.

Which means the time to get to Torrisi Italian Specialties is now.

Here’s our usual weekly list of Sifton’s lazy prose and odd exaggerations:

• …Torrisi Italian Specialties, a tiny and terrific new restaurant…
• …an excellent turkey hero…beautifully cooked…
• But the dishes…are edible paintings…
• …the restaurant shows itself to be towering in its ambition…
• There is always warm, just-made mozzarella…outrageously good…

Review Recap: ABC Kitchen

Today, Sam Sifton reviews ABC Kitchen, and gets it basically right, awarding two stars (the same as we did):

The notion of the place is haute organic and Hamptons sustainable. The restaurant is airy and open and relaxed the way the second homes of the wealthy often are, with LED-style lighting over warm floors. Ingredients for the cooking, as a position paper on the back of the chic cardboard menu declares, are “consciously sourced.” The breadbaskets were “handcrafted by the indigenous Mapuche people of Patagonia.”

The words tumble out like refrigerator magnets onto the table. Everything here is: Fair trade! Globally artistic! Reclaimed and recycled! Soy-based! Post-consumer fiber!

You meet people like this. Only when they are spectacularly good-looking and appear to be attracted to you are they manageable.

ABC Kitchen pulls off the magic trick. The food is great and not terribly expensive. It is a pretty room. The crowd runs high-wattage with net worth to match.

As usual, Sifton digs into his depleted store of over-used adjectives, trotting out a great, a perfect, two terrifics, and the usual “very good.”

The review is correct, but must be taken in the context of the entirely incorrect two stars awarded to The Mark in late April.

Review Recap: Mia Dona

Did you ever meet someone at a football game, who shouted, “Even I could coach this football team?”

It happens with restaurants too. Donatella Arpaia was in partnership with two very talented chefs, David Burke and Michael Psilakis. She split up with both, so that she could do the cooking herself, despite having no training as a professional chef.

Turns out, it’s not so easy. So says Sam Sifton in a withering zero-star review of Mia Dona:

And so here is the new, chef-less iteration of Mia Dona: exactly the sort of decent, middlebrow, red-sauce Italian restaurant you’d relish if you found it in a town near the town where you grew up in the suburbs of New York. Within the five boroughs of New York City, we call that sort of restaurant satisfactory.

“Satisfactory” is Times-speak for mediocre:

The main dishes, however, go off the rails. That eggplant parmigiana is almost totally free of taste or character, a sandwich interior taken from a deli in Anywhereville. The roasted baby chicken with peppers and sweet-and-sour cipollini onions, meanwhile, has a corporate tang, a hint of mild depression: a charity-dinner entree made for 200 people.

There is competently prepared branzino, boring as protein out of a can marked “farmed white fish,” and unremarkable mussels in a sauce made of white wine, with tomato and pancetta. You’ve had that before.

And for those who have only experienced tripe-ish excellence at restaurants like Casa Mono or Momofuku Ssam Bar, Mia Dona’s version of tomato-braised beef tripe with garlic toast can serve as a complete explanation why some consider tripe to be spongy and horrid. It is both.

This was technically a demotion, as Frank Bruni had awarded two stars to Mia Dona when Michael Psilakis was in the kitchen. But after Psilakis’s departure Mia Dona became, in essence, a brand new restaurant. And according to Sifton, no longer a very good one.

We gave one star to Mia Dona, but truth be told, it was at the lower end of one star. We have no argument with Sifton’s decision to give zero.

Review Recap: Fatty ’Cue

Today, Sam Sifton gives a onespot to the latest member of Zak Pelaccio’s fatty tribe, Fatty ’Cue:

The food is incredibly good. Fatty ’Cue is a restaurant worth traveling to visit. To expand on the playbook of awesome, Malaysian-ish cooking on display at the Fatty Crab restaurants in Manhattan, Mr. Pelaccio’s Fatty Crew — with Corwin Kave as executive chef and Andrew Pressler as chef de cuisine — has added to their roster Robbie Richter, the Queens-born pitmaster who helped start Hill Country in 2007. Fatty ’Cue offers smoked crabs and smoked lamb ribs, coriander-dusted bacon and pieces of pig.

Sifton nails the place, but I am starting to tire of his stereotypes:

…a biker bar for the kind of bikers who don’t ride Harleys in leathers and boots, but stripped-down Schwinns in boat shoes and skinny jeans.

…it sure would be funny to roll up to the place with a white-shoe lawyer, some actuarial accountant from Tucson or dramaturge from the Upper West Side…

…Fatty ’Cue might be uncomfortable for those who hear more music at Lincoln Center than at Southpaw.

And also his obscure “look how clever I am” references:

It recalls, almost perfectly, what the Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa called the magic of the present moment.

But by the low standards that currently pass for New York Times criticism, this one passes muster.

Review Recap: Pulino's

Today, Sam Sifton gets back on the straight-and-narrow, awarding one star to Pulino’s Bar & Pizzeria. There’s an acknowledgment that the owner, Keith McNally, is working from a template, though Sifton doesn’t seem to hold it against him:

Mr. McNally is an important figure in the recent social history of Manhattan. His restaurants have introduced or enhanced neighborhoods all over downtown: Pravda and Balthazar in SoHo, Pastis in the then-quiet meatpacking district, Schiller’s on the Lower East Side, Morandi and Minetta Tavern in the West Village.

Now, there is Pulino’s. You can sit at the bar there, drink Campari and read the newspaper, as you can at any of Mr. McNally’s establishments, feeling grand under a ceiling that soars above a checkerboard floor, surrounded by distressed mirrors, chicken-wire glass, towering walls covered with liquor bottles. The room evokes Schiller’s and Pastis alike, and is as recognizably McNally as the man himself, standing rumpled as Eeyore by the pass to the kitchen.

He seems to love most of the food, finding only a few flubs and a “punishingly loud” room. Presumably, these are the reasons why the restaurant got just one star, rather than the two that McNally and Chef Nate Appleman likely expected. (These days, practically everybody thinks they deserve two stars, unless they’re gunning for three or four.)

But according to most of the reading I’ve done, one star was the correct rating. This is the Sam Sifton of last year, as opposed to the recent Sifton, who has been pulling stars (and restaurants) out of a random number generator.

The review came awfully fast, though. Pulino’s opened to the general public on March 26, and Sifton’s visits were probably wrapped up by April 23, just four weeks later. (The Times photo shoot was on April 28; it needs to be scheduled, and Sifton is unlikely to have paid additional visits after that.) Perhaps Sifton expected some complaints: on the blog, he notes that the restaurant was open an additional two weeks for “friends & family.”

Still, I think he should have given McNally and Appleman a few more weeks. It might not—indeed, probably would not—have changed the rating, but would have been more fair to the restaurant.