They have a candidate for the world’s worst restaurant website, which cannot be bothered to transmit basic information like hours of operation or menus.

Their facebook pages are slightly more informative. Slightly. As I gather, The Mulberry Project, in Little Italy, is known mainly as an inventive cocktail den. The Vinatta Project (in the former Florent space), is a cocktail and comfort food spot. Or perhaps I’m mistaken. It’s hard to tell.

The Greenwich Project aims higher. There’s talent in the kitchen: Carmine di Giovanni, a former chef de cuisine at Picholine and David Burke Townhouse. Those places aren’t cheap, and this one isn’t either. With appetizers $15–21 and entrées $28–39, you’re going to drop some coin to dine here.

There’s no doubt Manhattanites will pay those prices at the right restaurant, but there’s not much margin for error. They’ll need a cavalcade of strong reviews and word-of-mouth to keep the place full.

And they’ve got a lot of space: a casual ground floor and a more elegant dining room upstairs. Grub Street reported that the bar room downstairs is meant to serve only small plates, but we were seated there and ordered from the full menu.

There was a decent crowd on a Monday evening, but it wasn’t full, and we didn’t look upstairs. We probably should have: if the photos posted on Grub Street are any indication, it’s the kind of comfortable, modern elegant room suitable for the kind of upscale food the chef wants to serve. The ground floor is nice enough for a casual restaurant in Greenwich Village, but it feels like everything ought to cost $5–10 less.

If I’m right about that, you may be reading in a few months that The Greenwich Room has introduced a new, less expensive menu, with happy hour specials and a $35 prix fixe. But this is a review of what The Greenwich Project is now, not what it might become. And right now, if you don’t mind the prices, you’ll find it’s a very good restaurant.

(Click on the thumbnail, above right, for a photo of the main menu. There are also small-plates and vegetarian menus, which I didn’t photograph.)

The amuse bouche was a cube of salmon with a crumble of diced peaches. We shared an appetizer of guanciale with fresh kimchi ($15; above right): a rich man’s crisped bacon, with plenty of flavor.

The kitchen comped two servings of the hamachi crudo (normally $20; above left). The garnish of pickled ramps and jalapeño may be familiar, but this excellent dish was a reminder of why it works so well.

Scallops ($36; above right) were served with morels, fava, salsify, and a foie gras sabayon. Scallop lovers would moan with satisfaction, but skeptics would say that for $36 one ought to have more foie gras than just hints in a technically correct sauce.

Ramps made another appearance, along with crawfish, in lobster cavatelli ($29; above left), a first-rate pasta that is one of the few entrées south of $30. The meal ended with a small plate of petits fours.

If you’re drinking, the emphasis here is on cocktails (mostly $14) and whiskies, including an impressive list of single-malts, better than I’ve seen in a long time. There is apparently a wine list, which the server neglected to present and I never bothered to ask for, the other forms of libation having occupied my attention.

I have my doubts about the viability of this place: the owners don’t have a background in fine dining, the chef isn’t well known, and this might not be the right location for it. But for now it’s all optimism. The chef is serving a high-gloss menu, unbounded by demand, hoping that demand will follow.

The Greenwich Project (47 W. 8th St. btwn 5th & 6th Avenues, Greenwich Village)

Food: High-gloss modern American, with French technique
Service: Not as glossy as the food, but good enough
Ambiance: A sleek, casual bar room downstairs; more elegant upstairs

Rating: Critic’s Pick 

The theater gave him a gorgeous, cloistered space, dimly lit with dark paneling and comfortable seating. Once you’re inside, it doesn’t look at all like a restaurant attached to a performing arts center. It’s open most days till midnight, Thursdays to Saturdays till 2:00am — hours clearly intended to attract more than just a pre-theater audience.

What’s missing is a reason to go. The food is competent, of course, as you’d expect at any Carmellini place. But it feels phoned in, as if Carmellini spent fifteen minutes on it before turning his attention to the next project.

The menu is divided in three “Acts,” with various snacks ($6–13), appetizers ($12–15) and entrées ($17–27). Perhaps they were worried about pushing the metaphor: desserts are labeled, simply, “desserts” ($7–9). All of it is fairly obvious stuff.

It’s great that they serve three kinds of bread with soft butter (above left); not so great that it comes cold and stale. Carmellini has a way with crostini, but the ones served here ($12; above right) were bland cousins of the better examples I’ve had at Locanda Verde.

The Cruditées ($13; above) were great. We loved the wasabi dip so much that we were tempted to ask for the recipe, so that we could serve it ourselves.

The burger ($18; above left) with caramelized onions, cheddar, and bacon, was terrific. It won’t quite make me forget the Spotted Pig or Minetta, but if you fancy a high-end burger it’s worth the tarrif. I had a taste of the Pulled Pork Roll ($17; above right), which was good enough, but I liked it a tad less.

The cocktails are great: try the Dandy Riot (Rye, Aperol, Angostura, Talisker 10). They’re probably not enough to make this place a destination, but should you be in the mood to drop in, you’ll be well taken care of. The wine list, like the food, is not an attraction, but the service makes up for it. When my fiancée was unsure which of two wines she’d prefer, the server brought over both and poured a taste of each. Full credit for that, when so many restaurants these days don’t bring over the bottle at all.

On a Friday evening, The Library was doing a respectable business before a show, but was not full. There were a lot of staff on the floor, so I assume they were expecting a late-night crowd. As a pre-theater restaurant, The Library is as good as it has to be. With such a beautiful space and a top-shelf name behind it, you’d think they could have done more.

The Library at the Public (425 Lafayette Street at Astor Place, Greenwich Village)

Food: Generic American cuisine, competently done
Service: Good; a high ratio of servers to diners
Ambiance: A warm, dark, country-clubbish dining room, upstairs at the Public

Rating: Neighborhood Spot

You know what a prix fixe menu is, right? And you know what a “small plates” menu is, right? If the two get married and have children, what do you get?

Meet Feast, a prix fixe restaurant with menus structured like a sequences of small plates. We loved it. To us, it was the best of both worlds—though others might not be so fond of it. Such is the case when a restaurant tries to fiddle with tradition.

The main menu offers a choice of three “feasts.” As of last week, the options were the Farmer’s Market Feast ($38), the Scallop Feast ($49), or the Nose-to-Tail Lamb Feast ($48). According to a recent email from the restaurant, the scallop feast will shortly switch to soft-shell crabs, and lamb will morph to pork. And so on.

Each feast consist of an appetizer course with four plates, an entrée course with another four, and a dessert. All prices are per-person, and the entire table must order the same feast. There’s also a separate (and small) à la carte menu, which the restaurant is clearly trying to downplay. Most tables seemed to be ordering feasts, which is the whole point of the restaurant.

So you get nine plates, served as three courses, at a pretty damned good price. Unlike a tasting menu, it doesn’t go on for hours. Unlike a small-plates restaurant, there’s no guessing how much to order, nor upselling from servers trying to entice you into ordering more than you need.

The chef is Christopher Meenan, a former chef de cuisine at Veritas. The food is not as ambitious, but it’s pretty good, and you get dinner for just about the price of an entrée at Veritas. It just might be just about the best meal for two, under $100 (before tax, tip, and drinks), that we’ve had in quite a while.

We ordered the so-called “nose to tail” lamb feast. It’s a bit of a misnomer: to me, “nose to tail” implies at least some of the offal or off-cuts (like brains, kidneys, tail, lungs, and so forth). It was an all-lamb meal, but not quite as adventurous as the name promised.

Our first quartet of plates included a carpaccio (above left) with honey crisp apple, almond, and cognac mustard; and a roasted pepper salad (above right) with soubise, banyls, and vinaigrette.

The merguez stew (above left) with tomato and quail eggs was probably the highlight of this group, while the “Shepherd’s Pie” with lamb belly and sweet potato (above right) was a bit underwhelming.

Moving onto the entrées, the potatoes gratin (above left) were wonderful, and so was the rack of lamb (above right) with an herbed crust and port reduction.

“Lambsagna” (above left), with lamb shank, goat cheese, and broccoli rabe, was quite clever, and the fricassée of winter vegetables (above right) was first-rate. The one problem with the format, is that when four hot dishes are served at once, whichever one you eat last is going to be lukewarm by the time you get to it.

Dessert, a pear galette served warm (above), was terrific.

If there’s a disappointment here, it’s the wine list, which is extremely brief (about ten bottles) — the server mentioned that more are on the way. The California red wine we ordered (Montgomerly Place Mouton Noir, 2008; $63) was fine, and not really out of place in the overall context of the cost of eating here, but it was the most forgettable part of the meal.

The décor offers a little bit of all the latest trends (taxidermy, reclaimed wood, exposed brick), but it’s a comfortable space, not terribly loud, even when full (as it was by 9:00pm on a Wednesday evening). The servers have much enthusiasm for the project, as well they should.

I don’t know if this unusual take on the tasting menu will take root and prosper, but we were quite impressed with it: a restaurant doing the little things well. We’d love to see it succeed.

Feast (102 Third Avenue at E. 13th Street, East Village)

Food: American cuisine, served in three-course “feasts”
Service: Attentive and enthusiastic
Ambiance: From the East Village playbook

Rating: Critic’s Pick 

The entrance at Neta could easily be missed. Like many sushi restaurants, it’s an inconspicuous storefront on a side street and does little to command attention.

That’s just fine for Neta, which is not meant to attract walk-ins, or those who just happened to stumble upon it. Everyone there, comes with a purpose.

Sushi aficionados have been packing Neta since March last year, when two former Masa acolytes fled the mother ship, and opened this much humbler joint in Greenwich Village.

All this is relative. At Masa, you’ll drop $450 per person before drinks, tax, and tip. At Neta, the omakase options are $95 or $135, or you can order à la carte (much like Masa’s sister restaurant, Bar Masa).

When you pay 70 percent less, obviously there is a difference. Neta is crowded and loud, even on a Tuesday evening. It serves mostly local fish species. The textural contrast between fish and rice is more blurry, less clarified. A piece of toro doesn’t bring the waves of unctuous flavor that it does at Masa.

But you’re paying $135, not $450, and surely that counts for something. Practically the entire $40 difference between the two omakase options goes into a serving of Toro Tartare & Caviar, a wonderful dish early in the meal, which sells for $48 all by itself if you order à la carte.

Altogether, there are 13 courses. The first half of this procession is more impressive. A Szechuan peppercorn spiced salmon stands out, as does a serving of grilled scallops and sea urchin; likewise, spicy lobster and shrimp. Among a sequence of sushi and rolls, a flight of fluke, soft-shell crab, and grilled and marinated toro was the highlight.

Sushi chefs in the U.S. send out desserts as if by obligation, though they haven’t much to say. Still, Neta has improved on Masa with a serving of peanut butter ice cream. I’m not sure I’d be happy if I’d paid $8 for it (the à la carte price), but at the end of a long omakase it felt just about right.

The service is far less formal than at classic sushi spots, but still reasonably good. We were seated at a table (the bar was full), and that makes for a less personalized experience. I frequently had to ask for dishes to be described a second time, when the first couldn’t be heard over the din.

I wouldn’t put Neta in the upper ranks of the city’s best sushi restaurants, a category that certainly includes Masa, along with Sushi Yasuda, Kurumazushi, Soto, Sushi of Gari, and 15 East. Neta’s not in their league, but it’s certainly very worthwhile.

Feel free to click on the slideshow below, for photos and descriptions of all the dishes we were served.

Neta (61 W. Eighth Street, east of Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Village)

Food: Sushi and Japanese small plates
Service: Informal but attentive
Ambiance: A sushi bar and cramped tables, in a space that’s too loud

Rating: Critic’s Pick

Parm, from the Torrisi/Carbone team, has an odd distinction: it’s a good restaurant and an over-rated restaurant.

It’s over-rated, mainly because of two very insane stars that Pete Wells awarded last year, thereby instantly insulting every real one- or two-star restaurant in town. Parm is a two-star restaurant like I’m the Queen of England.

But if we step back from the ledge beyond which madness lies, Parm is good for what it is, a slightly over-achieving neighborhood sandwich shop.

The one-page menu doesn’t change much: it’s kept inside of a plastic sleeve, to keep it presentable and avoid re-printing costs. There are a bunch of veggies, pastas and fried foods for sharing (various items, $6–14), sandwiches and platters ($9–17), and then just one entrée served every day, a Veal Parm that comes in three sizes ($16, $22, $25). Nightly dinner specials (keyed to the day of the week, and apparently unchanging) are $25.

All of this happens in a tiny space next to the chefs’ first hit restaurant, Torrisi Italian Specialties. We dropped in at around 6:00pm on a Saturday evening, with the tables full, but ample space available at the bar. The tables looked awfully cramped and dark: even if there’d been one vacant, I think the bar was the better bet.

[Note: For some reason, all of my photos came out with a pinkish hue. If the ambient lighting was pink, I certainly didn’t notice it at the time. Anyhow, I didn’t try to repair them, so here they are in their pink glory.]

Pizza Knots ($5; above left) are a great sharing dish. Parm doesn’t serve pizza, so this isn’t what it is at most restaurants (leftover dough from the pizza oven). It’s just a really good dish in its own right. Naturally, they send out three of them, an awkward quantity to share.

Potatoes ($7; above center) are described on the menu as “smashed and crispy”. They’re so good that we put in a second order.

The menu doesn’t say so, but if you’ve already ordered full entrées, they’ll send out a half-order of Baked Ziti at half the usual price ($6; above right). It’s a perfect realization of what you want this dish to be, with its topping of fluffy ricotta.

The Meatball Parm ($12; above left) is the dish that sent Pete Wells to heaven and back. You can have it on a roll or a hero ($3 more). I’d do the roll next time. What they call a meatball is really more in the shape of a burger patty, and a very good one, served medium rare, but it’s a gooey mess and doesn’t fit in a hero roll very well.

Veal Milanese ($25; above right) is one of those day-of-the-week specials. My son thought it was merely okay, and at $25, seems quite a bit over-priced in relation to the rest of the menu.

There’s a modest wine and cocktail menu, the latter with goosed-up classics like the Mulberry Punch, the Chinatown Sling and the Beet Negroni (all $12), all in the spirit of what is obviously meant to be a nostalgic place. Service is just fine. (Disclosure: one cocktail was comped.)

While Parm should never have come within sniffing distance of two stars, it’s very good for what it is. I wouldn’t stand in line to get in, as people do at prime times, but if if you’re in the area and there’s a seat at the bar, by all means drop in for a sandwich or a snack.

Parm (248 Mulberry Street between Prince & Spring Streets, NoLIta)

Food: Italian–American classics, mostly sandwiches
Service: First-rate, for this type of place
Ambiance: A long, but narrow bar and some cramped tables

Rating: Neighborhood Spot

Remember Parea? I’d totally forgotten it, until I read a few months ago that it remodeled and became a steakhouse, Parea Prime.

Parea was relevant for a short while, back in 2006, when Frank Bruni gave it two stars. When I visited for the first time, in early 2007, I thought he was exactly right, but a later visit found a restaurant that had run off the rails.

Whatever its merits, Parea wasn’t in the “conversation,” as defined by “places people talk about” on blogs, food boards, etc. It remained open for seven years, so it must’ve had a following, but not enough of one to remain in its original form.

Now we’ve got Parea Prime, a hybrid between old and new. There’s still a section of the menu dedicated to “Greek Entrees,” and most of the appetizers are Greek too.

But in the center of the menu, where the eye is sure to fall first, you’ll find Prime Meats, “Hand selected by Pat LaFrieda, U.S.D.A Prime Dry Aged for 28 daqys minimum in his Himalayan salt room.” I had to quote the whole thing.

According to Grub Street, the chef here is Jean Christophe Villard, a Bobby Van’s alum. Is there a separate Greek team on the premises? Parea Prime really is two restaurants in one. The Greek dishes have no steakhouse influence; the steaks and the sides have no Greek influence. They just co-exist, side by side.

So we started Greek, with the excellent bread service (above left), a quartet of spreads ($15; above center), and that old, reliable chestnut, the flaming Saganaki ($13; above right).

As Bloomberg restaurant critic Ryan Sutton observed recently, “Steaks, like wines, are curated.” If you’re serving Pat LaFrieda dry-aged beef, it would take real incompetence to ruin it.

I’m happy to report that the porterhouse ($47 per person), sliced Luger-style, was wonderful. Three diners with modest appetites shared the portion for two, which was ample. A side of creamed spinach ($8) was first-rate.

The sizzling apple-smoked bacon ($5; above left) was thicker and richer than even the Luger version. Three of us couldn’t finish it. The server sent out a comped sample of the desserts (above right), all of which were wonderful.

The wine list is full of little treasures, like the 2000 Chateau Ducluzeau, which is a steal at $65. The over-syrupy cocktails ($14 each) are disappointing: flavored martinis and the like. Better to stick with wine and enjoy the addictive breadsticks. Our bar tab was transferred to the table, after a brief protest.

The old Parea décor has been tastefully re-done. It’s now less overtly Aegean, though it looks a bit corporate. It’s a hybrid, much like the menu. The place was about half full on a Wednesday evening. The service is just fine.

I have a hard time awarding destination status to a place like this, when good porterhouses are now so widely available. Based on this small sample, Parea Prime is getting just about everything right. I’d certainly go back, if I were in the area.

Parea Prime (36 E. 20th St. between Broadway and Park Ave. S., Flatiron District)

Food: A Greek/steakhouse hybried, with Pat LaFrieda dry-aged prime steaks
Service: Good
Ambiance: A pleasant, if corporate-looking midtown dining room

Rating: Neighborhood spot

Le Restaurant at All Good Things is a mashup of trendy ideas:

1) It’s a restaurant inside of a market (Brooklyn Fare, Il Buco Alimentari).

2) It serves only a tasting menu (Brooklyn Fare, Atera, Blanca).

3) It’s open only on certain days (Frej).

4) It has a French name (Le Philosophe, Le Midi, Lafayette), even if the connection to French cuisine is, at times, tenuous.

5) It serves austere Nordic-style plates, many of which consist of vegetables arranged like abstract art (Frej, Aska, Acme).

Despite the feeling you’ve been here before, Le Restaurant manages to seem new, and not quite derivative. Even if some of the trends are recycled, no one could say they played it safe. Not when the only menu is a $100 tasting, served just three days a week (Thursdays to Saturdays).

The good news is: the Great Recession is officially over, if places like this can open and thrive. And thrive, I hope it will. New York needs more restaurants willing to take chances, even if this one misses the mark.

The chef is Ryan Tate, formerly of Cookshop and Savoy, where he was chef de cuisine. He told Grub Street that his approach “is really just meant to get people to relax,” a peculiar aim. I never before thought that people needed $100 tasting menus to accomplish that.

I wish I could endorse it. They’re such nice people here, clearly trying hard, clearly eager to please.

And they’ve done such a lovely job decking out the post-industrial basement, in the bowels of Tribeca’s new upscale grocery, All Good Things. It’s a comfortable, minimalist, quiet space, admitting plenty of natural light from an outdoor garden.

But ultimately, the chef must be held accountable for his $100-per-head 7-course tasting menu (over $200 after drinks, tax, and tip). There was only one outright dud, but most of the remaining courses were more “interesting” than good.

They’re bumping up against the price of many three-star, and even some four-star restaurants. Jean Georges is $118 for four sublime courses, and after amuses, it’s more food than Le Restaurant. The pre-opening press referred to a $70–80 menu. Even that, in my view, would have been pushing it.

The wine list (above right; click on the image for a larger version) exacerbates the sticker shock, given that most bottles on the short, handwritten document are $70 and above—not really outrageous given the restaurant’s overall price level.

But then again, you expect a wider variety at a restaurant this expensive. The 2010 Clos de Gat, an Israeli Merlot, was inoffensive, but you wonder why they could find nothing better to serve for $80, especially when that’s one of just five bottles of red wine on offer, and three of the remaining four are north of $100.

It’s almost beside the point to describe each dish in detail: you can’t choose what to order, and the menu changes every night. Some of the write-ups in other online reviews sounded better.

I suppose that when the chef rewrites the menu every day, they can’t all be home runs. But I can only write about what we were served, which, at the price, was underwhelming. (Click the red image, above left, for the handwritten menu distributed at the end of the meal.)

The bread service (above right) was pretty good, with both bread and butter made in house.

Yucca (above left), coated in squid ink and dappled in aioli, tasted kind of funky, like a sour cheese. Then came Roasted Radishes (above right), with little sheets of fried chicken skin, whey, and tapioca, which I noted was a “fun” dish.

The next dish (above left) didn’t register much flavor: onions, rabbit liver, sherry vinegar, and quail eggs. Following that was one of the oddest items I’ve tasted all year (above right): Savoy cabbage hiding a couple of small oysters, with celtuce (an obscure vegetable in the thistle family) and creamed coffee.

I cannot complain much about snails on a skewer (above left) with chickpea polenta, green garlic and blue cheese, except that I was waiting for the “I must have this again” dish, and it hadn’t arrived yet.

But then the bottom fell out with flavorless roasted wood pigeon (above right), which had the consistency of cardboard and wasn’t redeemed by cauliflower florets, yellow beets, and a saffron foam.

Dessert was wonderful: a disc of spiced butternut chocolate (above left) with white mulberry, and a riesling and milk jam, followed by petits fours (above right). But it didn’t efface the sense that we’d paid over $200 a head for a mediocre Israeli Merlot, a handful of unimpressive hors d’oeuvres, and an overcooked roasted pigeon that I won’t soon forget.

The staff, it must be noted, were unfailingly attentive and professional. If I were giving stars for service, they’d get three. The food, on this particular occasion, came nowhere near living up to that.

On a Saturday evening, the space was reasonably full by 9:00pm. There is no indication from the street that this space houses a restaurant, so obviously there is word-of-mouth bringing people in. To keep them coming at this price, they’ll need to do a lot better.

Le Restaurant at All Good Things (102 Franklin Street at Church Street, Tribeca)

Food: Austere, market-driven American cuisine
Service: Excellent
Ambiance: A post-industrial space with minimal decoration, but quite comfortable

Rating: Not recommended

What a wonderful time it is to be a Francophile in New York, with little French bistros and cafés opening all over town. I thought Frank Bruni told us that France was dead?

Welcome to Cocotte (“little casserole”), a delightful little Soho spot that opened last October. It’s a little slip of a space—”the size of a studio apartment“—seating just 35.

The dining room is a few steps down from sidewalk level, decorated in dark gray, with the menu written in chalk on the blackboard-colored walls. There’s a tiny bar and an even tinier counter in the kitchen that accommodates all of two guests at a time.

The chef, Sébastien Pourrat, serves tapas-style cuisine from the Southwest of France, near Basque country. It feels like half-French, half-Spanish.

There are about 25 items on the menu, priced $7–16, in eight categories (including desserts). Most are suitable for sharing (maybe not the soups). A terrific-looking bacon & Basque cheeseburger ($12), which we didn’t try, seems to be the only bail-out dish.

Salade de poulpe ($14; above left) was refreshing, the octupus tender and still warm. The poisson du jour ($16; above right) was a mackerel, very good but an unusual preparation, difficult to describe.

Farçis (stuffed vegetables) are a Provençal/Niçoise specialty (see the French Wikipedia article). Cocotte offers several of these; we had the champignons (mushrooms) stuffed with chorizo ($9; above left). The piperade ($10; above right) is served in one of the restaurant’s namesake small casserole dishes, a mix of braised bell peppers topped with a poached egg. We finished with the assiette de fromages ($16; below right).

The cuisine here is not complex, but it’s inexpensive and well made. This is the kind of restaurant you’d go back to again and again, and if there isn’t a “must have” on the menu, you can order anything and not be disappointed.

Aside from the cheese platter, nothing we had was quite like anything we’ve tried in the city. This menu is unique.

The wine list is not long (they say it’s growing soon), but it’s fairly priced, and everything on it is offered by the glass, small caraffe, large caraffe, or bottle. The staff offer tastes before pouring, a friendly practice many larger and far more expensive restaurants can’t be bothered with nowadays.

By 9:00pm on a Wednesday evening, the small space was full, but the servers’ attention never flagged. For more photos, see the slideshow below.

Cocotte (110 Thompson Street between Spring & Prince Streets, Soho)

Food: French–Basque cuisine, served tapas style
Service: Puts many larger places to shame
Ambiance: A small, dark, casual, but welcoming space

Rating: Critic’s pick

Spanish cuisine is on the upswing in New York, with places like Boqueria, Salinas, Terdulia, and Barraca receiving strong reviews in recent years.

As the Observer’s Joshua David Stein notes, their successes must be weighed against high-profile flops, like Gastroarte, Romera, and Ureña.

Perhaps the chef Dani Garcia and owner Yann de Rochefort (of Boqueria) had those flops in mind when they opened Manzanilla near Gramercy Park two months ago. Garcia has a Michelin two-star restaurant in his native Andalucía, but here he aims a lot lower, bargaining that Manhattan diners aren’t ready for his $150 tasting menu.

It’s a pity that chefs don’t feel they can bring their best work to New York, but that’s the world we live in. I can’t blame the chef for opening an unabashedly populist spot that will succeed, in lieu of a more ambitious one that probably wouldn’t.

Manzanilla, a close twin of one of Garcia’s restaurants in Southern Spain, styles itself a brasserie. It’s mid-priced by Manhattan standards, with snacks (7 items; $8–29), appetizers (8 items; $13–18), entrées (10 items; $26–40) and side dishes (3 items; $8).

You could put together a “tapas” meal from the snacks portion of the menu, but they’re not the focus; unlike most of the competition in New York, there are no paellas to be found. Most of the dishes, at least as described, come across as fairly tame, but in our small sample, they were all executed well.

Tomato Tartare ($8; above left) is as much of a pun as the chef will allow, but it bursts with robust flavor.

A foie gras terrine ($18; above right) is decorated with caramelized goat cheese, green apple purée, and raisins. It doesn’t bust any culinary boundaries, but foie gras junkies will go home happy. The chef gets no extra credit for burnt slices of toast (right), half of them with holes a baby’s hand could slip throuh.

I’ve less to say about Striped Bass ($27; above left). SSuckling Pig ($34; above right) was one of the better renditions of a classic dish that I’ve had in a while.

There’s a bustling bar area up-front. The cocktails are terrific, although you might wait a while to get a bartender’s attention. The Spanish-heavy wine list is excellent for a new place. There aren’t many bargains, but there are many good selections to be had above $60.

In the early days, the kitchen at Manzanilla is operating at a high level, allowing for the limitations inherent in the format. The question with these types of places, is whether they can sustain that after the review period is over and the founder returns home to tend the rest of his empire.

Manzanilla (345 Park Avenue South at 26th Street, Gramercy)

Food: Classic Spanish cuisine, classic execution
Service: A shade on the slow side, but mostly very good
Ambiance: A bustling brasserie with a large bar and an open kitchen

Rating: Critic’s Pick

Our fine dining tour of the Dolomites concluded with St. Hubertus in the luxurious Rosa Alpina hotel in San Cassiano, the region’s only two-star restaurant, and a clear step above the other two we visited, La Siriola and La Stüa de Michil.

There are several tasting menus offered, but we ordered a four-course meal from the carte. Nothing is inexpensive here. Dinner for two, including wine (a €65 Carmenero) came to €373, or about $467.

Like the other starred restaurants we visited, the space is accented in blonde wood, rustic artwork, and sprays of flowers. The staff dress in a livery of modern gray suits. The service style is classic, elegant, and prceise, with a batallion of servers, up to four at a time appearing at your table whenver there are dishes to be delivered or cleared.

My son, who has become an adventurous eater, started with the calf’s head (€40): as prepared here, by the time it reached the table, you couldn’t really tell what it was, aside from a delicious treat. Variations on duck liver (€41) were prepared four ways, capped by a foie gras crème brûlée.

My son’s spelt linguine with veal ragout (€32) was one of the meal’s highlights, perhaps the best illustration that there’s no limit to how good such a simple dish can be, when the chef has sufficient skill. I ordered a risotto with graukäse (€30), a traditional Tyrolean cheese. For the main course, we both had the lamb (€42), prepared about four different ways (loin, chop, belly, shoulder), all superb.

A baked Tarte Tatin (€22) was the best dessert of the trip. Multiple rounds of petits fours followed.

As I noted in the previous review, I elected not to take detailed notes. I hope these brief impressions, coupled with the slideshow, give some idea of what the restaurant was like. Descriptions of the photos are on the Flickr site.

St. Hubertus, Rosa Alpina Hotel, San Cassiano, Italy