After Ryan Sutton gushed over it last week, Timesman Sam Sifton heads to the unattractive restaurant Tenpenny in the Gotham hotel and comes out with the same opinion. While it "is not the prettiest restaurant, nor does it offer diners a compelling reason to visit beyond the promise of good food in a weird environment," you want to go and and eat there so you can "imagine yourself telling friends how you used to eat the chef Chris Cipollone’s food back when he was cooking in that grim hotel space in Midtown." If Tenpenny were "in Brooklyn or on Avenue A, you might have already heard about it from your coolest friend, and you would probably have to wait in a long line to get in and pay for your meal in cash. Here in dead-at-night Midtown, at the heart of the city’s grid, you can simply call for a reservation."
Adam Platt, meanwhile, heads to David Bouley's new TriBeCa kaiseki-joint Brushstroke and while he finds the place and its rigid tasting menus a little formal (if you want à la carte sushi, for instance, you pretty much must eat at the bar) the food is "impeccably made" and the main dining room is a "soothing" one "in the spare, woodsy style of a Shinto shrine."
Both Time Out's Jay Cheshes and the Village Voice's Robert Sietsema this week make the trek to Alex Stupak's Village taqueria Empellon and come out with mixed feelings. Sietsema loves, loves, loves the "magnificent" tacos but finds much of the rest of the menu a mixed bag. For instance, the newly added "spice-rubbed skirt steak is sublime" but you only get five pieces of it. Though do try the desserts, he says. Meanwhile Cheshes gives the spot two-stars but doesn't seem very taken with it. The space is "buzzy and attractive" and some of the dishes are hits (seriously, you have to try the desserts from Stupak's wife Lauren Resler) but the bottom line is "for the city’s margarita-and-guacamole-mad hordes, even middling Mexican is better than none at all."
Finally, the New Yorker's Table for Two this week heads to Gentleman Farmer on the Lower East Side. The space is "not much bigger than your first New York apartment" and yet the chef, Karim Nounouh, manages to send "out ambitious preparations of game meats like pheasant, rabbit, venison, and wild boar" from an "impossibly tiny kitchen." But if you aren't interested in a restaurant whose "atmosphere shifts to that of a subway car" after a dozen or so diners sit, maybe this isn't the place for you.
