Bloomberg's critic Ryan Sutton has seen Top Chef's Sam Talbot's restaurant Imperial No. Nine and he is not impressed. He calls it "a pretty restaurant filled with pretty people eating pretty lousy seafood." Also, the help sucks, Talbot's fish is "spongy, mushy, as if fetched from the same back corner of a refrigerator where the dodgy milk sits," the beef culotte has "the tang of liver or kidneys gone bad," the rhubarb pie "contains no pie," the place makes five kinds of gin and tonic (with flat tonic), and so on and so forth. It is safe to say that Ryan Sutton will not be getting a Christmas card from Sam Talbot this year.
Meanwhile David Bouley's Japanese kaiseki experiment Brushstroke racks up two more positive pro reviews today. First up, the Times's Sam Sifton stops by for a visit and awards the long-awaited restaurant two stars. Though it is available, "Pass on the sushi unless starvation for raw fish has brought you to the restaurant’s door." Instead, he recommends succumbing to the process: "plates served on a flower-bedecked lacquer tray, one after the other offering surprises and the taste of the now." The restaurant is quiet and charming and over-staffed, but there are worse things for a fine restaurant to be. "You will not go thirsty, or wonder for more than a second where the restrooms are."
Sifton wasn't the only critic charmed by the restaurant. Time Out's Jay Cheshes also went and lurved it, awarding it four out of five stars. "Bouley puts the remarkable cuisine of young chef Isao Yamada at the fore here, and hasn’t muddied the waters by getting too hands-on with the place. The chefs, designers, head bartender and hostesses are all Japanese—and promisingly, for that matter, so are quite a few patrons." The dishes are gorgeous and "flow like parts of a symphony, from muted petals of raw kombu-wrapped sea bass one night to a rich and restorative black truffle custard, with crab underneath and sweet mirin on top."
Then over at the Voice, Robert Sietsema checks out the gastropub Jones Wood Foundry and says if you are looking for "English peasant fare" you have found your spot. It "forms the bedrock of the menu, in servings that qualify as single-plate meals—though ones generally devoid of veggies." The dishes are big and that's okay, so are the flavors. Meanwhile, the Voice's other critic, Lauren Shockey, checked out Monument Lane in the West Village and found a restaurant where it seems like they've got "almost every major food fad of the moment" on the menu. "Except for some hidden gems, "middling" describes Monument Lane." So if you are making the trip... stick to the poutine.
