Professional eater Sam Sifton at the New York Times is not a fan of Rogan-loving Top Chef alum Sam Talbot's SoHo fish restaurant Imperial No. 9. So much so that today he refrains from giving the restaurant any stars whatsoever. The problem, you see, is consistency. Even when a dish appears at one visit to be "a cairn stacked high in the middle of a vast moor of culinary mediocrity," on another visit, well, at least it's "not rancid!" When a restaurant priding itself on fresh ocean fare serves fish like that, there's a problem. "Not that anyone eating at Imperial No. Nine really appears to care," since "The vibe of its ficus-filled, chandelier-bedecked, glass-sculpture-bisected greenhouse dining room is more social than cultural or gastronomic."
One of Adam Platt's guests in his New York review of Alex Stupak's Empellon says “I don’t think this is your average West Village Mexican joint,” and that seems to be the point of the two-star review. This is "a casually elegant Mexican restaurant that has been designed to appeal to the new breed of scruffy, tattoo-bearing, avowedly non-gourmet culinary sophisticates who have radically reshaped the city’s dining scene over the past decade." And that's okay! The tacos and sopes are "a parade of gut-busting delicacies," even if the entrees "felt like an afterthought" (which, actually, they were—Stupak only recently added them to the menu). And like everyone else, Platt praises the "simple, competent desserts" from Stupak's wife Lauren Resler.
"Long live fregula, bucatini and naked ladies!" That's really all the takeaway you need from Steve Cuozzo's gushing writeup of The Leopard at des Artistes in the old Cafe des Artistes space. The food it isn't cheap, but for a restaurant in its infancy it is "roaring in its cradle." And anyway, the real "achievement lies in resurrecting a 'landmark' that most New Yorkers shunned, and making it as fresh as Café des Artistes must have seemed a half-century ago."
Always happy to get out of Manhattan, the Village Voice's Robert Sietsema once again heads to Flushing this week to review Hunan Kitchen, "the most serious restaurant serving the food of the region wedged between Sichuan and Guandong that New York City has yet seen." It "looks like any other East Asian restaurant, but more sparsely decorated," and that's okay. Bring "lots and lots of friends, because the cuisine provides one surprise after another."
Finally, the New Yorker's Table For Two this week is at Michael White's restaurant in the Setai Fifth Avenue, Ai Fiori, where they find "contextless luxury. This is a restaurant that has everything—more or less faultless cooking, imaginative plating, exemplary service—except character." There are grand touches to be found, but by evening the restaurant is well filled up "with what is pretty clearly an expense-account crowd. (With minestrone soup at twenty-three dollars, they’d better be.)" Fair warning.
