"The setting is dropped-ceiling bland, with a few plants and paintings for color. This is in keeping with the neighborhood’s restaurant history: 456 resembles nothing so much as a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown." —At the corner of Nostalgia and Zen you will find Sam Sifton's review of 456 Shanghai Cuisine. Oh my God, I am SO HUNGRY RIGHT NOW.
"THERE are two remarkable things going on at Ciano, the casual, new-style Italian restaurant that Shea Gallante opened a few months ago on East 22nd Street. The first is Mr. Gallante’s food, which is ambitious, beautiful and flavor packed, a kind of Italian home cooking made grand and attractive, rich as Berlusconi, not as oily." —Oh, Sam Sifton, don't you ever change.
"We'll get to your needs in a minute. Here's what would be great from my point of view, and which would make up entirely for the time I was in the Marais with my pregnant wife and this jumped-up little terrier in a Basque restaurant sneered at us for arriving without a reservation at his entirely empty restaurant at 6 p.m. He was plenty sophisticated-European. He responded to our request for a table for two with a curt, 'Non,' adding that all the tables-he even swept his arm back to indicate them-were reserved. So do me a favor and take your husband to Peter Luger in Brooklyn and see [...]
"Then lobster, a slash of red and white claw meat in a lobster bordelaise so deeply flavored as to recall both veal stock and opium smoke, with cabbage to bind them together. And sturgeon, a rectangle of meat the color of ivory, with a sauce of reduced grape must and a grape-pumpkin marmalade. It's a mad hatter's dish, cooking out of Lewis Carroll." -Alice In Wonderland is everywhere these days: movies, hip-hop, politics, and now restaurant reviews-Sam Sifton gives Colicchio & Sons three stars in today's Times. I'd complain about oversaturation. But that would be Petty.
Times dining critic Sam Sifton has mixed feelings about SD26, Tony May's downtown 21st century version of the venerable San Domenico. On the one hand, the candele with cauliflower, saffron, pine nuts and anchovy oil evokes "the very essence of great Italian cooking." On the other, the octopus carpaccio with sun-dried tomatoes, "to the good, looked like a Chuck Close painting," but, to the bad, also "tasted like one." (And, in a nice touch: "SD26 is the restaurant equivalent of a second wife: younger, considerably more nervous, dressed in a way that might raise eyebrows in the social circles the original restaurant was opened to serve.") Either way, I [...]
This brief Q&A with new New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton affirms our excitement about his selection. [Via]
