As an achievement in design, Steuben’s is unparalleled. No hackneyed, cliched or sardonic architectural detail was spared in the construction of this physical love letter to a time not too long gone when wood-veneer paneling and vinyl-covered steel-tube chairs were the height of de mode fashion. Every angle in the…
While Steuben’s (see review) has that whole American regional thing going, scores of other restaurants focus on foods of even more precise regional specificity. Corn Belt picnic cuisine? Done. Japanese mountain peasant food and North Vietnamese party grub? Done and done. And when Frasca first opened, it swore by the…
As we pull into the parking lot, I see the sign for live entertainment, Saturdays from nine until one in the morning. I find live music in a restaurant distracting, and say so as if after the years we’ve spent together — nearly all of them described by the arcs…
I miss Mee Yee Lin — the old Mee Yee Lin on West Alameda Avenue, the little dim sum place where I first ate crispy fried intestine, where I could linger over a late lunch in a homey American cafe as envisioned by a transplanted Chinese family. But that Mee…
After dark, this stretch of 22nd Street can be rough. The sidewalks are unlit, every open space is a parking lot, and the storefronts are shattered, boarded up. On the walls, the tags run together like tribal voodoo — less artistic than furtive, a secret language spelled out in whispers…
The worst thing about barbecue is waiting for it. I hit Sam Taylor’s Bar-B-Q during a shift change last week, and I had to wait fifteen whole minutes — which is about fourteen whole minutes longer than I’m comfortable waiting for anything. I have what you might call an impulse-control…
There’s one thing you’ll never want for at Ocean: service. On a Thursday night, dozens of bodies are on the floor — servers and bussers and runners in pale-blue chambray and black, captains in shirts and silk ties, managers of every description. Three tenders and a barback in the pit…
From the outside, Pesce Fresco looks like just another strip-mall Italian joint shoved between nail salons and auto-parts stores. Even inside, it looks like so many similarly themed, similarly imagined restaurants: mustard-yellow walls and dark upholstery comforting in their commonness; reproduction Taittinger prints and posters advertising things that once were…
As if I don’t already have enough chef Troy Guard/Sullivan Group stuff kicking around in print, here’s another tidbit. In a recent conversation, spin mistress Leigh Sullivan let it slip that she’d just been on the phone checking on dance lessons for Troy, her husband.. “Seriously? Dance lessons? What for?”…
Word came down from Washington, D.C., last week: No more horse slaughterhouses in the United States. To which most people responded, “Are there horse slaughterhouses in the United States?” Yes, there are. Three of them. All owned by foreign companies that are slaughtering tens of thousands of horses a year…
Life is full of small pleasures and little joys. Sometimes, they’re all you get. The bad stuff is big, often overwhelming, frequently spinning madly out of control. Focus on it and you’d think the whole universe is going to hell. What with wars and disasters, tragedies both personal and global,…
El Coyotito #3 (see review) is a real Mexican restaurant — all tacos and menudo, sopas de mariscos and sad accordion music on the juke. Lola, on the other hand, is a very fake Mexican restaurant that, in being fake, has earned the freedom to be so much more. In…
At first, the most surprising thing about Tables is the lines. Big lines that sometimes reach to the door, stretch past it and spill onto the patio, lines that break and become clusters of neighbors squeezed too tightly around four-top cafe tables, gatherings of friends on the sidewalk and nearby…
Tables (see review) is a great neighborhood restaurant — one of those places you dream of finding when you move to a new neighborhood and remember long after leaving. But if Tables is the fantasy-come-almost-true, the Cherry Tomato is indicative of the reality — the kind of spot you usually…
Lung cancer has never been sexier. I’m sitting on the patio at Sketch Food and Wine — lounging on the patio, actually, which is surprising, because I’m just not built for lounging. Fellas tuned high like me don’t lounge well. Twitchy men, men always on the make for something, men…
Wine bars come and wine bars go. Like Sketch (see review, page 53), they often enter the scene with a splash — but then, crippled by the double demands of being excellent in both the kitchen and the cellar, too often vanish almost as quickly. For more than ten years,…
Halfway through my lunch at Islamorada Fish Company, it occurs to me that this is the worst meal I’ve had in five years. I’ve eaten a lot of breakfasts and lunches and dinners out in that time. And I’ve had a lot of bad ones. I’ve been disappointed, nauseated, poisoned,…
I’m all for consistency in restaurants, and grouse loudly (and too long, some might say) about restaurants where the organic squab in styrofoam demi is delightful one night and too dry the next. The Kitchen does not have a problem with consistency. Last week, it was almost exactly the same…
I can still miss it something awful, but there are now times when I’m glad I’m no longer a chef. When it’s 103 degrees on a Friday afternoon and I remember deep in my blood and bones the crushing, slaughtering heat of summers spent working the line, I don’t miss…
What kills me about Opal is that it’s not necessarily a bad restaurant; it’s just so much less of a great restaurant than it once was. When I started this job four years ago — when chef Duy Pham was making his first passing glances at genius in its kitchen…
We’d already ordered drinks, Laura and I, and were just settling into the purple banquette behind a scratched black cafe table at Prima, Kevin Taylor’s most recent revision at Hotel Teatro. This isn’t the first restaurant Taylor has had in this space. Until last year it was jou jou, a…
Toby, my waiter at Restaurant Kevin Taylor, is very excited. When he hands me the menu, the look on his face is one of barely contained joy. He waits while I look over the first page — beaming, fairly spilling over with enthusiasm. I’ve already told him I haven’t been…
