Momofuku Ko, the trendy new 12 seat restaurant by acclaimed chef David Chang, is getting more attention for its maddening reservation system than for its food. That’s partly due to the fact that no critic has been able to get into the place and review it, not even the top dog in town, Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni. The problem is that Chang refuses to give anyone preferential treatment, and all who would dine at......

Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni awards two stars to Mia Dona (pictured), the best rating that a somewhat casual place like this could hope for: “The food is robust, often rustic and sometimes proudly unsubtle, hammering away at its intended effect.” The East 58th Street Italian restaurant is a remix of Michael Psilakis and Donatella Arpaia’s shuttered restaurant Dona, and compared to Anthos, Psilakis’s haute Greek place, Mia Dona rolls like “a Buick, a more......

Writing for the Post, Andrea Strong feasts at Broadway East (pictured), the chic new Lower East Side organic restaurant with the dainty carbon footprint: The restaurant composts, filters and carbonates its own water, uses a green linen company, and donates waste cooking oil to the Environmental Energy Recycling Corp. Oh, and the food? Strong calls it “a brilliant compromise” between carnivores and vegetarians, “showcasing veggies along with organic meat and sustainably harvested and locally procured......

Writing for the Times, Frank Bruni calls the wine and charcuterie restaurant Bar Boulud (pictured) “a terrine machine, a pâté-a-palooza, dedicated to the proposition that discerning New Yorkers aren’t getting nearly enough concentrated, sculptured, gelatinous animal fat” and awards it two stars. Bruni also revisits Fiamma and calls the owners out for jacking up prices by 20% just days after he rated it three stars. The Post’s Steve Cuozzo says the critical raving about the......

Today the Times’s chief food critic Frank Bruni revisits WD-50 (pictured) and elevates the Lower East Side avant-garde restaurant to three stars (a 2003 Times review by another critic had awarded it two). Chef Wylie Dufresne has made WD-50 a destination with his experimental, transgressive menu, and Bruni concedes that in the past “too many of his creations were gratuitously perverse… many visitors understandably feel that what they’ve experienced isn’t so much a meal as......

Today the Times’s Keith Dixon, a self-described “clumsy, overambitious cook,” offers tips for cooking dinner in a crowded city apartment made even more cramped by a newborn baby. Dixon has adapted his cooking technique to accommodate a light-sleeping baby who, awakened by a clattering spatula, derails dinner plans as he and his wife “labor to get her back to sleep.” So he’s evolved into a “Silent Chef” with “ninja stealth” and suggests, among other things,......

Today the Times’s Frank Bruni marvels at Manhattan’s new wave of high tone restaurant openings during a recession, and pins the trend not on entrepreneurial bravado but on the fact that it takes years to get a fancy eatery open, and most of these new places were envisioned in flusher economic times. It is true that in 2005, the top fifth of earners in Manhattan made 52 times what the lowest fifth make – $365,826......

Frank Bruni, the Times’s top restaurant critic, awards the new 2nd Avenue Deli one star today, which isn’t bad considering it is, despite all the history, still a deli. We popped in there for food and photos just before it reopened at its East 33rd Street location and found the sandwiches (pictured) as monumental as ever; a second visit turned up no sign of the free bowl of gribenes (chicken skin fried in chicken fat)......

Photographs by Tejal Rao With his wife Martine running the front of the house, chef Alex Ureña has made a few more adjustments to Pamplona, their small East 28th Street restaurant known as erstwhile hell for sconce connoisseurs, but consistently a solid bet for modern Spanish food at a good price point. Following Frank Bruni’s 2 star Times review in November, Pamplona introduced a weekday lunch, soon following that up with a brunch menu.......

This week in the Times, Bruni one-stars Mesa Grill (pictured), knocking the restaurant down from the two stars given it by William Grimes in 2000. Says that while the Bobby Flay restaurant “has considerable charms… on balance [it] presents only flickers of the excitement it did [when it opened] in 1991… It’s an overly familiar, somewhat tired production. More to the point, it’s an inconsistent one.” Peter Meehan goes to Hakata Tonton for $25 and......

Bar Boulud: Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni recently lost his patience waiting on hold for 15 minutes to make a reservation, which should give you some sense of how feverish the excitement is for Daniel Boulud’s latest foray. The tony uptown wine bar, across the street from Lincoln Center, enjoyed the raging buzz of a sneak-preview opening on New Year’s Eve and now the 100 seat restaurant is open for real. Judging from the photos,......

Paul Adams goes to Back Forty (pictured) for the NY Sun this week. “The restaurant takes its focus on farm-to-table cuisine almost to the point of self-parody,” he says. Back Forty could benefit more by the presence of Peter Hoffman (the chef and owner) in the kitchen, not so much at the greenmarket, says Adams. This week in the Times, Bruni one-stars Barbuto. He loves the roasted chicken, so much so that he basically reviewed......

When The Villager broke the news that fancy East Village cocktail lounge Death & Co. would be temporarily shut down by the State Liquor Authority, no one was as publicly dismayed as Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni. In a blog homage to the elegantly dark nightspot, Bruni gushed:There’s a drink on Death & Co.’s latest cocktail menu with bourbon and rye, along with Courvoisier and bitters. I may in fact have had it – or......

The entrée is so over, the top chefs tell us. Yesterday Times reporter Kim Severson sunk her teeth into the long decline of the entrée and the increasing dominance of side dishes and tapas at many fine restaurants. As former Gramercy Tavern chef Tom Colicchio tells her, “Eating an entrée is too many bites of one thing, and it’s boring.” Amid all the evidence of diminishing entrée options at restaurants nationwide (at Gemma, entrées are......

This week in the Times, Bruni goes to Grayz, gives the restaurant one star. He says of the restaurant that refuses to call itself a restaurant (it’s a ‘cocktail lounge that serves small dishes’): “These dishes demand fuller attention than the setting allows, and the prices—$39 for the short ribs—only make total sense if eating is the point of a visit.” In Dining Briefs, Bruni goes to Belcourt, which he says is much better than......

NY Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni, he of the fast-food cross-country road trip (he swears by Chick-Fil-A, which has but one local outpost in NYU’s food court), has revealed more of his inner workings in a recent interview with website Refinery 29. For starters, Bruni eschews a big breakfast because of all his professional eating burdens throughout the day. On most mornings he strolls over to Levain Bakery and picks up a baguette with butter......

Trying to walk in certain city neighborhoods is fast becoming an extreme sport. Between the new, bigger newsstands and bus shelters, the perpetually metastasizing newspaper boxes on every corner, the increasing popularity of alfresco dining, the delivery guys on their bikes and – let’s not forget – tourists, wending your way down the sidewalk without reaching for your Taser demands a degree of patience not often found in your average New Yorker. A month after......

For almost two decades, the 35 year-old chef Alex Ureña has been quietly working behind the scenes at some of New York’s most well regarded restaurants: His very first kitchen job was at The River Café during Charlie Palmer’s tenure. A few gigs later, Ureña was translating the contents of Ferran Adrià’s first cookbook for David Bouley, a chef he spent 7 years with and considers a mentor. Alex Ureña later served as executive chef......

This week on food-TV, we've got: Tonight on No Reservations (10pm on the Travel Channel), Bourdain goes to Buenos Aires and Patagonia, Argentina. On Top Chef, Episode 11 airs Wednesday at 10pm (Bravo). Chef Jimmy Canora is the guest judge. Frank Bruni blogs about the show in the Times, calls Howie “the season’s best villain, the toque you’d love to choke.” And Bourdain is guest judging again this week as well; says that this episode......

Frank Bruni, in the Diner's Journal, waxes poetic about the oysters at Wild Salmon and Aquagrill, and discusses the reasons why he often disobeys the "rule" that one is not supposed to eat oysters in months that don’t have an ‘r’ in them. We're with Frank on this one. We love oysters in the summer. The platter above was from a recent oyster happy our at P.J. Clarke's downtown. They were cheap, but didn't hold......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting on Davidson Ave. in the Bronx, an armed robbery on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn, and a shooting at 40th Ave. and 10th St. in Queens. Bye-bye, birdie: Ziggy, the 6-week old red-tail hawk who fell and was saved in Midtown last week, was released into Central Park today. “When voters get confused, they vote no.” That almost seems like a sensible tack to take if you......

This week in the Times, ">Bruni revisits Tom Colicchio's Craftsteak, upgrades the restaurant from one star to two. He says, "The improvement in the steaks has made it easier to appreciate the restaurant's other virtues… the unassailable quality of its raw bar selections; its gigantic, crunchy onion rings, some of the best in the city; its fried bone marrow appetizer, a decadence-squared dream." He still thinks the menu is overcrowded, though, and doesn't like the......

Yesterday morning, the nominees for the 2007 James Beard Foundation Awards were announced at the Beard House on West 12th Street. In additional to New York restaurant stalwarts David Waltuck of Chanterelle, Floyd Cardoz of Tabla, and Terrance Brennan of Picholine (which was rebooted in 2006 to impressive reviews, the nominees also include a bumper crop of young chefs including David Chang for Momofuku Ssam Bar, Daniel Humm for Eleven Madison Park (both for......

Say what you will about Pitchfork, but it's a good resource and once you get the writer's tastes down, the rating system can help point you in a good direction. That rating system goes from 0 to 10, but has gone as low as, um, this. Now the Pitchfork head honcho, Ryan Schreiber, has left the sites hometown of Chicago and moved to Park Slope. He'll be living amongst bands his site has championed (Clap......

This might be the nuttiest re-purposing of one beauty product since the use of Preparation H on puffy eyes. There's a scary New York Magazine Intelligencer piece on how Benefit's Benetint is being marketed as a nipple tint. Yes, a "kiss-proof and water-resistant" nipple tint, apparently what every woman wants. While Benetint says the product was originally meant for lips and cheeks giving women a "sexy flush," it seems that nipples need make-up, too. No......

So apparently we were the last ones to know that Frank Bruni is gay (see "Mrs. Bruni" comment last week). But as we know from his one-star review today, that didn't stop him from taking in the sights while dining at Robert's Steakhouse in the Penthouse Executive Club. He and the others at his table might have been focusing primarily on the food, "[w]e were strangers to such pulchritudinous territory, less susceptible to the scenery......

The fall out from restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow's full page NY Times ad complaining about Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni continues, much to the delight of foodies, critics of restaurant critics, and mental health professionals. Last Friday, former Times food critic Mimi Sheraton wrote in Slate that Chodorow was an "idiot" to run an ad, given "the added exposure of the negative review to so many who may never have read the original." And then the......

Jeffrey Chodorow has it out for Frank Bruni, and we mean big time. In a full page ad in yesterday's New York Times dining section (at a reported cost of over $83,000), Chodorow a essentially called Bruni a hack with no real food or reviewing experience (see Bruni's bio here), and accused Bruni of personally attacking him rather than focusing on the food at his latest restaurant, Kobe Club. In a rather deliberate move, he......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: A large fight in the Bronx, an unusual MVA in Manhattan and a "Jet Blue aircraft disturbance" at LaGuardia - Gate B5 Promises from the Department of Transportation mean nothing, even after two children die Activists want tax-paying immigrants to have the right to vote; immigrants did vote in national elections between 1776 and 1926 Stop planning a scuba trip in Fiji - amNew York has the scoop on......

Frank Bruni explores the world of the solo diner. And before you jump to conclusions, he's not talking about dining at the bar, which many solo diners find more comfortable, but dining solo at a table in the main dining room. Admittedly, the only time we've done this is when traveling for business as we generally prefer the vibe and sometimes conversation at the bar, but we might just try it one of these......