Donde Dinner? - 432 East 13th Street

Donde Dinner? wants to make your next dining experience an adventure. So, every Friday, we pick a restaurant and post its address for you. The catch is, that's all the information you get. No name, no type of cuisine, and no Googling. But first, here's last week's address:

480 Ninth Avenue = Larb Ubol

This week's restaurant follows typical Donde Dinner? fashion. Price, quality, and accessibility have all been taken into account. You won't be waiting at the bar for two hours with $15 cocktails and you never have to worry about a dress code. Just hop on the train, or your feet, or your bike, and head to:

432 East 13th Street (map)

N.Y. State of Restaurant Minds (and Our Meal at the Elm)

The Elm is one of the few restaurants to open this year that seems to be after three stars from The New York Times. The Marrow and Lafayette struck us as concepts that sought the same achievement, but both came up two stars short. We're certain Michael White's team at Costata is chasing three as well, but that review won't be out until (probably) September.

The trend is very much away from fine dining, polished rooms, and chiseled service from suited waiters. It's as if every new restaurant is following what's become the two star template. Pearl & Ash, Uncle Boons, ABC Cocina, Montmartre, Hanjan, and Mighty Quinn's have all opened in the past seven or eight months and have all received two stars. They are fun, casual eateries where reservations and a month spent saving aren't necessary to eat there.

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Two Star Success for ABC Cocina

[benjamin petit for the ny times] dan kluger"For his next trick, Jean-Georges will open a Spanish-inspired, small plates restaurant." These were the words we started tossing around last summer after we caught wind that Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Dan Kluger would be opening a restaurant in the former Pipa space inside the ABC Carpet & Home building. Now that ABC Cocina is open, and has been for three months, Pete Wells has filed a review.

"There’s an alchemy at work at ABC Cocina," he writes, "The kind that can turn the last thing you’d want to order into the first thing you’ll ask for next time around. For me, it was the vegetables with brown rice, which I expected would taste like a tea made by steeping the yellowed pages of the “Moosewood Cookbook” in warm kombucha and straining it through Pigpen’s bandanna. It was, in fact, one of the freshest, cleanest vegetable dishes I’ve tasted all summer."

The success with which Vongerichten and Kluger coax flavors from farm fresh produce is no surprise – their scope of vegetable prowess has been on display at ABC Kitchen since 2010. A few things miss the mark at Cocina, but the restaurant is run by chefs that have a focused and learned approach to cooking – one they have built into a restaurant that New Yorkers are excited to eat at. ABC Cocina is another in the growing canvas of two-star restaurants opening in the city. More on that here. [NYTimes]

Eat the Week; July 22nd - 25th

Grand Central Oyster Bar will open a location in Park Slope | Pete Wells takes a star away from Daniel; leaving just five four-star restaurants in New York City | A look around Park Slope's new L'Albero dei Gelati | Donde Dinner? - 480 Ninth Avenue

Donde Dinner? - 480 Ninth Avenue

Donde Dinner? wants to make your next dining experience an adventure. So, every Friday, we pick a restaurant and post its address for you. The catch is, that's all the information you get. No name, no type of cuisine, and no Googling. But first, here's last week's address:

293 Van Brunt Street = Homemade

This week's restaurant follows typical Donde Dinner? fashion. Price, quality, and accessibility have all been taken into account. You won't be waiting at the bar for two hours with $15 cocktails and you never have to worry about a dress code. Just hop on the train, or your feet, or your bike, and head to:

480 Ninth Avenue (map)

A Look Around L'Albero Dei Gelati; Bringing Great Gelato and More to Park Slope

L'Albero Dei Gelati opened their first stateside satellite last Thursday on 5th Avenue in Park Slope. The Italian import has three locations in Italy and each, including the new Brooklyn location, borrows from the Slow Food Movement that started in Piedmont in the 80s. L'Albero's mission is to source ingredients locally and from farmers who practice sustainable farming. The gelato is the main draw here, but L'Albero also serves coffee, beer and wine, meat and cheese, excellent panini (like the corteccia with mascarpone, lardo, dark chocolate, and black pepper), and bakes their own bread/pastries in-house. The gelateria opens at 10am on weekends, 11am during the week. Cantelope sorbet for breakfast anyone?

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Our Inevitably Eroding Food Landscape

evan sung for the ny times"Every taste seems to transport you to another world, while every gesture of the staff convinces you that you live in the privileged center of this one. Daniel, which turned 20 this year, can make you feel that way." So writes Pete Wells at the start of his review this week. It reads with the same magnitude of the Le Bernardin review the critic filed in May last year, but Wells gave that restaurant the same four stars it already had. This week, Daniel has a different fate.

A lot is being said of the way Wells went about the review. "One night I had a reservation 15 minutes apart from a colleague who wasn’t likely to be recognized, as I repeatedly was," the critic explains. "We both ordered the six-course $195 tasting menu. (A three-course prix fixe dinner is $116.) Our meals were virtually identical. Our experiences were not."

But the New York Times restaurant review is irrefutably one of the most relevant pieces of food world commentary. And given the current state of food culture (how long would it take to come up with an accurate count of food-based reality TV shows and/or chefs who have more than one restaurant and/or people that don't take pictures of their food before they eat it), if a restaurant is privy to the fact that the Times critic is dining with them, there is little to be done to dampen the flame his/her mere presence ignites. That's not to say anything what so ever should be done differently for him/her, but seating the critic in the best server's section, folding napkins, refilling water, having the executive chef or proprietor cook the critic's food etc. are actions every restaurant will take should the circumstance arise.

"Daniel built its fame on Mr. Boulud’s exquisite refinements on French peasant food," Wells writes. "Over the years, the refinements have multiplied while the peasant food has been sent away to his many spinoff bistros." Wells gives Daniel three stars. The dagger that took away the coveted fourth is justified, as the critic notes partial treatment, and it suggests success (chefs expanding their empire) comes at a price (their flagship suffers)."

With three stars from Wells, Daniel joins the likes of Carbone, Ichimura at Brushstroke, Atera, The Nomad, Dining Room at the Modern, Kyo Ya, and Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria. It leaves Le Bernardin, Jean Georges, Per Se, Eleven Madison Park, and Del Posto as the city's surviving four-star restaurants. [NYTimes]

Park Slope Oyster Bar Will Be Grand and Centrally Located

News broke at the end of last week that century-old Grand Central Oyster Bar will open an outpost in the former Fornino space in Park Slope. Fornino closed at the beginning of the year and a couple's plans to open a restaurant there fell through after rent was raised and the owner starting looking for golden arches or an equally mindless cash cow to occupy the 256 Fifth Avenue space.

Grand Central Oyster Bar has two locations in Tokyo and one in the Newark Airport. The new project in Park Slope will make the neighborhood one of the city's premiere destinations for oysters and synchs with the neighborhood's quickly changing landscape. Le Pain Quotidien recently opened in the former Moutarde space across the street from Fornino, Calexico will open soon one block south, and barbecue heavyweight Dinosaur Barbecue has hit their stride having opened a month ago a block and a half west (technically Gowanus). From here on out it looks like it's all or nothing for Park Slope. [GTHMST]