Mighty Mighty Quinn's Barbecue

hugh mangum [daniel krieger for the times]New York City got a slew of new barbecue restaurants at the end of last year. Fletcher's Brooklyn Barbecue setup shop on Third Ave in Gowanus, BrisketTown opened on Bedford in South Williamsburg, and Hugh Mangum brought Texalina Barbecue to Second Ave in Manhattan via Mighty Quinn's. Mangum's barbecue is a hybrid of sorts, inspired by the traditions of Texas and the Carolinas, and in today's Times, Pete Wells awards his efforts two stars.

Wells weighs in on each of the three newcomers in his review. He likes the sides at Fletcher's, "like the beans that lap up wood smoke as they bake in the pit next to the meats; the crisp house-made refrigerator pickles, put up in a jar; and the macaroni and cheese when it is topped with the great burnt-end chili." He's also a big fan of the brisket at BrisketTown, where Daniel Delaney "rubs the brisket generously with salt and cracked peppercorns and smokes it for many, many hours, until it is very, very tender." But it's the barbecue at Quinn's that has his heart. To make it easy for you, here's a list of the restaurant's barbecue with their prices and what Wells has to say about each:

Brisket ($8.50 single serving/$22 by the pound) - "The brisket is cooked patiently to render much of the fat from the top cap, moistening even the leaner lower muscle until it gleams."

Pulled Pork ($7.25 ss/$18.75 btp) - "The pulled pork is the only one in town that doesn’t make you embarrassed for New York. It is staggeringly good."

Smoked Sausage ($7 ss/$12 btp) - "While there is nothing wrong with a smoked hot sausage, the one here isn’t quite strong enough to build a meal around."

Spare Ribs ($8 ss/$23 per rack) - "Spare ribs are exceptional, too, meaty and juicy, with a smoky outer ring the color of cherry soda."

Brontosaurus Rib - ($23 ss) - "The beef rib is an instant conversation stopper, a long block of impressively tender meat clinging to a Jurassic curve of bone."

Half Chicken - ($8.50 ss) - "The only disappointment is the chicken, no better or worse than what a skilled weekend cook can produce with a kettle grill." [NYTimes]

The Sun Will Come Out The Marrow

After winning the first season of Top Chef, Harold Dieterle set his sights on New York, where he opened Perilla with Alicia Nosenzo in May 2007. The food there, according to the restaurant's website, is "seasonal American." Kin Shop came next, and for that menu Dieterle looked to Thailand. The team opened The Marrow in the last weeks of 2012, and this time, Dieterle let his roots inspire the cooking. In his review of Dieterle's third restaurant today, Pete Wells explains, "Half his menu is inspired by his father’s German roots. The other half draws from the Italian cuisine of his mother and her relatives."

Wells finds a riff "between dishes that are completely sure of their purpose and the ones so overembellished it’s unclear what the idea was meant to be." The restaurant's namesake dish, served with sea urchin, is "a pun on textures, a delicious joke that you got with your tongue. Some dishes, though," he continues, "made me wonder whether I’d missed the punch line."

Wells is enamered with Jill Roberts' wine list and pastry chef Ginger Fisher's desserts. The ginger stout cake, for example, "really is worth jumping up and down about." But, because of inconsistencies Wells finds throughout the menu, he awards The Marrow just one star. [NYTimes]

Tell Louro I Love Her

David Santos was the chef at 5 & Diamond and Hotel Griffou before he started hosting super clubs at his Roosevelt Island apartment. For a $75 donation, guests were treated to a seven-course, Portuguese-inspired meal with dishes like coriander cured snapper and sweet potato and duck tongue salad. About a year after the super club started, Santos opened Louro in the West Village, and today Pete Wells awards the restaurant one star.

At Louro, Santos continues the super club theme on Mondays, "when the restaurant puts away its à la carte menu and serves a fixed-price meal," writes Wells. It also goes the B.Y.O.B. route Mondays, "While some restaurants that offer tastings also push a wine pairing that can double the check, Louro let me carry in beer I’d picked up at the supermarket."

Santos takes a worldy approach in the kitchen, where "His cooking ranges avidly through flavors from around the globe, but what it expresses most clearly is the sheer pleasure of being set loose in the kitchen." The small plates and eggs & grains dishes at Louro are the most exceptional, compared to "the larger meat or fish dishes, which tended to be forgettable." While Wells is clearly taken by the passion in Santos' cooking, he writes, "My praise for Louro would be louder, though, if the more substantial dishes were as satisfying." [NYTimes]

Aska, Aska, Read All About It!

[daniel krieger for the new york times]Nordic cuisine was undeniably one of 2012's hottest trends. The year's biggest contributions came via Frej opening in Williamsburg, Acme opening on Bond Street, and Tribeca welcoming Atera, Matthew Lightner's chef's counter Pete Wells awarded three stars in July. The trend continued to ripple at year's end, when Aska opened in the former Frej space. Today, Wells keeps the Nordic torch lit with his two-star review of the restaurant.

Fredrik Berselius runs the kitchen at Aska. He was also the chef at Frej, Kinfolk Studios short-lived pop-up restaurant. Where Frej only offered a five-course tasting for $45, Aska serves a six-course option Sunday through Thursday for $65, and a la carte options seven days a week. Eamon Rockey, former General Manager at Atera, signed on and curated a beverage program that parallels Berselius' New Nordic approach.

At Aska, "A common ingredient is made unfamiliar," writes Wells, "a transformation the kitchen pulls off again and again." Berselius proves to be a culinary shapeshifter of sorts, and "What looks like a whole fish is in fact the fried head and tail of a herring, with the rich, soft cured fillet connecting the two crunchy ends. (Granted, fresh herring may not qualify as common. “It’s one of my favorite ingredients, but I’ve only been able to get it twice in the seven years I’ve been cooking,” Mr. Berselius said.)"

"Mr. Berselius knows how to turn up the flavors when he wants to. The flavors he draws out of vegetables, meat and seafood can stop your breath. He found exceptional sweetness in the purple carrots he served with pike and whipped anchovy cream, and extracted a broth from monkfish bones that had something like the depth of veal stock when it was spooned around a fillet of the fish and a slice of its sautéed liver."

Aksa's $65 six-course tasting is easily one of the city's finest fine dining experiences, and one that turns a cold shoulder to the constantly rising price tags on prix-fixe menus around town. [NYTimes]

The Stars Shine Bright in Maysville

[rebecca greenfield for the times]Pete Wells files on the newly opened Maysville on West 26th Street today. The American-inspired restaurant is the shared vision of Sean Josephs (owner of Char No. 4 in Brooklyn) and chef Kyle Knall, "whose understated American style," Wells wrtes, "is a winning blend of the refined and the unpretentious." This approach to cooking was honed at Gramercy Tavern, where Knall worked before signing on to open Maysville.

"Encountered as words on the menu, some of his food may have a been-there, done-that feeling. But if you have done this before, it feels different this time." Wells notes the frequent use of hay in kitchens around town these days, writing, "I’ve had more hay set in front of me in the past year than a thoroughbred training for the Kentucky Derby, but never was it used to as good effect as it is at Maysville, where its smoke infuses warm oysters." "True, some things I ate erred on the side of subtlety," Wells writes of Knall's food, but concludes, "More often, he nailed the nuances."

Maysville takes it name from the city in Kentucky where Kentucky bourbon was born, and the restaurant boasts a list of 150+ American whiskeys. Domestic products also get their due in "a deep wine list that does well by the United States. Wells finds the list, "is surprisingly extensive even if its large number of three-digit prices feels out of place."

Maybe Wells will hit Char No. 4 sometime this year. For now, he awards two stars to Maysville, a restaurant in his eyes that's "a confident restatement of the American tavern."

Pete Wells Visits Sri Lanka by Way of Shaolin

[dave sanders for the ny times]If there's good food abuzz, Pete Wells will find it. He ended 2012 with a review of Thirty Acres in Jersey City. He's already been to Brooklyn this year, and now he files on Lakruwana on Staten island.

Eric Asimov wrote about Lakruwana in 1995, explaining, "the restaurant, at the time the only Sri Lankan restaurant I knew of in New York, was unlicensed. To get to Lakruwana you had to climb six floors above a pornographic theater near Times Square. You entered a suite and walked to a back room past shelves of exotic canned foods like jackfruit and shark curry. In the back was a wooden picnic table with benches and, unaccountably, an umbrella. That was the "restaurant."" Fortunately, the restaurant operates legally now.

"Lakruwana relocated to Staten Island," Wells explains, "where an estimated 5,000 Sri Lankans have settled over the past few decades." It'll take some extra time to get to, but go to Lakruwana on a Sunday, when the restaurant serves an all-day buffet, the food for which is kept hot in clay pots that sit over open flames. On what's inside, Wells writes, "Lifting the lids, I found deviled chicken in a chile sauce with a balance of sweetness and spice that grew more captivating the more I ate; sticks of pineapple in a lightly hot curry paste soured with tamarind; chopped kale mixed with coconut and stir fried just until the greens begin to relax, a wonderful thing to do to kale; fat yellow lentils stewed in coconut milk with the warming flavors of mustard seeds, curry leaves and cinnamon sticks." Wells awards one star.

In a seperate article Wells penned for Diner's Journal, Wells explains how he came to discover Lakruwana, writing that, after Hurricane Sandy, "Staten Island was one of the places very much on my mind, and soon I began driving across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to scout for prospects." Wells goes on to mention a handful of dining options and praise the oft forgotten borough. [NYTimes] [Diner'sJournal]

Elizabeth Falkner's Presence in New York is Starting to Krescendo

[elizabeth lippman for the times] finocchio flower powerAt the end of 2011, San Francisco chef Elizabeth Falkner announced she was closing Citizen Cake and Orson. The former had been open for 15 years. If you see a pattern in the restaurant names it's because Falkner, a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, was an aspiring fillmmaker before she became a chef. After 25 years in San Francisco, Falkner set her sites on New York City, where she landed on Atlanctic Avenue in Brooklyn and opened Krescendo in the former Downtown Atlantic space. The restaurant has an Italian menu with a heavy lean towards pizza and it showcases her ability in the kitchen as a chef and baker.

Falkner has appeared on Top Chef, Iron Chef America, and The Next Iron Chef for the first time on season four, where she lost in the finale to Geoffrey Zakarian. The last out-of-town chef to have spent time on TV and open a restaurant in the city didn't fair so well, but today, history doesn't repeat itself. Pete Wells awarded two stars to Krescendo.

"The Finocchio Flower Power is the pizza version of the sparkly oven," writes Wells, "a lavishly constructed detail that lets you know that Krescendo is much better than the neighborhood Italian joint it is trying to pass for. I do not know why Ms. Falkner and Nancy Puglisi, the restaurant’s owner, camouflaged the place so thoroughly, but the result is that not enough people are talking about Krescendo." Wells is a big fan of the restaurant's consistency and thorough execution. "The quality of a restaurant’s pizza often correlates negatively with that of its pastas and salads. Ms. Falkner," he reveals, "brings the same quiet focus to all her cooking at Krescendo."

Wells Pops Over to Arlington Club

[piotr redlinski for the times] popovers at arlington clubLaurent Tourondel was working at Cello when the restaurant earned three stars from the Times in 1999. Five years later, Tourondel partnered with Jimmy Haber and the BLT empire was born. BLT Fish, Prime, Burger, and an eventual split with Haber would all unfold by 2010. At the end of last year, the Upper East Side welcomed Tourondel via Arlington Club; a collaborative effort with the nightlife gurus of Tao Group. In his review today, Wells reveals an unconventional steakhouse worthy of two stars.

“When he’s in the zone,” Wells writes of Tourondel, “as he is most of the time at Arlington Club, his cooking is as ingratiating as it is skillful; it wins your affection right away and then your respect.”

Sushi makes an appearance on the menu, but Wells hints that you might want stay away from it, “Do not, I beg you, get involved with the sushi rolls. The rice is cold and tightly packed; the fish is dull. The sushi menu is so out of place that it’s a little embarrassing, in the way of a Hawaiian shirt bought on vacation and worn to the office.”

Arlington Club strays from traditional steakhouse routine in many ways. “But,” Wells explains, “like many such things at Arlington Club, it’s memorably good. The restaurant doesn’t know how to follow the script, but its improvisations are inspired.” [NYTimes]