Uno Estrella Por El Toro Blanco

[lauren decicca for the times] lobster puerto nuevoJohn McDonald and Josh Capon are the guys behind Lure Fish Bar and B & B. El Toro Blanco, their most recent venture, is a new addition to the white-hot trend of hip Mexican restaurants (Salvation Taco is the newest), and it's on the receiving end of a colorful one-star review from Pete Wells this week.

Josh Capon built out the menu with Scott Linquist, who has worked on both coasts making contemporary Mexican cuisine. A pan of chorizo fundido was a big hit with Wells and co., leaving Wells to desribe the dish as one "in which Mexico looks Switzerland calmly in the eye and says, “I’ll see your cheese fondue and raise you some green chiles and a heap of crumbled spicy sausage.” (Switzerland folds and leaves the room.)"

"The look of El Toro Blanco," writes Wells, "is the latest sign that in New York City, Mexican cuisine is cool, of the moment and ready to be presented without quotation marks." Alex Stupak definitely helped get that palota rolling when he opened Empellon Taqueria and Empellon Cocina less than a year apart. Calexico helped get the fuego burning. Park Slopes's Fonda landed an outpost in the East Village last year. Dos Toros is settled in. Hecho in Dumbo is still a fresh favorite. There's Gran Electrica...

Thirty Acres, Two Stars

[robert stolarik for the times]For his last review of 2012, Pete Wells landed at a restaurant in Jersey City. Thirty Acres is the vision of chef Kevin Pemoulie and his wife Alex. Pemoulie has five years of chef de cuisine at Momofuku Noodle Bar on his resume and the glowing two-star review is likely to bring a few new customers to the PATH in the ensuing weeks. "A restaurant like Thirty Acres would be a find in any state," Wells writes. "It is the kind of place that can redraw regional boundaries, making the Hudson River no more of a barrier to eaters in search of inventive cooking than the East River has become in the past few years. For those who live near a PATH station, it may be easier to reach than several talked-about restaurants in Brooklyn."

Wells has a few gripes with the reservation policy (only available for groups of 5 or more), but likes just about everything else in the 32-seat restaurant, including "the servers, who are unusually friendly and free of pretense," and "the pastel portraits of Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford on corrugated cardboard."

Thirty Acres is B.Y.O.B. and the menu makes for a wonderful canvas to be painted by a slew of different wine. Smoked quail with walnut bread pudding, cranberry bbq sauce, and kale, gnocchi with mushrooms, sauerkraut, sour cream, mustard, and ricotta salata, and steamed cod with mussels, kielbasa, Old Bay, and celery make excellent partners for those old rieslings and expressive zweigelt some of us might have laying around. [NYTimes]

One Glowing Star for Royal Seafood Restaurant, Jake

A few days after Hurricane Sandy, Pete Wells wrote "Why Downtown Needs Diners Now." The article pays homage to the southern end of Manhattan, where power was out for six days. "Chinatown alone is worth fighting for," he wrote, and in his favorable one-star review of Chinatown's Royal Seafood Restaurant today, he has this to say of a particular visit, "This was a week after the hurricane and a few days after the lights had come back on in downtown Manhattan. Chinatown was on my mind."

Wells highlights a dish he notices is not on any menu, but is on every table. He explains, "Chinatown veterans look around the dining room to see what others are eating." At Royal Seafood Restaurant, the answer is lobster. "It was hacked into sections and wok-fried with a sticky, time-honored Cantonese sauce of scallions and slivers of ginger."

The Times critic offers some advice for those looking to dine at RSF in the future, "The best strategy: sit on an aisle unless you speak some Cantonese. Tables are jammed together, and sitting too far from the trolleys puts you at risk of missing a favorite dumpling." "You can order from the menu all day," he continues, "but the best time to explore it is by night, when the dining room and presumably the kitchen are less frantic."

Pete Wells Looks Behind Tandoor Number Two

[karsten moran for the nytimes] executive chef gaurav anandMoti Mahal Delux opened on the Upper East Side five months ago. The restaurant doesn't have a liquor license, but it does have a tandoor oven. The unique flavors it imparts on a handful of dishes at Moti Mahal Delux is largely responsible for the two-stars Pete Wells gives the restaurant in today's review.

"The restaurant, which opened in July," Wells writes, "is itself an outpost of an empire, a chain centered in New Delhi that has built a formidable reputation among Indians for its tandoori chicken, butter chicken and that black-lentil dal." Tandoori refers to anything that's been cooked in a tandoor oven; an ancient cooking vessel whose heat source is generated by wood or charcoal. Modern tandoor range in shape, size, and material, but the originals were small, portable, cylindrical clay ovens.

At Moti Mahal Delux, in addition to the transformation papdum undergoes in the tandoor, "The tandoor also imparts a winning smokiness to an unpromising-sounding snack of grilled pineapple, sweet potato, apple and bell pepper in a sweet-tart malt vinegar marinade that has a slowly mounting black-pepper buzz." The dish is one example of the vegetarian dishes that Moti Mahal Delux does well. Desserts, like the walls, were mismarked, "For a new restaurant, it has a few spots too many that could use a fresh coat of paint." Cosmetics aside, the two stars will surely boost business, and something tells us lunch just got a whole lot busier too: "A weekday lunch special with two appetizers, three entrees, a biryani, naan and dessert comes to less than $12."

No Meat, No Matter; Two Stars for Dirt Candy

[nagle for the ny times] cabbage at dirt candyKate's Joint raised the bar for American-vegetarian food when it opened in the East Village back in 1996. The restaurant closed earlier this year, but Dirt Candy is there to carry the Village's vegetarian torch. Dirt Candy is what Amanda Cohen calls vegetables, it's also the name of her restaurant she opened in 2008. The restaurant's website explains, "When you eat a vegetable you’re eating little more than dirt that’s been transformed by plenty of sunshine and rain into something that’s full of flavor: Dirt Candy."

In his two star review of the restaurant today, Pete Wells enjoys the food and the way humor plays a part in the Dirt Candy experience, "Since opening Dirt Candy in the East Village almost four years ago, the chef Amanda Cohen has been waging war on the “eat your vegetables” mind-set, using humor as one of her weapons." Cohen's sense of humor is found throughout the restaurant's website and menu, wine list included, where a sparkling wine on offer from the Veneto is described as, "A fresh, lively sparkling wine from Italy that dances on your face." "Humor is so integral to Ms. Cohen’s work," Wells writes, "that she may be the only chef in America who could publish her first cookbook in comic-book form and make the decision seem not just sensible but inevitable."

Writing a menu is never a simple task, and when the menu is completely void of an entire food group, a heightened level of creativity is called for to ensure seats will be filled on a nightly basis, even if there are only 18, as is the case at Dirt Candy. This creativity shows up at the restaurant in dishes like eggplant tiramisu and the cauliflower entree, where "Ms. Cohen gives cauliflower florets a long bath in maple smoke, dips them in cornflakes, fries them to a golden crisp and serves them on waffles." It's a playful twist on the chicken and waffles classic. There are a few misses on the menu, but, ultimately, Wells finds Cohen is "not adapting the vegetarian cuisine of some other culture. She is inventing her own."

Steady as M. Wells Goes

When Hugue Dufour and Sarah Obraitis opened M. Wells in Long Island City, Queens in 2010, they did so without a long-term lease. Longevity wasn't an option, but the married couple opened anyway because they lived across the street and had faith in their community. When news began to spread that the diner was actually closing, the public became curious to see the couple's next move. There was talk of a steak house and catamaran in LIC, but M. Wells Dinette, their cafeteria-style restaurant at MoMA PS1, came first. Just as Sam Sifton awarded M. Wells two stars in April last year, Pete Wells gives M. Wells Dinette two stars today.

The lunch only, schoolhouse dinette pays homage to the building's former identity as a school. As far as what's going on in the kitchen, Wells has this to say, "A native of Quebec, Mr. Dufour learned his blithe disregard for moderation while cooking at Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal, where he was also the pastry chef and an owner. Most of the time, his celebration of the unbridled joy of eating like a lumberjack is so convincing that I’d be prepared to split cordwood all day just to earn the right to pull up a chair."

There are a few misses at M. Wells Dinette, but nothing Dufour's otherwise sturdy repertoire and pastry chef Bethany Costello's deft touch with seasonal fruits can't make up for.

646-532-GUYS

[photo; kelbaugh for the new york times]Our initial reaction when we heard Pete Wells reviewed Guy Fieri's new East Coast implant was, "With so many great (new) restaurants in the city, why would Wells waste time in the culinary void that is Times Square at Guy's American Kitchen & Bar?" Then we remembered it's his job to explore, in its entirety, the establishments that make up this city's food landscape. Sometimes that means taking the train to 42nd Street.

The New York Times restaurant critic is like the industry's shepherd; the foreman. By monitoring the cuisine and experience had at restaurants throughout the city, their opinion keeps restaurants on their toes. Unlike the bored and whiny voice of the Yelp writer, the fastidious efforts found in the New York Times restaurant review column are of great concern in New York and beyond. From Claiborne to Reichl to Wells, whether one agrees or disagrees with a particular critic's style of writing or distribution of stars, the restaurant critic for the New York Times stands as the superintendent of the world's greatest food city. Sometimes, entirely beyond the critic's control, a restaurateur will crash into the landscape of New York City restaurants. When they do, their efforts are subject not only to the opinion of an informed public, but to the more aptly tuned-in scrutiny of the Times critic.

We'll be the first to stand up in support of Guy's shenanigans on "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives." In many ways, "Triple D" is a deeply personal, introspective look into the heart and soul of this country's food culture. The eateries Fieri visits are the type of lunch counters and grease pits that Americans have frequented for decades. They are post World War II creations made possible by the development of industrial farming and a disregard for caloric intake. They are also places where 85% of the inventory is frozen.

When it comes to Guy Fieri's food, we've never gone out of our way to eat it, which may or may not be on purpose. Our only taste of Fieri's fiery combinations of adjective-heavy preparations presented at the likes of Johnny Garlic's, Tex Wasabi's, and now Guy's American Kitchen & Bar, comes via another Food Network show: "Guy's Big Bite," in which we learned Fieri is a California native with an unorthodox approach to cooking that might be better suited for those parts of America that happen to be no less than 500 miles from large bodies of salt water.

That's not to deny Fieri's impact on America's food culture, but in a city where chefs are shaving frozen foie gras over lychee and pine nut brittle, and making edible squid ink baguettes that resemble razor clam shells, maybe there is little room for "Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders" and "Tequila Turkey Fettucine."

Park Slope's Talde Gets a Star

[kara zuaro] Dale Talde, David Massoni, and John Bush are neighborhood guys. At the root of their partnership and business model is a shared desire to provide good food and a casual dining experience. Dale Talde recently became a partner at Thistle Hill Tavern, Massoni and Bush's first restaurant in Park Slope, where he is now in charge of the menu there. Talde, the trio's most ambitious restaurant, was less than a year old when the team opened Pork Slope, an American Honky Tonk serving chef Talde's take on bar food. As for the restaurant, Talde's immediate success when it opened in January has given the Park Slope eatery serious culinary momentum, the likes of which has brought in Pete Wells, who filed a one-star review on the restaurant today.

"About a month into its run," Wells writes, "the dining room ticked along briskly, and the cooking, which could be called pan-Asian if that didn’t sound so alarming, was smart and skillful." That was before Talde was in charge of three menus, hard work to say the very least. The best way to deal with that is to be at three places at once, but science hasn't made that possible yet. In his review, Wells mentions how whenever Talde was in the kitchen, "The food was back to its old, confident self."

The review seems to suggest that had Talde been in the kitchen on each of the three visits Wells made before he could file his review, an unwritten (written?) Times requirement, he may have stamped it with a second star. Talde, no stranger to competition, is ready to do what it takes to right the wrongs. He had this to say about the review via Twitter: