Mediocre!
Pass the tapas! And please be nicer!
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Author Archive
Dining Districts
Two enjoyable, out-of-place joints.
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Napoleon Complex: Why New York doesn’t speak affordable French.
I’ve done the math. Cheap French could be done just as easily, and just as well—and it could succeed on the same level in Manhattan—as cheap Italian. All a restaurateur has to do is choose a light, Southern style to specialize in and employ a great sommelier. Extremely fresh seafood, first-rate herbs, organic vegetables and
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Scopello’s lesson in how not to do Italian.
Until a few weeks ago, the only option for Italian food in Ft. Greene was Cino’s, a 70s-style spaghetti and meatballs spot. It was a glaring absence for the Brooklyn enclave, which houses good Caribbean, French, Senegalese, New Orleans, Cambodian, Thai, Mexican, Middle Eastern and South African restaurants in about a dozen tree-lined blocks. Scopello
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Havana Central and Uncle Nick’s Ouzaria.
One of the table sauces at Havana Central is Goya’s green tabasco. It’s the cheap, industrial way for a Latin-American restaurant to go, but Goya’s green pepper stuff is pretty good. Havana Central, one of a handful of inexpensive restaurants in the destination-dining zone between Union Square and the Flatiron Building, has the feel
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Blue Ribbon Sushi Brooklyn does justice to the big name.
I know a few people who aren’t impressed by the Blue Ribbon restaurants, but none of them are the sort of people who spend their days thinking about what they’re going to eat next. The rest of us experience serial obsession. We go to B.R. as often as possible for months at a time, and
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Una Taste of Otto; Beef Bowl-a-Rama; Real Munchies Paradise
I managed a single visit to Mario Batali’s brand-new pizza restaurant before deadline. It’s a big, beautiful space, not wholly unlike the restaurant that occupied the same address previously, Clementine. The chief difference is the front room, with a new bar along one wall, an adjacent antipasti station and a casual-dining area with stand-up tables
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Sugarcane: More Supper
Flatbush Ave. from the Manhattan Bridge to Grand Army Plaza is still pretty rugged, better for driving than walking. The area is flat, but you can imagine the route as a high, dry ridge, with Brooklyn’s fertile plains rolling down from both sides. Park Slope and the Heights are on one, and all the uncounted
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Hope & Anchor Diner
The American institution of the everyday neighborhood restaurant only still exists, like vacant apartments, in such places as Red Hook. Not quite an exception is rural America, where one can find roadside diners making enormous omelets of farm-fresh eggs for guys in yellow "CAT DIESEL" hats before dawn. Those are places in suspended animation, however.
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Teaching the Teacher
We’ve all heard the heartwarming cliche about teachers learning as much from their students as their students do from them. I wondered if there’s any truth to it. Because my family is to teaching what the Osmonds are to singing (I’m not sure if there’s a tone-deaf black sheep of the Osmond family, but if
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