Two years ago, you’d only encounter a place like Kloe on a tree-lined block, among the classiest of neighbors. Instead, find this Platonically ideal little bar/cafe on what was until recently the least cool block of W. 14th St. Kloe’s back area is unusually cozy for a restaurant bar, with a feel that’s half trendy spot, half commuter’s pub. The dining area comes off as equally convivial and unpretentious. My party found it funny the way our waiter kept saying "enjoy" instead of "have" (as in, "Will everybody be enjoying the wine tonight?"), but the guy chuckled right along with us.

Another rather current feature of the restaurant is its price structure. Some appetizers are set a few dollars up from the norm so that entree prices could be inched down, and the menu as a whole looks more reasonable when you scan it. Clever, but don’t try to outsmart Kloe by skipping starters. Citrus-poached jumbo shrimp satisfied my recurrent craving for absolutely perfect shellfish better than any dish I’ve had all year. The fruit flavor was just a sweet kiss rounding out pure seafood sensation. They’re worth the $9 price tag even without crunchy haricots verts and plump white beans.

Steamed Prince Edward Island mussels in a classic herb and garlic Pernod broth ($9) is another grade-A shellfish bargain. But it’s the plate with two preparations of salmon–seared and smoked, arranged in a petite "stack" with chive mousse and potato crisps ($7.50)–that makes for Kloe’s greatest bar-snack-cum-appetizer. The lox is comparable to the house-smoked variety served in the pubs of Northern England, and the seared fish, too, imparts a double taste–of the noble fish in the raw plus a guided touch of fire.

Salad Nicoise ($15.95) brought yet more seafood delights: peppered tuna rare enough to impart a bit of a sushi buzz and decently fat anchovies to help season the string beans, egg, olives and potato. A cook can hardly go wrong with these ingredients, and Kloe’s has the confidence to put them in tried-and-true settings, which neatly overrides the risk of becoming mundane. Good workaday flavors are the blessings these times demand.

In that vein, I’m going to limit comment on Kloe’s main courses to its steak frites–one of the most expensive options at $22. The fries are the size and shape American fried potatoes are supposed to take: just like McDonald’s. The herb and vinegar on them is mild with some bite–very springtime-in-Manhattan–and the portion is enough to impress any tourist wandering in off 14th St. The meat? New York strip, 10 ounces, grilled by someone who understands both the meaning and the finer implications of the words "medium rare." This is where we’re at, food-wise, during the worst economy in decades. Not even a tiny bit bad, and not even in the neighborhood.

I look forward to seeing developments similar to Kloe on 23rd St., which for the past several years has been the city’s weirdest zoning anomaly. The Flatiron fine-dining district stops absurdly short at E. 23rd, as if to parody the landmark’s narrowness. On the west side, it’s different. Chelsea’s upscale scene has long since spilled over onto the express route, so you can get a preview of what sorts of things are likely to come, eventually, between 11 Madison and Union Pacific.

Negril, on the Chelsea side, is the sort of highly praised and popular restaurant it makes sense to doubt. The prices are too high ($19.50 for a shrimp roti) and the scene at the long, busy bar is self-consciously bougie–the kind of thing Spike Lee mocked, back when he could laugh at himself. The old reviews the restaurant posts should be dismissed, because too many bland, ostentatious Caribbean restaurants were promoted by New York critics in years past. Negril’s namesake, after all, is a tourist town.

Yet the restaurant really is pretty good. And the prices are fair if you order takeout–it’s the biggest price disparity between a restaurant’s two menus I’ve ever seen ($12.50 for the same shrimp roti, for example). The room and service are undistinguished (15% tips are included on every check), so skipping them is no loss. Appetizers–including par-for-the-course ackee and saltfish ($10.50) and "Calypso Shrimp" ($13.95) that compare to Kloe’s shrimp starter about as well as Jamaica, Queens compares to Jamaica, West Indies–are also weak. But Negril’s entrees are so tasty, I’m wondering if the most cost-efficient way to eat them as often as I’d like to might be to rent a second place within delivery range.

The curry sauce in that roti is a rich, dark yellow, with flavor complex enough to expand your mind and a burn that seems to stoke itself when you’re not looking. With tender goat instead of shrimp, the dish is just as good–and $3 cheaper. Most impressive is Negril’s jerk chicken ($15.50 or $7.95 takeout). Order the white-meat version, and what shows up is a single breast the size of a porterhouse. Who knows where they get it, though a better question might be why, because big pieces of chicken are exceptionally difficult to grill. It takes forever to cook even a regular-sized chicken breast through, so the chances of ending up with medium char on the outside and juicy meat inside are slim.

Negril’s kitchen houses a true master. The inside of my massive breast wasn’t only juicy, it actually tasted of ginger and garlic from a pre-grilling rub. The jerk sauce that ran in the singed crevices of the well-handled meat evidenced the same expert hand. The tough part of a jerk sauce is blending the nutmeg and cinnamon so that they’re neither overwhelmed nor assertive, and at Negril those flavors sing the exact-right harmonic note. This sauce tastes like it could go on French toast–until the burn sets in.

Another must-have at Negril (and the only good reason not to opt for takeout) are the special rum drinks. The bar uses Jamaican overproof and, in many cases, fresh ingredients. Try the dark and stormy ($8.50), made with homemade ginger beer.

Kloe
243 W. 14th St. (betw. 7th & 8th Aves.), 12-255-5563.

Negril
362 W. 23rd St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 212-807-6411.

Rice to Retches

Anything goes when bread is out of style and the toy of the year is a more primitive variation on the yo-yo. Everything’s about marketing, dude! Then summer arrives, and with it dawns awareness of a big problem. You’re competing with ice cream. You’re serving rice pudding.

A couple of the more pliant media outlets have paid lip service to Rice to Riches–the gleaming result of an insane fever dream of an entrepreneurial plot, cooked up by some rich guy. The room suggests a Martian colony’s premier pachinko parlor, as imagined by some rich guy. The product looks like wallpaper paste. The dippy poetic naming strategy, at least, is brilliant: Your serving of neon joint compound can be topped with "Mischief" or "Heaven." I mean, it was brilliant when J. Crew came up with it for their mail-order catalog 20 years ago.

The one smart move was charging $4.50 per "Solo" portion, which, along with the Buck Rogers decor, attracted the trendoids as effectively as a velvet rope. But I’m going on record saying–risky as it is to ever do so–that people just aren’t dumb enough for this particular rich guy’s crazy scheme to work. He plans on opening five more Rice to Riches parlors within three years. I wish the guy the best of luck, even though his chocolate-cherry goop is a thunderously sorry excuse for a chocolate dessert (imagine generic-brand, artificially flavored ice cream, only warm and sort of lumpy). It’s great to know that business plans that hinge on the outlandish forecasting of future developments didn’t go out with the internet gold rush.

Ciao Bella is right around the corner, so it’ll probably be the first to be trampled under the merciless march of progress. Shortly after Rice to Riches drives Häagen Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s out of business, look for rice cakes to become the new pizza. Guess who’ll be in on the ground floor? Yeah, they laughed at the guy who thought of putting pantyhose in plastic eggs and selling them in supermarkets, too, but look at him now, ice cream lovers!

Will you be laughing when the musical truck idles down your street, and your grandchildren are chasing it, shouting with glee, "I scream, you scream, we all scream for rice pudding"?

Rice to Riches
37 Spring St. (betw. Mott and Mulberry Sts.), 212-274-0008.

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 even local goat cheeses are all readily available here, and thanks to Manhattan’s abundant supply of stellar line cooks, the chef needn’t be an artist. You could pull off a little Mediterranean bistro menu with classic bistro prices.

There’s only one likely explanation as to why it isn’t done, and it’s disturbing: people wouldn’t go. New Yorkers are dopey about French cuisine, expressing with their dining habits an anxiety over sophistication that comes off, ironically, nothing short of provincial. The expectation seems to be that a French dinner should be pricey and more-or-less over one’s head. Excepting the top tier, Manhattan French restaurants seem to live and die by how well they live up to that expectation. In other words, craft and value are minuses.

Exhibit A for this argument could be Aix, a newish Provençal place on the Upper West Side. It’s doing great. When I walked in one recent weeknight, with a party of four and no reservation, the hostess looked at me like I’d mentioned the war. She got over it, though, and the wait turned out to be brief. Normal expectations—why would it be necessary to call for a table at Broadway and 88th St.?—had exposed a house secret.

Most of Aix’s entrees are above $25, and appetizers are $9 and up. That puts it in a price category just under Montrachet; dinner at Aix is more expensive than lunch at Chanterelle. Those are places where dining is an experience. Aix, on the other hand, feels like any other Upper West Side restaurant: the kind of room in which a whole lot of upper-middle-class professionals can relax and have a good time they won’t specifically remember. It’s an atmosphere perfect for Rosa Mexicano, where the guy makes guacamole from scratch at your table. Aix gets away with it because it’s crowd-pleasing too, in a perverse way.

We started with pistou. That’s what pesto is called in Nice. Aix’s menu describes it as "vegetable soup with sardine tartar," yet the dish is a bowl of pesto. Tremendously tasty pesto, in fact. It’s good enough to enjoy plain, and it’d complement about a thousand other foods. You wouldn’t think raw sardines would be among them, and you’d be right. But plenty of those were in Aix’s pistou. Raw sardines are fantastic—to eat them is to know how it would feel to devour immortal Poseidon’s very eyeballs. Of course that’s too strong for pesto. Our soup’s flavors competed so fiercely, it came off like some sort of evasive action to confuse the enemy. (Not to bring up the war.)

Crabmeat cannelloni in chili broth, with clams and celery root, also would have been better as a modest soup. Its red sauce tasted of peppers and thyme, and the crabmeat was as sweet and luscious as one could ask for. The noodle it was rolled into was more of a papery crepe. It must have been a presentation thing, or maybe an excuse to use an Italian code name.

A tomato tart with "green basil (specified, apparently, in deference to customers anticipating the purple Thai kind), parmesan coulis, yellow tomato sauce and green olives" turned out to be an open-faced vegetable sandwich on a puffed pastry. The latter was beyond buttery and of perfect texture. The tomatoes were unseasonably potent. But the pair didn’t blend and the rest was garnish.

Shrimp with basil brochette is Aix’s best appetizer. The never-been-frozen jumbos were herb-coated and almost blackened. With this dish, the restaurant’s needlessly supercilious routine plays out safely on the side, in the form of saffron mustard dressing on a radicchio and zucchini salad.

Aix does have the sort of up-and-coming sommelier a casual New York French restaurant should want to employ. He looks very young, but seems the type to work extra hard to make up for that. His list is well-balanced, and his recommendations (including a glass of full-bodied Cote du Luberon, and, from the bottle list, a soft red from Languedoc, Domaine Rimbert, that satisfied our party’s divergent tastes) proved perceptive. He takes his time and wears nice suits. The rest of Aix’s staff busts its collective hump in red smocks.

Our entrees kept pace with the disappointing starters. To be fair, I should stress that the quality of raw materials Aix is working with is rare in any American city. And there’s no obvious shortage of skill in the restaurant’s kitchen. The problem as I see it is that the chef is deliberately perpetrating a charade. That Upper West Siders are happy to play along doesn’t detract from the dishonesty.

Take the chicken, for example. It’s baked with star anise and a touch of honey. The flavoring isn’t subtle at all—every bite of meat tastes of herbal licorice. The chicken’s skin is golden and sticky. What comes on the side is also assertively earthy: a medley of sauteed mushrooms with artichoke and potato. This is all how it should be. It’s what you call a bistro plate. So how does it get to be $24?

Pork loin was a superb cut diminished by a caramel ginger sauce. Though the tender meat was edible, its flavoring was intrusive to the point of wackiness. This is the kind of thing the market demands: pork roasted with Chinese candy. It meets uniformed diners’ qualifications for nouvelle cuisine.

A daurade filet in olive oil was another fine Mediterranean bistro plate, black truffles and all. It came with some tomato gnocchi and cost $28.

Savory roasted lamb was marred by overkill, but not as much as the pork. This time the exquisite meat was left alone. The showpiece was a giant ravioli filled with braised, minced shank meat. Pointless.

A dessert Aix calls provençal salad was the most impressive dish we tried, if only because it exceeded the sum of its ingredients. Its slices of sweet heirloom tomato with honeydew and some candied celery (think sour-patch veggie), served with a scoop of fresh mint sorbet. These combined to elicit a single, unique sensation. I don’t know how provençal it was, but the "salad" conveyed the sort of rustic technology it makes sense to expect from the region.

All of Aix’s appetizers are available in the restaurant’s front bar, which is a busy after-work spot. There are also a couple of entrees that are served only in the bar, among them Aix’s cheeseburger. I never tasted it, but I can say it looked better and better as the night wore on.

Model

Model International Restaurant is a Haitian family joint near Brooklyn College. It draws a mixture of students and Flatbush locals, both of whom seem a bit more inclined to order grilled takeout chicken than to sit down. Top Grill Chicken is the name of the takeout operation—it has its own menu.

Model proper is white-tiled, bright and mirrored, with plastic tablecloths and pop radio playing loud. It’s my experience that many of the best meals in the boroughs are to be had in such tacky, no-frills settings.

We started with acra, which are deep-fried root-vegetable fritters. They tasted like fryer oil. A vegetable plate with creamed spinach and plantains was also sorely lacking. The best thing on the platter was a gargantuan portion of bland, so-called creole rice and beans.

Grillot—nuggets of fried pork—arrived absolutely desiccated. If it’s supposed to be that dry, grillot must take some getting used to. Poisson Gros Sel, billed as fish Model’s style, was better. It was a whole red snapper, steamed and bathed in what the waiter called a white sauce. That turned out to be a lemon/butter deal, only with cloves and some habañero pepper. It held my attention, even though the fish had a tinge of fishy odor, which fresh snapper doesn’t.

You can’t find great neighborhood restaurants without taking bum trips now and again. It’s the part of the process you don’t usually hear about—riding all the way out to the end of a subway line, friends in tow, to try a restaurant that wouldn’t be worth a visit if it were within walking distance.

Before we’d wasted too much appetite at Model, one of my companions abruptly stopped eating and announced his intention to lead us 20 more blocks, this time into Midwood, where we could get pizza at DiFara’s. That place is a true, deep-Brooklyn gem, over-discovered as it is. Eating out isn’t like horseback riding, though. You should never risk more than one spill per day. So to Midwood we trudged. If you know where to get good Haitian, please clue me in.

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 is a couple of blocks away from BAM and the new Viennese place across the street from it, Thomas Beisl.

That’s not out of range for pre-theater traffic, but it’s far enough (especially compared to Beisl) that Scopello will likely need the patronage of locals in order to survive. The menu posted in its window is bound to entice everyone who knows their Italian cuisine. The name of the restaurant is taken from a Sicilian village famous for its old seaside tuna factory, and among the listed offerings are specialties from the island. For a hip-yet-down-to-earth district that really needed an Italian restaurant, Sicilian is a brilliant idea.

But Scopello’s atmosphere is totally out of tune with Ft. Greene. Tables are crammed toward the back of a dining room that’s completely empty up front. Waiters are so focused on emptying wine bottles you’d think they were paid by the refill. Blaring out of the stereo speakers on a recent Saturday night was the Gipsy Kings—1993’s favorite of restaurant managers with no idea what CD to play. One should expect such vibes when dining pre-theater dinner off Times Square; it’s not going to fly among the brownstones, where successful restaurants thrive off regulars.

For Scopello to remain in business, it needs to radically revise its menu, too. The signal of knowledge and quality it broadcasts is egregiously fraudulent. Word is bound to get out. What the restaurant can manage are simple pastas with supermarket ingredients. These, along with a crafty strategy of overpriced appetizers ($8 range) and inexpensive entrees ($12-$17), open the door for a policy of bilking tourists and satisfying locals. It’s workable if the bad dishes can be rendered significantly less insulting.

Our first course wasn’t awful. Potato and eggplant croquettes were reminiscent of the fried snacks sold at Sicilian train stations. A plate of swordfish carpaccio was even better. Beautifully sliced and very slightly cured, the meat came off pure and clean. A salad of greens, blood orange and smoked herring, on the other hand, was marred by overdone, pre-packaged fish. Tipping its hand, Scopello calls this salad "vucciria," after a Palermo market known for its ultrafresh seafood. Our second warning was the caprese salad. Little goes into preparing the dish beyond the selection of its tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, basil and olive oil. When all four are unremarkable, an Italian chef might as well show up at the table to express his contempt in person.

The Scopello special of spinach risotto with shrimp would be substandard for an Italian airline, and can only be described as a lumpy, exceptionally bland failure. Three words from my friend—the unfortunate diner who also took the hit with the caprese salad—sum up the problem with this dish: Fucking Minute Rice.

The sarde a beccafico was another travesty. In Sicily, this is a starter dish made by rolling fresh sardine filets around a stuffing of pine nuts, raisins and breadcrumbs. A quiet wedding of sea and earth, it brings out the breezy sweetness in both. I find it profoundly appetizing, and would have celebrated Scopello’s main-course version had it inspired even a single, fleeting moment of mouth-watering sensation. Instead, I enjoyed a mouth-puncturing. The sardines were unfileted, and, since they were rolled and stuffed, unfiletable. There was no possible forkful devoid of sharply inedible little bones. What little I managed to swallow tasted all wrong, a threat to my warm memories of the dish.

The busboys who cleared our still-full plates didn’t ask if we wanted the leftovers wrapped nor whether something was, perhaps, wrong with them. That’s why it’s a safe bet that Scopello will die young. It apparently doesn’t even imagine that it might need to improve.

Maybe they should put the bartendress in charge. She recommended we try the ravioli, and it was the closest thing to decent that graced our table. The noodle was passably firm, and the squash inside tasty. Adorning the ravioli was a sage-butter sauce that seemed to have been cooked by someone with kitchen experience.

The pasta alla norma (with fried eggplant and salted ricotta) didn’t inspire outrage either. In fact, if a suburban friend who’d just taken up Southern-Italian cooking had you over and served you pasta like this, you’d congratulate him or her on a job well done. After all, not everyone has access to farmer’s markets and import items. Or talent.

Scopello, 63 Lafayette Ave. (betw. Fulton St. & South Elliot Pl.), Brooklyn, 718-852-1100

Salt

Given the above, it should come as little surprise that I sometimes have trouble getting friends to join me for research meals. They’re excited by the prospect the first time, sure, but who can blame a pal for refusing to repeatedly follow you into a slap in the face? To keep my companions on board, I let them lead me sometimes.

That’s how I ended up at Salt, the Soho bistro favorably reviewed in a Times "$25 and Under" column a couple weeks ago. My friend Shawn had no patience for my objections—"They review places you just covered all the time," he countered—but he had enough patience for the long wait you’ll find at every restaurant reviewed favorably by the Times.

The room’s singular feature is an overhead wine rack that runs the whole width of the place. It’s no-frills for Soho, but I’ve seen enough mirrors and old photographs lately anyway. The other design feature of note is equally efficient: in the place of wobbly little banquette tables along the sides, Salt has long, communal slabs. By sacrificing the illusion that your party has its own space, the restaurant provides a sturdier surface with more room for food and drink.

Check out these fancy-sounding appetizers: carmelized onion risotto, red wine reduction ($8.50); wild mushroom bread pudding, saffron-truffle emulsion ($9.50). Thankfully, neither dish, in reality, was quite as pretentious as its description. The risotto was a creamy essence of onion and grain, while the "pudding" turned out to be the most savory Thanksgiving stuffing I’ve ever had the pleasure of gobbling. We also had steamed shrimp and crabmeat dumplings ($9), which might have been superb—if only they’d made it to our table still steaming.

The entree page is split into two sections, one for chef entrees (with chef-chosen sides) and protein 2 (you pick two sides from a list of options). Not everything goes with everything else, we found, and the quick, polite staff doesn’t offer guidance. Our whole roasted dorade ($19.50), though perfectly supple, fresh and moist in its balsamic reduction, tasted a little too sugared by the butternut squash puree underneath it. Sauteed eggplant with roasted garlic was another true note in that dissonant chord. Some quieter complements for the assertive whitefish—say, braised baby autumn vegetables and Yukon Gold potato puree—might have been better choices.

With roasted organic chicken breast au jus ($15.50), we opted for brussels sprouts and pearl barley. This time, the entire plate was smashing. The chicken’s skin was crisp, its meat a potent reminder that when it’s not factory farmed, this bird actually has flavor. Marble-sized sprouts dense with tender leaves and barley redolent of harvest time balanced the dish while maintaining a consistency of springy texture.

From the chef side, we tried the roasted salmon filet with chorizo, asparagus and wild mushroom fricassee ($18.50). This was another excellent piece of fish that was pleasingly candied on the topside. The vegetables made the grade as well, but the dish didn’t quite triumph altogether, owing to some bullying on the part of the chorizo: even the asparagus, down to the last segment, tasted of spicy sausage.

Salt isn’t a bargain, though its prices are fair. Its menu is like its communal banquette set-up: what looks gimmicky and irritating is actually serviceably innovative. I’ll be back to find out if the squash goes better with grilled portobellos and a Newport steak ($20.50), and whether or not the chef makes music with New Zealand lamb shank, merguez, white beans and spinach ($20.50).

Next time, though, I’ll skip dessert. The pecan tart was too dry to be fairly classified in the pie family—it was more of a brittle—and the chocolate bread pudding was no better—it resembled an overbaked breakfast muffin. Shawn, who loves bread pudding and was excited by Eric Asimov’s (somewhat backhanded) praise for Salt’s, was crushed. It was his own fault for trusting a reviewer.

Salt, 58 Macdougal St. (betw. Prince & Houston Sts.), 212-674-4968

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 of a food factory. The room is long and narrow, and bare, brick walls make for a loud space. The lighting was definitely a professional job, maybe to remind tourists they’re still in Manhattan, or perhaps to assure Manhattanites that they’re not slumming.

The floor staff is mostly Latino, but only the chef is Cuban. The menu comes complete with original ideas like the paella bar–a build-your-own option–and pressed sandwiches. One might suppose that Havana Central is a franchise, and that this New York location is the latest expansion from a model that has succeeded elsewhere, like Florida. They also sell t-shirts and caps, contributing to the feel of a brand-building campaign. But that’s wrong. This place, with its mostly cheap prices, sporadically tasty meals and industrial feeling, is all ours.

Try the Cuban barbecued ribs ($12.50-$16.50), which come slathered in mango-ginger-habañero sauce. (Curiously, this worthy sauce is also available for purchase, despite being excused from duty as a tabletop condiment.) The meaty ribs are expertly charred, balancing the fruity sauce with a bitter bite.

Another winner is the Cuban sandwich, a bargain at $6.95. While not assembled with the loving touch of a humble little Cuban cafe, it’s easier to handle than what you’d get at one of those. A precision-grade sandwich press makes for sharp corners and evenly browned and crunchy toast, under which swiss cheese and mustard are melted just right. Smoked ham dominates the flavor, while abundant slices of roast pork provide the heft underneath. Think of it as the Cuban-American answer to a New York-style pizza-with-everything.

For a buck or two more, you can try a pressed chicken, turkey or steak-and-onions sandwich that comes with a side of sweet potato fries sliced thin enough to effectively bypass the limp orange-fry problem.

Much in the way that the Goya table sauce is at the top end of the packaged-food spectrum, so is the plate of empanadas ($5.75), which tasted a bit like tv-dinner pot pies. The chicken sofrito is the choice: it edges out the taco-ish beef picadillo and a broccoli-and-cheese with fresh broccoli.

The restaurant appears to go out of its way for vegetarians by flagging meatless options, but actually little effort is put forth. A vegetarian sampler plate ($7.95) has some decent eggplant and zucchini, but not all of the "fire-roasted" items were cooked all the way through. Why "fire-roast" when you have a grill onto which you can ostensibly place delicious vegetables? Because said grill was full of ribs, no doubt. Also, our waitress didn’t bring a promised side of mango-pineapple slaw. Once we reminded her, it became clear she’d been trying to save us from the bottom of the slaw barrel.

Also steer clear of the arroz con pollo ($7.95). The chicken was dry, and the beans and rice sub-par. And our special entree of red snapper in wine and herb sauce ($16.95) confirmed that Havana Central is the type of restaurant that must be used correctly. The snapper’s sauce was muscular, and served only to mask the fish, which I suspect was the special only because the kitchen needed to get rid of it. Not an unusual tactic for Saturday night in a tourist district, but still inexcusable.

The pitcher of champagne sangria ($26) drew no complaints. There are also port, shiraz, Spanish red, Spanish white and rose varieties that come without the piles of fruit. (If you like your sangrias like that, try the premier versions available at the East Village tapas restaurant Alphabet Kitchen.) Along those lines, the "classic" mojito ($7.95) was tasty and struck a harmonious chord, despite a glaring lack of fresh, muddled mint. At the very least, every specialty drink comes with a stalk of juicy sugarcane.

The most clever part of Havana Central’s packaging is undoubtedly the location: It faces no direct competition from other quick, real and reasonable restaurants. Even accounting for the two or three misfires, Havana Central offers 10 times the value found along the nearby Park Ave. South slop strip.

Uncle Nick’s Ouzaria

Up in the true land of the quick, real and reasonable, the corporate atmosphere of Havana Central isn’t even an option. Judging from a recent experience, it must be hard to dine on 9th Ave. in Hell’s Kitchen and not be served by the owner of the restaurant. Of course, there are a few little empires growing up here.

One is Uncle Nick’s, whose fare was voted "Best Greek Food" by New York Press readers in our 2001 poll. The cozy sit-down place for grilled fish and meats in the $15-entree range has since expanded into the more casual Ouzaria next door.

The newer restaurant is primarily a bar with some food available–mostly tapas-like plates and combo platters of dishes from Uncle Nick’s proper. Regulars will be pleased to learn that the popular stunt dish of flaming cheese makes appearances in the Ouzaria regularly, singeing eyebrows while waiters shout "Opa!"

Since I wanted to remember what my dinner tasted like–and I was with a friend discussing the war–I decided to skip the ouzo. We instead stuck to Greek lager, which tastes suspiciously like every other beer from every other country I’d never had a beer from before. They’re probably all coming out of the same basement brewery in Istanbul.

For $7.95, the Ouzaria serves hot pita with all four of Uncle Nick’s Greek dips. Melitzanosalata earned the most dips by far, thanks to robust eggplant and a mysterious herbal seasoning. The fish-roe taramosalata wasn’t as fluffy as fresh-whipped mayo like it’s supposed to be, but it tasted fine. As did the garlic-potato skordalia, which was a little too cold. Tangy, refreshing tzatziki was second best, portending more yogurt delights to come. The pitas themselves were fantastic, lent a minutes-from-the-oven crispness courtesy of Uncle Nick’s grill.

And about that grill. I’m of the opinion that grilling and serving whole, fresh fish isn’t a big deal, as evidenced by countless villages and cities on the Mediterranean that do it every day. New York, too, is a seaside town, but every place that grills whole fresh fish here makes a big deal of it. They add fancy sides or sauces and charge upwards of $14.95. I had hoped that Uncle Nick’s Ouzaria, unpretentious as the place is, would buck this trend, but it’s no different.

At least the cooks know what they’re doing. You could do much worse than the grilled zucchini and eggplant that come on the Ouzaria’s overflowing assorted tapas platter ($19.95). The strips of chicken breast were crisscrossed with grill marks yet remained juicy, but though the butterflied shrimp were beautiful, the little critters had zero flavor. Plentiful chunks of wine-sauteed Greek sausage were the consolation prize, as were the fat green olives.

A vinegary bean salad with full-flavored gigantes and imported feta pushed the quality of the platter toward the high end, while the cold, chewy calamari and sliced black olives–from a can?–brought everything down a notch. An additional plate of grilled octopus ($7.95) was ordered in an attempt to lift our spirits, but it arrived with that unique octo-ability to hold a marinade’s flavor in its tender fat. A couple of pieces were too gummy to consume, which, together with the most toothsome tentacles earned the dish an overall rank of standard.

It’s easy to see why Uncle Nick’s baked desserts are a hit with the hoi polloi: they’re industrial-strength and economy-sized. The baklava ($2.50) approximates the size and mass of a brick. (And it’s about as delicate.) Custard creme wrapped in filo (galacto bouriko, $3) also demonstrates corner-cutting on the pastry, with all the evidence buried in cinnamon and nutmeg.

Given those, yiaourti ($3) was a big surprise. Uncle Nick’s homemade yogurt is as thick as cream cheese, and it was complemented here by a very light, though not-too-subtle, floral honey. This classic combination demonstrated the casual sort of greatness that Greek food should convey. There’s a feeling that you’re experiencing something loved by many for a long time. And that has become very hard to find.

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 then let the intensity dissipate naturally. When the yearning gears up again, it may be for a dish yet untried, or it may be for another taste of an early favorite off that world atlas of a menu. The Blue Ribbon operating system is designed for users who concentrate hard on what they plan to eat next.

Not much for the Soho scene, I didn’t join the cult of Blue Ribbon until they made it to Park Slope. You can’t convince me that the outerborough incarnation is not superior. In Brooklyn, the expansiveness of the founders’ vision has been fully realized. B.R. Brooklyn is a place you can walk into for a cheap and quiet twilight meal one night, and a boisterous after-midnight bistro blowout the next. The room is so festive and the service so gracious that whatever variety of dining experience you want, it’s all but guaranteed. One night, I watched a difficult patron give the Brooklyn host a hard time. The matter was settled within seconds, as if the customer’s bad vibe had been digitally erased.

When an establishment with such a high level of quality control opens a new sushi restaurant, one must try it immediately. The biggest obstacle on the way to Blue Ribbon Sushi Brooklyn is undoubtedly the restaurant next door–it’s tempting to think of B.R. Sushi Brooklyn as just another menu option at B.R. Brooklyn. One might arrive craving raw food and then, at the last minute, change from sweet shrimp and big-eye snapper to oysters and steak tartare. The lure of the older restaurant’s duck, skate wing, matzoh ball soup, shrimp provençal and pu-pu platter could prove overwhelming.

But the newcomer has allure all its own. From the sidewalk, a massive sushi bar appears as the stage, richly colorful and lit for clarity. The rafters are big timbers, as if the decor was inspired by a Japanese mountain lodge. And every table is a wooden booth, so there’s no chance of accidentally bumping elbows with a stranger while partaking of the meditative pleasures of sushi.

The menu is not quite as flabbergasting as the one next door, but it’s close. There are 20 Atlantic and 18 Pacific sushi/sashimi a la carte offerings, plus one filet mignon and one lamb, and all 40 can be used in the maki or hand rolls. They’re priced to compete with other Park Slope sushi joints, as are the sushi and sashimi platters ($11.75 to $27.50). The special-rolls menu ripples with the deluxe: an inside-out California roll with king crab ($14.50), a spicy scallop roll with smelt roe ($6.50) and the Blue Ribbon Roll, which contains half a lobster, shiso and black caviar ($16.75).

The sake and appetizer lists also stretch from staples to extravaganzas. Unfortunately, the only choice for hot sake is the house, Ozeki, which isn’t superb. Some of the starters seem to be alternative preparations of delicacies from the sushi menu. Many others–including grated mountain yam with tuna ($15.50), peppered lamb with red miso and soy sauce ($8.75) and a salad of broiled wild mushrooms with tamari butter ($8.75)–demand return trips. The night of my first visit, devoting limited resources to fancy appetizers was out of the question due to the specials menu, a bountiful list of more than a dozen more sushi/sashimi options. Several fall into the must-be-ordered-whenever-available category.

We started simply: oshitashi horenso, miso soup and shrimp shumai. The cold spinach ($3.75) was exquisite, delicately presented and seasoned. The homemade dumplings were better than dim sum fare, but no threat to New York’s best (which are served at the East Village noodle shop Soba-Ya). The soup–at $3.50, the cheapest of seven miso and/or seafood soup options–is served with bonito broth and miso paste separate, which affords a rare opportunity to sample the base of this deceptively complex dish. As much as I appreciated that, a standard $1.50 instant miso would’ve been more Blue Ribbon of them.

For the sushiphobic, there are six cooked entrees, four steamed (salmon with shiso, red snapper with plum wine, lobster with miso butter or yellowtail with eel sauce) and two broiled (eel with rice and pickles or filet mignon with enoki mushrooms), all between $19 and $25.

And now, sushiphiles, here comes the good word. The Blue Ribbon roll is fantastic. The caviar on each cut piece is the perfect complement to the chunk of lobster meat inside, and Blue Ribbon Sushi’s rice conducts the duet professionally. While the rice is dryer and harder than any other I’ve had, it gives against the teeth much like a fresh pasta. With the juicier sushi pieces, including a yellowtail that gushed some kind of Neptunian spring water, the effect was devastating.

The spicy lobster roll ($8) proves a worthy retake on the spicy-tuna-roll idea. The tuna, on the other hand, wasn’t in the top tier when I visited. The texture was on but the taste weak, and it was served a little too cold. In any sushi restaurant, the quality of a given fish will vary from week to week, if not from day to day, and these variances are more acute when the fish is shipped in from far and wide. Disappointing as the cold tuna was (and it was hardly that), there was at least a suggestion of due care. When sushi seafood isn’t caught on the same day that it’s served, that’s often the most one can expect.

A word about the service: My table had a lot of menu questions at the outset, and it wasn’t entirely clear that our waiter, not a native English speaker, was up for answering them. He was quickly and smoothly replaced by the floor captain, who provided typically superb Blue Ribbon. service. If you have trouble, ask for her.

Annoyingly, the menu doesn’t include a sashimi appetizer plate of the day. Experienced sushi diners usually order one in order to learn which fish are especially good. To get the chef’s selections at B.R.S.B., one must recruit at least one partner to chip in for a "Toshi’s Choice" entree platter, which starts at $75 for two. Recruit I did, and neither of us regretted taking the plunge.

We spotted Toshi with our platter on that stage of a sushi bar long before it got to our table. His decoration was an arching red snapper tail planted in an abalone shell, held up by a foundation of tuna sashimi and daikon radish. Like most Americans considering Japanese food presentation, I find some of the more elaborate efforts plainly bizarre. But this looked great. Heads turned as it moved across the room.

I counted approximately 16 nigiri sushi pieces and 18 sashimi. Best were an extremely clean hamachi, a sextet of broiled eel sushi that will make the packaged-eel standard unpalatable for months to come, two pieces of gorgeously marbled blue-fin tuna belly (o-toro, a special) and–the biggest surprise–stellar sardine sushi. I love sardines in any form, and these were so quietly beautiful that it was like realizing your lover looks sexier in flannel pajamas than dolled up for a ball.

The cut-up double serving of orange clam (another special) arranged on a lemon wedge was also extremely satisfying, as was the live sea urchin on the half-shell. The spiky uni (also a special, though there’s sea urchin on the regular menu as well) was from Maine, powerfully briny though not of the taste-it-for-a-week magnitude.

The unspectacular pieces were still very good. Arctic char is a firm, lusciously oily sushi fish that need not be overshadowed by its cousin salmon–our plate was none the worse for including both. Smoked yellowtail was prepared in-house with an appropriately light hand. Sea bass sashimi was as tender as that great fish can be in raw form. Spicy crab sushi and tilefish sashimi were fine, but if I’d been less discombobulated when ordering, I’d have suggested (as Toshi’s Choice customers are invited to do) some favorites that I didn’t want to leave without trying. Among these was bonito, a salty critter common on Pacific shores but hard to find around here. It was on B.R.S.B.’s special menu for only $3.25. I’ll be going back very soon.

My party finished with another rarity from the specials list: ankimo, or monkfish liver. Most fans of this gooey, mouth-coating delicacy had to try it a few times before they came to love it, as it has a peculiar taste somewhere between calves liver and tuna fat that can be a bit frightening in its longevity. Confident that the ankimo would be good, we opted to find dessert on the way home, and rode out of the restaurant on an oceanic protein high.

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 in the middle. That last is an authentic Southern Italian touch. Or, it would be, were patrons allowed to eat pizza at the stand-up tables, but they’re not.

Once you sit down it’s hard to resist the wine list, which takes up three of Otto’s menu’s four pages. Even the beer selection points one to it. There are (so far) no bottled beers, and only two draft options, both specially made for Otto by the lackluster Brooklyn Brewery. The table rule I can accept as a business necessity, but the unavailability of a dry Italian lager had me thinking before I’d even seen a pie that despite Otto’s parlor-competitive pizza prices, Batali had gone too 5th Ave. and not enough Naples.

For appetizers we tried a plate of assorted meats ($21) and the bruschetta of the day ($6), which was called otto lardo. Naturally it was bacon on toast, and quite good. The meats also evidenced our celebrity chef’s passion for the rustic side of pork. Head meat cooked with oranges (testa) didn’t go over very well, but some aged coppa and fennel salami were delightful. The plate had only small tastes of those but plenty of Otto’s comparatively young prosciutto di Parma. It’s high-quality stuff, rich but not too powerful for consumption without wine or fruit. As imported prosciuttos go, I’d rate it a seven.

There’s a nice long list of pizzas, with all manner of topping strategies represented. For this maiden voyage my party tried two simple ones: the bianco ($7) and the Napoletana ($10). In both cases the crust was cracker-thin and tasteless. With the bianco it didn’t matter, because all that one has on it is olive oil and salt–which is to say it comes off as something meant to be less eventful than pizza. On those terms it was a knockout, because the stupendous oil had us smelling warm Mediterranean breezes on literally the coldest day of the year so far. Supporting the Naples-style pie, though, Otto’s quesadilla-esque crust incited yearning for the charred, crisp-yet-chewy stuff you get at Grimaldi’s or Lombardi’s. The tomato sauce showed serious promise, but it didn’t taste right on the Napoletana because its (otherwise excellent) anchovies had been soaked in vinegar. That’s just wrong. What the fish are supposed to bring to this pizza’s sweetly acidic tomatoes is unadulterated ocean salt.

For dessert we tried two more traditional specialties. Pecorino came with an astonishing chestnut honey, but its beauty overpowered the cheese, precluding an harmonious union. A sample of Otto’s gelato (made daily in-house) revealed it to be the major triumph of the restaurant so far. Murray Hill’s Il Gelatone came very close, but now Batali will always be the one who nailed it: true Southern Italian ice cream is finally available in New York City. To those who don’t know the experience, the price will be bigger news. He’s charging $7 for two scoops.

Beef Bowl-a-Rama

The mid-90s sushi boom resulted in a supersaturated market, but new Japanese restaurants keep on coming. These days a shabu-shabu barbecue joint or a sake bar is much more likely to show up on any given Manhattan block than is another sushi place. It’s as if making it over the sushi hump has primed the New York palate. Most promising is the arrival of walk-in noodle shops like the West Village’s Ony–where all the food is interesting, inexpensive and fun to eat.

But it looks as if the noodle-stand movement is being usurped. Suddenly, it’s beef-bowl restaurants that have the momentum. It doesn’t quite make sense. Maybe raw corporate power is the explanation.

Last spring’s opening of the first American Yoshinoya, near Times Square, made international business headlines. The chain is a national powerhouse, regularly referred to as the Japanese McDonald’s. It serves meal-sized portions of beef and rice (or chicken and rice, or beef and chicken and rice, or vegetables and rice) in styrofoam bowls for $3.79.

The Times Square Yoshinoya is bright enough but not sleek enough to convey Tokyo. There’s a mod decoration involving fake bamboo that takes up the center swath of the room. Without a setting of economical Japanese elegance to make it seem like exactly enough, the restaurant’s fare comes off as very little indeed. The beef might as well be strips of fatty Steak-Ums, and its thin teriyaki-ish sauce only barely seasons the otherwise tasteless rice. The veggie bowl sports a thoroughly off-putting carrot, broccoli and cauliflower medley.

The upside is that in every bowl served, the rice is glutinous and very hot. The promise of such warm and sticky sustenance is probably what keeps Yoshinoya regulars coming back. Much science must have gone into getting it to come out exactly that way every time. They’re not exactly lining up at the Times Square Yoshinoya, but most nights it’s full of all kinds of Asian Americans and tourists.

Meanwhile, down in Herald Square, a new competitor is trying a different model. At Don Don Ya, the bowls cost a dollar more. The place has the clean lines and relative silence New Yorkers have come to expect of modest Japanese restaurants. This one offers the staple sushi pieces and rolls in addition to rice bowls, including salmon, eel and shrimp tempura as well as beef and/or chicken. The bowls themselves are of a higher grade of styrofoam.

Don Don Ya’s leaner beef is still factory-processed rump roast. And though thicker than Yoshinoya’s, the sauces here, too, are little more than soy with sugar. But the salmon filet, accompanied by some steamed fresh broccoli, made for a nice light meal. Even Don Don Ya’s beef ’n’ rice made it easier to see how the dish can be the Japanese hamburger. If Yoshinoya’s is the equivalent of a Quarter Pounder, this is a standard pub burger.

If rice-bowl places are going to make it in this town as more than an adjunct of sushi restaurants, though, they’re going to have be very aware of their local competition: takeout Chinese. A minority of office workers might find that Don Don Ya makes for a nice lunch alternative now and then, as does sushi. A soba stand serves meals hardly more exotic and arguably tastier than its Hong Kong-style competition. Yoshinoya, with its proud branding and elemental menu, has picked a tougher row to hoe. They’re going to need more goopy sauce colors, more spices and some pork if they want even a prayer of muscling in on the Hunan Dynasty.

The Real Munchies Paradise

I was going to follow the above with a few words about Hong Kong-based Aji Ichiban, the Chinese and Japanese chain that’s been popping up downtown, billing itself as "Munchies Paradise." There’s one on Mott St. just outside Canal St. Station, and another on the hip stretch of Lafayette St. They sell dried fruits and candies by the pound. The cool part is that there are lot of items you don’t see every day in America, such as dried squid treats. And in front of every big jar of Aji Ichiban product is a dish of samples for tasting. You can have a blast in there.

But you probably won’t want to return again and again. And catering a party with Aji Ichiban snacks is nothing a New York host would want to do more than once. No, our real Munchies Paradise is Sahadi Importing of Brooklyn. For its selection, prices and quality, there is no better place to load up on handfuls of good stuff. The 55-year-old store is far from secret–it’s a zoo on Saturdays–yet I’m of the opinion that more people need to know about Sahadi’s. Maybe with more business it can grow into one more room and have its own bakery. And some Sunday hours would be nice.

The nuts section alone is mind-blowing. You look at it and sense that all your life, your experience of nuts has been needlessly empty and unsatisfying. A taste of cinnamon-coated almonds can confirm this. A pound of Sahadi’s remarkably flavorful salted cashews is only $5. There are nuts and dried fruits from Iran, Turkey and all over the Arab Middle East–you can even get dates on the vine. The halvas, brittles and nut-paste loafs are a whole other thing to get into.

The prepared-foods counter features fine samosas and spanikopita, an array of Middle Eastern salads, curry couscous and delicious garlic hummus for only $2.75 per pound. There’s lamejun (seasoned beef and tomatoes on pita, a Lebanese favorite) and desserts from a bakery in Ridgefield Park, NJ, that must be quite an establishment itself. Sahadi’s cheese section includes feta from France, Greece, Bulgaria and the U.S., and there’re tons of amazing olives. The rest is spices, coffees, specialty teas, legumes and grains, locally baked pitas, breads and sweets and lots of imported packaged goods. When it comes to dealing in what people actually want, no Far Eastern (or strictly Western) merchant can mess with the Middle.

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. A true neighborhood restaurant tumbles with the times and keeps its balance.

The mainstream of diners took a plunge with Northeastern suburbia. It started when the men who built the region’s Acropolises and Academies retired. Suddenly a stranger appeared at the register. The next to go was often the Garden State Brickface and Stucco exterior. A late-80s remodeling wave swept away the jukeboxes and the oil paintings of Athens, replacing them with mauve-upholstered booths and walls vertically striped with useless mirrors. The prices jumped to $9.50 for a club sandwich. From Maryland to Maine, it was a hive mind gone mad. Today, Greek diners are for travelers, divorced dads exercising visitation rights and, late on Friday and Saturday nights, the sort of high school students who receive cars for their driving-age birthdays.

The scene in New York City was similar though not quite as depressing, if only because the severity of money pressure here precludes such an excruciatingly gradual demise. Here, restaurateurs who had fed neighborhoods held on until the Roaring 90s before selling out to absentee owners (or getting forced out by Starbuckses and Gaps). The new wave of coffee shops flaunted "style," which is to say they lacked the menu diversity, atmospheric serenity and respect for breakfast of a proper diner. Any that happened to serve decent food, no matter how quietly, ended up overrun. People from far and wide are starving for neighborhood restaurants.

I’m not here to tell you that there’s a revival of neighborhood restaurants going on in Brooklyn. That’s something I would dutifully report if I worked for a publication that primarily serves non-New Yorkers, such as The New York Times. At the risk of flattering the reader, allow me to suggest that you know about the revival, and that you’ve been to several of the restaurants that would be included in a Times roundup on it. What I hope will be news to you is that one neo-diner, which would probably be omitted or mentioned only as a minor instance of the trend, is actually its culmination.

Hope & Anchor of Red Hook is a place one can comfortably eat at five times per week.

Of course, one is unlikely to do that if one doesn’t reside in Red Hook. That might be part of the restaurant’s success. Even more impressive, however, are the odds against someone who doesn’t reside in Red Hook entering Hope & Anchor even once. Of course strangers who show up are treated hospitably. Red Hook is still the city, even though certain twists of human and natural geography have made it an enclave. The key is the effect of enclave status on a new diner’s simulation of classic neighborhood-restaurant reliability. When whatever arrives from beyond the borders is noticeably foreign, that which proves to fit inside those borders is automatically woven into the fabric of society. That’s why even though Hope & Anchor opened in June, it leads a movement begun much earlier in Williamsburg, DUMBO and Cobble Hill. There’s just nothing special about choosing to be in those places.

Hope & Anchor’s setting is its anchor. Next come the same staples as its inferiors in more restless Brooklyn neighborhoods. Breakfast all day, featuring cinnamon French toast, buttermilk pancakes, tofu scrambles, eggs, chorizo hash, hot oatmeal and Kellogg’s cereal. Burgers, tuna melt, a club sandwich, veggie pitas, grilled cheese and the BLT. All of the above are $6 or under. Snacks are also traditional: hot wings, pierogies, fried squid. The salads and entrees are more innovative.

Trying the liver at Hope & Anchor just to be zany and enjoying it very much–that’s special. The menu says the bacon-and-onions-garnished dinner entree ($9) is balsamic-glazed and from a calf, but my experience was not so gourmet. The liver was like tenderized fatty steak, well-done in butter, and it caused me to feel stronger right away. Mom was right. The bacon proved necessary to offset the organ’s characteristic aftertaste (more of an after-consistency, really), and fortunately there was enough of it to accompany the high pile of liver on my plate. I actually took leftovers home to eat for lunch the next day. The only downside was a careless error: not enough onions.

Hope & Anchor’s owners also started Panino’teca 275, a bar and Italian sandwich shop on Smith St. I praised the older restaurant a few months ago for its pitch-perfect tone of Southern-European slackness. While toasting irons compact Panino’teca’s sandwiches into melted little treats, some subtler mechanism works in the opposite direction, cooling and loosening the day’s hours.

Hope & Anchor is not only American but New English (the name is a Rhode Island motto; one of the owners is from there), so it’s naturally more businesslike than its sibling. Yet once again form follows function. The room plays on nostalgia via such details as a rotating dessert display and a selection of old-fashioned cocktails (try the fine whisky sour), while the decor as a whole aims for a sturdy Brooklyn timelessness. And though the name exemplifies a Generation-X tic–assigning value to the arbitrary–the restaurant’s preservation and reinvention efforts are exacting. Hope & Anchor is a modern neighborhood restaurant, not a throwback.

A selection of plucky American wines introduces the restaurant’s sense of adventure. Every bold move here, though, is balanced by a serving of sentimentality. Did Greek diner owners go through something similar when they put gyros and spanakopita, hotdogs and fried flounder on their menus? You can’t call it pandering if the wistful need is justified. Hope & Anchor’s taste inspires reflection even as it runs toward the crowd-pleasing.

Salads are available come 11 a.m., and dinner is only served after 5 p.m., possibly out of respect for breakfast; few wish to face challenges in the morning. A Cobb ($7) goes for it with blue cheese, tomato, avocado, chicken, bacon and egg. Mixed greens get a lemon dressing. The watercress salad ($6) is flavored with pureed mango and mint leaves, which go together surprisingly well–coming off simple, New Worldly and fresh.

Rhode Island clam cakes ($5) demonstrate the traditional side of the equation–they are lumps of fried dough with not a whole lot of clam chunks inside, precisely like at the boardwalk. I felt no affinity for them, but it hardly could have been clearer that the person who put the item on the menu loves it deeply.

The specialness of choices comes up again at dessert-time. One of my Hope & Anchor dining companions probably resembled the 70s toddler she once was as she devoured an order of chocolate pudding ice-box cake ($5), which is just pudding (quite possibly Jell-o brand) layered with crumpled-up, mushy graham crackers. It was a powerful one-two punch for her. The other dessert options–apple pie a la mode, peach tart, banana cream pie and chocolate layer cake–go for the same effect.

The forward-looking aspect of the neo-diner project manifests in the dinner entrees. That’s the case even with the liver, which must have designed to transcend habitual pessimism. Monkfish with chickpeas, calamari, green olives and soft, spicy chorizo (optional–Hope & Anchor invites special orders on its menu) in tomato broth ($12) had the same light quality as the watercress salad, and tastes as good. Marinated skirt steak with fresh green beans ($10) was tasty and tender. There’s also grilled pork loin with vinegar potatoes and herb salad ($10), mushroom lasagna ($12), gnocchi with sun-dried and fresh tomatoes ($11), herb-roasted chicken ($10) and a seared tuna steak with ham, lemon butter and a potato pancake ($12). These aren’t tough dishes to do well. The main thing is that they’re done right.

The hope at Hope & Anchor seems to be for creative simplicity. You can eat a three-course meal there and connect the dots from flavor to flavor, mentally drawing what might turn out to be an early ray of some dawning corner-store culture: rustic yet knowing, at times sophisticated but never striving. Everybody wants some of the old thing and some of the new thing. I think Hope & Anchor is an early articulation of an idea our offspring will assume was always part of the country. We’ll know it’s not quite authentic, that it’s a self-conscious construction, maybe only culture at arm’s length. Culture it is, though. A far cry from a Frenchman making cheese from an 800-year-old regional recipe, sure. But a far cry from McDonald’s, as well.

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
there is, that’s my Mormon analogue), I had the means
to find out. Below are slightly edited emails from six of my relatives, all
responding to the question, "What have you learned from your students?"

Students
didn’t teach me about my subject. I knew more than they did or I wouldn’t
be much of a teacher. My greater knowledge base was a function of my being older
and better educated–not necessarily smarter. Rather, students raised the
issues, the questions, the challenges that kept me growing intellectually, right
up to the end. What I miss most about teaching is the daily intellectual engagement.

In my next-to-last
year, I was teaching "Principles of Foreign Policy." The course was
based on a game simulation I had invented. We were exploring the Middle East
problem (which was much less of a problem than it is now) when I discovered
that one of my students was Palestinian. She rejected, out of hand, everything
I had to say. She forced me to confront my own knowledge base and prejudices
so that I could be fair in dealing with hers.

I already
knew more about the Vietnam War, Indo-China, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and
Ngo Dinh Diem than anyone else I know, because I had to learn about them when
my students demanded that I teach them the facts as I understood them. The specifics
changed, but the intellectual engagement remained.

The most
obvious way I learn from summer school students is through their unconscious
revelations of their cultural backgrounds. They are easily read barometers.
When I asked my summer sex-ed class to write a journal entry about why people
have sex, more than half of the class included "to make money" in
their first few responses.

I believe
that the origin of the cliche about learning from students is Pirkei Avot
("Chapters of the Fathers"), a collection of sayings of the rabbis
of the Talmudic age. The passage goes something like, "I have learned from
my teachers, and more from my colleagues, but most of all from my students."

I find that
students often come up with insights and ideas that are new. The author of the
quote might have spent more time with his students than his teachers. Most Torah
scholars do. When hashing over a story and its meaning, students trained in
the interpretive arts will offer unique and compelling explanations. "Torah"
means, among other things, "teaching." It is said that each person
receives the Torah they need when they examine the stories of the tradition.
It’s easy to see how such a process can teach a teacher much about where
a student is coming from, as well as how to teach more effectively, and about
the complexities of the story itself. I don’t think math and science teachers
get this as often. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if other teachers disagreed
with the statement entirely.

I sometimes
suspect that this old saw is teacherly disingenuousness. Our culture values
teaching and teachers very little, yet teachers are deeply proud of what they
do. To display such pride to the public might seem like arrogance. So teachers
downplay their own power by assuring everyone else that the classroom is a democratic
place, where teachers’ and students’ opinions on any given matter
are equally worthy and valid, and where the learning process is entirely a two-way
street.

Maybe this
represents a concession to postmodern dismissals of "knowledge." Now
I’m as open to poststructuralist critiques of historiography and literary
canon as the next humanities/social-sciences graduate student, but a productive
classroom environment needs a teacher to know more than everyone else in the
room–about everything. My favorite teachers have been enlightened and benevolent
despots. We students may have disagreed on occasion with his or her interpretations,
and we were encouraged to flex those muscles, but in the end, if we respected
the teacher at all, we were mostly sponges. For a good teacher to be swayed
by student opinion was an extraordinary event.

What I do
learn from students is how to be a better teacher. My students often know next
to nothing about American history, but they probably know better than I do what
sort of classroom tactics they find most productive. I’ve given lectures
that have totally energized some students and left others completely cold. How
could I have gotten through to them, too? I ask and learn a tremendous amount
from the ensuing discussions.

For 28 of
the 39 years I spent in the classroom, the annual high point came while teaching
Macbeth to sometimes avid, sometimes reluctant, 11th-graders. I loved
teaching that play for many reasons, not the least of which was that every year
I learned something new from the students. Sometimes it was a different interpretation
of a line, sometimes an indication of how Shakespeare’s ideas are still
relevant today. There was always something I came away with that I didn’t
have before.

One March,
several of my colleagues were planning their retirement for the approaching
June and encouraged me to consider retiring too. I thought about it and heard
all the arguments about why it would be a logical move economically for me.
When the conversation turned to what we were doing in class and I realized that
if I retired I wouldn’t have another opportunity to learn something new
about Macbeth from my students, I burst into tears. So another thing
I learned from my students was that I was not yet ready to retire.

Now that
I am retired, however, I’m loving every minute of it.

The student
body where I teach is diverse in terms of age, ability, ethnicity and socioeconomic
status. In my Abnormal Psychology course students need to write and submit a
weekly journal to demonstrate their understanding of the mental disorders they’re
learning about. Reading these journals, I learn (and relearn) how easy it is
to miss the strengths that can accompany emotional illness. My students cope
with severe mental illness in their families–and even themselves. In any
given semester, more than half of my students are taking psychoactive medication
and many have had psychiatric hospitalizations they write about. Their diagnoses
range all through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
and yet they hold jobs, care for their families, come to school and prepare
for careers in helping others. They prove that strength in coping, "hardiness"–whatever
you want to call it–can outwit misfortune. I’ve learned how well-developed
coping skills can aid us all in tough times and how to avoid focusing on just
what’s "wrong" with a person and see how much may be "right"
with them.

I learn
a lot from my students about Japanese society and culture, and resist the temptation
to take too much class time getting tutored in Japanese language. I depend on
a few of my students for weekly help with translation. I get lots of mail through
the university administration, and because I can hardly read anything written
in official Japanese, I ask my advanced students to tell me during office hours
whether or not each piece of mail is important. If I ask them to tell me the
subject of the mail, that task tends to prove difficult for them, and slow,
so I ask for the subject of only the mails that are maybe important. Almost
always, when I hand over a piece of mail, they consult with at least one other
student before deciding, "It is maybe not important." One of my colleagues
told me she files away every single piece of her junk mail from the administration,
out of a sense of duty. But I file each unimportant piece of mail directly into
my trash can, which makes my students giggle.

My students’
distance from my culture helps me gain fresh insight on it. One student asked
whether "Against the Wind" is a happy or unhappy song. Hmm. I had
the class debate it. Afterward, I lectured about how that mixed, nostalgic tone
was an important theme of Bob Seger’s songs, including that ubiquitous
tv commercial for a pickup truck that uses "Like a Rock." Bob Seger’s
rock ’n’ roll nostalgia–"I was strong as I could be!…
Nothin’ ever got to me!"–fit and fed American nostalgia
for some version of the nation’s own lost youth.