Tell someone the address of Almond restaurant, and they’re liable to say: “Wasn’t that Borough/Rocco’s/Caviar and Banana/Commune?” The answer is yes, yes, yes and yes. Walking into the space may also make you experience déjà vu all over again, because interior has many of the same elements of its predecessor Borough – the same tables [...]

The Redhead has been playing hard to get for some time now. Though she lives right near by me, every time I stopped by for dinner, she was booked, with waits of an hour or more. Ever since Bruni gave her a star – an honor that many similarly casual spots don’t earn – the [...]

When an upscale chef embarks on a downscale restaurant, does the place get elevated or the chef get knocked down a notch? Tom Valenti is the latest of a number of respected New York chefs to go the casual route, opening the West Branch, a gastro pub to complement his successful Upper West Side restaurant [...]

Dumbo: It used to be the kind of place where women didn’t walk alone at night, artists and musicians got home just as day laborers were waking up, and the only place to eat was Pedro’s, though you wouldn’t necessarily want to eat there, either. The nearest deli was in Brooklyn Heights, and there were [...]

Now that the High Line has opened to the public, the Meatpacking District feels newly revitalized. Can it also be an exciting dining destination again, as it once was before all the restaurants here turned to lowest-common-denominator cuisine: steak, potent cocktails, and faux exotic Asian food? The just-opened Standard Grill may be guilty of trying [...]

Back in the mid-’90s, when investment banking ruled the day, Monkey Bar was the place to see and be seen. There was a certain type of guy who gravitated here – the one who would wear his Brooks Brothers suit and Hermes tie out at 11pm rather than change. But on a recent late night, [...]

Finally! Minetta Tavern is open. Yes, that one, the place that’s been around for 72 years.
Amid all the buzz about Keith McNally’s new venture, there was always one thing that wasn’t clear. Why had he chosen this crusty old place as the next incarnation of McNallyism? If you’ve lived in New York long enough, you [...]

Often it’s the new restaurant right around the corner that you get to last. That’ll be where you just stop in after a movie or a night out with friends, right? Wrong. The highly stylized and buzzed-about Apiary, right around the corner from me, was always fully committed when it opened in mid 2008. But [...]

Sometimes it seems as if the whole of one’s existence—trying new restaurants, admiring retro-modern interiors, sampling overpriced local ingredients, hanging out in the West Village, referring to oneself as “one”—could be summed up as Stuff White People Like. Commerce restaurant in the West Village is no exception. On a recent evening, we witnessed dozens of [...]

It’s hard to be taken seriously with a name like “bobo.” Wharton business major Carlos Suarez found he kept using the word, coined by David Brooks, when describing his plans for a new restaurant. Only a Wharton business major or Mary-Kate Olsen wouldn’t pick up on the inherent insult in a word that means “half [...]