Sometimes just getting a meal in Paris can be a titanic battle of wills. Take the steak frites place we tried to go to on a recent night. Though recommended by a seemingly reliable guidebook (plastered on the windows there), it was nearly empty at 9:30. We walked in, walked out to consider our options, [...]

By Parisian standards, La Ferrandaise is a very young bistro. Open only a few years, manned by a chef who has yet to see a gray hair on his head, this spot in St. Germain falls into the same traditional category as venerable institutions that have been open a hundred years or more. Yet it [...]

If Maialino is an Italian restaurant that faithfully renders the classics, Faustina is the opposite: It takes Italian cuisine and turns it on its head. Why serve cannelloni the traditional way when you can break it down and reconstruct it as separate layers of pasta, cheese and fresh tomatoes? And the art of crudi here [...]

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 [...]

If the underground sliver of space that houses Bar Henry hits you with a wave of nostalgia when you step through the door, it’s because it used to house Zinc Bar. Once jammed with students and aging bohemians, clogged with smoke and a tangle of jazz band equipment that you had to step over to [...]

Has there ever been a real Maryland-style seafood restaurant in New York? You can find Philly cheese steak, Southern food, Austrian food, Cuban food, even Malaysian food faster than you can find a decent crab cake in this town. And the attempts of New York chefs to appropriate Maryland seafood are often bungled, such as [...]

The Breslin is a restaurant for people who like to eat. That may sound redundant, but given the lengths to which some restaurants go to accommodate picky eaters (an entrée of “steamed vegetables with boiled egg” at one downtown spot comes to mind), the Breslin embraces food with genuine gusto.

Granted, chef April Bloomfield’s British pub [...]

There may be no second acts in American lives, but there are in the New York restaurant business. Donatella Arpaia, who opened davidburke & donatella with chef David Burke, then Dona, Anthos and Kefi with chef Michael Psilakis, has moved onto act three with Mia Dona, which she recently reopened as a solo project.

As in [...]

When somebody asks you to recommend a “cool new restaurant,” you’re liable to start ticking off names by neighborhood – usually in the Meatpacking District, West Village, Noho, Williamsburg or someplace with similar caché. But it’s time to radically adjust your thinking, because the new hot neighborhood is… the East 50s.

If anyone could reinvigorate formerly [...]

Brinkley’s may be new, but this pubby Nolita spot has an old-school preppy vibe, with Steve Miller Band and the Doobie Brothers playing on the stereo. Outfitted with a huge backlit bar, subway-tiled dining room, and horseshoe-shaped banquettes good for parties of six, Brinkley’s draws a similar bankers-and-ex-debs crowd as Southside downstairs.

Still, there’s a downtown [...]