You could meet the most gracious person in the world, and if it was five minutes after his car got towed…well, he just wouldn’t be at his best. Take, for instance, The Sun, Moon & Spoon, an ambitious young restaurant in Hastings-on-Hudson. Open just a year and in an unusual location above the Hudson […]
Remember the hair color ad with a gorgeous blonde begging: “don’t hate me because i’m beautiful!”? Somehow that came to mind when Peter X. Kelly, chef/proprietor of four restaurants in southern New York, talked about the downside of his stellar showings in Zagat survey. Last year, only nine restaurants nationally attained scores of 29 […]
In the East Village’s “Curry Chasm,” there are so many Indian restaurants jammed into one block that people joke all the food comes out of one kitchen. And it’s true that there is a remarkable “sameness” to the curries and tandooris. The Bengal Tiger in White Plains serves Indian food of a higher order, […]
Great ingredients, simple preparations, flawless executions. need more? Pound Ridge is another world—a lovely little village with white clapboard churches, stately 19th-century mansions, and the manicured look that comes with money. The jangle of ugly commercial development that has ruined so many American towns has been tightly controlled here. Like Shangri-La, this wealthy community […]
An updated thowback in Hartsdale There is such a thing as reviewer’s bad luck. Say, you’re ordering and the waiter mentions the whole menu is changing the very next night. It’s time to update. Everything’s going! Fortunately, there are a few dishes at Harrys of Hartsdale that the regulars can’t live without. And […]
A Classic Adventure If you don’t know Bronxville, the directions to Sagamore Grille are confusing: “Go around the roundabout, under the train tracks, around another roundabout that circles over the other roundabout, and then…” It took us a few whirls on the roundabout, but we finally circled back to the historic white stucco building in […]
An oenophile’s dream I don’t normally watch Oprah, but she recently hosted Anthony Bourdain, a New York City chef whose memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly exposes some truths about restaurants you might rather not know. (Butter is the chef’s best friend, for instance, and you can easily consume a stick […]
Delicious tradition, from north to south When it comes to ethnic food, Americans want “authenticity” (at least we say we do). The trouble is, we don’t always know what that is. Some food writers, for instance, have spread the notion that there is no such thing as “curry,” that it is a cheapened and stereotypical […]
Prime Quality When was the last time you saw a T-bone steak on a menu? It seems like a glorious excess of the fifties, something people ate in a more optimistic age. We were a big people back then, requiring big cuts of meat. Astronauts needed protein! Times are more restrained now, at […]
