When a friend and I ate lunch recently at Butterfield 8, the restaurant was still in its very first days, so we weren’t expecting an entirely smooth ride. And we didn’t initially feel put out by our server’s many warnings that the restaurant wasn’t up to speed.
No espresso just yet? No problem. Only an abbreviated [...]

A question that a reader recently submitted dovetailed with a complaint I hear frequently from friends and a frustration I share. When most — but not all — members of a party arrive on time for their reservation at a restaurant, why are they sometimes required to wait for the others in the bar or [...]

I love burgers. And I do mean love.
I love them plain. I love them with cheese. I love them especially if that cheese is Swiss, and maybe even more especially if it’s a good Cheddar, and maybe best of all if it’s some kind of blue cheese, so long as that cheese isn’t in the [...]

I’m not sure why, but no Manhattan neighborhood seems to draw precisely the kind of gastronomic scrutiny — the ceaseless naysaying, the tireless cheerleading — that the Upper West Side does.
People are forever itching to declare that the restaurant scene there has finally come of age or, alternately, to pronounce it hopeless. Both camps wildly [...]

A friend who dined at Aquavit on Valentine’s Day had an unhappy surprise. Her check appeared, and the sum was higher than she expected. Looking closely, she noticed that an automatic 20 percent gratuity had been added. And she said she hadn’t been informed that this would happen when she made her reservation, nor did [...]

Several readers said they thought I underrated the restaurant Telepan in a print review last week, and I’m sure there will be ratings in the future that some readers will deem too generous or too stingy.

These divergent opinions undoubtedly reflect the subjectivity of any one person’s experience of a restaurant — or for that matter, a book or movie. They may also reflect how much what happens inside a restaurant, unlike what happens in a book or movie, can change from night to night, even from hour to hour.
One diner may go to a restaurant once and hit it on its best night or happen to order the very best dishes. Another diner may hit the restaurant on its worst night or stumble across an unrepresentative batch of clunkers. I go to restaurants multiple times so I can work my way through the majority of the menu and average out a restaurant’s performances over time.
But I should probably point out that not all star ratings are created equal, a fact perhaps obvious to some readers but not to others.

For example some restaurants barely cross the barrier between one and two stars, while others fall just slightly short of the barrier between two and three stars. All of these restaurants end up with the same two-star rating, even though my degrees of enthusiasm for them may not be precisely the same.

The star rating is a judgment call I make carefully. One more or one less star can affect business, but I have to give readers my honest opinion.

I also hope that the full reviews of these restaurants, as opposed to a necessarily reductive star rating, gives readers a more complete sense of my thoughts and a better idea of whether its a restaurant that they would enjoy.

The morning after a recent visit to the Italian restaurant Il Mulino, I had e-mails from two of my three dining companions.
“I feel so bad for my office mate,” wrote one of them. “It’s oozing out of every opening, every pore, of my body: garlic. I dragged myself to the pool this morning and, while [...]

A reader correctly noted that limitations on what can be ordered are not the only special circumstances that large parties face. At restaurants that otherwise don’t require credit cards to guarantee reservations, large parties will often be asked to provide precisely that.
The reader mentioned Artisanal as one such restaurant. Artisanal isn’t alone. For example [...]

There are nights when even the most committed gourmand cannot wrestle with another Niman Ranch pork chop, ponder yet another panna cotta or hear another server murmur, “Pardon my reach.”
And on one of those nights, not so very long ago, I went to Hooters.
Yes, fellow New Yorkers, we have one here. It’s in midtown, really [...]

Just a few days into this new blogging venture, I’m delighted by, and extremely grateful for, the comments that have been submitted. And I don’t mean the ones that have been complimentary and encouraging (though, yes, those are nice to read). I mean the ones that ask intriguing questions or mention unheralded restaurants or make [...]

Restaurants don’t always mirror real life, and when you dine out, there isn’t strength in numbers. More often, there are restrictions.
An acquaintance complained to me recently about making a reservation for a large party at the new restaurant Del Posto and being informed that members of the party would not be able to order freely [...]

Those of us who write about restaurants lavish more attention on openings than on closings. But there are times when we should pause and take note of a restaurant’s departure, especially when the restaurant has a real, meaningful legacy.
71 Clinton Fresh Food certainly does. Before it opened in 1999, the notion of stylish people [...]

What price brand extension? What cost extra exposure?
These questions came to mind when I ate dinner recently at David Burke at Bloomingdale’s. It’s an attempt by David Burke, an accomplished New York chef, to class up the eating at a department store.
But is the department store instead dragging down the cooking of [...]

I eat out as many as seven nights a week, and there are even nights when I eat out twice, taking full advantage of a visit to a far-flung neighborhood by getting up from dinner in one restaurant to sprint to dinner in another. Some months I take fewer than five nights off, and those [...]

When does conventional confidence bleed into the grander realm of what the Greeks called hubris? Perhaps when a restaurateur (i.e. Stephen Starr) from a smaller, less glamorous culinary environment (i.e. Philadelphia) enters a city with many big, theatrical Japanese restaurants (i.e. Matsuri, Megu, En Japanese Brasserie, Nobu 57) and says that his own entry in [...]