One of the best things about Gramercy’s small Spanish restaurant Casa Mono is that if you’re stuck waiting for your table, you can hit the tapas joint Bar Jamon around the corner for a pre-dinner Iberico ham gorge. And if you [...]

Impossible to be Lebanese and not have cripplingly high expectations of Lebanese restaurants in NYC—partly because there are barely any to speak of. Yours truly, of Beirut extraction, wasn’t too blown away by Ilili when it first opened (the menu seemed a bit too fusion-y), but now chef Philippe Massoud is doing spectacularly authentic, [...]

Chef Floyd Cardoz deserves more fame than NYCs overcrowded celeb-chef ranks seem to have room for. But his true-believers know he’s got some serious chops—evidenced both in the swank upstairs dining room at Tabla, where the menu leans Euro-Indian, and downstairs at the more casual, regional-Indian-inspired Tabla Bread Bar. The Bread Bar is [...]

Before anyone reads any further, it should be said: This is a raw-foods restaurant we’re about to discuss. But don’t stop reading. Most raw-foods restaurants [...]

Ultra-talented chefs Alex Raij and Eder Montero were fired from their previous job at the Spanish spot Tia Pol (where crowds consistently spilled out the door). So what did they do? Open up their own restaurant, Txikito, down the street—and promptly [...]