Sometimes in New York, you don’t always get what you want, or even what you need. At least not right away. Torrisi Italian Specialties is a perfect illustration of this principle, as it is of so many other New York truths: that Little Italy needs a jolt of real Italian and Italian-American cooking; that Billy Joel was pretty slamming in the 70s; and that those little pink-green-yellow striped Italian cookie-cake things you find in ancient Little Italy pastry shops are pretty damn good. When Torrisi first opened, [...]

A fantasy shop for Spanish-food fetishists, Despaña now has some tables in back where you can gorge privately on the Basque tapas laid out marvelously on the counter. Some of my favorites here are the Flautas Castañas,small sandwiches of salchicon sausage, goat cheese, and [...]

Don’t show up late to dinner at Raoul’s. There’s no place to wait—the bar area is cramped and zoolike—and your dinner date will want to kill you. If you get the showing-up-on-time part right, you can’t really go wrong at this sweetly worn-in old French bistro. The crisply seared [...]

Nothing about “vegetarian souvlaki” sounds appealing—unless you’ve tried the sandwich at Snack, Soho’s microscopic Greek restaurant and takeout joint. Big fat Greek butter-beans are doused in rivers of [...]

Café Gitane sums up what’s enchanting about Nolita—and what’s so damned annoying about it. A little café on a side street with deliciously potent coffee; a laid-back, vaguely French-Moroccan [...]