Suspend your disbelief—at the weirdly non-New York vibe in the dining room, and at the fact that a seriously fantastic restaurant can exist in the Financial District tangle—and you’ll be in for one of the best food experiences to hit the city this year. At SHO [...]

Very rarely does a restaurant start hitting on all cylinders from the moment it opens. But to paraphrase that old ad: With a chef like Andrew Carmellini, it’s got to be good. At Locanda Verde, Italian-food genius Carmellini picks up where he left off at A Voce (which is now in Chicago transplant Missy Robbins’s highly capable hands) with a solid lineup of [...]

Ever since he turned up in NYC, first at the long-defunct Atlas on Central Park South, UK-born chef Paul Liebrandt has been sprouting all kinds of nut-job ideas—and bless him for that. Say what you will about molecular gastronomy and its equally overwrought brethren; it’s healthy to have a cheerfully bonkers streak running through a few of the city’s restaurants. Chicago embraced this long before NYC did. At Corton, Liebrandt may [...]

Matsugen, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s tribute to the soba noodle is—at least in its Tribeca incarnation—a pretty austere affair. The Tokyo branch is a little darker, louder, sexier, but New York City seems to equate soba-eating mostly with [...]

Stone Street, like the Frying Pan in Chelsea, is one of those distinctly non-Manhattan curiosities—without which Manhattan wouldn’t really be Manhattan (you follow?). The restaurants lining the sidewalk all share tables in the middle of the street, and the scene feels more like an enclave in a raucous Eastern European neighborhood. In a good way. (At prime time, though, it’s very Manhattan—in a bad way: Crowds of suits out to get hammered.) Adrienne’s Pizza Bar is one of [...]