Grub Street

Bobby Flay's returning to the New York scene with Gato, his 2,640-square-foot restaurant on Lafayette Street. The Mediterranean menu, which draws influence from Spain, Italy, France, and Greece, includes dishes like scrambled eggs with almond romesco, lamb-sausage pizza, kale-and-mushroom paella, and charred beef with blue-cheese brown butter. Rockwell Group designed the sprawling space to evoke the feeling of a rural Mediterranean village, and it includes a 12-seat lounge, a 20-seat solid teak-wood bar, and a 117-seat dining room with windows overlooking Crosby Street. Note that Gato is still in the soft-open phase, but there is a limited number of reservations available to the public now. Take a look at the décor, the menu, and a few of the dishes, straight ahead.

Aska, Swedish chef Fredrik Berselius's critically lauded restaurant within Kinfolk Studios, will close after service on March 19. Per the Times, Berselius will do so "to avoid stagnation and to keep challenging himself in the kitchen."

Hollywood restaurant Pink's — known for its chili dogs, as well as its bacon-chili-cheese dogs with chopped tomatoes, as well as its mozzarella-topped Giada de Laurentiis hot dog — is opening a vendor stand within Bristol, Connecticut's Lake Compounce amusement park, where it joins (of course) kiosks and restaurants like Fried Bats, the Croc Pot Cafeteria, and the Funnel Cake Factory.

This week, word spread that Per Se, Thomas Keller's ultra-high-end restaurant, received an excruciating 42 points during its most recent health inspection. It currently has a "grade pending" while the staff addresses the issues and Keller awaits a hearing on the grade. The media loved this story: NBC ran with "Exclusive NYC Restaurant, Per Se, Gets Enough Health Violations for "C" Grade." The Guardian went with the less-accurate "Michelin-starred restaurant Per Se earns 'C' grade from health inspectors." These headlines, and the many others like them, all imply the same thing: Fancy-Ass Restaurant Is Dirty As Hell. But the reality is that as a medium, the confusion between letter grades and violations points has less to do with any immediate threat to diners and more to do with the the health department's inscrutable rules. And the agency's online reports are so opaque that they don't offer diners, or restaurants, any useful information.

Twenty-year-old actress AnnaSophia Robb — the star of The Carrie Diaries and The Way Way Back — has some time off at the moment, which means she can enjoy living in Williamsburg and "catching up on life." But that doesn't mean she's out raging at clubs every night with famous starlets: Robb's life in the city is calm and grounded. She eats grilled-cheese sandwiches at her yoga studio, goes to Chipotle with friends, and stays in to cook with her boyfriend. This week, Robb also found time to attend her first-ever Knicks game and indulge her sweet tooth at One Lucky Duck, Cookshop, and Gramercy Terrace. Read it all in this week's Grub Street Diet.

All your MFA-student friends will no doubt put a fist of joy (or two) through the nearest sheetrock wall once you inform them that writing legend Charles Bukowski is finally getting his own line of commemorative beer. The new project, which will continue throughout the year, originated at Boston's Bukowski Tavern, which is one of several establishments around the world either named for or in honor of the famous author, who liked drinking. (This includes Post Office in Williamsburg, incidentally.)