Hot-Chocolate Frenzy in Flatiron; Know You’re Eating Sperm in MidtownAstoria: Sunswick is having an Abitas beer promotion on Sunday with drink specials, but if you’re less concerned about game day, you could check out the renovation at Il Bambino. [Joey in Astoria]
Carroll Gardens: Naturally Delicious caterers, who also did this blogger’s wedding, will deliver a V-Day menu that includes baked oysters, lobster bisque, tenderloin, a cheese plate, and a Valrhona flourless chocolate cake to those who want to stay in but aren’t able to whip up our sexy stash of recipes. [A Brooklyn Life]
Flatiron: City Bakery kicks off its monthlong hot-chocolate festival tomorrow, which highlights rotating “additional flavors, from Caramel or Banana Peel to the Chili Pepper or even Beer varieties.” [Restaurant Girl]
Midtown East: If you show up at Sakae Sushi and find that it’s closed for a couple of days, you can stop into nearby Yakitori East on 44th Street. Just remember: The winter specialty shirako that their menu dubs as “soft cod roe” is “rather beige globules of sperm sacs.” [Gothamist] On February 12, eliminate “menstrual and sexual health concerns” through food at D’Or; let’s hope there’s chocolate involved. [Love Your Femme via Gridskipper]
Union Square: Mesa Grill impresario Bobby Flay just got back from Greece and would fly there again for all that “delicious Greek olive oil and some lemon and some potatoes and Greek salad,” but if he would just stay in New York, maybe Mesa Grill would have been able to hold on to more of its stars. [Diner’s Journal/NYT]
NewsFeed
Breaking: Did the ‘Times’ Review Bury Mesa Grill’s GM?We’re hearing a rumor that Mesa Grill GM Daryl Swetz has been let go as a result today’s Times review, which downgraded the restaurant to one star. We’re wondering whether the server who flippantly told Frank Bruni that the sixteen-spice-crusted chicken contained “salt, pepper and 14 other spices!” also got the boot. We called Mesa for comment and were kept on hold for fifteen minutes. Sluggish service indeed! We tried calling again and learned that Swetz isn’t in today. We’ll let you know when we hear back from the restaurant. Got other tales of post-Bruni restaurant realignment? Leave them in the comments.
Mesa Grill Review [NYT]
The Other Critics
Mesa Grill Keeps One Star, Barely; Richman Rejuvenated by DovetailMesa Grill loses a star, but this is one of the worst one-star reviews you’ll ever read, even going so far as to compare it to gulag gourmet: “During one dinner the three slivers of chicken in the appetizer tacos were among the most shriveled, desiccated pieces of meat I’ve seen outside a bodega buffet at 3 a.m.” [NYT]
Related: Salute the Gulag Gourmet Movement
Now this is something cheering: Alan Richman found a tablecloth restaurant that got him genuinely excited. Dovetail’s food, he says approvingly, is “exuberant and shocking” — in a good way. [Bloomberg]
Paul Adams hits Cooper Tavern, a not particularly ambitious hotel restaurant recently given a “meh” review by Frank Bruni, and likes it a little better, although the fries are “pathetically poor” and the pork chop is “hardly going to be the talk of the city’s pork chop grapevine.” We can testify that that part is true. [NYS]
Openings
Video Proof: NYC About to Be the City That Has It All
Earlier this week we lamented that you can’t ride a mechanical bull in these parts without first riding the PATH train. That’s fixin’ to change tomorrow, when subterranean Tex-Mex spot Johnny Utah’s opens with a $25,000 mechanical bull front-and-center in a seventeen-foot-diameter ring (the law requires eight feet on each side). The beast, which will have nonfunctional “grazing” and functional “running-of-the-bulls” hours, was custom-built and trucked in from Idaho by a cowboy-writer named Cody, who the owners (also involved in Gin Lane) say is “the bull guy” (visit mechanicalbulls.com if you want your own). “Our mechanical bull is our mascot,” says Bobby Rossi (the mascot, by the way, costs $10,000 per year to insure). “We’re not an adult Chuck E. Cheese.”
NewsFeed
Employees Only Aims for That Forties Feel in Their New RestaurantWord got out on a bulletin board the other day that Employees Only was acquiring the old Marylou’s space on 21 West 9th Street near Sixth Avenue. EO bartender and co-owner Jason Kosmas tells us more: “It’s going to be much more of a restaurant than a bar. Think of the difference between Lucky Strike and Balthazar.”
