After a few visits to Laut in Union Square, and after plenty of less impressive meals around Chinatown, I'm convinced it's my favorite Malaysian restaurant in Manhattan. More

If Junoon has a mission, it's to show that Indian food is just as deserving of linen napkins, sommeliers, and the fine dining experience as any other. It sticks reasonably close to the classics we recognize: curries, tandoori meats, kebabs, and flatbreads. More avant garde restaurants shove you into something new; Junoon attempts a gentler nudge. The desired effect is a simple one: to have its diners, who may not otherwise give the cuisine a second glance, see what Indian food really tastes like when made with quality ingredients and careful technique. More

Reviews generally start with an introduction, but I'm going to start this one with beef tongue. Because as I sit at my computer it keeps popping into my head, the memory of it, as it has been ever since my visit to Perla last week. Beef tongue with a whisper-thin crust that gives you just the slightest resistance before you get to the impossibly tender meat underneath. Beef tongue that's been in brine for a week before it's braised, then charred. "I can't stop thinking about that beef tongue," confessed the friend I'd brought to dinner the next day, in a conspiratorial tone, over coffee. It does that to you. More

It's hard to imagine a restaurant more eagerly anticipated than The Nomad. Because it's hard to imagine a more celebrated chef than the man behind it, Daniel Humm. The Swiss-born chef has racked up just about every top accolade in the business for his work at Eleven Madison Park: three Michelin stars, four stars in the New York Times, a James Beard award for Best Chef: NYC—the list goes on. Humm and partner Will Guidara purchased Eleven Madison from Danny Meyer last year, and opened NoMad, a more accessible counterpart, last month. Humm tells us that his second restaurant is certainly derived from his work at Eleven Madison, but intentionally brought down to earth; "our food, but maybe not plated with tweezers." More

Whenever you start talking about an up-and-coming neighborhood—particularly one that you live in—you run the risk of over-boosting. Suffice it to say, amongst the new arrivals in the area, there are the good, the bad and the ugly. Even within single establishments, menus can be hit or miss. The 5 and Diamond, a two-year old neighborhood restaurant with high aspirations (Ryan Skeen of Pera, Café Boulud, and Fish Tag helmed the kitchen when it first opened, but no longer has any association with the restaurant), gets many things right, but other things very wrong. More

Plenty of restaurants these days do the rotating menu thing, changing up at least a good portion of their dishes every night. The downside, of course, is that you don't have much time to experiment to get something right. But at Battersby, that didn't seem to be a problem in the slightest. Chefs Joseph Ogrodnek and Walter Stern showed us, on our visit, exactly what we wanted to be eating this first week of April. And not only were they dead right, but they pulled everything off beautifully. More

Did New York need another ingredient-driven Italian restaurant, where the base elements are so good the food practically cooks itself? We didn't think so, until we had a killer meal at Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria, the salumeria-trattoria spin-off of its slightly more formal sister restaurant Il Buco. The real question is: where do you start? More

Those of us who love Danny Meyer's restaurants are accustomed to thinking of him as a man who creates welcoming spaces, with stories and personalities and an intimate sense of place. Restaurants very much tied to their neighborhoods, which you couldn't really pluck up and set down somewhere else. Restaurants you want to be at, not just eat at. That's not quite the case at Meyer's newest, North End Grill; but there are plenty of reasons to make a visit. More

What happens when two young chefs with serious modern cooking chops team up with a young, insightful wine director to open a restaurant in Williamsburg? It could be a recipe for a navel-gazing, ego-stoked disaster. Or it could be Gwynnett St., a delightfully unpretentious—yet thoroughly Brooklyn—restaurant that aspires to be a great neighborhood spot but winds up being much, much more. More

There's obviously a great deal of thought put into this restaurant of Taavo Somer's, with Ignacio Mattos as the chef. And a lot of intentional quirk. The room is inviting and rustic, warmed and perfumed by an enormous wood-burning oven; while the photocopied, garishly colored menu looks like a 'zine cover from 1995. On that menu are dishes that change daily, their names handwritten in descriptions like "sunchoke cream, chestnut, dust." But while some of these wildly creative dishes delivered, others didn't at all. More