This is what one of them told me recently, when I asked him to help me understand why Aldea had become such a hit. “You’re asking me why a restaurant is a success or a failure? Are you kidding me? If I knew that, I’d be rich.”

Talk about a problematic business plan. The chef, George Mendes, was recently labeled a “journeyman” by New York magazine’s website. At Aldea, he enjoys dabbling in cuisine with hints of molecular gastronomy, a style of cooking all but rejected by New Yorkers. Alternately, he prepares upscale Portuguese cuisine, a reflection of his upbringing, and when have you heard of diners clamoring for that? Let me also point out that Aldea is located on a dreary, south-of-midtown-Manhattan street with almost no foot traffic, so anybody who eats there is going to have to seek out the food.

The result, by my reckoning, is one of Manhattan’s best new restaurants. I admire everything about it, except the wine-by-the-glass prices. (They should be a couple dollars less.) I understand perfectly why I feel this way, but I don’t understand why everybody else does. I thought chic New Yorkers wanted to sit at a counter, face a plywood wall, wear flip-flops, and contemplate menu offerings of pork belly and charcuterie. This sure isn’t that—although charcuterie is available, and there are six counter seats facing a vividly lit open kitchen.

I suppose Mendes is technically a bit of a journeyman, but his travels have taken him to the kitchens of David Bouley, Alain Passard, Roger Vergé, Alain Ducasse, and Martín Berasategui. Perhaps it would have been kinder to label him a one-man expeditionary force. He has become a formidable technician whose only weakness might be trying a little too hard—every dish I tried was brilliant in one way or another, sometime in multiple ways, but a few suffered from excess creativeness. Add in very fair prices (no entrée more than $27), charming service, a well-priced wine list (more than a dozen selections at $30 or less), and a stunning design, and you’ve got a restaurant that nobody who cares about restaurants should miss. I’ll add something else: If you’ve never had the slightest interest in Portuguese food, that will change after eating here.

Let me go right to the dish I liked best, his version of Arroz de Pato, rice with duck, a kind of Portuguese paella. (The name isn’t translated on the menu, but, thankfully, most are.) The rice, from a Spanish town called Calasparra, is so expensive that a Brazilian woman eating with me admitted she never used it in her cooking. Mixed in with the rice were two different crunchy elements, duck cracklings and the famous soccarat (pan scrapings), plus duck confit, thin slices of chorizo, and a scattering of olives. Sitting atop the rice was a bonus, a few tender, silky slices of rare duck breast that tasted as though they’d been cooked sous vide, although I was told the technique was slightly different. Two of my friends vehemently declared the rice not al dente enough, which caused me to become irate and explain that every rice dish on earth isn’t required to have the texture of Italian risotto.

Almost as wonderful was an appetizer, shrimp alhinho, whole shrimp that tasted briny-iodiney, as shrimp should. Clinging to them was an intense, reddish sauce that practically glowed, a sauce made from garlic, smoked paprika, and delightfully fishy flavors extracted from the head of the shrimp (the part you’re always told to suck on but don’t want to). I haven’t eaten a great deal of Portuguese food, but I’m convinced that shrimp alhinho couldn’t be better. Continuing with the theme of simplicity is Mendes’s house-cured salt cod, which is fresh cod lightly salted, sautéed, and accompanied by asparagus and morels. There’s not a lot to it and nothing not to love about it. Only slightly fancier is monkfish over caldeirada, in principle a soup, but here a kind of crabmeat stew under the slices of unusually delicate monkfish.

I was fine with Mendes’s occasional use of foams. I had them twice, the first time as a lemon-yuzu froth that nicely lightened up meaty, chewy razor clams, and the second as green-garlic bubbles over peas, a poached egg, and Tennessee bacon—perhaps not the most Portuguese of preparations but a lively and sumptuous dish nonetheless. The only dish I failed to admire was his trickiest effort, a consommé containing a mushroom “ravioli” (his quotation marks). Mendes is attempting to duplicate Ferran Adrià’s celebrated green olive that isn’t a green olive but rather an olive-flavored liquid encased in a delicate shell, an example of spherification or mystification or maybe gremlins at work. Adrià’s fake olive tastes like an olive. Mendes’s fake mushroom does not taste like a mushroom.

His sea urchin on toast isn’t more molecular gastronomy, but it’s plenty inventive—sea urchin, a delicacy, is accompanied by lime, wasabi, and cauliflower cream, and it’s a toss-up whether it survives the onslaught of extras. (I thought not; a friend said I was wrong.) The two of us had the opposite reaction to baby cuttlefish in a coconut-curry soup. She though the coconut dominated; I demurred. Totally impressive are his crispy pigs’ ears—they looked like wontons —in a pot with apple slivers, pickled ramp bulbs, and cumin-yogurt. It sounds like too much, but I have yet to see a pig part that couldn’t take on all comers.

The room itself is a miracle—modern, airy, textured, stylish, sleek, and minimalist. White birch saplings popping out of the wall reminded me of the 3-D books I loved as a kid. The narrow, undersized restaurant space is divided into four distinct rooms—a bar with a somewhat soaring ceiling; a low-ceilinged main dining area that should have felt cramped but was so wonderfully lit it did not; a back room with that bright open kitchen, counter-seating, and a couple more tables; and a small upstairs dining area. Aldea is soothing—something else I thought was no longer of interest to New Yorkers.

Desserts, which I was told were made by Mendes, are surprisingly sophisticated. Most savory chefs preen with pride when they can pull off a baked apple, but he handles sweets extremely well. Sonhos turn out to be Portuguese bombolinis, but these are unusually yeasty and contend for New York’s best mini-donuts, a tough competition. Of the three accompanying sauces, I thought only the hazelnut praline was perfect for donut dipping. When I first tasted his caramelized brioche, I wasn’t certain I admired it, but then I couldn’t stop eating. It’s crusty, crunchy, juicy, and milky, kind of a breakthrough in crumb cake.

Mendes is clearly New York’s breakout chef of the year, comfortable with the oldest of old-world cooking as well as the snazziest of modern techniques. He’s not yet Adrià or Ducasse, but there’s reason to wonder how close he can come.

31 West 17th Street, New York, NY; 212-675-7223; aldearestaurant.com

On the occasions when we got our way, I always ordered the same three items: the grilled knoblewurst, which is a garlicky beef sausage that seems to spend a lifetime on the grill, so tough and hard (and delicious) is the casing. Then, depending on the size of my appetite, next would come either a modest grilled hot dog (natural casing, of course) or a dreadnaught sandwich of hot pastrami (massive, blackened, meltingly soft, and mildly peppery). Everything was just right.

Prices were good, too. Sometimes my father would have a small draught beer. It cost a nickel.

I loved Katz’s, the great restaurant of my childhood. I got a ticket at the door (same as now). I got a glass of water from the self-service dispenser (same as now). I loved the distinct smell—sweet and sour and sweaty, the mingled bouquet of pickle barrels and workingmen. Now, at $14.95 for a pastrami, the clientele seems to be mostly tourists. As far as I can tell, they are odorless.

For the past 50 years or so, nothing changed for me whenever I stopped in. Knoblewurst, hot dog, pastrami. All as excellent as ever. (Well, the rye bread has slipped badly, but that’s a problem endemic to New York, not just to Katz’s.) To me, this was the Great American Restaurant, and I decided that on the occasion of the 4th of July I would give it the attention it really deserved, try to eat everything on its menu, which has expanded significantly over the years. Talk about a feat of biblical proportions.

It’s hard to calculate all that is offered, since a few items come in two sizes—large and larger. Bologna and eggs aren’t even on the menu. More than 60 is a good guess.

I went there four times and got almost a third of the way through my mission before I quit in dismay. I want to give myself credit. I’m not sure another man alive has tried so many of Katz’s offerings, 19 in all. Actually, I’m not sure any man alive has ever eaten so much terrible food. I find it hard to believe the owners have ever eaten what I’ve eaten, or they surely wouldn’t keep serving it. Much of what Katz’s prepares is the worst food for the money in New York. (At $3.10 for a hot dog and $4.50 for cole slaw, it isn’t cheap.)

I have one friend, somewhat of a Katz’s insider, who claimed I was being unfair, because the only food that anybody goes there for is the pastrami. He told me this after I came to the table bearing a chopped liver sandwich—an enormous mound of smooth, bland liver served ungarnished between two slices of bland rye bread, the culinary definition of monotony. Disgusted—at me, not at the restaurant—he said, “We're the only schmucks in here not eating pastrami.” My friend the insider claimed that 90 percent of the sandwiches sold are pastrami (a huge exaggeration, by the way), and that 100 percent of the people who order them are happy. I won’t argue. In fact, I’ll go him one better and say that the mustard is terrific, as good as deli mustard gets, and the pickles are pretty good.

Let me tell you what other sandwiches I tried: Roast beef (pre-sliced, properly rare, tasteless), brisket (soft, flavorful, dry), and tongue (pre-sliced, ice-cold, but rather creamy and flavorful when brought home, gently warmed, and served correctly). The countermen famously give you a taste of whatever meat they are slicing, but you must have the courage of a Golem (a mythical Jewish avenger) to declare it no good and demand they start over with a different chunk of meat.

In addition to the three items I’ve always eaten, I can unequivocally recommend two others. The knockwurst, really a hot dog in jumbo form, was boiled to order, and to me was more luscious than the grilled hot dog, less salty and spicier. And the salami, both the soft and the hard kind, is fine. There’s no shame in the salami, so if you want to follow the advise of the legendary sign hanging from the ceiling of the restaurant (Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army), you can do so without fear that he’ll frag you when he returns home.

The stuffed derma, a kind of Jewish culinary oddity that looks like a sausage but is mostly minced vegetables and seasonings, was microwaved and inedible. An Italian woman with me said, “That’s pansy-ass derma. Our Jewish lawyer, Mr. Klein, always took us to the best kosher restaurants, where the derma was moist and fatty and the skin nice and crisp.”

There are a multitude of knishes available. I planned to sample the square and the round versions of the potato. The square, off the grill, contained almost unseasoned mashed potato inside a chewy, unpleasant casing that didn’t taste like any variety of pastry I’ve come to know. The round version was only available microwaved, so I passed. If you have one microwaved dish at Katz’s, you’ll never try another. The potato pancakes, supposedly made from scratch, tasted pre-made from a packaged mix. They had no discernable potato flavor.

The applesauce and the baked beans tasted canned. The cole slaw was so terrible I couldn’t guess where or how it was made. The matzoh ball soup was freakishly awful, a lukewarm, dark-brown, oniony broth containing a soft, tasteless lump of an inscrutable carbohydrate.

Here’s one semi-breakthrough: The eggs with bologna were only half-bad. The bologna was sliced thin, much too salty and barely warmed. The eggs, cooked pancake-style, the way my grandmother used to make them, might not have been perfect, but they sure tasted good. If you’re interested in knowing what Jews living in pre-WWII shtetls ate, have the eggs. (But pair them with pastrami, salami, or tongue.)

I haven’t mentioned one of the sandwiches until now, because it comes with a request for forgiveness. My mother and my sister used to share a corned beef sandwich whenever my father and I coerced them into eating at Katz’s. The corned beef I had in my sandwich was tough, rubbery, salty, and understeamed. I tried again, this time buying some as takeout, and paying an astounding $23.75 a pound. The texture was more pleasant, but the only discernable flavor continued to be salt.

Spoiled Jewish sons don’t often do this, but I owe my mother and sister an apology for all those meals at Katz’s we put them through.

205 East Houston Street, New York, NY; 212-254-2246; www.katzdeli.com

Whenever I’m wary of restaurants, and I was wary of Andrew Carmellini’s Locanda Verde, I look for dishes that make me nervous. Blue crabs and jalapeños in an Italian restaurant certainly qualifies.

Allow me to clarify.

A few years ago, Carmellini was the chef at Café Boulud, where he cooked French food so brilliantly that many critics, myself included, considered it one of the top three restaurants in New York.

Then he moved to A Voce. I ate there three times and found his Italian food consistently uninspired. (To be fair, most critics loved the place.) Now Carmellini is doing Italian food at Locanda Verde in Tribeca’s Greenwich Hotel. The place is built on the footprint and incorporates many of the furnishings of Ago, which was a short-lived branch of an L.A. restaurant named after Agostino Sciandri, a chef nobody in New York ever heard of and nobody in New York ever cared about. Ago is not a hard act to follow.

Where Ago was rustic, Locanda Verde is shiny—it’s as though the decorators hired a flock of magpies to steal sparkly objects for use as ornamentation. It still has Ago’s pizza oven, where Carmellini cooks his already celebrated chicken for two, and, thankfully, it has a much-improved wine list with notable bargains, especially in Italian whites. Try the silky 2008 Latium Soave, $35, or the remarkably complex and minerally 2007 Contra Soarda Vespaiolo, $45. You might want to go with the selections of the sommelier, Josh Nadel, partly because he’s trustworthy and partly because the wine list is printed in small type, on brown paper, to be read in a dark room, and is therefore nearly indecipherable.

Joining me at dinner was a friend who once lived for 20 years in Rome. I wanted a wise old hand to assist me in figuring out if Carmellini was a talented Italian cook or belonged in the world of souffles and fricassees.

Not until we were seated did she tell me that she wouldn’t be much help. She knew Italian food. That wasn’t the problem. She said she refused to judge food that way because of something she was told by a wise restaurateur long ago. His advice to her: “Food is either up or down. Nothing else counts—doesn’t matter if it’s Italian, Indian, or Swahili. Up or down.”

Supposedly, Locanda Verde is Carmellini’s idea of a neighborhood Italian tavern. (That’s what the website says.) To be honest, I’m not sure what Italian neighborhood the food here is intended to represent. Certainly blue crab with jalapeño on lightly toasted (instead of crisp) bread isn’t a crostino from any Italian region I’ve visited. Furthermore, many of the menu items have sweet elements—sultanas, agro dolce (sweet and sour sauce), pickled cherries, saor (vinegar, onions, and raisins); all those suggest Sardinia, Sicily, or maybe Puglia. Okay, that’s Italian. One of the antipasti I ordered, crisp fried artichokes with yogurt and mint, tasted like the best Greek dish I’ve ever eaten in an Italian restaurant. And, by the way, once you’ve finished your complimentary foccacia, no other bread is served. If eating without bread isn’t non-Italian, I don’t know what is.

Did I mention that the blue crab crostino was smooth, sleek, mildly spicy, and absolutely satisfying? Or that the fava bean crostino was not just tasty but more recognizably Italian? I haven’t forgotten a significant fact: At this point I’d eaten five items and sampled two wines and everything was beautifully prepared, served or vinified. (Carmellini gets no credit for the final one.)

We had two pastas. The maltagliati—that means “cut badly” and refers to scraps of fresh pasta—with pesto was an irresistible classic, maybe the best clearly Italian dish I’ve ever had from him. Linguine with clams, sweet peppers, and “nudja” was less admirable. “What’s nudja?” I asked. I sort of got an answer. Later, I Googled it. No help. It was the only dish of the evening I didn’t admire. The spicy sausage sauce—I believe that was the nudja part—was clumsy, with no discernable sausage.

Carmellini’s porchetta, described on the menu as “the way I like it,” was tender, savory, sliced thin, and very mild—I might have thought it was veal-chetta had I not been told it was pork. The chicken for two was a huge, alluring pile of juicy, herbaceous, garlicky, jumbo chicken parts tossed with fennel, peppers, onions, zucchini, and asparagus, all quite succulent and all very wonderful, a dish that should not be missed.

Gelati and sorbetti are just fine, the textures exquisite, the flavors less intense than expected. The toasted almond semifreddo, which comes with cherries, compensated with an avalanche of almond. Best of all was a raspberry-pistachio cake with pistachio gelato, the best gelato of the four I tried.

Thanks to that long-gone Italian restaurateur, evaluating Locanda Verde is simple. The exuberant, unconventional, unexpected, and mostly Italian food is undeniably up.

379 Greenwich Street, New York, NY; 212-925-3797; www.thegreenwichhotel.com

I understand that almost every New Yorker but me venerates the gallant farmer who trucks in tiny heirloom potatoes that he reluctantly parts with for $3 apiece. I don’t get it. The customer treks across a multitude of boroughs to get to the market, stands in line to buy a small sack of pesticide-free produce, then heads home with a cash-free wallet. Finally, exhausted, he has to cook.

Still, I love a different sort of outdoor food market, the kind that sells prepared foods. Purists spurn this concept. Some farmers’ markets even forbid their sale. That’s the only kind of market I like, the ones that sell food a person can actually eat.

Strolling while eating is my favorite outdoor activity. At outdoor markets, virtually every prepared-food item I buy is handmade, often by the very people selling them, which defines artisanal. The term “honest food,” so often used by food writers, never made sense to me. Maybe this is what it stands for.

Only a churlish person—I’m speaking now of a good friend of mine—could feel otherwise. When I invited this person to accompany me to one such market, she replied, “I hate going to a market and seeing stands with prepared food that I can get at Zabar’s. I don’t need an outdoor market for pickles that cost $1,000 a jar, that hand-crafted, expensive stuff. There’s more of that in New York than there are nail salons. I’m looking for asparagus and baby lettuce and radishes. That’s why I’m at a farmers’ market.”

It’s worth pointing out that this woman basically lives a cheerless life, since all she ever does when she’s not at work is shop and cook. She has no time for anything else. So making a nice bean salad takes her two days, whereas if she picked it up ready to eat at a market, it would take her two minutes. I don’t understand people like her.

My new favorite market, the one she declined to visit, is the Brooklyn Flea, behind the Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Fort Greene. It’s open Saturdays, starting at 10 a.m., although I noticed that most of the food purveyors don’t get going until about 11 a.m., so if you go any earlier you might have to spend a little time poking around the offerings of the non-food vendors—hand-sewn 19th-century linen, or ancient doorknobs, or whatever it is that people think they need for a better life.

My persnickety, produce-loving pal did pin down one peculiarity of the prepared-food phenomenon: the plethora of pickles. Located only a booth or two apart at the Brooklyn Flea are Rick’s Picks and McClure’s Pickles—their bottled pickles sell for as little as $6 to slightly more than $10, which still isn't supermarket prices. Rick’s are more daring, with all kinds of pickled veggies, unusual flavorings, and swell names, like Spears of Influence. McClure’s are crunchier and more classic, although the spicy garlic and dill is more potent than the pickles old Jews used to eat on the Lower East Side. Bob McClure, the co-owner, told me he makes his hot pickles from his great-grandmother's recipe, which always incorporated cayenne peppers, although he often substitutes habaneros to achieve a quicker burn. Let me tell you, those pickles will scorch a man’s skullcap. He told me his pickles are kosher-certified, and while that really makes no difference, in my heart I believe pickles should be no other way.

I pretty much loved everything I tried at the Brooklyn Flea, and I ate a lot. At Asia Dog, which sells hot dogs reminiscent of those from the famous Japadog cart in Vancouver, I particularly liked the all-beef, organic hot dog served banh mi-style, which means topped with shredded carrots, daikon, cilantro, and possibly pâté (it was supposedly in there but I couldn’t find any). I had a tiny, fresh, luscious red-velvet cupcake, just three bites, that cost a dollar and was sold by the very woman who makes them, Keavy Landreth of Kumquat Cupcakery in Brooklyn. A dollar seems too little for anything, but I got some idea of the economics behind flea-market merchandising from Landreth, who told me she sold 500-700 assorted cupcakes every Saturday. Also under a dollar: Salted caramels that tasted like France, from Liddabit Sweets.

A fellow named Aaron Osborn, co-owner with his mother-in-law of Elsa’s Empanadas, sells two little stuffed, baked pastries with admirably flaky crusts for $5—I particularly liked the classic filling of beef, raisins, and olives. He said his mother-in-law learned how to make them from her husband, who came here from Argentina, and she’d been practicing the art of empanadas for 30 years. Sure beats snack food reheated by some high-school dropout working in a fast-food joint.

The Brooklyn Flea showcases two local treasures, one of them a portable, wood-burning pizza oven operated by PizzaMoto that turns out unexpectedly successful Neapolitan-style pies. I was so eager to get one that I ordered the first of the day, when the oven wasn’t quite ready, and the crust came out undercooked underneath. A little later I convinced a woman eating a pie to show me the bottom of her crust. Instead of slapping me, she complied, and it looked perfect. (People who eat prepared foods at outdoor markets are invariably amenable and cheerful.)

But the most enjoyable food came from the three Red Hook stands that have set up shop there. (You probably know about the troubles of the Red Hook stands, which were doing a swell job feeding Mexican and Central American street food to devoted regulars at the Red Hook ball fields until the Bloomberg Administration decided to meddle and make a hash of a delightful local custom.) At the first one, I bought an ear of corn on a stick, and let me tell you, nothing is better when eating outside than food on a stick. The ear was slathered in melted butter and Mexican cheese, then sprinkled with chili powder, and it went perfectly with a cup of agua fresca, in this case watermelon juice, from the unnamed juice stand next to the unnamed corn stand.

Best of all, and worth standing in line for, were the pupusas from Soler Red Hook Food. These are freshly grilled corn cakes stuffed with cheese and a second ingredient—I had one with chopped chicken and another with chopped zucchini, even better.  Complimentary toppings include pickled cabbage slaw, tomato sauce, Salvadoran cream (whatever that is), pickles, and peppers. I had it all. Just to round out my perfect platter, I added a chicken tamale. I usually find tamales absurdly heavy, but this one, like the pupusa, was beautifully stuffed and brilliantly savory. Afterward, I spoke to the owner, Rafael Soler, who comes from the Dominican Republic and seems to get all the credit for his pupusas, even though they are a food of El Salvador. I asked him how he became such an expert in pupusas, and he admitted he owed it all to his wife, who’s from El Salvador.

Maybe that’s what’s meant by honest food.

Brooklyn Flea: 176 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, NY; www.brownstoner.com/brooklynflea

No city boasts as many such establishments as New York, where pizza long ago came ashore from Italy. I’ve written a story in the current issue of GQ where I name the 25 best pizzas in America, and in seeking them out, I visited all the most beloved New York spots. Surprisingly to me, and shocking to others, only one made my list—Totonno’s in Coney Island. (It’s been closed most of the year because of fire damage, but the owners hope to reopen next month.)

None of New York’s ancient spots do anything less than a good job, but some have become industrial pizza factories, churning out pretty ordinary pies to feed the masses lined up outside. Not all are that way. I particularly admired three of these places, even if none of their pies made my list.

Grimaldi’s
19 Old Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY; 718-858-4300; www.grimaldis.com

Famously located under the Brooklyn Bridge—well, it isn’t, but it’s close—Grimaldi’s is as old-school as Italian gets: Sinatra idolatry, red-and-white checked tablecloths, cramped seating. Here you’ll find two long lines, one outside on Old Fulton Street consisting of customers waiting for a table, and one inside with customers waiting to use the single unisex bathroom. The indoor wait is more appealing, since you’ll be standing next to the huge oven and you can watch flames flickering over the searingly hot coals. You can also watch the somewhat jaded cooks making pizzas endlessly and tirelessly, because at Grimaldi’s the orders never let up. Now and then they flip dough to one another, probably to break the monotony. The oven is just right, but the crusts are merely okay—they have a fresh, bready smell, but to me they’re a little too thick and slightly too soft, somewhat undercooked. The tomato sauce is vibrant and essential, which means the white pizzas are best skipped. These basically consist of soft, melted mozzarella atop soft, bland crusts. I tried a half-dozen pies and by far the best was topped with grated cheese, fresh mozzarella, tomato sauce, and excellent, spicy, thick-cut slices of pepperoni. Service is pleasant, but the tables aren’t comfortable and you’ll be moved in and out quickly. You might admire the pizza, but you won’t feel the same about the dining experience.

Patsy’s
2287–91 First Avenue, New York, NY; 212-534-9783

Located in East Harlem (and no longer associated with the myriad other Patsy’s in the city), Patsy’s has settled into a comfortable old age. It has a number of storefronts stretching south from 118th and 1st Avenue—one of them seems to be used as a depository for pizza boxes, an extraordinary use of what must be valuable retail space. Inside another doorway is the unremarkable oven, which looks to be clad in aluminum foil. The primary dining area is spacious and sedate. With the oven a couple doors down, nobody is yelling out orders to the guys making pies. Patsy’s has potential to offer an upscale dining experience, but in truth it has little ambience other than a multitude of citations, proclamations, and commendations attesting to its excellence. The drinks come in plastic cups. Service is between lackadaisical and non-existent. The pies are so neutral that I found it impossible to get the friends I brought with me to agree on which ones they liked. Crusts are very thin—“paper thin,” according to the menu—and apparently deliberately undercooked. (The one pie I got that might accidentally have been left too long in the oven by far had the best crust.) The plain pie resembles classic New York street pizza, which means it has a smudge of cheese and sauce, so understated that my New Jersey friends complained that it amounted to nothing at all. Ordering your pie with extra cheese and sauce will assure you a pleasing level of gooiness. The meatball pizza is pretty good, too. Not many pizzerias can pull that off without turning the ground meat into dust.

Di Fara
1424 Avenue J, Brooklyn, NY; 718-258-1367; www.difara.com

Domenico DeMarco is the Paul Bocuse of pizza. Nobody is more beloved. Nobody has done more for pizza. After infinite years standing in front of his ovens, he’s still at it, day and night, making every pie himself, poking each crust with his fingers, tossing on fresh Israeli basil at the end. (Let’s end one myth: The fresh herbs he puts on his pies are not grown in his window—he’d need a greenhouse to cultivate all that he uses.) DeMarco might be the last of the old-world-style pizza craftsmen, and in addition, he has the stamina of a triathlete. Nothing in my pizza story generated more outrage than my decision not to put one of his pies on my list of America’s 25 best. The first time I went, I tried five kinds: round pie plain; round with pepperoni; round with porcini; square pie plain; square with broccoli rabe. (Great broccoli rabe, by the way.) The famous thin-crusted pie was crisp and crunchy, not my style, and DeMarco pours on the oil, way too much. The crust on the square pie was rich and heavy; when topped with cheese, tomato sauce, and broccoli rabe, it was enormously filling, like a gooey Italian Sunday dinner on bread. I went back a second time, this past weekend, and ordered a pepperoni pie. The crust this time was thicker and chewier, and the edges reminded me of warm Italian bread. The oil was even more excessive. Everybody but me seems to love Di Fara’s pizza. I merely like Di Fara’s pizza. It’s tasty. But I have to utter the unspeakable and, I suppose, unforgivable: To me it isn’t among the very best.

Click here to read Alan Richman’s “American Pie,” from the June 2009 issue of GQ.

Were I to categorize pizza today, I’d consider it a full-fledged sub-category of ethnic cuisine, even though it is evolving and undergoing a stylistic conversion that makes it seem more and more American. Long ago we began our ongoing love affair with Italian food by embracing Italian, sub-category Southern cuisine. Next there was Italian, sub-category Northern cuisine. Now pizza has moved from an appealing snack to real restaurant food. It’s a sub-category all its own.

In the past few months three more serious pizzerias have opened, all in the areas that are ground zero for the local pizza movement—Brooklyn and Manhattan. These are Emporio in the Nolita area near the venerated Lombardi’s, Ignazio’s under the Brooklyn Bridge near the equally beloved Grimaldi’s, and Tonda in the East Village, not far from Luzzo’s, which is more of a cult pizzeria.

Pizza, of course, is perfect for these difficult times, inasmuch as it’s consoling, familiar, inexpensive, and non-challenging, a savory food that offers all the comforts of desserts without the brutal carbohydrate count. Here’s how these three—and their newfangled ovens—rate.

Tonda
235 East 4th Street, New York, NY; 212-254-2900; tondapzza.com

It’s huge for the East Village, with about 100 seats inside and out. One of my friends said, “You could fit eight East Village apartments and three East Village bars in here.” It was also, on the night I went, practically empty, although the few customers in the place were mostly gorgeous women, which made up for a lot. Tonda is yet another attempt to impose Naples purism upon New York City sensibilities, this time with a weird oven that combines the fierceness of a fire-breathing dragon with the spookiness of a sacrificial fire pit. The pies are supposed to rotate around the fire-pit—more fetishism, I suspect—but they were decidedly motionless when I was there. When I asked the fellow tending the oven why they weren’t twirling, he gave the wheel a shove with his wooden paddle and explained, “Sometimes you have to give it a push.” I always think of pizza ovens as friendly, but this one is sort of creepy. Service at Tonda was inept, not unusual for the East Village, where waiters spend most of their time chatting with friends. The toppings here are overly ambitious yet flavorsome, but the crusts are flabby, tasteless, barely charred, and lacking the puffy outside ring that is reminiscent of a true Naples pie. My favorite menu item by far was the arancini, listed under “Neapolitan Street Food” but as far as I know found just about everywhere in Italy. These little rice balls were wonderfully crunchy, the only item we tried that came to the table crisp.

Ignazio’s
4 Water Street, Brooklyn, NY; 718-522-2100; ignaziospizza.com

You think the name is odd? Wait until you see the place. I suspect no pizzeria in history has resembled this one—the decor is Turkish-Indian-Pious, with lavender hues, tacky metal light fixtures, and religious art. The evening I ate there, one waitress wore cowboy boots, the other had an overabundance of tattoos, engendering a hipster pretentiousness that was neutralized by packs of wailing babies and a traffic jam of strollers parked in the center of the room. The oven was a clever variation on a standard gas pizza oven, with easy opening doors and glass inserts for watching the pies bubbling away. Ignazio’s (the name of the owner’s father) has received attention for its supposedly superb meatballs, but they had run out before 7 p.m.—the best we could do was watch the last order being brought to a table near ours. We asked for two pies, and 25 minutes later the waitress came by and told us our order had been misplaced and the cooking was about to begin. The good news: She said our root beers were on the house. The bad news: The pies finally showed up. The crusts were hard, flat, bland. Pie number one, titled The Pizza, consisted of insipid tomato sauce, decent mozzarella, and no noticable hint of the promised Pecorino Romano. Pie number two, listed as a specialty pie, was topped with bacon, avocado and tomato, an unusual idea. The bacon was flavorful and crunchy, the tomato again disappointing, and the cold avocado slices particularly inappropriate. They sat aloof, wanting nothing to do with the other ingredients. I could sympathize. I wanted nothing to do with Ignazio’s.

Emporio
231 Mott Street, New York, NY; 212-966-1234; www.auroraristorante.com

I want an oven like Emporio’s in my house. The outside is white, tile-like brick. The centerpiece is a metal door, maybe cast-iron, seemingly ancient, that reads Ideal Service Range. The fuel is wood. I don’t think a fancy oven is a guarantee of a good pizza crust, but it seems to have worked here. Plus the room (a fascinating amalgam of farmhouse and high-tech) has a sweet, woody smell. While waiting for the first of our pizzas, we tried two appetizers, a fried artichoke that was mushy, greasy, and tasty; and an ugly rendition of vitello tonnato, which is veal in creamy tuna sauce. One of my friends thought it looked like potato salad in a deli case. The best pie here, and the best at any of the three places I tried, was the margherita (although it isn’t given that name). The tomato sauce, from San Marzano tomatoes, was properly vibrant; the fresh buffalo mozzarella wasn’t overly watery; and the crust was thin, supple, and strong. (A little more char would have been nice.) I didn’t think all the pizza combinations were well-conceived, but certain items were particularly delicious, especially the rich, fatty, juicy guanciale (pork cheek) and the spicy sopressata. Only three of the ten pies had tomato as an ingredient, which is a shame, because it’s top-notch. Service here is both incredibly sweet and totally inflexible: We were told we had to order everything we wanted immediately, which meant no waiting to see if we were in the mood for two pizzas or three. The three of us happily ate five.

Next week: The old guard—Patsy’s, Grimaldi’s, and Di Fara

Ordinary pizza, the kind that doesn’t interest me, can be found anywhere. That’s because too many of us will happily devour anything that has a crust under it and cheese on top of it. Great pizzerias are rare, and I don’t believe I’ve come across any that are located in suburban malls.

When I set out to do my story on pizza, which can be found in the current (June ‘09) issue of GQ, my goal was not only to determine the 25 best pies in the United States but also to rate the cities, number one through ten. When I started this quest, I figured only four spots—New York, San Francisco, Chicago and New Haven—had a chance to take the top spot, and be certified as the best pizza city in America.

I wasn’t surprised when New York City finished first, but I was shocked at the reason. Of all the venerated pizzerias in New York, the only ones I felt lived up to their reputation were Joe’s, a slice shop in Manhattan, and the great Totonno’s in Coney Island. What allowed New York City to soar above all others were the new pizzerias, those that for the most part are specializing in the American pies I learned to appreciate above all others.

1. New York. As coliseum-sized pizzerias with coal-fired stoves fade away—or become middling chains—artisanal pizzamakers arrive in Brooklyn and Manhattan, delighting a populace that seems ready to eat pizza all the time. I tried 137 pies in the New York City area, and I’m not certain that was enough.

2. San Francisco. More artistic than artisanal. Creative toppings are the thing here, not just on pies that made my top 25 but everywhere I went, which was all the way to Santa Rosa. Speaking of ingeniousness, kudos to the guilt-inducing headline on the tip jar at Arinell, a slice joint in the Mission district: “2 Killed Outside Pizzeria.”

3. Detroit. No city has more consistently satisfying pies than Detroit. No city executes its particular style, in this case the square Sicilian, as flawlessly as Detroit. Hard to go wrong wherever you eat, although a hopeless local peculiarity is burying the pepperoni under the sauce.

4. Chicago. Pan, deep-dish, stuffed, Neapolitan, tavern, and, thanks to Great Lake, the ultimate new American style. Not the most elegant or consistent pies, but Chicago is by far the most versatile pizza city in the country.

5. Providence. What it created, the grilled pizza, it does impressively, although no place came close to Al Forno or Bob & Timmy’s. Also specializes in pizza strips, sold mostly in bakeries. Nobody tells Providence what kind of pizza to eat.

6. Los Angeles. The pizzerias are improving, although rarely the ones that everybody talks about. Nowhere else are the good pies so unexpected and the mediocre ones so highly publicized.

7. New Haven. Sally’s and Pepe’s alone keep the reputation of New Haven alive. Bar, on Crown St., is the rudest pizzeria in America—and it sells a mashed potato pie, another insult.

8. Philadelphia. Shockingly, none of the pies in the top 25 came from South Philly, the heartland of the Italian community. But if you want brawny, big-hearted pizza, that’s still the neighborhood to visit.

9. Phoenix. Just one pizzeria anybody cares or talks about. I flew across the country to eat at Pizzeria Bianco, and it was worth it, at least until I got tossed out.

10. Boston. The pies, like those in South Philly, are old-school, but then Boston is a lot like Philadelphia, even if it hates to admit it. Sister city Cambridge is more innovative, but the pies have overwrought toppings and limp crusts.

It’s back, and I’m happy. I’m a man who knows how to cherish a crash.

I’m surprised that everybody doesn’t feel as I do. Maybe it’s because classic French cuisine is temporarily out of favor. Maybe it’s because lunch is no longer thought of as a noble pursuit. Maybe it’s because that even in these tough times many people foolishly believe that the more you pay for food, the better it will be.

Another thing: I like to drink at lunch more than I like to drink at dinner. I was taught that habit by an old friend of mine in Montreal, a civil servant who always consumed a full bottle at midday. He justified it this way: “Often people say to me, ‘How can you consume a full bottle of wine and then go back to the office?’ I reply to them, ‘How can I bear to go back to the office unless I consume a full bottle of wine?’”

A proper fixed-price meal costs less than $30 and consists of three courses. That’s vital, and that’s what I found at each of the five French (or near-French) places I visited recently. Such comprehensive dining requires a considerable expenditure of time, often 90 minutes, sometimes more. Again, this is perfect for our times. Now that nobody can find work, why not spend all your free time in restaurants? Occasionally it’s difficult for me to find a luncheon companion who feels as I do, but I’m always willing to dine alone. My role model here is the great Roman conqueror, Lucullus, who set the standard for solitary dining when his servants attempted to bring him a truncated meal on one such occasion. He berated them, saying, "What, did not you know, then, that today Lucullus dines with Lucullus?" To tell you the truth, I often dine with a magazine.

Should you go to lunch with a friend, make certain your companion will not rush off before dessert, citing either a pending meeting or an excess of calories. A prix-fixe lunch is not fuel for the workplace; it is a low-cost celebration of life.

These meals tend to have limited choices. Ideally, you will be able to select from at least three appetizers, three main courses, and two desserts. Chefs tend to place comforting, harmonious, nutritious specialties on their prix fixe menus.

Such meals have only one downside. Your fellow diners might well be bargain-hunters, not connoisseurs, and it is possible they will not dress to your (or my) gentlemanly standards. Not only are such people loath to spend more than $30 on a meal, they are sometimes loath to spend more than $30 on clothes. But at least they will be more agreeable than those who only dine during the period known as Restaurant Week, when specials are even more extreme. Such diners are unlikely to depart restaurants without stuffing the silverplate in their pockets.

Le Cirque
151 East 58th Street, New York, NY; 212-644-0202; www.lecirque.com

The cafe of Le Cirque is where I would lunch every day if I lived in one of the Beacon Court condos above the restaurant, although it’s likely that if I could afford such an apartment, I would happily spend more than $28 on a meal. I ate alone, accompanied by a half-bottle ($42) of 2003 Dauvissat premier cru Chablis (okay, it wasn’t Vincent Dauvissat, but it was still darned good, with a green-gold hue). I started with lobster risotto that tasted Mediterranean, as though the stock were made with the broth from a good Marseille bouillabaisse, and next ate veal breast topped with broccoli rabe on one side, a bit of cooked pear on the other, and a sliver of Pecorino-Romano across the top. It was a mini-education—veal with pear tastes entirely different from veal with broccoli rabe and sharp cheese. I finished with crème brûlée. Le Cirque does crème brûlée the way Stradivarius did violins.

Le Veau d’Or
129 East 60th Street, New York, NY; 212-838-8133

The room still looks fine—dark multihued wood paneling, Paris street signs, white tablecloths, fresh flowers. The aged proprietor stands in front. His smiling daughter waits tables. Nobody asked if I wanted wine or bottled water—ice water was poured so incessantly I felt like a field worker parched by the heat. The $20 fixed-price lunch offers bistro standards, and there is no reason to flip the menu and spend a few dollars more on slightly fancier food. I started with country pâté that was from no known country, pushed most of it away. (The mustard, however, was sharp and satisfying.) Skate, my main course, was served Colonel Sanders-style, with a crunchy coating. Actually it wasn’t bad, and it came with cubed potatoes, oval discs of carrots, and plenty of parsley sprinkled atop everything —it reminded me of an entree from a French country hotel in the fifties. Dessert, supposedly a French apple tart, looked like old sliced apples on Saltines. If only it had tasted so good.

Café Boulud
20 East 76th Street, New York, NY; 212-772-2600; www.cafeboulud.com

Here you will find superb value plus ridiculously good service. A dilemma: What do you tip waiters when you’ve eaten a $24 menu—$3.50? Obviously unfair. The menu had the flat-out fanciest food of any I tried: high-toned, stylish, artfully cooked, carefully arranged. There were even $24 wines—I had a 2007 Muscadet that had been marked down from $35. My friend started with the spring vegetable broth and claimed she liked it, even as I berated her for not eating heartily enough. My starter, called shrimp ceviche but really not a ceviche, consisted of baby shrimp (that could have been tastier) standing upright in a guacamole-like avocado puree and topped with plantain chips. I again had skate, currently a mainstay of the under-$30 menu. This time it was stuffed with all manner of vegetables and served in a traditional brown-butter-caper sauce. My roasted pineapple dessert was deconstructed: vanilla cake, mango foam, and rum ice cream scattered about the plate. Are French pastry chefs in revolt, no longer willing to painstakingly build sugary edifices?

Nougatine
1 Central Park West, New York, NY; 212-299-3900; jean-georges.com

Odd doings here, in the lounge that all must pass through on their way to the deluxe restaurant Jean Georges. Some of the tables, those near the window, are swell. Others, near the open kitchen (of Jean Georges, not Nougatine) aren’t bad. Then there was mine, wedged between two partitions, making me feel like a Formula One driver in his cockpit, awaiting the starting gun. For $24.07, you’re entitled to any two of the 14 menu items plus dessert. It’s an astounding offer, but there are wild food swings. The tuna tartare (topped with a rosette of radish slices, in a ginger marinade that demonstrated the genius of Jean-Georges Vongerichten), the slow-cooked salmon (more genius), and the chocolate peanut cake (hauntingly subtle) were the three best items I ate at any of my five prix-fixe lunches. Then there was the rest: Roasted chicken, beef tenderloin, and citrus sponge cake, none much better than high-end bar food. The restaurant has two kitchens, one for Jean Georges and one for Nougatine. Hard to believe the great dishes came out of the same kitchen as the middling ones.

Benoit
60 West 55th Street, New York, NY; 646-943-7373; benoitny.com

This is Alain Ducasse’s simulacrum, an Epcot-ish replica of his ancient and revered Parisian bistro of the same name. The New York Benoit is neat, pale, and unrealistic-looking, but the prices are much more reasonable than at the French original, and the kitchen has improved significantly since a shaky opening. The prix-fixe lunch has a couple of options, two courses for $19 or three (add dessert) for $24. (There’s a bonus of tiny, warm cheese puffs known as gougères.) The dishes are homey, somewhat rustic, carefully prepared and, if you pick the right ones, emotionally quite French. One is an appetizer of asparagus under puff pastry sitting atop mushrooms in cream sauce. Charles de Gaulle would have wept. My two favorite main courses were the chopped beef (herbaceous but undersalted) wrapped in a stewed tomato, and salmon in puff pastry, precisely what a member of the bourgeoisie might have served colleagues coming to his home for dinner. Skip the prix-fixe desserts and invest your savings in the profiteroles—they’re deconstructed, of course. They cost $20, are intended for two, and feed four in splendor.

“Your party is all here, right?” asks Carmine.

I explain that our fourth will be right along.

“You have to wait,” he says.

Foolishly, I try to change his mind. I promise that we will order right away. Pizza. Wine. The cheese he personally carries over from Italy, ages himself, loves beyond reason.

He shakes his head.

I point out that nobody else is waiting for a table, so there’s no reason why we can’t have one. He looks at me as though he has never seen anyone so dim-witted. He explains that all the other customers who had to wait for tables because their parties weren’t complete will be angry if we don’t have to wait. His reasoning makes no sense to me, but I am dealing with Carmine. I’ve never seen another man with such a combination of good heart and suspicious mind.

Another partner in Celeste is Giancarlo Quadalti, the chef, who spends most of his time at another restaurant, Teodora, on the East Side. When I ask him to explain Carmine to me, he says, “When we opened Teodora in 1997, Carmine comes in with us. We become partners. Unfortunately.”

He pauses. “In this relationship, there are a lot of unfortunatelys.”

I am not the only one who finds Carmine difficult.

Carmine’s last name, I am finally able to reveal, is Mitroni. For a long time, he refused to let me print it. He explained, “My family ran a restaurant in Bordighera for 40 years and my uncle never let anybody know his last name. People like us don’t want publicity. Chefs want publicity.”

Although the food at Celeste was conceived by Giancarlo, Celeste is Carmine’s restaurant. He is a big man in his mid-40s who decided to get skinny a couple of years ago and has stayed that way. Last week, when I stopped in, he was wearing an orange shirt and a red sweater vest that exquisitely complemented the grayish-blue plates that line the walls. (I don’t believe a lot of money went into Celeste’s décor.) He is in the restaurant every evening, unless he is in Italy finding wine and cheese. When he is on the premises, he is impossible to miss, a larger-than-life host from a forgotten era when every great restaurant had one like him.

Celeste is not exactly great, but it is a wonderful trattoria, one of my favorite places to eat in New York and the first place I send visitors from out-of-town who aren’t looking for three-star dining. It seats about 50 in conditions so cramped they border on uncomfortable. The napkins are dish towels. Curios and knick-knacks are scattered about. No credit cards. No reservations. Everybody waits except pregnant women. Says Carmine, “This is the Upper West Side, so every other lady is pregnant. I need valet parking for the strollers.”

Prices are impossibly low, most pastas selling for $9.50, pizzas $13 and under, no main course more than $16. Yet price is not the reason I find Celeste irresistible. Carmine is a near-genius with wine and cheese who has recently added gelato to his areas of expertise.

The pizza has a Roman-style crust, more flat and crisp than I prefer it, but properly cooked. The toppings are impeccable. Carmine rattled off a pizza special last week that had three cheeses plus salami. He speaks so fast and Celeste is so loud I barely heard the names of any of them. The combination was exquisite, a masterpiece of cheese melding, and the salami tasted so authentically Italian that I asked Carmine where it was from. “Where do you want it to be from?” he replied. Carmine is always willing to provide information, except when it’s something you actually wish to know.

The pastas are simple and exceedingly satisfying. The paccheri (broad tubes) with ricotta is cooked precisely, the tomato sauce mild and comforting. Freshly made tagliatelle with shrimp, cabbage, and Pecorino is a combination that technically makes no sense, since fish and cheese seldom go together, but it is one of my favorites. I always think it needs more cheese, but Carmine pays no attention when I tell him that.

He will hate hearing this, but the main courses are erratic, even if conceptually they are fine. On that recent visit the monkfish in a tomato ragout was overcooked. The thin-sliced filet wasn’t so skillfully done, either, some pieces medium-rare as ordered, some well-done. The roasted potatoes were lovely, with a thick, crunchy crust. A special of vitello tonnato—slices of rare, cold veal with a creamy tuna sauce—was exactly as it should have been, as though Carmine had assembled it himself.

He is not a chef, but if he were in the kitchen, overseeing every plate, mistakes would not happen. He is a perfectionist, but he cannot do everything and Giancarlo is usually across town at Teodora. I am pretty confident that delegating is not among Carmine’s gifts.

His wine list is special, even by his exacting standards. Everything by the glass is $7.50 or less, and about 20 bottles sell for under $30. Because Carmine cannot make anything simple, there is a reserve list plus another 200 wines not on the list. When he talks about wine, he is shockingly edifying. He recommended a Semidano di Mogoro Anastasio ($29), a white that was dry, minerally, a touch vegetative, compelling, and unique. I’d never heard of the Semidano grape. I don’t think there’s an Italian grape Carmine doesn’t know, and there are hundreds of them.

Desserts at Celeste are unexpectedly sophisticated. The tiramisu, much like pudding at most places, is a benchmark of how this much-abused favorite should be prepared—the ladyfingers and the mascarpone cheese understated. The gelatos are unlike any other in New York because Carmine brings in the flavorings from Italy and a fellow by the name of Gino makes them in his basement in Brooklyn. (Somehow, I knew not to request Gino’s last name.) They are as gelato should be, intense yet relatively light. Try the spicy pepperoncino with candied cloves. No, you’ve never heard of such a combination. Neither had I.

Then there are the cheeses. They come in various sizes, with five to 33 selections per plate, and the arrays have names like piccolo and dopio grandioso. “It sounds like we’re in Starbucks,” one of my friends said. Each is paired with a different compote, preserve, honey, or infusion, some of them handmade by Carmine, though not the honey. “The Italian honey is the best in the world because the bees are like the men, very aggressive,” he says.

When you order cheese, every sliver and every accompaniment is described in detail by Carmine at the speed of an auctioneer. Guests experiencing this for the first time appear stunned. He talks about stirrups (Caciocavallo) and morning vs. afternoon milk (Gorgonzola piccante). Italian cheeses are as hard to understand as Italian politics. I never quite know what he’s talking about, but a woman at our table said, “It doesn’t matter. When Italians talk about food, it’s different, so seductive and passionate. It’s like they’re talking about their children, something they love unconditionally.”

I nearly had a breakthrough with Carmine on my last visit. I asked him if he felt apologetic for making us wait for no reason at all. He replied, “Italians feel remorse but no guilt.” I couldn’t make sense of that. Maybe you can.

502 Amsterdam Avenue (near West 84th Street), New York, NY; 212-874-4559

I agreed that $250 was more than reasonable, providing this turned out to be one of those incomparable French dinners that made so much money seem like a bargain.

“Wine included?” I asked.

“Of course,” he replied.

He was frantic to eat at Per Se. Who isn’t? Per Se isn’t the most expensive restaurant in America—I believe that’s the sushi restaurant Masa, a few doors down. Nevertheless, the tariff until now has been about $700-800 for two, and even in this economy, obtaining a reservation remains difficult.

The price is so high because Per Se offers only tasting menus in the dining room, and they go for $275 apiece. Add in a $200 bottle of wine and there you have it, the $750 dinner for two. You say you’d order cheaper wine? Doesn’t work that way. Nobody ends up settling for an $85 Austrian red when they’re having $550 worth of food.

Recently, something happened. The restaurant has a bar area it calls a “salon”—defined as a hall where guests gather. Here, nobody gathers. Empty. Bleak. On the occasions when I’ve dined at Per Se, I thought the bar was the greatest waste of useful space in New York City. (Now the title belongs to the old Yankee Stadium.) A couple of weeks ago, somebody at the restaurant got the swell idea of offering no-reservation, à la carte meals there. In this case, “à la carte” is defined as eating a normal-sized meal at a price normal human beings might consider reasonable.

I’ve always had mixed feelings toward Per Se, which combines a cold, hard-edged, modern space with overly warm California-style service. In addition, being required to eat so much left me, as well as my wallet, moaning. On the other hand, the white partridge-eye patterned hand towels in the washrooms are so classy I’m tempted to stop in regularly, and pick up a supply to use as pocket squares.

The draw is Thomas Keller’s cuisine. Should you merely read the menu, you might think it’s much like the food of other American restaurants that combine French technique with American creativity. You’d be wrong. There’s an unmatched intensity and vividness to the cooking, and inasmuch as his sourcing of ingredients is superlative, the final result is practically unbeatable.

This is what my friend and I were talking about on the bench, when the door opened and out came a hostess, who called us “gentlemen” and asked if she could take our coats. Pretty darned considerate, in particular the compliment. That’s the first inkling of where all the money you spend at Per Se goes.

Here’s the deal in the bar…I mean, the salon: There’s no real view. The privileged few in the dining room look out upon Central Park, but that’s only attainable in the salon if you get the single couch facing the plate-glass window and scuttle way over to the right. On the other hand, most meals at Per Se take place at night, and there’s nothing to see.

There are no real tables. Instead, you eat on extra-wide coffee tables (weirdly studded with metal bolts, which I’m sure cost a fortune, like everything else at Per Se). You get woven mats, not tablecloths. The space is expansive, the ceiling high. My friend made a first-rate observation shortly after we were seated: “Bar dining is always so degrading, and this sure isn’t that. I don’t feel rushed, crowded, tossed off. This isn’t Per Se Light. This is dignified.”

In fact, Per Se’s style of service works better in the bar. In the main dining room, I always feel as though I’m getting a lecture. In the less-ceremonious bar, the staff seems inclined to chat. You can get up and walk around. (You’ll probably be followed, but out of solicitousness, not suspicion.) The staff is pleased to enlighten you on the quotation from the great French chef Fernand Point that’s sealed under glass, and to explain why the bar has Champagne flutes stacked impractically high overhead. It’s actually—I’ve never used this word before for Per Se—fun.

The meal, it turns out, isn’t quite à la carte. You get extras, which is swell. Also necessary, because the portions are very, very small. We got a gougère—one per person—prepared not simply with cheese but with an extra rich, cheesy mornay sauce. Then came the signature Keller sesame cone topped with salmon tartare, although I thought the tartare was too compacted, the chives too oniony. Wonderfully concentrated white-asparagus soup with tarragon foam was next. Finally, a single langoustine accompanied by razor clams and chopped-up chorizo sausage, a sort of mirepoix of pork.

We had ordered three main courses, or at least what pass for main courses here—remember, they’re small. The gnocchi were okay, which, of course, isn’t good enough, not when you’re paying $26 for six gnocchi with a few fresh peas. They were soft. They were pillowy. They weren’t creamy and luscious enough to overcome their blandness.

The duck was three tiny slices. They were Keller (or, in this case, chef de cuisine Jonathan Benno) at his best, the meat uncannily intense. The dish cost $38 and was worth the price, because this was as good as duck breast can be, and there is no complaining about price when you can say that. The duck showed up with one spear of unusually sweet asparagus and a few pickled ramps.

The steak was two small blocks of beef called a “calotte,” which translates as “cap.” My guess is that it was the cap of a rib steak, a luscious cut of meat. The cost: $46. Again, incredible, every bit as luscious as most kobe-style beef but with a beefier texture. It came with broccolini tempura that was impossibly perfect. How many broccolini? By now you should know the answer: One. There was marrow, too, which I like salted, on bread. I requested salt. Out came six kinds of sea salt, this being Per Se.

This, of course, was the proper meal to accompany that aforementioned $85 bottle of Austrian red. After I made my budgetary limitations known, the waiter recommended a 2006 Moric Blaufränkisch, a wonderfully polished example of a sometimes-coarse grape.

I went back another night, tried again. Nothing took place that made me like a la carte at Per Se any less. The friend I brought this time was dumbstruck with the extravagance of space. She said, “In New York, space is expensive, and you get more than you need here.” Her take on the décor: “Very architectural, with good bones. It reminds me of the way Thomas Keller dresses—all in black and very severe.”

Wondering if I might be wrong, I tried the gnocchi again. I stand my ground. I still wasn’t impressed, even if the dish came with morels, my absolute favorite mushroom. We had another of Keller’s signature dishes, butter-poached lobster, which was the same as always, darned good but not overwhelming. Better was pompano with bacon, joining the duck and steak as uniquely intense. Another tip: The mustard emulsion with the pompano joined the mustard sauce with the duck as masterful. Now I know what sauces to buy if Keller ever starts bottling them.

I ordered one dessert, the only one on the salon menu, a chocolate-grapefruit mousse with pink grapefruit ice cream. Brilliant. Before this, I hadn’t considered myself a mousse man. Now I am re-evaluating the genre.

The total cost of the first dinner, including wine, tax, and tip, was $237. The second (with another $85 bottle, this time a 2007 Rheingau Riesling) was $217, which adds up to $454. Neither meal left me stuffed, merely well-satisfied. The price meant I could go back a third time, and still not spend as much on three dinners as most couples spend on one.

Time Warner Center; 10 Columbus Circle, 4th Floor, New York, NY; 212-823-9335; www.perseny.com

In case you didn’t know, McNally is a celebrated New York restaurateur who owns Balthazar and a bunch of other places that induce wistfulness, if not downright longing, for the old days. Carter is a celebrated New York City magazine editor who owns just about every Hollywood celebrity, inasmuch as he can get them into Vanity Fair or the Waverly Inn, depending on whether it’s fame or food they seek. I figure it had to annoy McNally that Carter had pulled off what he does so well—renovate a lethargic old restaurant, and convey a sense of history to casual dining.

Now McNally has Minetta Tavern, which is more than 70 years old and located on a small, sweet street in Greenwich Village, not far from Waverly Inn, which is more than 80 years old and located on a small, sweet street in Greenwich Village. The Village has no shortage of such venues, all legendary. They became famous because famous people would drink in them until they became incapable of doing whatever it was that made them famous. At one time, alcoholism guaranteed initiation into what was called intellectual circles.

McNally’s partners in Minetta Tavern, which re-opened a few months ago, are two former chefs at Balthazar, which specializes in classic French bistro items. I guarantee that if you end your meal here with the chocolate souffle for two—a classic French dessert—you will go home happy.

The place looks wonderful, but then McNally restores like nobody else. Only the booths (swell, if a little too cozy), the floor (black-and-white tile), and the chandeliers (which would look better in a Spanish restaurant) are new. At the Waverly Inn, Carter has his mural of olde New York. At Minetta Tavern, McNally has a collection of original sketches, caricatures, and photos that’s even more evocative. My group of four sat under a photo of the two greatest Rockys—Graziano and Marciano—and another of the absolute greatest Cindy of them all, newspaper columnist Cindy Adams. She seemed to be about 20 and was wearing a sun dress and pearls, her hair in a ponytail. What a babe.

My group wasn’t planning to start with kirs, white wine with black currant liqueur, but the $30 bottle of wine I ordered, a 2007 Coteaux du Languedoc, was so acidic it needed doctoring. I asked for a glass of crème de cassis, and added a splash to each glass of wine. Do the same and you’ll feel very 1970s, the last time that drink was a fad. My second wine, a 2006 Gigondas from Le Clos des Cazaux ($60) was so delicious it went down too fast. The list, decently priced (unlike the Waverly Inn’s), has more fancy bottles than any bistro-like restaurant needs, but if you care to indulge, the 2002 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti La Tâche, one of the world’s great wines, is well-priced at $1500.

I know I said the Balthazar boys do simple French fare well, but an exception is the salade de pissenlit, tough greens served with an irrationally fishy anchovy vinaigrette. A friend called it “fatally anchovyized.” A trio of tartares was one-for-three: the veal with black truffle and the beef with mustard were uninspired, the raw chopped lamb was sweet and perfumed. Bone marrow was perfectly okay, as bone marrow invariably is, and calamari stuffed with salt cod and piquillo peppers was not only correctly prepared, it had the advantage of complementing the chandeliers.

The entrees, despite uneven salting, were better. We tried the hyped black label burger, which costs $26 and is basically a massive quantity of wonderful ground beef. No finesse, but still hard to beat. The trout meuniere lacked butter—kind of a fundamental flaw—but was otherwise a nice slab of fish, if you like your fish with croutons, a first for me. Crispy pig trotters were fatty, ridiculous, and terrific, but the best dish of all was the lamb saddle, voluptuously flavored. This place sure knows how to do lamb.

One of the reasons I so liked the chocolate souffle is that nothing was done to ruin it—no ice cream or sauces plopped into the center to transform it into mush. It was warm, creamy, intensely chocolaty, and large enough for three. Also worthwhile are the pots de crème, miniature custards in three flavors. I loved the chocolate. The place knows chocolate, too.

One of my friends who had eaten with me at the Waverly Inn said she preferred Carter’s place to McNally’s, because the celebrities weren’t just on the wall, they were also present in the dining room. The food is certainly steadier at the Waverly Inn (also homier), but the service and the wine list are better at Minetta Tavern. The simple French bistro items that are impeccable at Balthazar, the ones that the chefs in the Minetta Tavern kitchen prepare so well, aren’t served here, and their absence shows. The menu is fancier, the French dishes loftier. That wasn’t essential—in the old days Minetta Tavern prepared basic Italian food—but it’s hard to complain about ambition.

Both restaurants, to me, have an enduring virtue—they transport you to a better time, when small neighborhood taverns flourished, even if too much of their charm was about too much to drink. Re-entering old New York is of incalculable value, an experience nobody should miss.

113 MacDougal Street, New York, NY; 212-475-3850

One of my guests, a young German woman, was startled enough by the food to ask, without irony, “Please tell me: Is this a restaurant for little kids?”

I can answer. Were I twelve years old and planning a birthday party, Buttermilk Channel is where I’d want it to be.

The restaurant is named for a tumultuous stretch of water once used by farmers to transport milk, which, legend has it, churned into buttermilk before reaching shore. I’d like to see the place renamed Mason Mints, after the famous candy once manufactured in Brooklyn Heights.

Almost everything about the food—which is for the most part carefully prepared—honors richness, softness, and, above all, sweetness. There are some very good house-made pickles—okay, many of them sweet—that are full of desperately needed acidity.

We ordered the pickles as a chaser, and kept saying to one another as the one-dimensional meal relentlessly progressed, “We need more pickles, don’t we?”

Buttermilk Channel is simple in appearance: It’s small, bright, warm, pleasant, loud, and minimally decorated. The walls are practically bare, just right for turning kids loose with crayons. The place mats are brown butcher paper. There’s a long communal table in the center. Reservations are limited to parties of five or more. For everyone else, the waits are enormous, which I’m certain says a lot about the American palate.

Should you be beyond your adolescent years and thinking of dining there, here are the dishes I tried that I can recommend for an adult palate: The skin-on (very grown-up) trout wrapped in bacon. (The semi-raw johnnycake that came with it was inedible.) The lean, flavorful, and not particularly juicy burger accompanied by fine fries and very mature homemade mayonnaise. Head cheese topped with a lovely pickle relish, a dish that has to be intended for adults, since no kid would put such yucky-sounding lunch meat in his mouth.

There’s a chicken-liver mousse that I would avoid. It’s fruity and topped with whole roasted grapes. Buttermilk fried chicken is really a version of chicken-and-waffles, ordinarily one of my favorite foods. Here it consisted of nicely fried but bony chicken pieces accompanied by very mushy waffles and a sauce that tasted like reduced maple syrup. Speaking of mushy, I have to warn against the house croutons, which are totally without crunch. More kid cuisine?

I don’t expect you to believe this, but the very flavorful duck meatloaf—actually, more like a burger—was sweet, too. It came with an oversized onion ring that was…well, at least with onions, nobody is surprised when they’re sweet.

Need I point out that dessert might be considered redundant after such a repast?

We tried five. The best was a root-beer float made with an admirable local product, Blue Marble ice cream. (Maybe because I loved this ice cream, the owners no longer serve it.) The oatmeal raisin cookies aren’t as good as those you can easily make at home. The restaurant’s signature dessert is a pecan-pie sundae, which I believe should replace glucose injections as the most rapid means of administering emergency sugar to those in need.

A friend of mine made a fascinating observation. He noted that the pecan-pie sundae was so saccharine that the best way to cut through its sweetness was with the excellent but relatively tart apple-cider donuts. Yes, donuts are the pickles of the dessert course.

524 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY; 718-852-8490

It has three dining areas, the rearmost of them reached by trekking through a less-than-gleaming kitchen; mostly French wines; one of the most satisfying steaks au poivre you’ll ever eat; a maître d’ who provides a touch of Gallic-style arrogance; and a spiral staircase leading up to restrooms and a fortune teller not on premises during either of my visits.

If inanimate objects can be said to have charisma, the front two rooms of Raoul’s are teeming with it: stamped tin walls and ceiling; wonderfully evocative portraiture; a 6’1” dancing hatcheck girl; a bar for local characters; and booths for guys who understand that this is a restaurant that impresses a woman with brains. It’s all slightly shabby, in a perfectly natural way, as places get when they’ve been used and used hard. (No fancy Manhattan designer stopped by to deliberately untidy up the place.) It’s the kind of restaurant that couples go to Paris to find.

As for that back room, the so-called “garden,” I’ll get to that shortly, simply because duty demands that I must.

Many of the decorative touches in the front rooms are reminiscent of Alsace, because that’s where the founding brothers came from, but few traces of that region remain on the wine list or menu. The food is primarily basic bistro French, now and then fancied up a bit. The wine list is slightly too expensive, but there’s a low-key fellow who gives his name only as Aaron who looks after the bottles and knows them well. If he’s not around to offer advice, try the 2005 Nicolas Potel Savigny-les-Beaune ($70), nicely juicy, as even a simple Burgundy of that great vintage should be.

Appetizers are less consistent than main courses, although only a chestnut soup that tasted like a mushroom puree must be avoided. I suppose the warm goat cheese with mixed greens could use an upgrade, but you won’t suffer should you order it. If you enjoy what the French consistently do to Italian risottos and pastas—make them insanely rich—you’ll enjoy the risotto with lobster and the tagliatelline with veal ragout and beautifully fried sweetbreads. The steak tartare is underseasoned but otherwise just fine, and the house pâté seems to belong to the burger family—that’s how coarse, simple, huge, and satisfying it is. (When your waiter asks if you want the sharp, vibrant mustard, by all means say yes.)

The irresistible main dish is that steak au poivre. Although unabashedly too peppery, it’s also an unexpectedly tender chunk of beef accompanied by a huge pile of perfectly okay fries that would be even better if cooked a little longer. Still, sea scallops were the best dish I tasted, simply because they were impossibly fresh and sweet and accompanied by vivid boy choy—no French standard there. A special of cassoulet, the slow-cooked bean-and-meat stew, was properly hardy, significantly oversized, and somewhat overcooked. An interesting choice is bavette, here the real French item, a chunk of chewy beef with the same flavor profile as skirt or hanger steak.

Don’t save too much room for dessert, but if you insist, the banana bread pudding is nicely rustic. The profiteroles, which seem to be what everybody orders, are disappointing in all regards.

I can no longer continue putting off talking about the back room. I’d prefer it didn’t exist, since I love the rest of Raoul’s. Actually, I’d prefer the maître d’ didn’t exist, either.

On my second visit, with tables empty everywhere in the front and middle rooms, he instructed the hostess to take us to the garden. I begged him: Please don’t.

He looked down at us in the French style, and said, “You made your reservation online.” Indeed, my friend had used OpenTable, listed on the restaurant’s website. The maître d’ informed us that OpenTable had assigned us to the back room, and that was that. As we were led away, no happier than prisoners in leg irons, he sneered, “Next time you should call.”

One of my friends said, “We’re not on the A-list.”

Another added, “No, we’re on the Web list.”

A quick summary of the glass-enclosed back room, the so-called garden: Airless. Musty. Dreary. Occasional blasts of cooking smells venting from the kitchen. (Particularly noxious when it’s the fish.) The primary wall decoration is a chilling mural that incorporates the twin towers of the World Trade Center. This, in fact, is one of the least romantic rooms in New York, although a friend with me did point out, “It’s so hot back here I’m thinking of getting undressed.”

And now for the most important advice of all: Call, don’t write, when you decide to go to Raoul’s—as everybody should.

180 Prince Street, New York, NY; 212-966-3518; raouls.com

“People living in the West Village can be stuck-up assholes, since they’re the rich children of rich Upper East Siders,” she explained. Then she modified that startling harsh analysis: “Actually, the people waiting to eat at the bar here are usually pretty civilized.”

Gottino, by Jody Williams, is mostly a long bar, one with a significant wine list and more than three-dozen miniature dishes, none of them constituting typical bar food. In décor and cuisine, Gottino has some Spotted Pig in its genes.

The prize my friend had captured were two places (still strewn with the detritus of previous diners) at the marble-topped bar. This being my first visit, I failed to grasp the magnitude of her accomplishment and inconsiderately said, “Can’t we sit at a table instead?”

She glared. She had done so much, and I was so unappreciative.

I pointed to an empty table in the rear. Precisely as I did so, a couple rushed over and grabbed it. Seemed fair and square, since Gottino doesn’t take reservations and there is nobody at the door—for that matter, it has no waiters. Confidently, she spoke to a bartender, who informed the couple that the table was ours.

At host-free, waiter-free Gottino, bartenders are omnipotent. Also very busy. They do it all, including keeping a mental list of who has requested a table. We got the one those two had taken because my friend had already told them I might want it. I understand how untrendy this sounds, but I prefer to eat with my feet touching the ground. The table, far to the rear of the restaurant, was fetchingly battered and had a little extra slab of wood hanging down that kept our legs from sliding under it. We ate sidesaddle, in the manner of Queen Elizabeth II on horseback, Trooping the Colour.

I tried reading the menu, which is basically brown writing on brown paper in a dimly lit brown room. A single votive candle barely helped. Even my friend could barely read it, and she’s half my age. This appears to be another trend in dining, the indecipherable menu—a week ago, in San Francisco, I had to walk outside in order to find enough light to read a wine list, and this was at night.

One of the bartenders came over. We ordered two dishes plus two glasses of Prosecco and assured him we’d soon want more. The baccalà mantecato, a traditional spread made from dried salted cod, was beautifully served in a mason-type jar with toasted ciabatta slices piled on top, but it lacked garlic and, oddly, salt. Steamed eggs with dried tuna roe, a variation on egg salad, was also inexplicably bland, despite the scattering of presumably salty fish eggs. Neither was bad, just terribly plain.

We waited and waited for the return of the bartender. My friend is enraptured by Gottino’s bartenders. This was her fifth visit, and she said it had as much to do with them as anything else. “They fill water glasses from a carafe, wear little aprons, whiz around; it’s like theater,” she said. “I can spend hours and hours here. Last time I was here from 6 p.m. until midnight.”

I thought we might be, too, waiting for one of these beloved bartenders to return. A half-hour went by. “They’re understaffed,” she said, as though I would like Gottino better if that were explained to me. I wasn’t planning on finishing the cod, but I hungrily did. Same for the eggs.

We talked about nuts. Gottino has baskets of walnuts everywhere, a cornucopia effect. Big baskets are there for interior decoration. Little baskets (with nutcrackers) are on the bar and at every table. At least at every table but ours. I could have used some nuts.

Finally, the bartender rematerialized. I sure can’t complain that Gottino makes you feel rushed. I quickly ordered seven more dishes. Everything came at once, the way it does at a Cantonese restaurant. Even my euphoric friend admitted our meal could have done with a little spacing.

I loved the country style pâté. Incredible. Rich, balanced, flavorful. A new standard of pâté moistness. She loved the salted anchovies on buttered toast. I didn’t, but at least I had found out where all the salt had gone. The rabbit pot pie confirmed what experienced diners already know, that rabbit is really, really dry. Tiny baked apples filled with pork sausage were first-rate, if you don’t mind a speck of sausage with your apple. The crespelle—a crepe—was stuffed with prosciutto and cheese, a savory and satisfying dish even though the prosciutto seemed awfully tough. That might have been because the bartender had provided me with a butter knife as a cutting implement. Loved his apron, though.

The Drusian Prosecco di Valdobbiadene was nicely dry, although a little lacking in acidity. It retails for about $15 a bottle. Our four glasses cost $48. Food is a better value. Almost everything is less than $10.

My friend looked a little worried. She thought I had not been charmed by the establishment or by the bartenders—by the way, they’re officially designated “gastronomos.”

“It’s a good date place,” she said.

I wondered if I was supposed to take that personally.

“It’s girly romantic,” she added.

I’m slow, but I thought perhaps I had caught on.

I said, “You mean that you and I…”

She finished the sentence. “…are just friends.”

52 Greenwich Avenue, New York, NY; 212-633-2590; www.ilovegottino.com

When it’s suggested that I dine at one of them, I tend to be scornful. Why would I patronize another Joe Bastianich-Mario Batali establishment where Joe and Mario are never around—or at least they never seem to be when I show up. It’s not that multiple offerings from celebrity chefs and their celebrity partners have to be disappointing (to say nothing of overpriced). It's just that they always are.

At this point, without flourish, my punch line: Tarry Lodge in Port Chester is unpredictably satisfying, with enough Batali touches to please the cravings that most Americans have for his version of American-Italian food, and enough individuality to highlight the skills of on-premises chef Andy Nusser, who ran the kitchen when the sainted Babbo first opened. It has just enough comfort and entirely enough class to make it one of the most satisfying dining options in Westchester County. A second surprise: reasonable prices. A third remains, but I’ll get to that. Enough shocks for now.

Tarry Lodge is large, accommodating about 180 customers in multiple rooms on two minimally decorated floors with yellow walls, marble facings, dark wood, and globe lights. It’s kind of clubby, or maybe lodgey would be better. Tables (except in the bar area) are good-sized, with too-hard chairs and bright-white tablecloths. The bar room features wine bottles stacked everywhere, not exactly an original concept, and both floors have a multitude of yellowish textile-covered panels hung on the walls for sound-deadening purposes. I think I once drove a Ford Fairlaine that had bench seats covered in the same material.

Upstairs is serene, with plenty of space between tables. The waiters, predictably, call it “Siberia.” I call it calm. The ground floor is crowded, bustling, noisy, and energetic, with a crammed foyer and nowhere to wait comfortably if you have a reservation or if you’re a walk-in hoping for a spare table—deliberately, not every seat in the house is booked. An uncivilized touch not unique to Tarry Lodge is a bar stuffed with diners, making it impossible to enjoy a pre-meal drink. Yet another belief of mine, also unloved by restaurateurs, is that designating a bar for eating rather than drinking is one of the curses of modern dining.

The menu, one-side of a printed page, seems small and simple but is not. The six major categories are antipasti (always irresistible at a Batali restaurant), pizza, salads, pastas, main courses, and daily specials. So here’s the final surprise: Tarry Lodge is one of the most interesting pizzerias in New York. The crusts are thin, charred, toothsome, and just a bit too chewy—you’re unlikely to finish off every bit of your puffy outer ring. The toppings—I tried four—are creative and triumphant. Not one dud. They include spicy salami and porcini; truffles, pig cheek, and egg; meatballs and jalapeño peppers; and a clam pie that is unlike any other clam pizza I’ve tried, which means the clams aren’t overcooked so horrendously they taste like rubber-bands-of-the-sea. The pie with black truffles costs $14, which means those certainly aren’t fresh tuber melanosporum from Périgord sprinkled atop them, but they’re good enough to provide a hint of the unrivaled truffles-with-eggs experience.

Within the antipasti category, don’t miss the dried salami from Batali’s dad, here called Armandino’s Salumi; or the garlicky baccala mantecato, which is reconstituted dried cod, enormously more appealing than it sounds. I wasn’t enraptured by the octopus with fingerling potatoes—potatoes refrigerated too long are just cold spuds. The butternut squash sformato, essentially a flan, was too spongy and sweet for me, but one of my infantilized friends was so enraptured he kept making references to his mother’s breast. (I won’t be dining with him again.)

Vitello tonnato, a Piemontese classic of thinly-sliced veal topped with a creamy tuna sauce, differed slightly from the usual, the savory veal served well-cooked rather than rare. I tried two pastas, a very satisfying but unexceptional pappardelle with meat sauce and a quite terrible version of spaghetti carbonara with ruinously thin and runny sauce. The eggplant parmigiana was pure Batali. It looked gorgeous upon arrival—the vivid, black-skinned, unpeeled eggplant topped with snowy white grated cheese—but I’m not certain that retaining tough eggplant skin ever improves a recipe. The lamb chops were a bit too lean but otherwise beautifully prepared, and they came with creamy but tough cardoons—the go-to veggie of the Piedmont region.

The wine list, crammed onto the reverse side of the menu, is much grander (and less expensive) than you might expect. I started with a 2007 Terredora Aglianico d’Irpinia that cost $30. It was so flavorsome I got carried away with my prowess and thought I could get away with a $24 2007 Calea Nero d’Avola. Not bad, but it didn’t approach the first bottle. Both grapes, the Aglianico and the Nero d’Avola, are red-wine staples of southern Italy.

Desserts tend to come in two or more parts, which means there’s always a chance of being partially disappointed. The sundae contains superb gelato plus biscotti that are remarkably reminiscent of zwieback. The fabulous panna cotta (cooked cream) is matched with so-so sorbet. The two best desserts in all regards are a cupcake-like chocolate cake with pistachio gelato and the pannetone pudding (really bread pudding) with caramel gelato.

I’m not certain why Tarry Lodge has turned out to be such a success, although I’m inclined to credit the presence of Nusser. I’m not the first person to espouse an unassailable theory, invariably ignored by chains, that everything good happens in a restaurant because a talented chef works there.

18 Mill Street, Port Chester, NY; 914-939-3111; www.tarrylodge.com

At 6:30 p.m. on a recent weeknight, I sat alone on a couch in the front of Le Bernardin, awaiting the arrival of Alan, feeling eyes boring into the back of my head. I had the distinct feeling that I was out of place. The chef, Eric Ripert, had a disdain for me that I was planning to challenge.

Pistachio cheese sticks were politely placed in front of me, but I still felt treated like a curiosity. In the main dining room the atmosphere was pleasant, stuffy folks engaging in rich conversation, but this king-like restaurant practically shouted, "Stay away, middle-class folks!" A vast number of waitresses and waiters wandered around topping already filled glasses, bringing food. Two giant vases of colorful flowers stood in the center. Alan swooped in through the front door and we were immediately seated at the second-best table in the restaurant. Clearly, he had been here before.

The amuse-bouche, or welcome from the chef, was gently placed in front of us. My fork slipped through the plump, tender shrimp, so soft I had trouble picking them up. Poached in truffle foam, they were sweet with a hint of woody essence. Alan argued endlessly with world-famous sommelier Aldo Sohm about which wines were appropriate for his meal. Opening the menu, I scanned it, looking at our choices. There were two tasting menus and a regular menu with a four-course meal for $109. The sections were Almost Raw, Barely Touched, and Lightly Cooked. Dessert would follow.

From the first section we chose an assortment of six Kumamoto oysters, each with a topping from light to complex; and yellowfin tuna with foie gras resting on a toasted baguette with shaved chives and olive oil. From the Barely Cooked section we ordered a warm octopus salad with a touch of paprika and olive oil, langoustine resting on lemon seaweed butter, and an extra course of peekytoe crab stuffed into a zucchini flower with black truffle sauce. Finally, I asked for Surf and Turf, not regular lobster and steak, but escolar fish and seared Kobe beef. Alan said he would be happy with whatever I suggested, so I asked for lamb from the Upon Request section. (I heard a few laughs when I did this, but I pursued a craving for meat in this fish dinner.)

My first bite was of a plump Kumamoto oyster with green apples, a taste of fish and ocean united with sour apples and earth. The fabulous flavors battled long in my mouth. The second, oyster with shiso mint, was dizzying, but my favorite was oyster in ponzu sauce. Fresh soy and luxurious oysters seem made for each other. The tuna, sliced into thin filets, was light as a flower and delicious as a warm summer day. The foie gras brought out the subtle flavor of the yellowfin.

Between dishes, I watched more people stream into this popular restaurant. Conversation grew louder, waiters became more frantic. The bread man kept returning with rolls, from sourdough to soft, sweet Parker House.

The octopus arrived, knocking out all thoughts of rolls. I had high expectations, perhaps a little too high. A subtle taste of octopus and olive oil crept into my mouth, but I had hoped for more zest. It needed to be pushed to the limit. I felt chef Ripert could have put a little more effort into this dish. The langoustine knocked out all doubts. Like the shrimp, the lobster was so tender and plump my fork slid right through. Sweet and spicy hit my taste buds. I was wrapped in a lemon-seaweed coma.

Down from heaven came the crab. It was enclosed in the zucchini flower, doused with black truffle sauce, topped with shaved truffles. It was out of this world. Each flavor—sour zucchini flower, sweet crab and woody truffle sauce—was a piece of a puzzle, and they fit together in a complex yet clear picture.

Finally, we had come to Lightly Cooked. Alan had claimed that the surf-and-turf was a signature dish of Le Bernadin. A bite of rich, silky beef followed by cool, refreshing fish was perfection. Escolar is delicate and delicious by itself, but it came with an anchovy sauce that rather bullied the fish.

As we relaxed and waited to order dessert, I discovered the décor. At first glance I thought Le Bernardin was modern, but it's really timeless.

As a "welcome" to an entire course called "Dessert," we were given an eggshell containing caramel, chocolate, cream, and sea salt. I tasted oceans of chocolate, skies of cream, and seas of salt. We ordered dark chocolate ganache with vanilla salt and sweet potato pearls, and a selection of sorbets. The pineapple put me in a warm, tropical place, the coconut was so creamy it was hard to imagine it contained no dairy, and the blood orange jerked me out of my creamy adventures and into bolder, tangier tastes.

But it was the chocolate ganache, so smooth and rich, that lingered with me for the rest of the night. That and a final thought. I realized with a pang how much it hurt to be mesmerized by a chef who hates me.

Food: 24 of 25
Service: 25 of 25
Decor: 23 of 25

Le Bernardin, 155 West 51st Street, New York, NY; 212-554-1515; www.le-bernardin.com

These days midtown still has plenty of eating places, but few of that sort. You’re more likely to find upscale chains, riff-raff food factories, make-believe bistros, or, at the high end, grandiosity for graying bankers, not that you’ll find many of those around, either. So unexpected is the classic, old-style restaurant that when Seäsonal appeared a few months ago, it got almost no attention, certainly little all-important buzz.

I can’t entirely blame the surroundings for the disinterest. For no good public relations reason, Seäsonal calls itself not just a restaurant but also a “weinbar,” which promises an evening of sticky Rieslings in funny green glasses. Even worse, the few press notices it received tended to classify the food as Austrian-German, evoking sausages, glockenspiels, and year-round celebrations of Oktoberfest. You’ll find none of that at Seäsonal, not even the random wurst.

The restaurant is dark, comfortable, minimalist, and adult. The music is soft. The customers dress respectfully. The artwork is quiet—a tired old guy in one painting looks like he endured a few too many sessions with Sigmund Freud. The chefs, Wolfgang Ban and Eduard Frauneder, love pumpkin oil and pumpkin seeds, which turn up everywhere. They dabble in foams. They make a heck of a potato salad, too.

The menu is almost entirely Austrian, which these days means high-toned and restrained. Austrian food used to be so outrageously rich I suspect the Austro-Hungarian empire was lost when its soldiers got too fat to ride into battle, but the cooking started changing about a quarter-century ago.

Seäsonal’s food isn’t exactly lightweight, but it is admirably complex, moderately priced, and quite authentic—although I have no idea what Chatham cod is doing on the menu. (If there really is cod in Austria, I suspect it’s breaded, fried, and molded into fishsticks.) A great many of the white wines, most of them from Germany and Austria, are labeled trocken, a welcome promise of crisp dryness.

The menu has one problem: Austrian titles. Are you eager to sample Marinierter Lachs? I think not, but you should be, not just because the name means nothing more than “marinated salmon” but because it’s swell, a flat disc of lush, creamy, barely marinated salmon cross-hatched with a sweet mustard sauce. In fact, almost all the intimidating menu names are nothing more than descriptions of the primary ingredients—well, that doesn’t explain the Kärntner Schlutzkrapfen, which turned out to be cheese ravioli, a pleasant appetizer wisely dominated by chanterelle mushrooms, not cheese.

The best of the meat dishes I tried was tafelspitz, which is boiled beef made famous by Emperor Franz Joseph, who apparently ate it constantly and did himself no harm. It’s rarely exciting, but when well-made, as it is here, the beef is rich, restrained, and satisfying. It’s a signature Mittleeuropean dish. With it comes applesauce laced with horseradish that provides a pleasing jolt.

Much less successful were braised veal cheeks, neither soft nor lush, served in wimpy gravy with so-so spätzle on the side. That cod was a touch too salty and a tad overcooked, but it was surrounded by mushrooms, peppers, and onions, making it about as lively as cod gets.

The best of the desserts were those made with dark chocolate, one a cone filled with mousse, the other a warm soufflé. The beignets, baked instead of fried, were a disaster. They were hard, dry, and impossible to pry apart, which made me think they’d been in the oven, forgotten, for a few days. Nor was I a fan of the Kaiserschmarren, a beloved Austrian specialty consisting of torn-up pancakes with apple-quince compote. An Austrian friend declared it absolutely authentic. I pronounced it boring.

For that matter, a little earlier in the meal I’d criticized the Wiener schnitzel, Austria’s dearly beloved fried, breaded, and virtually unseasoned veal cutlet. It tasted like every other authentic Wiener schnitzel I’ve eaten, deadly dull. My friend was so outraged by my critiques of Austria’s favorite comfort foods that he sarcastically said to me, “How can you be right and a whole nation be wrong?”

I replied, reasonably, “It isn’t as difficult as you might think.”

132 West 58th Street, New York, NY; 212-957-5550; www.seasonalnyc.com

Open more pizzerias.

We can’t seem to get enough of them, and we don’t seem to care what we spend at them—I’ve recently seen pies with a couple of ordinary toppings sell for as much as $28, although not at the two new places I visited last week, where prices peaked at $17.

Co. (pronounced "company") is located at the corner of a very un-Manhattan-like strip mall in Chelsea. I was in line with dozens of other shivering supplicants before the 5 p.m. opening bell and entered to the musical thunderings of “We Are the Champions.” (Our waiter claimed the selection was a coincidence.) The attention being paid to Motorino, in Williamsburg, is somewhat less frenzied, even though it is almost perfect in design: trendy, understated, homespun, and comfy, one of those restaurants that makes all of us who live elsewhere wonder why we don’t move to Brooklyn.

At Motorino, a roaring-hot, wood-burning pizza oven is the centerpiece of the restaurant. At Co., the oven is hidden, although one of my intrepid diners managed to sneak a peek while pretending to use the restroom. He said, “It was a thrill, like seeing a naked woman.” (I guess he doesn’t look at the Internet much.)

The pizza at Co. is produced by Jim Lahey of the revered Sullivan St Bakery and answers this question: If pizza is essentially crust, and if crust is essentially bread, and if Lahey is possibly the finest bread-maker in New York, shouldn’t the pizza at Co. be superb? This is not a trick question. The pizza is, for the most part, exactly that. The only flaw is an occasional wrongheaded harmonizing of toppings, annoying but far from fatal.

Co. sends out precisely my kind of pies: supple and thin, chewy and charred, with little in the way of a poufy outer crust. Many people like poufy, including most Naples residents, but I find too much outer ring—the part chain pizzerias like to stuff with cheese—a waste of valuable dough. If you are a poufy outer crust person, you might wish to cease reading this segment of the story and immediately move on to Motorino, where the outer crust rises up like Mt. Vesuvius.

A second vital attribute of Co. pizzas is their impressive lightness. Each one is about 11-inches in diameter, allowing for four ample slices, and while every mouthful is satisfying, they remain among the least filling pies on earth. None of us had any difficulty eating two whole pizzas, and the hungriest said, “I could do with another.”

Co.’s classic margherita—buffalo mozzarella, tomato sauce, basil—was its best, simply because the tomato sauce tastes so summery and fresh. (It turns out to be half-fresh, half-canned.) The only flaw in the pie was the basil, so nuked it had shriveled into a tasteless dab of green. The Boscaiolo, which is tomato, mushroom, buffalo mozzarella, sausage, onion, and chile flakes, was essentially a mushroom pizza with every other topping a minor accent. The Popeye has the same problem—it has six toppings but remains basically a spinach pie. (Yes, boscaiolo indicates mushrooms to Italians and popeye means spinach to Americans, but I like to taste the other stuff, too.)  The now-famous flambé, a take on Alsatian flammenkuchen, is the one to order if you want the thrill of bacon and wish to fill up.

It isn’t just the oversized outer ring that makes Motorino’s pies reminiscent of Naples. It’s also the wetness. (Okay, I have an admission: I might be the only person on earth who doesn’t consider the pizza of Naples impeccable.) Motorino’s Margherita DOC pizza—buffalo mozzarella, tomato sauce, basil—is a soggy mess.

The same pie made with the housemade fresh cow’s milk mozzarella is somewhat less mushy in the middle, but when you pick up a slice of either one, most of the toppings slide off. (Don’t tell me to use a knife and fork. That’s no fun.) But please don’t get me wrong: Both taste good, really good, although Motorino’s tomato sauce can’t compete with Co.’s.

The pies here are more rustic than those at Co., the toppings seemingly tossed on rather than meticulously assembled. The single exception was the pie made with mozzarella, artichokes, smoked pancetta, Parmigiano-Reggiano, onions, and crisply cooked oregano, a gorgeous piece of work. Second best was a combination of mozzarella, too-salty smoked ham, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and nicely charred brussels sprout leaves.

Co. has a wine list. (Have the 2007 Crios de Susana Balbo, a Malbec from Mendoza, $36.) Motorino is hoping for one, and nervously worries about being rejected. We were allowed to bring our own wine, charged no corkage, and provided with perfectly nice wine glasses and a lovely corkscrew, but the waiter refused to open the bottle, fearing somehow that such a courtesy would bring down the wrath of the New York State Liquor Authority.

Motorino also has a terrific dessert—fried pizza. That’s pizza dough deep-fried, topped with powdered sugar and accompanied by a pile of fresh lemon slices for squeezing on top, thus creating a kind of part-chewy, part-crunchy funnel cake with lemon icing.

I asked a woman accompanying me why she couldn’t stop eating it, and she looked at me as though I understood as little about women as I did about Naples pizza, which she loves. “Because it’s fattening,” she said.

Co.: 230 Ninth Avenue (at West 24th Street), New York, NY; 212-243-1105; www.co-pane.com. Motorino: 319 Graham Avenue, Brooklyn, NY; 718-599-8899; www.motorinopizza.com

It’s a residential and industrial area in Brooklyn, 4, 5, 6, or 8 blocks in size (depending on what blog you read), located practically under the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges and named for the Battle of Vinegar Hill, fought in Ireland in 1798. It’s impossible to resist. It’s impossible to find. It’s practically at the gates of the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, where I did reserve duty in U.S. Army boats 35 years ago. I never knew it was there.

Walk through the restaurant’s front door, which indeed looks like the entrance to a private residence, and you’ll immediately feel at home. Wood floors, wood tables, wood chairs, all somewhat mismatched. Wood-burning oven, too. Add in lots of votive candles and overhead light fixtures that reminded me of Skee-Ball targets.

The overall décor package is Distressed Chic, similar in style to two other Brooklyn restaurants, Moto and Five Leaves, but more homespun. There’s a tiny room downstairs with a fireplace, perfect for a small party, maybe her and you.

The host wears a fedora. The chef is his girlfriend, Jean Adamson. The staff is well-meaning, kind, and attentive. The food is uneven, not alluring enough to draw throngs from Manhattan, but perhaps that’s not the idea. Inasmuch as there is no other restaurant in Vinegar Hill, locals might be grateful enough for its presence to fill it up.

The menu was small: three appetizers, four mains, two veggies, and two desserts the evening I went with a couple of friends. We ate everything. By far the worst item on our table was the tap water. When I insisted we switch to bottled water, unusual for me, one of my friends perceptively remarked, “I imagine the pipes on this street haven’t been replaced in a hundred years.”

The chicken-liver mousse was delicate, velvety, and laden with spices, both the hot and the sweet kind. Mussels, roasted to a burnished red glow, were impressive, but they were perversely piled in a bowl so tiny they managed not to come in contact with the lemon-chili-garlic oil puddled beneath them. (Dipping the accompanying grilled bread in the oil compensated somewhat.) The butternut-squash tart was clunky in every way—heavy pastry, stolid vegetables chunks, an overdose of blue cheese.

The crispy chicken, reasonably crisp, had an intriguing accent from sherry sauce and came in a cast-iron pot so hot my friend’s hand brushed the side and came away with a first-degree burn. The Country Chop, a massive serving of sliced pork accompanied by colossal fingerling potatoes, was underseasoned and underwhelming. I longed for salt and pepper shakers, but they're only provided upon request, an unnecessary vanity. Roasted cod was so undercooked it was practically cod sashimi, which is not a Japanese delicacy. Kale-and-walnut ravioli were shapeless, weighty, and satisfying. The two vegetable selections summarized the range of the cooking here: Brussels sprouts, boring; celery-root-and-potato gratin, brilliant.

The two desserts were pleasant, the kind you might hope to be served at the home of a friend. One was a chocolate Guinness cake that did not taste of Guinness (but to my knowledge never does) and the other a pound cake with grapefruit sections. Both were topped with creamy stuff. Both were swell.

America really doesn’t have bistros—I suppose diners are as close as we get—but Vinegar Hill House rather reminded me of one. And it’s far more imaginatively decked out than a French bistro, one of the design elements being an outhouse door that we were told came from the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

I cannot attest to its authenticity. I’m not so old that indoor plumbing hadn’t been invented when I served there.

72 Hudson Avenue (between Front and Water Streets), Brooklyn, NY; 718-522-1018; vinegarhillhouse.com

L’Artusi, located in the West Village, is the larger, more casual, and less expensive offshoot of the much-loved dell’anima, and it’s already so popular that obtaining a 6:30 p.m. reservation on a weeknight required intense negotiations with a reservationist. In addition to the pedigree, another lure is a wonderfully appealing menu filled with soothing Italian standards—some as everyday as spaghetti and meatballs, others as fashionable as scallops with sea salt. All but one of them are priced under $20.

The greeting at the front door is swell. The room is understated in a pleasant way, with decorative touches that say Ralph Lauren Home. Wine service from the start was first-rate, and I loved the bright, bubbly white Lambrusco, served by the bottle for $36. If only the food hadn’t come along and ruined a perfectly nice evening.

I’m not going to mess around. Here are our dishes, one by one:

Beef carpaccio, pricy at $14, a serving of emaciated slivers sliced so thin they had stuck fast to the plate, like Scotch tape, and had to be scraped off with a fork. An appealing touch was a sprinkling of rye-crisp crunchies.

Raw Nantucket Bay scallops, fairly priced at $14 and not lightly dressed, as Italian crudo tends to be, but presented as a soupy mess with sea urchins, lemon, and chives. In the dim light of L’Artusi, the presentation eerily resembled mac ‘n’ cheese.

Albacore tuna, another crudo, not cheap at $14 and not what I’d call an impeccably-sourced product, but not bad. The square slices were topped with cucumber and fennel.

Ricotta gnudi, middlingly priced at $16, and drenched in butter, the primary flavor element. Soft and pillowly, as gnudi are supposed to be, but more like a stuffed pasta, which gnudi are not supposed to be.

Wild boar, decently priced at $18 but dry, stringy, and devoid of richness or gaminess. Topped with a white cheese sauce similar to sour cream and accompanied by polenta that tasted like an instant product boiled, unseasoned, and plopped on the plate.

Porchetta, overpriced at $23 and just awful. Porchetta is supposedly a moist, herbaceous, boneless Italian pork roast. This version consisted of a ring of tough, chewy fat, about one-and-a-half inches thick, surrounding what seemed to be a pork meatball. It’s only January, but I don’t care. L’Artusi’s porchetta is officially the worst dish of 2009. (Late-breaking development: porchetta is suddenly off the menu—permanently, one hopes).

Again and again, a friend eating with me said, “Well, back to the bread.” I’m certain we’re remembered there, because we ate three portions. The bread, not housemade, came from a Brooklyn bakery, and was okay. The olive oil for dipping, not housemade, came from Umbria and was pretty good. The staff kept asking us if we wanted more bread and we kept surprising them by saying, “Yes.”

We tried a few desserts. I liked the bittersweet chocolate pudding.

I want to be fair. I ate just one meal with just one guest at L’Artusi. That is not what any journalism school symposium would consider a reasonable sampling. Some people might think that this restaurant deserves a second chance.

My response: Not on your life. No way will I eat that food again. Even restaurant critics have the right, in extraordinary circumstances, to behave like human beings. No reasonable person would return to that restaurant after eating what we did. Occasionally, rationality must triumph over responsibility.

I will use as my guideline something I once heard said by Jane Stern of the estimable food-writing twosome Jane and Michael Stern, authors of the Roadfood publications. She was asked at a panel discussion whether she ever returned the next day to a place if she didn’t like the food, and she replied, “If we think the food is no good, we don’t wait around for it to get better.”

228 West 10th Street (between Bleecker and Hudson Streets), New York, NY; (212) 255-5757