Restaurant Advice from the editors of

You came to visit...
Now how about a good lunch — or dinner?!

New York has more to offer than the Javits Center & Times Square, you know. And the best restaurants are not necessarily in your hotel.CitiGraphics Newsletters is based in New York, and we like to eat nicely, and treat our clients well. Here are some of our favorites, some of them not likely to be in the guidebooks.

Go to Chinatown!

New York boasts some of the best Chinese cooking outside China — always has.

• The big surprise: The Downtown Holiday Inn's Pacifica Restaurant. This is A1 Cantonese cooking, well prepared and nicely served. Highly recommended: Stuffed Beancurd. MuShu Pork. Peking Duck — elegant showy dishes. Equally good: Whatever soup the chef makes that day (pray hard for Velvet Chicken Corn Soup...). Or, ask maitre d'hotels Alan or Patrick for suggestions. This is where we eat about once a week and where we go for client lunches and larger parties (up to 150 people...). Great bar here — these guys make a fabulous martini. Address: 138 Lafayette Street. Easy to get to: Take the #6 Lexington Avenue Local or N/R Broadway Local subway to Canal Street. Walk north (uptown) one block to Howard Street (then one block east to Lafayette, if you took the N/R train).
• A special treat: Yeah Shanghai Deluxe Restaurant. We have just started going here a lot. Shanghai cooking is lucious and quite different from Cantonese; New York has several Shanghai-style restaurants. This one is turning out to be a consistent favorite. Highly recommended: The Drunken (or Wine) Chicken and Aromatic Beef appetizers. Steamed Juicy Pork Buns ("Tang Bao") [and don't hesitate to make those your meal...]. Outstanding braised ("Tungpo") belly pork. Lion Head meatballs served in soup with noodles. The food here is very consistent from visit to visit — a good indication of a top chef — and flavors are crisp and intense. No large parties; there is only one table handling eight people and the room is small. Address: 65 Bayard Street, kittycorner across from Elizabeth Street; take a cab to this one, and ask the staff to call a car service for the ride back.
• Another Shanghai style restaurant: New Green Bo. This is kitty-corner across from Yeah Shanghai. This place is always busy, because the food is good. Portions are generous, so you might want to order a basic selection; order more dishes later if you need it. Particular value: The fried dumplings. Also very good scallion pancakes. This restaurant is said to be operated by the wife of the old 456 Restaurant, which was commonly considered one of Chinatown's best for decades; many specialty dishes are the same.
• Can't get to Chinatown? Our favorite Szechuan-style cooking — we learned about it from Mr. Chang, from Taiwan's representative office — is Wu Liang Ye. Try the dry-sautéed green beans, and the best (also, most authentic) twice-cooked pork in New York. This is food for folks who like spices; Szechuan cooking is hot; if you worry about this, remind your waiter you're a Western Devil and ask him to have the kitchen go a little easy on things. Address: 36 West 48th Street, on the north side of Rockefeller Center and easy walking distance from Times Square or Grand Central Station area hotels. Equally interesting, also Szechuan: Grand Szechuan (Da Szechuan) on 9th Avenue at 24th Street; this is less elegant than Wu Liang Ye, but gets double-thumbs up from Mr. Lin (Mr. Chang's successor) and Jackie Newman, editor of Flavor & Fortune, the premier Chinese cuisine journal. For diet fans: Skip the rice, minimize the veg, and you can do low-carb, Atkins diet stuff, even in Chinese.

Prefer something more, er, traditional?...

• For BIG MEAT fans: The obvious choice is Churrascaria Plataforma, the rodizio at 316 West 49th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Call for a reservation (212-245-0505); this place fills up. Never been to a rodizio? The salad bar is neat — but avoid a large portion. Ask for the setup of side dishes at once, and turn over your tag to "go". Then eat some of the most succulent steak, roast beef, chicken, sausages, (et cetera et cetera) you will ever have. The service is fast and cheerful; the bar is superior; leave room for dessert (tiramisu if you have room — excellent). Again, this is walking distance from most show hotels.
• For haute cuisine: This is a tough call. We like the Café Pierre in the hotel of the same name (Fifth Avenue at 60th Street. This is now Four Seasons operated. The cooking is elegant, European, simple and perfect. Service is superb. The room is small; and you will rarely have a crowd competing for a seat. The result is always pleasant. We've never had a bad meal here, period. The fish is unusually good, prepared in a way that its freshness and flavor (never "fishy") comes through. Pray for the sole or the grilled sea bass. Another treat recently sampled: bits of veal quickly sautéed and served in a simple sauce with mushrooms with spätzle — "Zürich style". Starters are good too — but you might want to just ask for another shot at the bread basket; the rolls and specialty breads are perfection. Deserts are what one would expect from a very good multi-star French restaurant; indulge, or, if you skip desert with your coffee, they'll give you a nice little plate of goodies to enjoy anyway. Great business idea: have afternoon tea in the adjacent rotunda, from about 3PM on. Less show, smaller, quieter and a bit more sophisticated than the more popular places for this American adaptation of the British practice. By the bye, you pay no more for this superior stuff than you would for lesser places.
• We like Tribeca's old established (pre-DeNiro...) Capsouto Fréres (451 Washington Street — this is definitely a call-a-cab location); the food is elegant "bistro" and the dessert souflés justly famous. Our recent choice, however, is the restaurant at the French Cooking School. In addition to an a la carte menu, the restaurant features a prix fixe "tasting menu" at lunch ($20) and dinner ($30). The food is good, the choices are interesting. The wine-per-glass is fine stuff, and cheap enough that you can order white with the soup and fish, and a nice claret with the meat course (about two glasses in the caraffe, by the bye). A recent meal offered a choice of lobster and sole for the fish, and chicken or veal for meat; the soup was a lovely pistu. The French Cooking School restaurant is on Broadway at Grand Street, on the edge of SoHo; do-able by subway but a cab will be easier.
• The best Italian food we've had in New York is at Il Cortile. There are many (very good) Italian restaurants in New York; this one is the best. One thing: Don't eat after breakfast, if you go to Il Cortile that night; the portions are HUGE! Highly recommended: a pasta course with porcini mushrooms in a tomato and cream sauce (one portion will do nicely for two people as an appetizer); main dishes range from an elegant variant on "surf and turf" to more traditional red meat and fowl dishes. What sets this apart is the obvious perfection of each dish. This perfection is matched in the wait staff; these guys are seasoned professionals and you can reliably ask for advice (especially on a selection from a very good wine cellar, with some excellent modestly priced items). At the end of the dinner, I personally stick to a lemon ice — it's all I have room for. Address: 125 Mulberry Street. Same directions as to the Downtown Holiday Inn, but walk a few blocks further east on Canal Street, the uptown half a block. Or, take a cab....
• On the other hand, there is pizza. Pizza is a cult in New York. Coal-fired brick ovens are almost commonplace. We think the current acme is Angelo's Pizzeria, at 117 West 57th Street, just west of Sixth Avenue. Coal-fired brick oven, of course. Fresh ingredients, of course. Other things on the menu besides pizza, to be sure — but if you don't eat pizza here, you have not eaten the real thing. [Visitors from Chicago: We think ours is much better.]

Interesting and Ethnic

• Want something really different? Slide on down to the The Turkish Kitchen, at 386 Third Avenue, between 27th and 28th Streets. This is a sophisticated interpretation of an unusual, er, regional cuisine; the Turks brought their own tastes and added them to the tastes of the people who were there (and there were people in Turkey for a very long time before the Turks wandered in...). The setting is elegant, the service is very good. Not flawless; we were being pushed off the Turkish wine toward a much more expensive Australian wine (frankly, good as Australian varietals are, they do no more with a dinner than the Turkish wine we tried anyway — a very drinkable red). Most of the food falls in two categories: Dishes are braised or done en cassarole, or they are more or less grilled. We think the grills, especially the boneless cornish hen, merit attention. There is a very good stewed lamb shank that is nicely savory. Dishes come with rice and usually some sort of simple vegetable, usually braised. Starters are nice, and are nicely set up to share. one portion gives two people a taste, so order accordingly. We particularly like the lamb on crispy flat bread, served hot and just a little spicy. Try to hit this place when it's not too busy; the kitchen seems to have trouble keeping up, and keeping the braising from overcooking things, when the crowd is on and the "B" team is called upon. Also, pick your seating carefully; the management has made the wholly unjustified assumption that dark enough to not see the food is elegant, and some places are simply too dark.
• What about a great Southeast Asian bistro? Try the Franklin Station Café. This one is sooo easy to get to: Just find your way to the #1 subway train (IRT, West Side local train), take it downtown to Franklin Street. Come to street level, walk across to the other side of the street (you'll see the rather monumental faux-traditional subway entrance canopy for the uptown entrance to the Franklin Street station), and right there, at the corner of West Broadway and Franklin Street, is the restaurant. This is a neighborhood place. The woman who owns it is from Southeast Asia; her husband is French. The food is generally Southeast Asian with a French flair. Dishes, when spiced, are deftly done — more so that in the usual run of Southeast Asian restaurants. The menu is itself charming (handdrawn); the small menu has a range of dishes from simple to more involved; deserts are worthwhile, as is the coffee. The wine list is rich and surprisingly modestly priced. Great for lunch, great for dinner (same menu). Stuck in New York over a weekend? This is a favorite place for brunch.
• Another Southeast Asian approach: Mangez Avec Moi, 71 West Broadway between Warren & Murray. This is a favorite luncheon place for lots of people; come a bit before or after the main lunch time, if you don't want to wait for a table. The luncheon specials are smaller portions of the main savory dishes — mostly curries and other stewed or braised meat and veg. The rest of the meal is a bowl of light miso soup and white or brown rice; the portions are generous and the flavors are spicy but deft. Ambience is simple, a bit crowded and very much pre-stockbroker/lawyer-chic. [BTW, if there's space at the counter, try the very small lunch bar next door.]

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And, have a good time!