Robert Sietsema at The Cardinal

This week in the Voice, Robert Sietsema is pleasantly surprised by the Cardinal: “The menu reads well. It offers no appetizers. There’s something reassuring about that, in contrast to the current practice of making you comb through a half-dozen categories to assemble your dinner with no idea what the outcome will be. At the Cardinal, you get a plate of food, and you’re well-fed.”

Sam Sifton files his final review, and it’s of Per Se, which gets to keep its four stars: “in recent years, and particularly under the kitchen command of Eli Kaimeh, who has been Per Se’s chef since early 2010, Per Se has matured. Its synthesis of culinary art and exquisite service is now complete. It represents the ideal of an American high-culture luxury restaurant.”
[NY Times]

Adam Platt awards one star each to RedFarm (“[Joe] Ng’s cooking is playful and fresh, and although some of his forward-thinking creations veer off the rails, most of the food is a cut above the kind of run-of-the-mill cooking you see these days down in Chinatown”) and Café China (“the most unexpected thing of all might be the strangely palatable desserts”).
[NY Magazine]

Steve Cuozzo raves over Jones Wood Foundry: “If Jones Wood Foundry were in Williamsburg, it would be the toast of every hipster-fixated blog… there’s nothing like it in Manhattan. And it’s laughably better than any cafe in its price range within 20 blocks.
[NY Post]

Ryan Sutton approves of Tertulia, which “jibes with New York’s haute-casual zeitgeist, a reasonable tradeoff given the designer food at discount prices. … It’s our most adventurous tapas restaurant after the offal-heavy Casa Mono.”
[Bloomberg]

Jay Cheshes finds a lot to love at the Cannibal: “Run by guys and packed with them, the place is so unabashed in its bromance for craft beer and artisanal meat it’s almost a parody of a manly restaurant. If you like meat and beer, though, it’s pretty close to paradise.”
[TONY]

Gael Greene finds hits and misses at Hospoda, which “isn’t that expensive. …The service is erratic, sometimes graceful, sometimes scatterbrained, sometimes disappeared. … Still, Hospoda is definitely a success on its own terms.”
[Insatiable Critic]

Tables for Two captures the scene at Miss Lily’s: “While most people are not coming here for a square meal, it’s certainly possible to assemble one. In fact, the menu is full of oddly heavy choices for what is really a night club, and dinner has an unfussy, home-cooked feel.”
[New Yorker]