Columnists: Steve Cuozzo

Latest Columns

• Pencil in this pensive cafe

  There’s life in the old bistro yet. Cramped, crazy-busy Le Philosophe shows how to make leaf-eating scenesters fall for duck à l’orange and lobster thermidor: lighten them just a little, and make the place look more...   May 15, 2013

  From Food

• Dahling! FiDi Cipriani is celeb-friendly again

  Victory for Cipriani Wall Street! The city has decided to build a new and shiny newsstand not in front of the venue’s red-carpet ballroom entrance, but on the next block west. We reported a few weeks ago how the plan to...   May 14, 2013

  From Commercial

• An authentic parmesan tease

  Carbone lays a big, fat uovo. Chefs Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi’s adorable Torrisi Italian Specialties indulged in small-scale presentation that avoided being precious. But at the century’s most slavishly anticipated...   May 08, 2013

  From Food

• Two stars for Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi’s new downtown spot, Carbone

  Carbone lays a big, fat uovo. Chefs Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi’s adorable Torrisi Italian Specialties indulged in small-scale presentation that avoided being precious. But at the century’s most slavishly anticipated...   May 07, 2013

  From Food

• Chuck eyes re-zone bonds

  Joining the melee over East Midtown rezoning, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will propose today that City Hall issue bonds to pay for future transit and infrastructure improvements in the Grand Central district. Schumer...   May 07, 2013

  From Commercial

• Chowing down at Stella 34, inside Macy’s Herald Square

  Except for Koreatown and Keens, the West 30s are a restaurant wasteland. Italian’s scarce, and when you stumble on the odd grim trattoria left over from the old Garment District, you wish you hadn’t. So, new Stella 34...   May 01, 2013

  From Food

• Miracle on 54th street

  In an unusual case of close cooperation between the owners of land and leasehold, Waterman Interests has signed a new, 75-year master lease at 400 Park Ave., at 54th Street. Tod Waterman’s company made the deal with...   April 30, 2013

  From Commercial

• The velvet blunderground

  Velvet ropes are synonymous with the city’s most exclusive entertainment and party venues. But now the iconic barriers are being called upon to guard a much more pedestrian location: the rim of a big, empty sidewalk...   April 23, 2013

  From Commercial

• Cuozzo to NYC restaurants: 10 things I hate about you

  Inedible sweets. Ridiculous menus. Inquisition-style seats. There’s no end to restaurant nuisances, especially if you love exploring the city’s “must-try” spots. I’ve been to more than a few this year. Herewith, a...   April 17, 2013

  From Food

• Landmark East contest

  Of the eight Midtown East buildings being weighed for landmark status, which — if any — should be immortal? In the name of democratizing the city’s landmarks designation procedure, Realty Check invites you to weigh in....   April 16, 2013

  From Commercial

• Big 3 eyeing Hudson Yards

  Time Warner, Citibank and Ralph Lauren Polo could be the next big companies to move to mammoth new Hudson Yards on the Far West Side. All three have had talks with Hudson Yards developer Related Cos. about taking space...   April 11, 2013

  From Local

• All brine and no Pearl

  Let’s get the good news about Pearl & Ash out of the way: Open six weeks, it serves some captivating “modern and globally inspired small plates” out of an open kitchen nearly as tiny as the dishes. Chef Richard Kuo has...   April 10, 2013

  From Food

• A new century in Brooklyn

  It looks like Brooklyn’s famous Cascade smokestacks will soon go up in a puff of nostalgic memory. That Bedford-Stuyvesant location that was a linen-supply factory for more than 110 years is slated for a large new...   April 09, 2013

  From Commercial

• A misbegotten war on restaurants

  What good are punitive, minutiae-absorbed restaurant inspections that cripple perfectly safe eateries in mid-meal — but can’t protect the public from a real risk? Earlier this month, Mayor Bloomberg himself had his...   April 09, 2013

  From Oped Columnists

• In your facelift, LA!

  In the 40 years since Johnny Carson hijacked “The Tonight Show” from Rockefeller Center to Burbank, the palmy blur New Yorkers call “Los Angeles” lost most of its mystique. We sneered at LA’s empty downtown, its inept...   April 07, 2013

  From Oped Columnists

• Twirls & tricks at Harlow

  Richie Notar was famously a driving force behind Nobu for 20 years. But nobody at Harlow, his splashy, sexy new Midtown “Old Hollywood Glamour Joint” (as a Times puff piece called it) is asking him about that. They want...   April 03, 2013

  From Food

• New towers turn Big Apple into Spec City

  Two new Manhattan office towers now going up will soon bring 900,000 expensive square feet to market. Not a square inch of that space has been pre-leased. Yet their developers seem unfazed. How can this be, given...   April 02, 2013

  From Commercial

• Manzanilla brings modern Spanish food back to Manhattan

  New York is finally starting to “get” modern Spanish cuisine. Not that catching up with the civilized world came easily: For years, whenever a brave chef or owner launched a quixotic quest to bring the style here, they...   March 27, 2013

  From Food

• Size matters

  Promgirl.com founder and racehorse owner David Wilkenfeld had a hot streak when his gelded colt Vyjack won four races in a row. He’s likely to make the Kentucky Derby if he runs well in the Wood Memorial on April 6, and...   March 26, 2013

  From Business

• Free Chase Plaza!

  JPMorgan Chase has done to Downtown what Occupy Wall Street couldn’t: It booted the public from a public park.  Bank chairman Jamie Dimon doesn’t see it that way. His lawyers claim Chase Plaza, open to all citizens for...   March 24, 2013

  From Oped Columnists

• Take ‘Gravy’ train to Brooklyn

  Is the pasta at Brooklyn kitchen god Saul Bolton’s new trattoria Red Gravy made in-house? “The bulk of it is extruded right here,” the waiter answered proudly. Well, extrude this. But no new 21st-century Brooklyn...   March 20, 2013

  From Food

• Tower rent may hit the roof

  What’s likely to be the city’s most dramatic outdoor terrace on an office building might help command the highest rent ever paid for a commercial penthouse: the triplex apex of 7 Bryant Park, the 28-story tower that...   March 19, 2013

  From Commercial

• Inconsistent kitchen at Siro’s is failing to draw a consistent crowd

  It takes guts to launch a mammoth new American restaurant at an East Midtown site that chewed up two previous steakhouses — local favorite Blair Perrone (from downtown) and national chain Ruth’s Chris. But the team...   March 13, 2013

  From Food

• $50M makeover on tap for Herald Center

  Herald Center, the thriving Herald Square area’s ugly-duckling shopping and school destination between Manhattan Mall and Macy’s, is getting a $50 million beautification and a repositioning to banish its discount-center...   March 12, 2013

  From Commercial

• Get Farm up & running – fast

  Here’s hopeful news for Upper West Siders fed up with their neighborhood’s paltry pick of Chinese (or any) cuisine: Red Farm, the delayed uptown edition of Ed Schoenfeld’s crazy-popular, proudly “inauthentic” Chinese...   March 06, 2013

  From Food

• An eatery you can dance to

  The people opening a new casual eatery at 100 W. 124th St. — right across from Jeff Sutton’s mega-retail complex, which breaks ground this spring — picked the luckiest name, and maybe location, in the world. Six months...   March 05, 2013

  From Commercial

• French for flailing? Tallulah

  Shocking news awaited me on my first visit to train-wreck Cafe Tallulah last week, where the media for two months had hailed chef Roxanne Spruance’s “new twists” on French bistro cuisine: She was gone! Yes! And barely...   February 27, 2013

  From Food

• Fed money keeps rail tunnel alive

  Related Cos. and Amtrak have agreed to build the first link of what’s hoped will eventually be a new rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River between New Jersey and Manhattan. In a breakthrough promoted by Sen. Chuck...   February 26, 2013

  From Commercial

• How to fare well in Apple

  Following a Mediterranean diet is a lot easier at home than in restaurants.  Lots of “Mediterranean” menus include tons of red meat and pasta — exactly what you’re not supposed to have, says the latest study. Eating as...   February 26, 2013

  From Local

• A bar at the heart of it all

  Time Warner Center’s “Restaurant Collection” is finally complete. So what if it took 10 years? Bland-sounding Center Bar is anything but: a stylish refuge just outside the doors of Per Se, Masa and Porter House — with...   February 20, 2013

  From Food

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