Middle Eastern food has a bad reputation. Some of this is easy to trace back to a Midtown full of greasy fast-food falafel carts and grimy storefronts hawking greyish gyros, no doubt. But some of it also boils down to an imprecise and inaccurate culinary calculus that we, as American eaters, are guilty of performing. Its central axiom: if chickpeas, then downmarket.

Hummus Kitchen, a new Israeli café in Hell’s Kitchen, has found a gentle way of shifting thinking about Middle Eastern food. The first line of attack is through décor–with exposed brick walls, comfy pillows and a shop-long lacquered banquette, as well as flooring that melds Art Nouveau-esque squiggles and traditional patterns, the restaurant feels extremely well put-together. While we do not generally place much emphasis on design–for us, food is the eternal sine qua non–the fact that Hummus Kitchen has paid such careful attention to its interior gives a little insight into the breadth of its subtle reputation rehab project.

Thankfully, the kitchen pays the same obvious attention to detail. In our several visits to the restaurant, we have eaten or drunk nothing that was not at least solidly good, along with several items that were truly wonderful. Among these is the mint-lemon granita lemonana (pictured left, $2.50)–a cooling, sinus-clearing drink that might be a bit out of season right now, but will be the first thing we order when the sun comes back to town. The restaurant’s eponymous dish (pictured below left, $3.95) was certainly worth naming the restaurant for, especially its texture, which is smooth yet substantial, and just garlicky enough to give a little lilt to the chickpeas. Interestingly, the hummus is served not only with a palm-sized round of perfect pita, but also with a green hot sauce that we suspect to be the kitchen’s version of skhug Temani, a zippy purée of coriander, peppers, garlic and vinegar–an unusual and very welcome addition to a plate of hummus.

Among the Mazze (small plates, all $3.95, no Frankie Beverly), we are big fans of the toothsome roasted cauliflower with green tahini, as well as the super-simple, super-savory feta and beet salad. The mixed platter of six or more mazze is the best way to taste several of the items, none of which disappoints. We also favor the ‘Super-Healthy Salad’ (pictured on Flickr, $6.95), and while we won’t make any claims about the health benefits of a quinoa and dried fruit salad, we can say that the textural contrast between soft butternut squash wedges and creamy, yogurt-slathered quinoa is pretty special. In the few months since Hummus Kitchen opened, this has become our new favorite lunch.

Among the house-made desserts, the traditional orange-infused knaffe and the crisp-tender baklava (pronounced by the staff as bach-LAU-ah) are our favorites (all three pictured on Flickr, all $4.50), especially eaten with a cup of very hot mint tea. Sure, all of this sounds like classic Middle Eastern fare, and indeed, it is. But what is truly different, and even a little transgressive, about Hummus Kitchen is the panache with which every meal is executed. Everything about the experience feels like a tremendous upgrade from other Levantine restaurants serving similar food at this price point. If the staff keep this up, both in Hell’s Kitchen and at the forthcoming Upper East Side location, they might just be able to pull off one of the best–and most well-deserved–reputation makeovers of the decade.

Hummus Kitchen, 768 Ninth Avenue (between 51st and 52nd Streets), 212-333-3009.

Restaurants in the Garment District, one of the borough’s last remaining gritty, industrial patches, have perhaps the toughest row to hoe in Manhattan. Not only must they lure diners in without the advantage of any real architectural appeal, they must also survive in an area that offers little residential space. Imagine a dirtier Wall Street, populated with zipper sellers instead of investment bankers, and you have the idea.

At the same time, the neighborhood has always offered rents low enough to attract risky, creative food ventures that might never have a chance elsewhere–Macaron Café and Go-Go Curry are two of the best examples of this. Lazzara’s Pizza, hidden upstairs in a nondescript stone building on 38th Street, is another. But, in the strangest synergy imaginable, Lazzara’s on 38th exploited its bargain Garment District rent even further by cleaving half its business into a recording studio that lives upstairs from the dining room. This, quite literally, is what they call vertical integration.

The downside to serving food from a GD address, especially one that requires climbing stairs, is that it is hard to build up a clientele of devoted patrons, no matter how good your chef is. So a few months ago, Lazzara made its move to a second location in the space left behind by Sawa BBQ on 9th Avenue, between 43rd and 44th Streets, right in the heart of booming Hell’s Kitchen. No matter that the storefront is narrow and features just three barstools and a slim wooden counter for diners–takeout and delivery are what this location is all about. Indeed, the décor, while inviting with its exposed brick and chunky dark wood detail, is so sparse that all attention inside is directed to the counter. No hip-hop beats to keep you hanging around, no tables or waitstaff to bother you. Come in, order your pizza, and go somewhere else to eat, it says quite plainly.

This message should not dissuade you, however. The pizza at Lazzara’s 9th Avenue location is quite possibly even better than at the Garment District location, and absolutely worth a visit, even if it means finding a local resident willing to host you while you snack on a few slices.

Sold in rectangular, thin-crust pies, Lazzara’s pizza looks like a crossbreed between Sicilian and Neopolitan styles, with crunchy, pleated edges and a tender, almost pasta-like base crust. At the (slightly further) uptown location, the pies all seem to be a bit crisper and with less of the bottom char that sometimes marred the pies on 38th. Of the several dozen toppings on offer at the 9th Avenue storefront, we have a few firm favorites: the Alorna (pictured above, $18/pie), a deconstructed meatball pie covered in peppers, Italian sausage, and ground beef; the vodka sauce and spinach pie ($16.50/pie), a piquant and very savory gloss on a 1970s pasta favorite; and the Tony’s Anchovies with a Twist (pictured right, $16.00/pie), where the ‘twist’ is succulent, sweet pan-fried onions that temper the intense saltiness of the briny anchovies–also quite easily the best anchovy pizza I have eaten all year.

Yes, there are appetizers, pastas and heros on the menu, but ignore them all, apart from the perfectly adequate salads and a super-gooey chicken parm. Really, Lazzara’s curious little oblong pies are the only thing that deserves your attention–and they only seem to be getting better. Which makes us wonder: If starting over sans recording studio improved the pizza as much as it seems to have done, what might losing the rest of the menu’s culinary dead weight do?

Lazzara’s Pizza, 617 9th Avenue (between 43rd and 44th Streets), 212-245-4440.

Single mindedness rules on the corner of 45th Street and Ninth Avenue. Out of what used to be the over-draperied rococo mess that was Jezebel have emerged two discrete restaurants that both take their names from a single dish. The Jezebel business has been scaled down to about a tenth of its former size and has re-emerged as Piece of Chicken, a table-free kitchenfront that sells $1 portions of ribs, greens and fried chicken. Some might view the move as a decline into reduced circumstances, but the focus has done Jezebel’s kitchen a world of good–the food is consistently wonderful, and now that it has no seating (nor piano player, nor porch swing), its overhead is laughably low. All of this adds up to a profitable business that adds real value to the neighborhood.

The teensy kitchen’s new neighbor–actually the occupant of its former space–is a familiar one. Five Napkin Burger is another collaborative effort from Andy D’Amico and Simon Oren, the Nice Matin duo that brought first Marseille and then Nizza to the very same block of Ninth Avenue. If this were Monopoly, the pair would be buying hotels right now.

Five Napkin Burger differs from its siblings in its rejection of a regional theme of any sort–the menu features the eponymous ten ounce chuck burger alongside sushi, pork chili, and Tunisian salmon tabbouleh. You could broadly call the food Amerasian Fusion Plus, but above all else, the restaurant’s repertoire always comes second to its mammoth burger (pictured top, $13.75). This hierarchy is just about right: The signature dish is Five Napkin Burger’s best, and despite its copious goopiness (pictured below right) it is worth a visit on its own. We are especially fond of the caramelized onions and aromatic rosemary aioli, even though they lubricate the bun so much that it is hard to even keep the sandwich intact enough to take a first bite. On our initial visit, we spotted a neighboring table anchoring slippery bun to patty with toothpicks, which is a tactic that works, but simply cutting the burger into quarters achieves the same results without the danger of puncturing a cheek.

Indeed, burgers make up the best items on the menu: the Italian turkey burger ($10.95), prepared with tomato sauce and peppers, reminds us of a very decent meatball sub, and the Ahi tuna burger (pictured left, $13.95) benefits from the contrast between the sweetness of the soft, brioche roll and the savory soy and wasabi mayonnaise. As much as we enjoy Five Napkin’s medium rare tuna burger, the tempura onion ring really ought to be served as a side–it adds nothing to the sandwich apart from more calories.

Most other dishes on the menu are adequate but not very special, especially the bland smoked tomato grits with shrimp (brunch only, $14.25) and the greasy, heavy pork chili (brunch or starter, $12.75). Similarly, the sushi, a puzzling companion to a hamburger-focused menu, is only satisfactory and probably ought to be ditched in favor of more light salads. We would also love to visit once when the waitstaff did not try to upsell us so wantonly at every stage of our meal.

But really, the timing could not be more perfect for Five Napkin Burger. Hell’s Kitchen has needed a casual, pretty reliable American bistro for quite some months–a gaping market void that can be traced neatly back to the day when Film Center Café got its extreme chrome makeover and suddenly decided it was Cookshop North. Sure, Five Napkin Burger could be 20% better than it is right now with very little effort, but with all signs pointing in the right direction in its early days, D’Amico’s kitchen should have plenty of time to revise and edit–as long as they leave their delightfully messy burger alone.

Five Napkin Burger, 630 Ninth Avenue (at 45th Street), 212-757-2277.

Ask a Hell’s Kitchen resident to point you in the direction of the best Thai restaurant on Ninth Avenue, and chances are pretty good that you’ll soon find a Wondee in your field of vision. There is no denying that Wondee Siam has flourished in the eleven years since it opened–in 2002, the flagship restaurant spawned a sibling (Wondee II) across the street, and then this month, a third Wondee (Wondee III) appeared ten blocks south on a rapidly developing stretch of Tenth Avenue. But since when is another restaurant in a chain news? Despite their common names, locals will tell you that the two original Wondees are far from interchangeable twins: Wondee I, even with its scruffy décor, is where table service is best, and where some people (not us) say New York’s best Thai food lives, while Wondee II’s food tends to be prepared spicier and with less oil, and therefore holds up better to carryout or delivery. Whether this differentiation is part of executive chef Phimploy Likitsansook’s master plan or is simply a happy accident, each restaurant maintains its own, quite distinct, role on a street stuffed to bursting with competitors. All of which begs the question: What might Wondee III become?

After a few meals at the new location, we are starting to think that 641 Tenth Avenue might be the Wondee where you wouldn’t be ashamed to take a date. Most of the menu is the same as at the other two locations–only a few noodle dishes appear to have been dropped or given new names, and nearly all the traditional Thai classics are still on offer. The kanom jeeb (pictured left, $4.95 for four), for example are every bit as uninspiring at Wondee III as they are at the other Wondees. We keep hoping that one of the cooks will amp up the flavors in these bland and heavy little mixed-meat nuggets, but for now, they remain a last resort on a menu where nearly every other option is at least decent.

Much better is the som tum (pictured right, $8.95), a shredded green papaya salad, made extra salty with dried shrimp and plenty of fish sauce and lime juice, and with enough red chili to cut through the salad’s strong umami overtones. If there is a better version of this, our favorite Thai salad, in the area, we have yet to taste it. And suspiciously, Wondee III’s som tum tastes exactly like Wondee II’s did until recently; we wonder if there hasn’t been a little kinky inter-restaurant chef-swapping going on among the Wondees. A conspicuously light touch with the oil on our kee mao noodles with squid (pictured left, $9.95) also makes us suspect that Wondee II’s former chef might have decamped for the new restaurant. This dish has always been one of our favorites, and it is heartening to see it prepared with generous handfuls of basil, slightly firm noodles, and most importantly: without an excess of grease.

The curries, especially the green curry (pictured on Flickr with shrimp, $11.95) still seem to be a work in progress: The bamboo shoots can sometimes be a bit too acidic and sour, especially since they are intended to offer more of a textural contrast to softer ingredients like cooked peppers. Nevertheless, Wondee III’s rich coconut curry broth is still solid and manages to keep the dish enjoyable. Few diners attempt the country style curry (also $9.95-$11.95), but, when ordered extra spicy, it is a great example of how one spoonful of food can provide an oscillating circuit of fiery heat and soothing coconut.

While we do not recommend trying the hottest dish on a menu when on a blind date, we do love how the new Wondee’s 1970s-inspired color palette and neverending tricolor leatherette banquette give the place a quirky, Via-Emilia-on-quaaludes appeal. If the first Wondee is too gritty a spot to bring a new friend, and ordering in from the second is too intimate, the strange, sleek charms of the third might be just the perfect solution. Who knew there was enough room in the city for another Wondee?

Wondee Siam III, 641 Tenth Avenue (between 45th and 46th Streets), 212-245-4601.

3 things we’re loving this week:

1. Gayla Trail’s DIY modern gardening extravaganza, You Grow Girl. For starters, anyone who grows her own nettles and makes soup out of them wins our respect. But we love the gorgeous photography and the site’s populist, urban-friendly tone most of all. And because Trail’s own roots are in Toronto, most of her growing tips work well here in the Northeast.

2. Poseidon Bakery’s rustic Italian loaf. When a little, be-Sharpied announcement announcing the arrival of ‘Rustic Italian Bread’ went up in the window of Poseidon Bakery recently, we had to stop in for a taste. We will also be the first to ‘fess up to our low expectations–Poseidon is a Greek bakery, after all. But Paul Fable’s $5 whole wheat pane rustico is crusty, with a dense, elastic crumb that stands up to the summer’s juciest sliced tomatoes in a way that large-bubble ciabatta or a tender baguette never could. Nevermind the Hellenic signage, because as Fable himself puts it, “Greeks and Italians are pretty similar–they are both Mediterranean. Why shouldn’t we make a little of their bread?” No argument here.

3. Blue Hill’s lemon madeleines. Served with coffee or tea, these fragrant, buttery little treats are among the only real constants on Dan Barber’s ever-evolving menu. And with good reason. We’ll spare you the obligatory Proust reference, but after popping a few of these warm mini-cakes, we began to see how transportative pastry really could be. Call ahead to make sure the madeleines are fresh–you will not regret it.

Sixteen months is a very long time to wait for an ice cream cone. But it has been nearly a year-and-a-half since we first reported that Hell’s Kitchen was about to get its own little piece of frozen dessert heaven, courtesy of East Village refugee NYC Icy. Then weeks and months passed with precious little work done to the shop’s new digs. More troublingly, after summer of last year ended, even the banners were removed from the window, and worse, around December of last year, it looked as if NYC Icy was going to amount to nothing more than just another cruel tease.

But something interesting happened–on one of our regular February walks past the storefront, we saw signs of construction being done. Then a few months later, we started to hear rumblings that NYC Icy would indeed open at the end of June 2008–and to our astonishment, it did.

So we paid a visit, then another, and another, and after licking and slurping a dozen flavors of their sorbet and ‘cream ice,’ we confess to being more than a little smitten. Our favorite style is the cream ice–an Italian-style confection that tastes like a cross between ice cream and gelato. Of the cream flavors, we think the pumpkin pie is tops, an aromatic, spice-infused concoction dense with sweet pumpkin and nuggets of pie crust. It is the best pumpkin pie-flavored food we have ever tasted, bar none. The banana and chocolate malt cream ices aren’t too shabby either. And among the sorbet flavors, we love the mango and mango-basil flavors, along with the fresh-squeezed OJ (pictured above with the banana cream ice in the background) and the pink grapefruit (cups range from $2.50-$3.75, depending on style and size).

At the same time, we are very consciously enjoying NYC Icy while it lasts, because all the signs are there that this very buzzworthy dessert shop has…well, screwed itself. Not only did it miss a second consecutive chance to open for a full spring-summer season, it opened this June without re-building any kind of momentum or excitement. There are no lines wrapping around the block, as there were with Grom’s openings–lines that on the Upper West Side remained for six months after the shop opened–instead, there is a local nonchalance that NYC Icy finally made good on its promise. One Tenth Avenue neighbor told us, “Eh. We’ve learned to live without it. They got us all worked up last year, but we have moved on.” Ouch.

For a shop that is already in the red for sixteen months of rent while the space sat empty, there is no worse omen than the indifference of the locals. Moreover, the storefront appears to have been given the kind of makeover that would take a competent contracting team sixteen days, as opposed to sixteen months–the floor has been tiled over like a bathroom, a graffiti mural covers one stark white wall, and the place has been furnished with three rolling ice cream freezers, a blue countertop and five orange IKEA chairs. Imagine what HGTV might do if they converted a florist to an ice cream shop in 24 hours, and you’ve got the idea–after all this time, NYC Icy looks like it was opened in a rush. Perhaps this is why the owners chose to hedge their bets and open a Ditmas Park outlet this year as well, a shop that is apparently garnering all the neighborhood interest that NYC Icy deserved, at least, had it opened as promised back in April ‘07. As much as we adore the icy snacks, we can smell the apathy in the air on Tenth Avenue and are counting the days until NYC Icy closes its doors and makes Brooklyn its permanent home. But for now, at least we have this summer.

NYC Icy, 628 Tenth Avenue (between 45th and 44th Streets), no telephone.

My relationship with breakfast is a dysfunctional one–one month I’ll eat nothing but high fiber cereal as I read my morning e-mails, and the next I’ll find myself piercing five runny yolks every working week. I enjoy the variety, but it is a by-product of a constantly changing A.M. schedule. However, the upside to this is that I have been able to sample my way through pretty much every palm-sized morning treat north of Union Square, and along the way, I have found a few favorites.

Two of them come from Sullivan Street Bakery on 47th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. The shop’s owner, Jim Lahey, a man whom you may recognize as the originator of that no-knead bread recipe, is an Italian bread savant. His pugliese loaves are without peer, but in the morning, I have grown very partial to his two seasonal fruit pastries. One, the brioche alla frutto stagionale (pictured in rear on right, $2.50) is a sticky, glazed affair made with tangy mascarpone cheese and sliced fruit (green plums, apricots, cherries), all piled onto a sweet dough base and sprinkled with slivered almonds. The other Sullivan Street pastry of my affection is the flaky torta sfoglia stagionale (pictured in foreground on right, $2.50), a gooey little round piece of fruit pie that leaves me covered in crumbs every time, but which is worth every little doughy fleck I find on myself. Also made with fresh, seasonal fruit, this pastry seems to contain messier, gloppier soft fruits better than the brioche does–hence the occasional appearance of berries and rhubarb in the filling line-up.

And then there is my other favorite, Café Zaiya’s almond yaki manjyu (pictured left, $3.95 for four), a crumbly, toasted almond confection filled with a dense and perfectly sweet red bean paste. Surprisingly, the nutty manjyu pairs better with a strong cup of coffee than anything Starbucks sells. A hot cappuccino and two almond manjyu might not be a match that anyone predicted would work well, but when I cannot make myself a bigger, healthy breakfast, it is a combination splendid enough to keep me smiling until lunchtime.

Sullivan Street Bakery, 533 West 47th Street, 212-265-5580.
Café Zaiya, 18 East 41st Street (between Fifth and Madison Avenues), 212-779-0600.

If there were a DSM-IV listing for Unwarranted Optimism Syndrome (UOS), its symptoms might include returning to eat on Restaurant Row while fanning a secret flame of hope that, due to its dire culinary context, there might possibly be something good there that has gone unnoticed. Consider us officially diagnosed, because we keep going back to the little stretch of 46th Street, even after being burned so badly before. After all, the cluster sits right at the pivot point of our neighborhood. And really, can an entire block of restaurants really be that bad? Well, after living with UOS for more almost five years, I am ready to say: Perhaps.

Leaving the always excellent Sushi of Gari and the occasionally inventive Pomaire out of the equation, there are few restaurants on the row that even merit a second look. Barbetta and Orso both do a decent steak, Firebird has its flashes of competence, but those are the paltry high points. Yet, when friends from elsewhere ask us to meet them on 46th for a bite to eat, thanks to our unbridled optimism, we rarely refuse. And every time, we wind up disappointed, as we did when we recently caught up with Uncle Heraclitus and friends at Joe Allen, an upscale pub that sits on the easternmost edge of The Row.

The rigatoni with Italian sausage and ricotta salata (pictured above, $18.00) was the best dish of the seven we ordered, and while it was filling, it was undercooked in places, almost crunchy. Meats and grilled items, nominally Joe Allen’s specialties, were often sloppy and occasionally stunningly awful. The salmon and asparagus special (pictured top, $19.00) was underseasoned, undersalted, and so slick with oil that it fell off HungryMan’s fork several times as he tried to eat it. At first, he called it “bar mitzvah salmon,” but after pushing his plate away halfway through, he admitted that coming of age never tasted that bad.

The grilled half chicken (ordered with a baked potato) (pictured above, $19.00) arrived redolent of lemon and garlic, but it was cooked to the consistency of a memory foam mattress. Egg dishes suffered from similar problems, from a grease-soaked chorizo and fried egg tostada (pictured on Flickr, $13.00), to my own frittata (pictured left, $13.00) that arrived oily and tough, seasoned with pepper but mysteriously no salt whatsoever and presented with two halves of an english muffin. One half was toasted dark brown, and another below was so crispy that it looked as if it had been pulled from the mouth of Krakatoa. This, at the end of the day, was diner food, not pub food–and poor diner food, at that.

With the Westway and Renaissance Diners just blocks away on Ninth Avenue, both serving food that is orders of magnitude better, there is only one reason to pay twice as much to eat a substandard meal on 46th Street: Joe Allen’s classy, dark wood décor. But the bottom line is that even the white tablecloths and exposed brick walls cannot make up for Joe Allen’s culinary misdeeds–no matter how deep your vein of unbounded optimism runs.

Joe Allen, 326 W. 46th Street (near 8th Avenue), 212-581-6464.

Christophe Barbier is nothing if not persistent. A transplanted Normand with a passion for French bakery classics like pain aux raisins and croissants aux amandes, Christophe came to New York several years ago and opened up a small casual café in Cobble Hill. This first business, Delicatessen, was soon followed by Nova Café, a catering and sandwich shop on nearby Verandah Place in Brooklyn Heights. Neighborhood residents became loyal fans, but people never seemed to remember the name of either eatery, calling them variously: Deli, Red Café, Christophe’s, Nova Court… . Then, in 2004, Barbier made a ripple in Brooklyn’s culinary tidepool when he made the decision to shut both restaurants down and follow his wife to China. Now, nearly four years later, Barbier has returned to Gotham, this time planting the seeds of his resurrected Nova Café and Catering in new ground: Tenth Avenue, on the western edge of Hell’s Kitchen–a stretch of Manhattan that looks uncannily like Court Street did fifteen years ago.

Nova Café’s small tiled dining space is bright and clean, with no more than a handful of small tables and a wobbly red leather banquette–this is uptown function over form. The rest of the interior is given over to a cavernous kitchen that looks as if it could be used to prepare a meal for a hundred guests without shifting a single piece of equipment. But forget the size of Nova’s grill and ovens–it is what comes out of this space that is so remarkable. Yes, the chocolate chip and cocoa chocolate cookies are wonderful, but–watch your back Claude–Nova makes some of the very finest puff pastry in the city: Crisp and buttery croissants with what seems like a billion silken layers of pastry; sticky, buttery pains aux raisins; and best of all, almond croissants with a perfect custardy balance of almond paste and pastry (all $2.00-$2.50).

Barbier’s pastry case is not his only asset, however. Nova’s made-to-order sandwiches, salads and pizzas are superb and, because they are all prepared à la minute, they are always fresh. One downside is that the average wait at the counter is longer than it would be at Pret a Manger or even Café Zaiya, but if you bear in mind that slower food pays greater dividends, it makes waiting for a sandwich on homemade bread a little easier to manage. We are partial to the egg salad sandwich ($7), layered with freshly sliced cucumbers and chopped dill, as well as the turkey, ham and swiss toasted sandwich ($7.75), slathered in a spicy, peppery ‘mojo’ sauce that transforms an ordinary turkey and ham panini into a juicy French-influenced Cuban sandwich. And then there is the most classic panini: tomato, basil and buffalo mozzarella ($7), which works so well at Nova because of the crunch from the yeasty bread that elides into a meltingly cheesy center. No surprise also that the pesto tastes as if it has been zipped up in the Cuisinart seconds before. If sandwiches aren’t quite enough for you, there are even bags of house-made potato chips for sale in small pouches of greaseproof paper ($2): pleasingly crisp, savory and like what every Ruffles hopes it will grow up to be.

For Barbier though, the café is just a side project; Nova’s walk-in lunch counter is a front for a much larger catering operation that organizes lunches and dinners for large events. The catering menu goes on for pages, covering a vast spectrum of cooking: items range from bagels and roasted brussels sprouts to braised boneless beef short ribs and Moroccan spiced chicken. We would love to see one or two of Barbier’s more refined dishes added to Nova Café’s daily specials menu–this might even bring in diners who want more than a sandwich or a pastry. Still, the truncated counter menu and the phenomenal croissants are enough to set the locals atwitter–friends in the neighborhood have asked us if we have visited “Red, you know, the place with the red awnings” and “Nova Restaurant” yet. It seems no matter how far west you move in this city, some things never change.

Nova Café and Catering, 820 10th Avenue at 54th Street, 212-977-8900.

If East Japanese Restaurant had a chance to choose its 55th Street digs all over again, we bet it would not take the restaurant directly next door to Yakitori Totto, one of the city’s finest Japanese grills. Technically, East was there first, but no matter. By now, the poor izakaya must be in desperate need of therapy, as it sits side-by-side with its direct competitor, playing Jan Brady to Totto’s Marsha. A good friend of ours once told us that this particular branch of East (one of several in the city) has earned the reputation for being Totto’s overflow room–when there are no tables in the adjacent building, people end up at East. It’s enough to make you feel a little sorry for the place.

While East admittedly tries too hard to do too much–sushi, noodles, grilled food, bar snacks–some of its better dishes are actually very good, as HungryMan and I discovered recently. That said, it pays to be strategic about eating at East. The restaurant hosts theme evenings throughout the week: “Let’s Eat Tuna on Wednesday,” for example, and these nights are often the best time to eat the signature dish, since there is so much of it in house that evening, and from what we have tasted during our visits, the theme ingredient is usually fresh. At the same time, a bit of counterintuitive strategy pays off here: Don’t, despite what your drunk friends may have told you, eat sushi here. This is not to say that East’s sushi is not adequate–it can be–but it never exceeds the quality of something you might be able to pick up from Whole Foods. Also avoid the noodle dishes, which are again, barely mediocre, if still edible. We found a recent order of the nabeyaki udon ($8.50) with tempura, sliced fishcake, and egg to be bland and rather greasy–a charmless bowl of soup, but a filling one.

What East does well is izakaya snacks and soups. Our favorite dishes, the tuna kimchi nabe soup (pictured on Flickr, $8.50), a zippy bowl of savory broth that hides a thick chunk of broiled tuna, makes a lovely winter dinner. So too, the restaurant’s very finest dish, the ika wata yaki ($7), grilled squid that has been marinated and braised in its own ink, soy sauce and a miso-mirin glaze. When I ordered the ika wata yaki for the first time, our server raised her eyebrows and asked me, “You sure?”. When she returned fifteen minutes later to see that I had polished the entire thing off, she smiled and told me, “Usually, only Japanese order this. It is too strong.” Indeed, she had a point–to eat ika wata is to embrace squid’s natural pungence, in much the same way that eating cuttlefish demands at least a passing tolerance for funk. And because the musky, umami-rich marinade lends the squid an extra stratum of earthy depth, diners expecting clean, flavorless calamari rings might be in for a shock. Yet, in a restaurant where nothing else is much of a surprise, perhaps punchy dishes like the ika wata and the kimchi nabe are East’s best hope for making a real impression of its own, for setting a course towards emerging from the (literal) shadow of Yakitori Totto. Lord knows, it won’t be the sushi that does it.

East Japanese Restaurant, 253 W. 55th Street (at Eighth Avenue), 212-581-2240.