This week Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni re-reviews Momofuku Ssam Bar, part of chef David Chang's New York empire, which you'll recall includes the impossible-to-get-into Momofuku Ko. There's a new chef at Ssam since Bruni awarded the place two stars in '07, and now he bumps it up to a lofty triple. The opening paragraph sums up his case: "If you’ve had just about all of the fawning over David Chang that you can take,......

If you rode the V line on Sunday, you may have lucked out with a seat on one of the old 1930s-era subway cars deployed as part of the MTA's holiday train revival. But there's nostalgia rolling above ground too! Buses from the '60s and '70s are now operating during morning and evening rush hours on the M8, M14, M20, M23, M34, M42, M57 and M79 lines, and the Q32 in Queens, through January 2nd.......

Ah, the East Village, that ever-trendy nightlife destination where visitors from Long Island and beyond flock to stab each other on the weekends. Around 1 a.m. Saturday night at Sutra on First Avenue and First Street, 22-year old Freeport resident Vivian Lee got into a heated argument with her 22-year-old boyfriend, RPI graduate Joshua Clarke. Witnesses tell the Daily News that when Lee caught Clarke flirting with another dame, she smashed a pint glass over......

Prespa: This new bi-level restaurant and lounge is named after two freshwater lakes in southeast Europe shared by Greece, Albania, and the Republic of Macedonia. It's a redesign of what was formerly Prespa Mediterranean Brasserie, and Strong Buzz says Murray Hill gourmands are fervently hoping it'll become a local dining oasis in their mediocre neighborhood. The menu from Executive Chef Richard Farnabe (Jean-Georges, Montrachet) emphasizes Mediterranean tapas, but there are also full size entrees such......

Want to live in New York City but can't afford Manhattan rents? Guess again! The Daily News is reporting that Brooklyn is now more expensive than Manhattan, and they have reports and data and stuff to back it up (via StreetEasy). Allegedly "the median rental prices in DUMBO, Park Slope and Fort Greene were higher than those in the East Village, Lower East Side, Upper East Side, Midtown East and Murray Hill." (Sales prices were......

The NY Times reveals that the number of Manhattan apartments going into contract or with accepted offers has "plunged by 20%" in October, when compared with September, and by 62% compared with October 2007: "There were 577 listings with signed contracts or accepted offers this October, compared with 1,588 a year earlier." Also: the number of Manhattan listings is at its "highest level in several years, up 20 percent since August and 33 percent since......

This week Frank Bruni reviews Market Table (pictured), the market-and-dining venue that now only focuses on dining from chef Mikey Price (who is a principal owner along with Joey Campanaro of Little Owl). And Bruni is taken by its "warm," "soothing," "humble," "unambiguous," and "generous" cooking, attitude and style and gives it two stars. He delights in discovering how "There’s bacon with the skate wing and bacon with the brussels sprouts and pancetta with......

Photo courtesy Vero Midtown. Vero Midtown: The little amber-hued nook seen here is nestled inside this warm and inviting wine bar on East 53rd Street that boasts a 2,200-bottle wine cellar. This is the second Vero location, and while the uptown original emphasizes panini, this iteration has a full kitchen serving dishes such as short rib tacos, gnocchi with foie gras and truffle sauce, and pan-roasted quail. The romantic scene is set by raw wood......

A 60-year-old Con Ed worker and a 74-year-old great-grandmother were killed in hit-and-run incidents in Manhattan and Brooklyn, while a 69-year-old wheelchair-bound man was critically injured in Queens yesterday. Just before 7 a.m., 74-year-old Bridget Morrissey was crossing 75th Street at 14th Avenue in Bay Ridge when a car hit her. The car did not stop and Morrissey, who used to work at Lutheran Medical's kitchen and had Alzheimer's, was pronounced dead at the hospital.......

This week Frank Bruni at the Times bestows two glittering stars on Allegretti, where one of his dining companions swoons for the fish soup, sounding like an absolutely insufferable food snob: "'It tastes exactly the way it should," she said, rushing the words out as soon as the soup was down. She wanted the rest of us to know. She wanted to crow. She wanted to be done with talking and get back to the......

The Chestnut Bar: Carroll Gardens neighborhood restaurant Chestnut has expanded into the space next door with a “cozy, rustic bar.” We're told it’s got exposed brick, tin ceilings, a U-shaped bar, tall snack tables made of recycled Chestnut, and a collection of antique "chestnuts" (bottles like these, from which the restaurant got its original name). Chef and co-owner Daniel Eardley is all about the farm-to-table, sustainable agriculture thing, and his $30 three-course prix fixe menu......

Milk and Honey, the dimly lit railroad bar on Eldridge Street with the fastidiously-prepared cocktails, "reservation only" policy, and unlisted number, blazed the trail for the city's current wildfire cocktail craze and speakeasy-style bars. In recent years, as owner Sasha Petraske has expanded his footprint with Little Branch, The East Side Company, new absinthe-centric White Star and that Community Board pariah Mercury Dime, Milk and Honey has also only gotten more popular, with the secret......

Corton: One of the most anticipated openings of the season, this modern French restaurant, formerly Montrachet, is the love child of big shot restaurateur Drew Nieporent (Nobu) and chef Paul Liebrandt, who dreams of owning a cryogenic freezer "for freezing the cooks when they misbehave." Located in Tribeca, the 65-seat space serves a three-course prix fixe for $76 and a tasting menu for $110. What financial crisis? Appealing options for the not-broke-yet include Ocean Trout......

This week the Times's Frank Bruni has a mouth-watering rave for Southern Italian restaurant Convivo (pictured), chef Michael White's revision of the stuffy L'Impero in Tudor City. He declares that Convivio has emerged from the transition "as a pasta lover’s dreamland...soulful and unpretentious...Mr. White can do it all...and is doing even better work with pasta at Convivio than he has done at Alto." Skip the seafood, though: "Roll-ups of fried swordfish with a yogurt sauce......

Philippe Express: Don’t let the name throw you; the cuisine here is Chinese, not French, and Seth Rogen has no connection with the place. Chef Philippe Chow is all about Chicken Satays, Crispy Beef, and Salt and Pepper Prawns, which has worked well for him uptown on 60th Street. This downtown satellite, opening tonight, features red banquets and automated touch-screen ordering. And in a “Big Brother’s Watching You Eat” twist, the touch screens will remember......

After years of massive expansion, real estate brokers are bracing themselves for a reversal of bank oversaturation. There are as many retail bank branches in Manhattan as there are Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts combined. Now Washington Mutual has postponed opening new branches (understandably), and other banks are consolidating their branches. One broker predicts that "we might have empty corners without a lot of takers out there chasing the space." But Mitchell Moss, NYU professor of......

Bike-friendly city Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan told reporters last night that August's street closures in Manhattan will be back next year. The Summer Streets program, which prohibited traffic on a 7-mile stretch from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park on three consecutive Saturdays, was "clearly a hit on Park Ave," Sadik-Khan tells the Daily News. She also says it's "highly likely" Summer Streets will be extended next summer to the other boroughs. While some retailers......

Tierra: Tapas now and forever! Franklin Becker, the chef who recently stepped in to try and breathe life into Sheridan Square, now has another responsibility: Tierra. Per the press release, it’s where "Old School Tapas" meets "New School Tapas." The menu emphasizes adventurous wine pairings with items like Cabrales Filled Dates, Warm Goat Cheese Torta, and Chicken Livers on Toast. It opens tonight in the space formerly occupied by Tasca, and the publicist's breathless description......

It was previously reported that Target would be opening their promotional "Bullseye Bodegas" at four temporary locations around Manhattan on September 11th. Now the opening date is September 12th, so either the reports were wrong or someone in marketing realized that 9/11 might not be the most ideal day to launch a campaign with the word "bullseye" in it....

The team behind Edible Brooklyn and Edible East End are launching their latest food-focused mag, Edible Manhattan, next week. per Grub Street, there's an in-depth look at the popularity of the Manhattan cocktail by St. John Frizell, a profile of the owners of Little Giant, a day with Nach Waxman of Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore and a classic quote from Greenmarket farmer Eugene Wyatt: “When I have vegetables for sale at my stand, customers......

Get yourself some popcorn, because this week Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni is taking the hammer to big shot media power-lunch nest Michael's. Turns out dinner there is an overpriced joke: "I thought Michael’s prided itself on produce. Then I had its appetizer of peekytoe crab with spears of white asparagus, which might as well have been spears of white wax for all the flavor they had....[Michael’s] certainly charges like a serious restaurant, levying a......

Manhattan, once one of the few spots that seemed immune to the foreclosure bug that has swept the nation. But the NY Times reports that more apartment owners in Manhattan are missing payments, putting their apartments up for sale to avoid losing them with foreclosures for this July up 78 percent from the year before. Manhattan homeowners may have believed that they were invincible because of the relatively stable real estate market with those folding......

The experimental Bx12 Select Bus Service that runs between upper Manhattan and the Bronx has been a big hit according to New York City Transit, with a trip from end to end on the route taking an average 12 minutes less time than before. (One transportation advocate says her average 65 minute commute has been cut to 48 minutes.) You'll recall that the route now features more buses (up to ten more during peak hours)......

Could it really be that Manhattan's obscene rents are becoming ever-so-slightly less obscene? That's the Observer's perception, and they've got market reports from the Real Estate Group New York [REGNY] indicating that rents on studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments are lower this summer than last. According to REGNY, in June the average rent for a Manhattan two-bedroom apartment in a non-doorman building was $3,950, 6.5 percent less than in June 2007. All this has the......

Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg and other city officials unveiled the newly renovated access path between Highbridge Park and the High Bridge in Manhattan. The $4.2 million project (which included a new pathway and restored iron stairway between the bridge and a water tower) is part of a $60 million plan to restore the High Bridge as part of Bloomberg's PlaNYC initiative. The Mayor said, "I’d like to think that the High Bridge will do for uptown......

Just because Merrill Lynch reneged on leasing office space in a tower planned for where the down-at-heel Hotel Pennsylvania still stands, don't think the property owner won't demolish the 89-year-old hotel anyway. Vornado Realty Trust still hasn't publicly settled on plans for the property, but the Observer reports the company recently applied for a Certification of No Harassment from the city, a prerequisite for demolition. Vornado is debating whether to construct a giant office tower......

Annette Mateo appears to have been one toke over the line last night when she allegedly carjacked an NYPD van and took it for a joyride that almost immediately became devoid of joy. According to the Post, Mateo had gone to file an unspecified complaint at a police station in Harlem and became frustrated with the lackadaisical response from officers there. Storming out of the building at 9:40 p.m., she came upon two rookie cops......

This week the Times’s Frank Bruni rhapsodizes about Perbacco (pictured), which has been open for about five years on East 4th Street, but has a much-buzzed about new chef: 26-year-old Italian hot shot Simone Bonelli, who comes from “the northern city of Modena and the kitchen of Osteria La Francescana, where Italy’s old guard meets Spain’s New Wave.” A two star rating from the Times is a slam dunk for a casual restaurant in this......

The most indispensable member of Council Speaker Christine Quinn's staff seems to be an unpaid 81-year-old World War II veteran, her father Lawrence P. Quinn. An endearing profile in the Times today spotlights his ongoing efforts for his daughter, who will run for mayor next year. Ms. Quinn, an openly gay liberal, calls him "an all-purpose schlepper" who comes in handy for retirement home photo-ops. Mr. Quinn, a practicing Catholic, seems to be crying for......

The surf was definitely not up on the city's waterways today, but that didn't stop a crowd of surfers from hanging ten in a paddle parade around Manhattan. The surreal sight of men and women standing on boards as they paddled up the East River was brought to you by Sea Paddle NYC, the second annual fundraiser for autism charities and the Surfers' Environmental Alliance. Razor Wire reports the 28 mile odyssey started at South Street Seaport at 9 a.m. this morning and finished in Battery Park City this afternoon. More photos here....