Earlier this week, New York Mag’s Adam Platt panned star chef Alain Ducasse’s Benoit (pictured), declaring it an “ersatz” brasserie and concluding that “French cuisine, as we used to know it, is deader than we think.” Now the Times’s Frank Bruni takes his turn, and while he disagrees that it’s “a throwaway restaurant,” he does concur that “Benoit is selling a dining experience so familiar it’s almost a cliché… And what of the ‘Parisian salad’?......

Even though winter’s barely a week old, many folks in the city have come down with a doozy of a cold, perhaps due to the sharp temperature drop that marked the end of an otherwise moderate fall. Our nasty respiratory bug is finally on its way out, largely because we’ve been treating it with a variety of potent soups available in Queens. Whether you're sick as a dog or just in need of a warm......

Hey, have y'all been using our new "Recommend this" feature at the bottom of each post? This week we're bringing you the "Most Recommended" posts from across the -ist world, as well as recommending some of our own. Phillyist thinks that readers recommended this post the most because "most of our quieter readers (probably) agree with us that rude commenting sucks." Know what else sucks? Philly's not getting the Olympics, but they are getting thinner.......

Sometimes, justice can prevail: A judge threw out a lawsuit from East Village drag queen eatery Lucky Cheng's against restaurant guide Zagat. The 2004 Zagat guide gave Lucky Cheng's a single digit food rating for the past two years (most recently a 9 out of 30), prompting the management to sue Zagat for defamation. Supreme Court Justice Diane Lebedeff wrote in her ruling:While this restaurant owner believes it has `hit the sweet spot' with its......

New critic Frank Bruni's premiere Dining & Wine > Restaurants: Arias From the Kitchen" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/dining/09REST.html?8hpib">Times restaurant review is of Babbo, the crown jewel in chef Mario Batali and partner Joe Bastianich's restaurant empire. Bruni gives three stars, the same rating Ruth Reichl gave it that heady summer of 98 when it first opened (if SLNY were around then, they would have noted that the line was busy busy busy, and then when someone would pick......

William Grimes came up with a better title for his Howard Johnson's restaurant review: HoJo's to Go? Say It Ain't So Apparently the old HoJo's in Times Square is thinking about packing it in, probably to make room for another Olive Garden restaurant or something like that. I love HoJo's- it was the hotel of choice for my poor pinko parents back in the 1970s. And I disagree with Grimes about the clam strips- I......