Pete Wells, the restaurant critic of The New York Times, gives four stars this week to Yoshino, a small sushi counter on the Bowery. Three other New York City restaurants received four stars in their last starred reviews by Times critics. Here are the others:
Last given a starred review in 2015.
The Flatiron district restaurant founded by Danny Meyer was first given four stars in 2009 by the Times critic Frank Bruni.
Mr. Wells also awarded four stars in a 2015 review, four years after Mr. Meyer sold Eleven Madison Park to its chef, Daniel Humm, and the restaurateur Will Guidara. “The restaurant tries as hard as any I know to bring delight to the table with every course,” Mr. Wells wrote. “It succeeds so often that only the most determinedly grumpy souls could resist.”
Mr. Humm is now running the restaurant without Mr. Guidara, whose share he bought out in 2019. Last year, Mr. Humm removed meat and other animal products from his menu, and in a subsequent review, Mr. Wells wrote that the new vegan dishes didn’t measure up to their predecessors:
“Almost none of the main ingredients taste quite like themselves in the 10-course, $335 menu the restaurant unwrapped this June after a 15-month pandemic hiatus. Some are so obviously standing in for meat or fish that you almost feel sorry for them.”
Last reviewed in 2014.
Not long after Jean-Georges Vongerichten opened his flagship on Columbus Circle in 1997, Ruth Reichl gave it four stars. Mr. Wells went back in 2014 and found that the chef continued to innovate there.
“Jean-Georges glides like a Mercedes sedan, but Mr. Vongerichten takes the curves like a Formula One driver,” Mr. Wells wrote in his review. “Consider the squab dish that just popped up on the menu. It comes on like jerk chicken, coated in a blackened rub, and while the seasonings are Middle Eastern, the searing heat is almost Jamaican. And here comes the creative leap that separates Mr. Vongerichten from other spice-peddlers: a hot sauce has been splashed around this charred squab, and it is made from flowers. A bright-orange blend of lime, fresh red chiles and peppery nasturtium petals, it makes the already fiery squab into what may be the spiciest dish ever served in a French restaurant.”
Read Pete Wells’s review of Jean-Georges.
Last reviewed in 2012.
Le Bernardin received its first four-star review from Bryan Miller in 1986, when the chef Gilbert Le Coze led the kitchen. Eric Ripert took over after Mr. Le Coze died in 1994, and the restaurant got a four-star review from Ruth Reichl in 1995.
Mr. Wells last weighed in with a 2012 review. “Some of the thrills are the hushed kind, like the way black garlic, pomegranate and lime support the crisp skin and white flesh of sautéed black bass,” he wrote. “Others are scene-stealers, as when a white slab of steamed halibut is slowly surrounded by a crimson pool of beet sauce that, with crème fraîche stirred in, will turn the delirious pink of summer borscht.”
Last week the restaurant celebrated its 50th anniversary with a special dinner.
Read Pete Wells’s review of Le Bernardin.