On my first visit to Jeffrey Chodorow’s new midtown beef palace, the Kobe Club, I sat at the tip end of the bar, which, as you may have heard, is shaped like a samurai sword and covered in sheets of glistening black stingray skin.

I dined on three kinds of Kobe beef (the “Samurai Flight,” for $190), each one stuck with a paper flag denoting the beef’s country of origin. The sheer novelty of a steakhouse devoted solely to Kobe beef compelled your faithful critic to name the restaurant one of the city’s top new steakhouses in the magazine’s annual roundup of the best new places to eat in 2007.

For weary boulevardiers like myself, a place like Varietal, which opened not long ago on a dreary stretch of West 25th Street, throws up all sorts of red flags.

First there is the name, with its overtones of wine snobbery and self-satisfied, organic correctness.

Then there’s the location, on a shabby block in a well-known restaurant death zone between the Flatiron district and the bustling center of Chelsea. Then there’s the décor, done in a slick neomodernist style like a thousand restaurants before it.

Warner LeRoy’s doomed incarnation of the Russian Tea Room closed only five short years ago, although in the frantic world of modern-day New York dining, it seems like five decades.

As the famous old room sat moldering on 57th Street, all sorts of odd things were happening outside. The French restaurant, in LeRoy’s day the template for luxury, disappeared from view. In the snootiest foodie circles, rusticated specialties like ramps and hand-foraged hen-of-the-woods mushrooms replaced caviar and foie gras as the objects of adoration and lust.

‘Do you ever see yourself opening your own restaurant?” is a question the Underground Gourmet is frequently asked.

To which the answer is always a hearty yes: If an ill- tempered chef were to thwack him over the head with a leg of mutton or a Le Creuset cast-iron skillet and if he were to survive, but with severely diminished mental faculties, then, yes, the Underground Gourmet would immediately, upon regaining consciousness, open a restaurant, despite the well-known fact that 99 percent of all New York restaurants declare bankruptcy and close within 26 seconds of their grand opening.

Vietnamese restaurants in New York tend to fall into two categories: those with atmosphere (and its incumbent sexy lighting, pricey cocktails, and questionable fusion tendencies) and those glaringly, plate-clatteringly without.

It’s that sparsely populated middle ground, balanced precariously between flash and Formica, that Vinh Nguyen hopes to occupy with his new Williamsburg restaurant, Silent H. The name is a reference to the unpronounced consonant in so many Vietnamese words, including Vinh, and it’s an assertion of ethnic identity as understated and personal as the restaurant’s modest, rough-hewn décor.

The first sign there may be something slightly off about Keith McNally’s newest restaurant isn’t necessarily the choice of culinary genre (casual Italian instead of the usual casual French).

It isn’t the room, which contains a bar area the size of a horse stall and is so low-slung it feels like you’re dining in the really loud basement of some semi-prosperous Tuscan peasant.

It isn’t even the restaurant’s semi-obscure name, Morandi, inspired by the semi-obscure painter Giorgio Morandi.

It’s not something one readily admits, but having spent his formative feeding years as a pimple-faced stripling tucking into Chick-Fil-A sandwiches, Mrs. Fields cookies, and Cinnabons, the Underground Gourmet considers himself something of an expert on mall food.

Nothing from one’s Orange Julius–gulping past, however, can prepare one for Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery, the long-awaited, almost egalitarian addition to the Time Warner Center—and the only piece of the TWC’s so-called Restaurant Collection puzzle that’s plopped down, somewhat ignominiously, right out in the open mall corridor, like an airport Au Bon Pain.

German food gets a bad rap in this town—the sainted if shabby memory of East 86th Street’s Ideal Cafe and a smattering of wurst-peddling biergartens notwithstanding.

It comes across as coarse and gassy, doled out by stout little men with faces like ripe tomatoes whose culinary skills amount to boiling wieners and frying potatoes.

Austrian food, in contrast, is perceived by the cognoscenti as almost spalike—not only lighter, but subtler and more sophisticated.

We will make it to Lincoln Center by 7:30, won’t we?” asked the woman of a certain age who was doing the early-bird shuffle with her tweed-jacketed husband at Kefi a few weeks ago.

This was only Kefi’s first night in business, and although the question was not so much a question as a rebuke, the T-shirted waiter assured her with a polite nod that all was well. “Good.
Now gimme a taste of this,” she said, pointing to another selection on the all-Greek wine list, having already dismissed two or three varietals.

It's been said (and if it hasn't, then I'll go ahead and say it) that great chefs have many of the same qualities as great musicians. Both disciplines require virtuoso talent, a taste for performing under pressure, and an ability to process prodigious amounts of detail and technique in a unique and creative way.

Many chefs, like many musicians, are card-carrying control freaks. Many chefs, like many musicians, keep erratic, unhealthy hours, have a taste for addictive substances (Bordeaux, pork fat), and are prone to towering displays of temper.