Momofuku Ko has hard stools, no atmosphere, no liquor, no service, and the food is not surefire on every course. But the food Frank Bruni did get, along with the $85 bill, was enough to get the place its inevitable three stars. [NYT]

“[Chef Daniel] Humm's foams, reductions and drizzles have huge payoffs.” Indeed they do! Restaurant Girl is flabbergasted by Eleven Madison Park's flashy, precise cooking and awards them her first five-star review. [NYDN]

Ryan Sutton also hits Ko and produces more or less the same review, minus the deathless Bruni prose. The verdict: “[W]hile Ko might be one of America's great restaurants, it's not quite a four-star restaurant.” [Bloomberg]

The view at Chop Suey is worth a star in itself to Frank Bruni, which is a good thing, because the food is “an uneven mash of inspiration and clumsiness.” [NYT]

Restaurant Girl is happy to have Eighty One on the Upper West Side; if only they did a better job with seafood, she would have been able to give it more than two stars. [NYDN]

Randall Lane is done messing around. This week, South Gate feels his wrath for “mediocre” food such as “gravy sporting the kind of congealed film I associate with bad TV dinners.” Two stars (out of six)! [TONY]

Randall Lane bestows three stars of six on Merkato 55 in a decidedly middling review. The place covers too much ground, he says, “an African greatest-hits tour that works only because there are so few top-shelf regional African restaurants here in the first place.” [TONY]

It's not that Steve Cuozzo doesn't get Merkato 55 or like Marcus Samuelsson. It's just that the food was pretty uneven when he went there and the chef was seldom around. Quoth the Cuozz: "But Samuelsson is too great a talent to let Merkato 55 slide into another Meatpacking District party venue. I hope he finds the time to make his labor of love worthy of our love, too." [NYP]

Alan Richman is back at what he does best, applying his critical pen to the efforts of high-toned tablecloth restaurants, in this case South Gate. He likes the food, but finds the place a little soulless and the staff entirely too service-y. (Though since he’s not anonymous; that’s bound to be a problem in any new restaurant he dines in.) [GQ]

Frank Bruni awards one star to Ilili, establishing the restaurant’s critical reception as generally admiring but far from ardent. Bruni uses it as an occasion to discourse on the current trend of highlighting previously low-rent genres, but he seems to have liked all the food and not found the prices or noise too distracting. [NYT]

Steve Cuozzo wanted to hate Chop Suey, he really did. The name was dumb, and he was skeptical of consulting chef Zak Pelaccio, whose “résumé of short-lived eatery associations … is as long as his list of bona fide accomplishments is short.” But he loved the food and its “bold, explosive” flavors. [NYP]

Ryan Sutton also plays the “better than it has any right to be” card with Chop Suey, declaring the place as “jolting, gorgeous, frightening” and reluctantly praising its Korean-themed food. [Bloomberg]