Little Park

Few New York chefs are as adept as Andrew Carmellini at synthesizing fashionable trends and translating them quickly into crowd-pleasing restaurants. While the food nods heavily toward the farm-to-table movement of the mid-’00s, Little Park is, in practice, refreshingly trend-free. The room, off the lobby of the Smyth hotel in lower Tribeca, is decorated in blondish, woodsy tones; the menu is simple and uncluttered; and the prices are unnervingly reasonable. As one polished little dish succeeds the next, the sense you get is that, with all these popular trends covered, this talented chef is taking the time, at long last, to cook for himself.