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OCTOBER

Frequent-flier reward: Marcus Samuelsson sets his sights on Riingo.   (Photo: Melanie Dunea/CPI)

Swede Dreams
Marcus Samuelsson checks into the Alex hotel with a New American menu and a nouvelle sushi bar.

Aquavit chef Marcus Samuelsson may have suffered a stinging Iron Chef defeat and shuttered his Minneapolis outpost, but he hasn’t been sitting around licking his wounds. He’s going where many talented toques have gone before—into the high-profile boutique-hotel-restaurant business. At Riingo (a deliberate misspelling of the Japanese word for “apple”), in midtown’s swanky new Alex hotel, Samuelsson deviates from the nouvelle Scandinavian style that made him this year’s Beard-award-winning Best New York City Chef, fashioning instead an inventive American-Japanese hybrid: contemporary riffs on Caesar salad and roast chicken executed by Samuelsson compatriot Johan Svensson, and porcini rolls with truffle aïoli at a sushi bar overseen by Shigenori Tanaka, late of Jewel Bako. Riingo will serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and comes equipped with the requisite lounge, house-infused sakes, and attention-getting décor. The woodwork is dark ebony, the floors are bamboo, and the mezzanine accommodates semiprivate dining with movable screens of rice sandwiched between glass panels. It’s unlikely the built-in Sub-Zero fridges in the residential suites upstairs will be getting much use. —Robin Raisfeld

• Details: Riingo, October (205 East 45th Street; 212-867-4200).

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Eastern Exposure
Geisha brings refined cuisine to the lounge set.

If you’ve developed a particular fondness for Le Bernardin’s patchwork of hamachi and tuna brushed with yuzu vinaigrette, don’t mourn its sudden absence. It’s not gone for good—it’s just migrated to Geisha, the Asian-inspired restaurant whose owners recruited Le Bernardin’s Eric Ripert to consult on the menu, and where he’s installed his longtime sous-chef, Michael Vernon, to execute it. Geisha is a culinary departure for its owners, Fabio Granato and Vittorio Assaf, known for their lively chain of Serafina pizzerias and the air-kissing clientele that frequents them, and it’s an opportunity for Ripert to delve more deeply into the Asian flavors that pervade his own haute cooking style. “We studied a lot of the Japanese culture in terms of food, and then we studied a little of Vietnamese, a little of Thai, a little of Chinese,” he says. “We created the menu inspired by those cultures but mostly using French techniques.” Concoctions like fluke marinated in ponzu and coconut broth, and Sichuan-pepper-crusted pork tenderloin with plum-wine sauce don’t aspire to be strictly authentic—just delicious. Not to mention affordable (for Ripert-caliber food, anyway). “The target is for a fun, hip kind of place where you can go and have cocktails and appetizers and then really good food,” says Vernon, who had the chance to perfect his menu in Le Bernardin’s kitchen. The Far Eastern flavor extends to the sleek David Rockwell design, which features basket-weave and pleated-maplewood walls, a room-dividing glass light box embedded with red algae, and cherry-blossom light fixtures above the sushi bar. Considering its provenance, the place will undoubtedly attract its share of the young, the hip, and the culinarily oblivious, a prospect that doesn’t seem to faze Ripert. In fact, he says good-naturedly, “I will probably go as a customer if it’s a good scene.” —Robin Raisfeld

• Details: Geisha, early October (33 East 61st Street; 212-734-2676).

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Salad days: Terre's appetizer of endives, roasted beets, walnuts, and Roquefort.   (Photo: Carina Salvi)

Earth Landing
Lespinasse’s Christian Delouvrier revisits the cooking of his grandmère at Terre.

The closing of the brilliant but fusty old Lespinasse may have been the best thing to have happened to Christian Delouvrier: After 40-plus years of working in other people’s kitchens, he’s on the verge of having not one but two to call his own. Early next year, the fastidious four-star chef will loosen up his toque a tad when he opens Delouvrier, which he swears will be “high-class but not stuffy.” Up first, though, is Terre, which opens in the meatpacking district in October and celebrates the foods Delouvrier remembers from his Gascogne boyhood, an idyllic time he spent climbing fig trees and gulping down freshly hatched raw eggs out in the barn—much in the manner of Rocky Balboa, he claims. “Terre,” he says, “is my roots. Gascony—the corn field, the ducks, the geese, and the cows, and don’t forget the beautiful chickens.” He won’t be flying poultry in directly, but he is insistent on using the same local suppliers and pristine ingredients that he used at Lespinasse—milk-fed baby lamb cooked in the rotisserie and finished in the custom wood-burning oven, for example, plus confit of baby pig, Tarbais bean soup, pâté de campagne, and terrine of rabbit. “It’s soul food, but French,” he says. “High-quality but simple, nice, and relaxed—and cheaper.” Which, coming from the man who once made a case for a $35 bowl of soup (langoustines do not grow on trees, mon ami), is quite a relief. —R.P.

• Details: Terre, mid-October (861 Washington Street; no phone yet).

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The Best of the Rest of October
Alex Freij follows Industry (Food) with Diner 24 (102 Eighth Avenue), a comfort-food canteen built in “desert-modern” style, featuring all-day (and night) breakfasts, TV dinners, and a VIP room. . . .

For his tri-state debut, the king of California cuisine unleashes not a Spago or Chinois on Main but the more proletarian Wolfgang Puck Express (111 Sinatra Drive, Hoboken, N.J.; 201-876-8600), home of the barbecued-chicken pizza and Chinois chicken salad. . . .

Inspired by the popular London restaurant the Providores, and developed in consultation with its chefs, Public (210 Elizabeth Street; 212-343-0918) specializes in global-fusion fare like smoked foie gras with grape-sago compote. . . .

No, Vento was not the Marx brother who couldn’t remember to zip his fly. The word means “wind” in Italian, and it’s the name Stephen Hanson and Fiamma chef Michael White are giving their tri-level trattoria in the meatpacking district (675 Hudson Street). Think Fiamma but more casual and a tad cheaper, with wood-oven pizzas, braised meats, and 30 wines by the glass. . . .

When Sant Ambroeus (259 West 4th Street; 212-604-9254) returns not to Madison Avenue but to the West Village, the posh pasticceria will allow sandwich-eating at the espresso bar and offer lighter, small-plate fare in the dining room, plus the usual gelati galore.