There is something incredibly unnerving about 50 Plates. We’re all for nostalgia and down-home cooking and county-fair food made sophisticated, but when you start talking about grandmothers and Route 66 while looking exactly like a West Elm, you lose us.

It still manages to feel comfortable, despite the glaring white tables, the overly strategic lighting, and the pricey arrangements that our own grandmothers would have clucked their tongues at as “wasteful, and ugly besides.” In other words, it’s totally at home… [More]

Call us persnickety, but we’re always encouraged when a Middle Eastern restaurant doesn’t refer to itself “Mediterranean,” which is a nebulous and often inaccurate cuisine type. It usually refers to the dishes of lands once covered by the southern penumbra of the Ottoman Empire, but it can technically include cuisines that are now totally distinct, like Moroccan, Italian, and Greek.

What these misleadingly named eateries are usually referring to is a menu much like the one at Nicholas, a mostly Lebanese… [More]