Pete Wells Gives Fung Tu Its Second Two-Star Review of the Day

Mere minutes after Ryan Sutton awarded two stars to Fung Tu, Pete Wells files his own review of chef Jonathan Wu and Jason Wagner's Chinese-American restaurant on the Lower East Side. Like Eater's own critic – and like Bloomberg critic Tejal Rao last month – Wells thinks the restaurant has really grown up since it opened a year and a half ago. The menu is now full of refined, nuanced dishes:

The Sichuan two-step occurs ... in a vinaigrette that dresses cured Spanish mackerel, carved into elegant slices that almost look like small anchovies. With tart little buttons of pickled hon shimeji mushrooms, Mr. Wu shows that he can pluck the hot, sour and salty notes as cleanly and precisely as Jean-Georges Vongerichten. He can also bend classic European spring flavors in his direction, tossing asparagus, morels and peas with ricotta gnocchi that receive a whiff of Gorgonzola from doufu ru, fermented tofu.

Overall, it sounds like the early misses have been replaced or fixed, the service is less "tightly wound," and Wells awards two stars. That makes Fung Tu, belatedly, one of the hottest tables in town right now.