Deuki Hong Lands in San Francisco, Cuozzo Looks Back at Da Silvano, and More Intel

— Deuki Hong, the Eater Young Gun who opened the Manhattan outpost of Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong, is now working on a fried chicken place and a Korean barbecue restaurant/fermentation lab in San Francisco. Both restaurants will be located in the Fillmore neighborhood. The chicken restaurant, dubbed Sunday Bird, is slated to open in SF this February.

— Dahlia’s Tapas Wine Bar on East Ninth Street has been closed during normal business hours recently, and nobody’s picking up the phone. The owners also operated Dahlia’s, the Second Avenue Mexican restaurant that got busted by the SLA for serving minors last January. That restaurant was replaced by a shortly-lived salad and juice bar.

— Made Nice, the new 28th Street casual restaurant from the EMP/Nomad team, is now slated to open at the end of January or February. Daniel Humm and Will Guidara’s new cafe will serve around 10 main dishes priced between $11 and $15, including things like smoked salmon with greens, and confit pork with kale and quinoa. Earlier this fall, Humm remarked: "Made Nice is a much cheaper restaurant for us...but it’s still about the recipes."

— On its sixth day in business, hot dim sum import Tim Ho Wan had a line out the door, 30 minutes before opening:

[Robert Sietsema]

— Post critic Steve Cuozzo looks back on the legacy of Silvano Marchetto’s celebrity haunt Da Silvano, which closed without warning this week: "[I]ts passing marks the end of another treasured phenomenon: a restaurant that’s entirely a function of its owner’s personality and whims. As at Elaine’s under Elaine Kaufman and at The Four Seasons dominated by Julian Niccolini, glamorous regulars’ devotion to ringmaster Marchetto made the place immune to changes in taste or reputation." And Mario Batali tells Cuozzo about his relationship with the restaurant: "I used to go for brunch every Sunday with my family in warm weather, sit outside and watch the parade go by — it was some of the best people-watching in town."

— Pete Wells’s two-star demotion of Per Se was the most popular food story in the New York Times this year.

— Voice critic Zachary Feldman likes the chicken shawarma and pretty much everything else at Eli and Max Sussman’s Samesa in Williamsburg: "Charred and coarsely chopped, the spit-roasted bird explodes with flavor, as do neon-pink pickled radishes and the filling $14 plate's nutty, onion-laced mujadara pilaf, made from lentils, quinoa, and chewy wild rice, which practically roars with cumin. Splashed with tahini-buttermilk and grassy green zhug, the multicolored array is as inviting to look at as it is satisfying to savor and demolish."

— Westlight and Le Coucou are two of the most beautiful restaurants that opened in 2016. Jenny Xie, the news editor for Eater’s sister publication Curbed, praises the former: "When life gives you a rooftop space with incredible views of Manhattan, you have to respond with huge windows, a swanky cosmopolitan vibe, and lots of plush seating — and Westlight does."

— Lilia’s chef/owner Missy Robbins makes a food prediction for 2017: "I think we will see a return to a lot of large format dishes (i.e. whole veal shanks for four people). They are comforting and communal and I think people are craving that right now. And wood-fired cooking continues to blow up."

— And finally, here’s how to make the perfect negroni: