"The first solo restaurant from Gotham Bar & Grill’s longtime chef Alfred Portale garnered two-stars this week in a glowing review from Times critic Pete Wells. The Times critic found that Chelsea Italian restaurant Portale — which opened last November at 126 W. 18th Street, between 6th and 7th avenues — is serving up “emphatic” sauces and “high-spirited” appetizers, Wells writes. The Times critic was particularly fond of Portale’s pasta dishes, specifically the tortellini, whose contents he likened to hot fudge: Wells did raise an eyebrow over the restaurant’s cuts of meat and fish, which he says were “generous and skillfully cooked” but more often upstaged by the appetizers, pastas, and vegetables they were accompanied by. Still, even that “wasn’t all that bad,” he says." - Luke Fortney