In November, Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton — names likely familiar to in-the-know New York diners — started as contributing restaurant critics at The Times, writing brief reviews that award stars to New York City restaurants. Their work first appears on Tuesdays in the Where to Eat newsletter (subscribe here), and each month those reviews are aggregated and published on nytimes.com and in the newspaper.

The contributing critics adhere to The Times’s ethics guidelines. And like our other critics, they do not give advance notice when visiting restaurants, they visit multiple times and they try to reserve tables anonymously. They pay for all their meals, and strive to have the same dining experience that any customer would.

Here are their four most recent brief reviews.

Dolores

★ | Critic’s Pick

“Mexico City-inspired” might be the New York culinary phrase of the year; it’s a term used to connote quality (or convey hype) at a certain category of Latin American restaurants. But at Dolores, set in a candlelit room that smells of charred corn husks, the owners try out a slightly more specific tagline.

Cressida Greening and Emir Dupeyron (of Winona’s), working with the chef Damian Escalante Petersen, serve “comida Chilanga,” the cuisine of Mexico City. And that’s not just P.R.-speak. Dolores specializes in bright, bold dishes that don’t always make their way to hip cantinas en tierra Yanqui.

Waiters bring out $4 papadillas, fried masa stuffed with hot mashed potatoes. They sit in small pools of red and green salsas, a little gasoline fire for the palate.

Botanas, or bar snacks, come out quickly. Cooks stuff fava beans into purple corn tlacoyos and huazontles (called Aztec broccoli) into cheesy fritters.

In New York, chicharrones usually translate to something crispy or meaty. Not here: Dolores stews its pork skin in salsa verde until it takes on the texture of soft meringue.

Mr. Dupeyron likes to namecheck famed Mexico City establishments. He cites El Turix under the entry for cochinita pibil; rolled tacos filled with citrus-marinated pork. And he credits Bar El Bosque for the lengua tacos, tiny corn tortillas that hold cubes of salted tongue and a whisper of onions. Local taquerias tend to overload their tacos, but the lengua is a study in minimalism — an entire cow’s worth of beefiness packed into a few square inches of meat and masa.

If it’s still warm out — a long shot — take a seat underneath the marigold awning with a fizzy Paloma in hand. For a moment, this tree-lined patch of Bedford-Stuyvesant feels just a little like La Condesa.

Mexico City-inspired, indeed.

Crevette

★

By Mahira Rivers

The crystalline waters of St.-Tropez are a distant dream from the sidewalks outside Crevette, Ed Szymanski’s West Village ode to the coastal regions of France, Spain and Italy. But here, the Riviera is as much a state of mind as it is a source of culinary inspiration.

Drawing from icy Atlantic waters, Mr. Szymanski assembles platters of raw seafood with the same attentiveness as some sushi counters. Sicilian sashimi, a take on a popular dish at Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco, recently featured slices of chilled scallop, tuna, trout and blackfish drenched in herbaceous olive oil and fistfuls of briny capers. Red shrimp carpaccio, so thin and translucent it could pass for sheets of lardo, is supple and sweet.

But don’t limit your dinner to the cold and barely cooked. Mr. Szymanski’s grilled golden chicken gets its savory depth from a fish sauce marinade. It is accompanied by a different kind of gold, to us food people, anyway: crispy, salty pommes frites. Butter beans in a vegetable broth with a refreshingly acidic herb pistou points to Mr. Szymanski’s knack for layering flavors and textures. A skewer of morcilla and merguez is simply delicious.

The menu covers a lot of ground (and sea), but can at times feel overwhelmed with ideas, like a manuscript awaiting an editor. For every successful dish, there is another that lands slightly askew, like an appetizer of grilled cabbage bathed a bit too generously in rich sauce.

The restaurant’s whitewashed dining room and bar have the summertime feel of a dîner en blanc. But winter lends its charms, too. A dark chocolate torte, smooth as butter, is especially good at a cozy banquette under dim lighting, gifted by the season’s early sunset.

Zimmi’s

★★ | Critic’s Pick

Vanilla has a reputation for blandness in certain circles. The slender bean carries such deep connotations of mediocrity that a new Google ad mocks iPhone users by depicting their devices as blobs of pale soft serve.

Enter Zimmi’s. The West Village restaurant is here to remind us of vanilla’s inherent distinctiveness.

The ice cream is made with so many Tahitian pods that the scoop appears ashen. It tastes densely of cream and flaunts a perfume that recalls fancy marshmallows. “I don’t recognize it as vanilla,” a companion said. This dessert isn’t afraid to alienate.

In a city rife with mega-brasseries, Zimmi’s, from the chef Maxime Pradié and the restaurateur Jenni Guizio, is an uncompromising bistro that doesn’t lean on steak frites or shellfish towers. In this small room, curtained off from Bedford Street, folks who look like they raided the alpaca department at Nordstrom eat vol-au-vents filled with airy pike quenelles.

Mr. Pradié, formerly of Lodi, showcases dishes that pay homage to the regional countryside cooking of France. Crisp socca comes topped with sliced bottarga, faintly orange and deeply briny. The chef whips up a bracing artichoke soup, cutting the mild astringency with a slab of foie. He sends out tender saupiquet stews, letting the black Beldi olives speak louder than the grassy lamb. And he drenches chicken in a tangy sauce moutarde, spiked with heavy cream and teeming with Vegemite levels of savoriness.

For dessert, the Proustian madeleines are an option, but I like the quince tart. It comes with a scoop of something you might have feelings about.

Markette

By Mahira Rivers

The salt cod fritters at Markette offer a glimpse into the chef India Doris’s potential at the restaurant she co-owns with the managing partner, Alex Pfaffenbach, just south of Penn Station. Their shells are crisp, the filling both meaty and light, a delightful contradiction. They are an exemplary display of skill from Ms. Doris, who trained in the fine-dining kitchens of the chef James Kent at Crown Shy and Saga.

The fritters, as with a few other dishes, start with an idea rooted in the Caribbean, where the London-born Ms. Doris traces her lineage. But more often than not, deference to stylized presentation and what the restaurant calls a European influence edges the food too far away from the verve and zest of Caribbean cuisine.

The chicken, while juicy, is obscured by a peri peri sauce sharper than vinegar, and buttermilk ranch that drowns out everything else. The bouillabaisse sauce in a grilled prawn dish is so refined, its deep oceanic flavors have been filtered out. Had the prawn itself been grilled a few seconds less, I might have better appreciated the excellent chile crisp granola on top.

The menu is designed for sharing at tables that aren’t much bigger than a hubcap, which can make for a vexing game of plate Tetris. I recommend a seat at the wide bar, preferably with an order of the braised oxtail gratin, a warm hug of a dish brimming with spice and cheesy Cheddar polenta. Skip the rock shrimp linguine, another dish overwhelmed by acidity.

Few of these concerns are so fundamental that they can’t be resolved in the kitchen. Because even if excellence rests heavily on execution, it is also true that a great restaurant begins with good ideas. And luckily, the menu at Markette is full of them.

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