• Ties are no longer required at the '21' Club. [Eater]
• The team behind Mansion is filing for bankruptcy; promoter Joey Morrissey will be taking over the space and renaming it M2. [P6]
• Kurve has five days to pay $52,253 in back rent or it faces eviction. [Eater]
• Martha Stewart says East 10th Street is the new Restaurant Row. [NYP]
• Payard pastry chef Chris Wise is moving to Philippe. [GS]
• Experts say 12,000-18,000 restaurants in the U.S. will close this year. [WSJ]

♦ Frank Bruni delivered a crushing review of the new East Village restaurant Kurve yesterday. Today, the owner of the Karim Rashid-designed spot, Andy Yang, is doing damage control: What Bruni calls "unremarkable," Yang says, is actually "purposefully simple." [GS]
♦ Celsius, the pop-up restaurant in Bryant Park, is now open. [Eater]
♦ Michael Dorf's City Winery isn't opening on schedule and the space is still raw, but he hosted a musical preview last night anyway. [GS, Eater]
♦ The space that formerly occupied by Seymour Burton is coming back to life as a surf-and-turf spot called Butcher Bay. [Feedbag]
♦ A preview of At Vermilion, the Midtown offshoot of Rohini Dey's Indian-Latin Chicago restaurant, Vermilion. [GS]
♦ A group of deliverymen protested outside Jonathan Morr's Republic yesterday with "No Justice, No Noodles" signs. [NYP]

♦ Frank Bruni delivered a zero-star review to Kurve in today's Times. After complaining about the puzzling service and frequent menu substitutions, he wonders how any restaurateur could "pour this much money and this much vanity into a project and bungle it to the extent that the Kurve brigade does?" [NYT]
♦ Noah Tepperberg's plans for the space formerly occupied by Earth weren't approved at a community board meeting last night, but they weren't denied either. [GS]
♦ The early reviews have been mixed for the new tapas bar Txikito. [Eater]
♦ The latest drink trend involves adding a blob of bacteria and yeast to sweetened tea. [NYP]

• The war between between Georgia and Russia is having an impact on the local restaurant biz: Russians are avoiding Café Georgia in Brighton Beach. [NYDN]