- american (new), flatiron, great for dates, michelin-starred, tasting menu, vegetarian-friendly, wine-paired menu
Eleven Madison Park: The Best Restaurant in NYC?
Regular readers will remember my first trip to Eleven Madison Park for the tasting menu last July and the resulting hullabaloo. We had a very good experience but not one that I put on par with the greatest dinners in NYC, and I gave the restaurant four out of five stars (er, donuts). Never a restaurant to rest on its laurels, however, EMP invited us back for a second tasting on the house, and we were so blown away by what the kitchen was capable of that I actually felt embarrassed about my first review. A little over a year later–last August–we decided to repay their kindness by visiting once…
-
Ben & Jerry’s Cannoli Ice Cream
When it comes to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, it’s all about two flavors for me: Americone Dream and What a Cluster. I’ll dabble in Phish Food and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, and I was into Magic Brownies (despite the Dave Matthews Band association) because it tasted like my hometown favourite, Graeter’s Black Raspberry Chip. But my local Ben & Jerry’s spot was running low on the good stuff and running high on Late Night Snack and the Greek yogurt flavors the other night, so my boyfriend convinced me to try the limited edition Cannoli. This picture is about as exciting as the ice cream itself was. The mascarpone base…
- asian fusion, cheap eats, east village, meat sweats, reservations make me special, restaurant reviews
Momofuku Noodle Bar Fried Chicken Dinner
Momofuku Ko is probably my favourite restaurant in NYC, so it was no surprise when my group of dining friends loved the whole rotisserie duck at Momofuku Ssam Bar and wanted to follow it immediately with the fried chicken dinner at Momofuku Noodle Bar. It was approximately an entire year ago that we did this, so my review will consist solely of photos and drool sounds spelled phonetically. Get ready. pork buns With hoisin, scallions, and cucumber. Because you’re not going to Ssam Bar or Noodle Bar and not getting the buns. In fact, you might go to Noodle Bar after Ko just to get the buns. the chicken: Southern…
-
Truffle Feast at David Santos’s Louro
I’ve been pretty terrible about blogging them, but suffice it to say that our first trip to Chef David Santos’s underground supper club was the first of many. Dave’s food is this hard-to-find combination of incredibly comforting and refined, and his passion for what he does makes it taste even better. And now the chef finally has a proper home, Louro in the West Village. The night before the official opening, we were lucky enough to get a couple of seats at his first Monday night Nossa Mesa supper club dinner, part of a weekly series of themed meals. This was the Black and White dinner, featuring loads and loads…
-
Long-Lost Brunch at The Dutch
I looked at my blog yesterday and realized it’s been almost two months since I posted here. I skipped the entire month of November. And you know I’ve been eating this whole time–and how. I have an Eleven Madison Park to write up, a Jean-Georges, a couple of Momofuku Kos . . . but I’m lazy, so I’m just going to post some photos from a trip to The Dutch this summer with my boyfriend and our friends Nik and Marko. It was getting buzz from the second it opened thanks to its chef, Andrew Carmellini, not only being super but having another restaurant with Robert De Niro. And I…
-
Dylan’s Candy Bar is the Best Candy Store in NYC, and I Wish Your Kids Weren’t Allowed Inside
Even if you’ve never visited NYC, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Dylan’s Candy Bar. It’s been featured on a couple of episodes of “Project Runway”, for one, and your mom friends have no doubt chattered away at you during soccer practice about how you just have to ride the ferris wheel at Toys”R”Us and then go to Dylan’s and let the kids fill up a bag with gummy brains, jujubes, and clodhoppers for a mere $12.99 a pound. Going to Dylan’s is, in a word, hellish. The store is packed–both with candy and with kids–at all times, and the crowd is backed up to the door and blocking…
-
Opening Week at Pig and Khao
My friend Ash, a food blogger in her own right, heard about Pig and Khao (get it? cow?) from her sister, who must have a Google alert for the words “pig face salad” to have found out about this place so fast. We detoured from our already-scheduled dinner in Ktown last night and headed to the Lower East Side instead to catch this Filipino/Thai collaboration between former “Top Chef” contestant Leah Cohen and the Fatty Crew (of Fatty Crab and Fatty ‘Cue) on its second night in business. Cutest pig butt ever, am I right? The promise of bottomless tap beer in the garden was tempting, but I couldn’t resist…
- 3.5, brunch, cafe, cheap eats, restaurant reviews, upper east side, vegetarian-friendly, weekend brunch
Alice’s Tea Cup is Pretty Tea-y but Not So Alice-y
My friend Kim online-introduced me to her hometown-friend-with-a-blog Katie Qué (pronounced kay) a few months ago, telling me that she’s a much more interesting blogger than I am and that I’d love her posts about “Game of Thrones” and her many and varied photos of her much-personalitied cat. Within days, we had created a House Katie sigil and motto. (Sorry if that means nothing to you. Wait, no, I’m NOT sorry. Watch “Game of Thrones”. And also “Girls”. Mostly “Girls”, actually.) Katie Qué came to visit her friend Patrick last weekend and was kind enough to invite me to be a part of her wallet-emptying/belly-filling/Alice-in-Wonderland-obsessing odyssey. My portion of the…
-
Cereal Milk, Crack Pie, and More at Momofuku Milk Bar
When you’ve finished licking the fat of a whole rotisserie duck off your fingers at Momofuku Ssam Bar and your friends claim they couldn’t possibly even look at the dessert menu, the only thing to do is to say goodbye to all of them, walk one block in whatever direction they happen to not be going in, and then to quickly double back to Momofuku Milk Bar, the bakery offshoot of David Chang’s restaurant mini-empire. The idea of Milk Bar chef Christina Tosi “living in Brooklyn, NY, with her three dogs and eating an unconscionable amount of raw cookie dough every day” like the Milk Bar website says kind of…
- 4.5, american (new), celebrity chef, jeans-appropriate, lower east side, michelin-starred, restaurant reviews, wine-paired menu
wd-50 Attempts the Reinvention
wd~50 is one of the first restaurants my boyfriend and I visited once we agreed that while some couples exercise together and some couples vacation together, we were going to be a couple who ate really fantastically over-the-top meals together. We celebrated our second anniversary with a few savory courses and the five-course dessert tasting and then went back for the full tasting menu, which included dishes that we still talk about years later as iconic examples of molecular gastronomy. When we heard that the menu format had changed to celebrate wd-50’s ninth anniversary, we knew it was time to go back again. The “From the Vault” menu is five…