• reservations make me special

    To OpenTable or Not to OpenTable

    My friend Erin tweeted this post from Kottke.org to me last night: And honestly, I had no idea this was going on. I don’t think I’d ever considered that OpenTable was making money from the restaurants at all, let alone a lot of money. But OpenTable has literally changed the way I dine. I basically won’t go to a restaurant at this point unless I have a reservation; I hate being told to wait at the bar, and I hate even more having to wait outside because tiny NYC restaurants don’t have proper waiting areas. Using OpenTable means I don’t have to waste time calling a reservation line, waiting through…

  • i am a country bumpkin

    Why You Don’t Want to Eat Your Vegetables

    I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life right now, and OMG, you guys. It is wonderful. My eyes have welled up with tears so many times over the way we treat the people who grow our food and the way I myself left my family farm to move to NYC. Here’s my favourite discovery from today: Our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we’ve…

  • financial district,  french,  midtown east,  midtown west,  pure carbs,  upper east side

    French Macarons at Financier

    As a lover of intense flavor experiences and creamy desserts, meringue cookies are about the least interesting treat in the entire world for me. They look nice and all, but their taste is always too weak, and biting into them is like biting into a hunk of diabetes-inducing chalk. But after being served a mango macaron at The Wright for my birthday, I keep finding myself unexpectedly craving those little French cookies. They have the tiniest layer of crunch on their outsides, easily broken just by holding them, but then their centers are somehow super-moist, almost like raw cookie dough. And their flavors are always wildly dense, like heavily-concentrated versions…

  • 4,  cheap eats,  malaysian,  restaurant reviews,  west village

    Fatty Crab – Malaysian – West Village

    Click on the URL for Fatty Crab, and you’re met with a tiny yellow crab that turns into a giant yellow crab and fills the entire screen with its creepy crabbiness. Pretty foreboding for someone who’s only now getting used to eating sea meats at all, right? Yet I still agreed to go with my friend Ash, and we still had a flavorful–and of course fatty–lunch. watermelon juice So sweet and refreshing, we had to have two. steamed pork buns I’m of the mind that pork buns may be the best thing ever introduced to the American palate. The super-soft white bread is so sweet, and the pork belly is…

  • i am a country bumpkin

    Eating My Weight in Fryer Grease

    I flew home to Ohio last night for a week of the CIRCLEVILLE PUMPKIN SHOW! Which some people like to refer to as the “Circleville Pumpkin Festival” or the “Circleville Pumpkin Fair” or the “Podunk Hillbilly Gourd Celebration“. But they are wrong. It’s a show if I’ve ever seen one. While there, I plan to EAT EVERYTHING I ATE LAST YEAR ALL OVER AGAIN. (And more.)

  • 5,  american (new),  celebrity chef,  east village,  great for dates,  japanese,  michelin-starred,  restaurant reviews

    Momofuku Ko – Japanese/American (New) – East Village

    I maaaaay have said some mean things about Chef David Chang in the past. I may have suggested he’s arrogant and that all of the NYC food critics are stuck up his butt. I may have complained about his anti-photo policy and his online reservation system that requires weeks (months!) of clicking just for the opportunity to spend $700 and not eat until 9:40 p.m. on a Monday night. But I was wrong, and on Saturday, Dr. Boyfriend and I had what was so unequivocally the best meal of our lives that I might have to add an extra doughnut to my rating system just to accommodate it. We’d heard…

  • 4.5,  american (new),  good for groups,  great for dates,  michelin-starred,  restaurant reviews,  upper east side

    What You’ve Read About The Wright is Wrong – American (New) – Upper East Side

    I was secretly concerned about going to The Wright inside the Guggenheim Museum for my birthday this weekend. The menu looked classically delicious, and photos of the decor made it seem like a hip 1970s spaceship (it won the 2010 James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Restaurant Design), but the reviews were a little too so-so, and we’d been totally unimpressed by a similar museum restaurant a few weeks earlier. But, you know, I’m always happy to find out for myself how a restaurant rates. Dr. Boyfriend and I decided to do the chef’s tasting with wine pairings, and right away The Wright scored points with me when our server…

  • i am a country bumpkin,  sea meats are gross

    Shrimp Heads as Homewrecker

    Dr. Boyfriend and I both have birthdays this month, and we want to eat delicious foodz on our special days. For mine, I made us a reservation at The Wright, which is the restaurant inside the Guggenheim Museum. (Click on the link and look at how beautiful it is! I don’t care how good the food is, ’cause I’m going solely for the decor.) For his birthday, he was thinking about going for an elaborate sushi dinner at the best place in town, but it just so happens that I saw a Momofuku Ko reservation open for that day and decided to snatch it up and try to convince him…