american (new)
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My Favourite Thing at Louro is Actually Everything
Louro has been open in NYC’s Greenwich Village for over a year now and is still surprising me with its robust flavors every time I go. Sometimes I’ll be sitting at a happy hour spot closer to home, and I’ll think, “Yeah, I could be at Louro right now instead, but what’s the big deal?” And then I’ll actually go to Louro and am like, “Why have I been wasting my life?” Chef David Santos has let me come photograph his food several times, so I won’t be giving Louro a score so as to avoid looking like a shill, but you’ll know that in my heart, it’s 5/5 all…
- american (new), good for groups, jeans-appropriate, kips bay, meat sweats, restaurant reviews, tasting menu
Resto’s Large Format Nose-to-Tail Lamb Feast
My mysterious food blogger friend The Pretender planned this large-format nose-to-tail dinner for us at Resto after much debate about whether we should do: 1) this version, which involves several courses made from parts of the animal, or 2) the similar dinner at the sister restaurant next door, Cannibal, where they serve charcuterie made from the animal and then the whole roasted animal itself. Having already done the whole suckling pig at The Breslin, I was more interested in a host of interesting dishes, and so we opted for Resto with my friends Jack and Anthony and his friends Sanjay, Jesse, Angela, CB, and Mutsumi. The Resto feasts can be…
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Distilled is More Than Just Wings (But the Wings Are Pretty Amazing)
It only took seeing “gochujang wings” and “Momofuku Noodle Bar veteran” in an article about Distilled to convince me. Our friend Colin had already visited and said the wings were “weird”, but they apparently weren’t weird enough that he wouldn’t come back, so he joined my friends Nik and Tim and me there one day after work to share what felt like a whole lot of food at the time but turned out to be just a little bit of southern comfort food and a whole lot of wine, mead, and cocktails made of wine and mead. Distilled wings These wings are not weird. Well, unless you consider it weird…
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The Tasting Menu at Louro
Having first met Chef David Santos at his home supper club, Um Segredo, I felt a sense of pride when he opened his first restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village, Louro. As he sold out his Monday night themed dinners (like the truffle feast) and received a star from the New York Times two months in, I was already telling people that “I knew him way back when”. The restaurant is a little bit of everything: a rustic floor and seating, nature-inspired lighting, and black and white photos of highbrow book collections. The food is on the fancy side, but the service makes you feel comfortable. I get the feeling that…
- 4.5, american (new), flatiron, good for groups, great for dates, jeans-appropriate, restaurant reviews, tasting menu, vegetarian-friendly, wine-paired menu
The Lunch Tasting Menu at Gramercy Tavern
We’ve long had Gramercy Tavern on our list simply because it’s a part of the Danny Meyer/Union Square Hospitality family of restaurants that includes Shake Shack, The Modern, and formerly Eleven Madison Park. With the Shake Shack burger being my favourite in NYC and Eleven Madison Park my third-favourite restaurant in all of NYC, my expectations for the $58 lunch tasting menu were high and were met both in the food and the service. fluke tartare, tangerine, peanut and fried shallot So citrusy, with a highlight of celery and a little crunch from the kohlrabi and fried onions. ruby red shrimp, carrots, quinoa and coconut broth So tender, with the…
- 4.5, american (new), celebrity chef, french, great for dates, michelin-starred, restaurant reviews, tasting menu, upper east side, wine-paired menu
The Tasting Menu at Daniel
I called our first visit to Daniel back in 2011 “as close to perfect a meal as Kamran and I have had in NYC”. It was our first time at a restaurant with three Michelin stars and our first time eating one of these over-the-top, wine-paired, France-fueled tasting menus. Since then, we’ve been to all but one of the three-Michelin-starred places (if anyone wants to put in a good word for Masa, I’m listening) and have basically had so much good food that we’ve started to question whether or not it’s been a mistake to ruin ourselves for mediocre food, so we decided it was time to go back to…
- 4, american (new), celebrity chef, great for dates, jeans-appropriate, meatpacking, restaurant reviews, tasting menu, wine-paired menu
Colicchio & Sons Tasting Menu
Tom Colicchio is special to my boyfriend and me, and not just because we’ve considered basing vacation plans solely on being able to visit the restaurants of “Top Chef” contestants. (Really just Michael Voltaggio’s.) Not only did we spend our last anniversary at Craft, but our first tasting menu there held the title of The Best Meal of My Life for the longest time. My first Craftbar pork belly is the standard by which I’ve judged all others, and we celebrated Valentine’s Day 2010 at Colicchio & Sons shortly after its opening. (My pictures from that were used in an NPR article making fun of food bloggers’s awful pictures. YES!)…
- 5, american (new), french, great for dates, michelin-starred, restaurant reviews, tasting menu, tribeca, wine-paired menu
The Tasting Menu at Corton
My boyfriend and I were looking for a tasting menu for last weekend. We mentioned Corton and then moved past it, figuring that there’s a whole world of NYC restaurants we haven’t been to. For days, we mulled over Gramercy Tavern, Corton, Scarpetta, Corton, Ai Fiori, Corton, Aldea . . . and then we actually read the menu on Corton’s website. SOLD. “Wacked-out modernist cuisine”, my boyfriend calls it. With two much-deserved Michelin stars to boot. This is the $155 tasting menu with wine pairings also at $155: This cracker with a micro shiso leaf (that’s Japanese mint, although it has a flavor all its own) came way too fast…
- 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…
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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…
