cuisine
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Um Segredo – Swinging Summer
Chef David Santos’s secret suppers, Um Segredo, are the fun of a dinner party (minus the clean-up) combined with the food of a world-class restaurant (not your friend’s thawed lasagna). You follow the signs once you get to Roosevelt Island, hand your wine over to Chef Santos, and settle in at a long table for a night of great conversation, great service, and even greater cooking that all makes for such a good time it’s somehow midnight before you know it. We loved our first time at Um Segredo, but we exclaimed over our second time. Swinging Summer dinner, $55 Everyone digging in to the homemade bread–called flatbread but actually…
- 4, american, cheap eats, east village, fast food, japanese, meat sweats, restaurant reviews, sandwiches, vegetarian-friendly
Japadog – Japanese/Fast Food – East Village
My friend Erin online-introduced me to her friend Lizzie back in 2008, and we quickly became Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and blogfriends. And by that I mean that we never actually met, despite living mere miles from each other. (Although one mile in Manhattan is like ten miles anywhere else.) But after four years, we finally forced a dinner a couple of weeks ago at Japadog in the East Village. And I’m not saying that eating a metric ton of wasabi mayo together makes people get along better, but it sure can’t hurt. Tonkatsu dog: deep-fried pork cutlet marinated in tonkatsu sauce with fresh cabbage Like a sweet and sour pork…
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Um Segredo, a Secret Supper Club
Even though Chef Dave Santos’s secret dinner clubs have been mentioned on the New York Times and BlackBook websites, have their own Facebook page, and are openly discussed on Chowhound and Mouthfuls, you still feel like you’re privy to something pretty special when you reserve a seat at one of these intimate dinners and receive your e-mail confirmation with directions to the private location on Roosevelt Island. I always say that there are no hidden gems in NYC because the ubiquitous review sites inevitably expose them within weeks of opening, but this is fine dining that’s literally hidden. All of my food-eatin’ friends had been to Um Segredo–Portuguese for “a…
- american (new), french, good for groups, great for dates, restaurant reviews, union square, vegetarian-friendly, wine-paired menu
Tocqueville Continues to Go Above and Beyond
With their creative, delicious dishes and impressive service that always delivers more than expected, it’s no wonder Tocqueville has long been one of my favourite NYC restaurants. They’re so good to their repeat customers that I secretly felt a little guilty buying the incredibly cheap four-course tasting deal that came up on Gilt City recently, but it was a great excuse to invite along some friends who hadn’t yet tried the restaurant. I walked away with my Tocqueville love reaffirmed, and they walked away with plans to return as soon as possible. warm cheese gougeres Brought to the bar area while we enjoyed some wine and whiskey, these had just…
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Atera and the Art of Foraging
The moment the four-star, accolade-laden reviews started rolling in for Atera–not all of them from people who had actually been to the restaurant, naturally–I called for a reservation. And then freed up every Saturday for a month in case the waitlist paid off and my boyfriend and I could get a spot. It was being compared to Momofuku Ko, our favourite restaurant in NYC, and Brooklyn Fare, our favourite restaurant in NYC to hate on. The chef, Matthew Lightner, trained at the #1 restaurant in the world and the #3 restaurant in the world, was named Best New Chef and Rising Star and everything else in Portland, and has brought…
