features
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Brucie NYC Blew My Mind with Brussels Sprouts
If you’ve been reading donuts4dinner since its inception, you know that the original purpose of this blog was to chronicle my rise from a farmgirl to a three-Michelin-star dining powerhouse. Well, since I became a full-time resident of a new Brooklyn neighborhood and also unemployed at the same time, I’ve been focusing on local restaurants and healthier living. It’s been great for the most part–there’s not a lot that’s more satisfying than finding delicious food that’s a short walk away–but part of me has missed the beautiful plating and mindblowing bites of the finest eateries. But then, thanks to my roommate/landlord/former co-worker/boyfriend, I found Brucie in Cobble Hill. The menu…
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The Entire Dim Sum Menu at RedFarm UWS
There are no reservations at the Upper West Side outpost of RedFarm, so my group of five showed up at 6:30 on a Thursday night hoping to beat the usual 8 p.m. dinner crowd. Even though it’s apparently twice the size of the original West Village location, the place was packed, and even having called earlier in the afternoon to put ourselves on a waitlist wasn’t helping. But the staff was zealous in finding a spot for us, and soon enough, we were seated at the end of a communal table in the middle of the checkered-table-cloth and blond wood dining room, about to eat every single item on the…
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Char No. 4: American Southern Food and Whiskey in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn
I happen to live in the midst of all of the cutest parts of Brooklyn, so a night out to one of my favourite neighborhood restaurants usually involves passing four more that I want to try the next night. Char No. 4 is one of the places I’ve always noticed with its dark tones, ceiling full of lanterns, and bar bustling every night of the week. I remember looking at the Southern-inspired menu once and thinking it was too small, but when my friend Kim, her cousin, and I decided to go on a recent weekend, I realized that the menu’s actually too big, because I wanted every single thing…
- 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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A New Era of Grimaldi at Juliana’s Pizza
I’m writing pizzeria reviews as Examiner.com’s Manhattan Pizza Examiner. I know it shows that I have the palate of a 5-year-old, but pizza’s easily my favourite food, so you can count on me for plenty of fangirling over crust and sauce in these articles. There are two reasons you’d try Juliana’s Pizza in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood: 1) You respect Patsy Grimaldi, who’s been making pizza in NYC for over seventy years. 2) You’ve heard about the two-hour lines at Grimaldi’s and already waited that long for a cronut earlier today. Read the rest here.
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The Swingle from Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pies
Red Hook is a neighborhood on the southwest coast of Brooklyn that’s accessible by cruise ship and nothing else. Okay, there’s one bus that goes there. And you could take the IKEA ferry if you were desperate. But for the most part, it’s meant for people who own cars, which excludes me, because I basically live in NYC just so I don’t have to ever drive. But one weekend, my landlord/roommate/former co-worker/friend Jack had his parents’ car, so I did what any responsible food blogger would do and asked him to drive us to Red Hook to eat chocolate-covered key lime pie on a stick from Steve’s Authentic Key Lime…
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Kellogg’s NYC in Times Square
- 4, celebrity chef, german, good for groups, great for dates, italian, jeans-appropriate, restaurant reviews, west village
The Marrow
I’ve read recently about how hard it is for a restaurant in NYC to survive after the initial buzz is over. A place opens, every blogger in the tri-state area rushes to review it, it gets no press after the first few months, and it dies. Naturally I accept all of the blame for this, because I’ve never been to any of the old Chef Harold Dietrle restaurants, but I’ve had my eye on The Marrow for months now. I watched him and cheered for him as he won the first season of “Top Chef”, and then I was so excited to live in New York City when he opened…
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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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California’s Umami Burger in NYC
There’s nothing a New Yorker loves more than feigning disinterest in other cities. We have everything worth having here, and Chicago can take its sparkling blue lake and shove it. But somehow, when it comes to food, New Yorkers have a fascination with everything from everywhere. Maybe it’s just that we want to say we’ve had it. Maybe it’s just that we want to be able to intelligently naysay it. Maybe it’s that we want to put it on a cronut. In any case, I found myself at the made-famous-in-L.A. Umami Burger on its fourth day in NYC. Partly because I had planned to go to the park and it…
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Mission Chinese Food: Crazy Spicy, Crazy Delicious
The first reviews of San Franciso’s Mission Chinese Food outpost here in NYC were written by professional critics and were, by my estimation, universally adoring. The New York Times said James Beard Rising Star Chef award-winner Danny Bowien “does to Chinese food what Led Zeppelin did to the blues. His cooking both pays respectful homage to its inspiration and takes wild, flagrant liberties with it”. The blog reviews that came soon after were less excited. I read complaints about the prices, which range from $4 for the vinegar peanuts to $14.50 for the mapo la mian. I read complaints about how everything was overwhelmingly spicy. Then I read complaints about…
