neighborhood
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Restaurant Review: Craftbar (Restaurant Week Winter 2010)
The Craftbar winter 2010 Restaurant Week menu is huge! Most restaurants have three to four choices in each of the appetizer, entrée, and dessert categories, but Craftbar has at least ten. If that isn’t reason enough to go, check out some of the offerings we sampled at lunch yesterday: Smoked pig head terrine, citrus mostarda I ate head cheese. There. I said it. I ate headcheese. I’ve been interested in it but never interested enough to actually order it, but I thought, “Hey, it’s Restaurant Week. This meal is going to be incredibly cheap, so even if I end up vomiting it up all over my shoes, I don’t have…
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Restaurant Review: Kajitsu
Having reservations somehow makes me feel really cool–despite the fact that only old people plan their meals and that I’d actually be much cooler if I just walked into restaurants on a whim–and I love using OpenTable to book just about any meal I can. While rating my recent wd~50 dinner last week, I saw the OpenTable Diners’ Choice list for the top restaurants fit for foodies and was surprised that I’d never even heard of #1. So naturally, I promptly booked a table for two there for Sunday night. Kajitsu is a cozy, sparse, underground East Village Japanese den dedicated to shojin cooking, which is the basis for all…
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Restaurant Review: wd-50
Evidently finally seeing my review of our first dinner at wd~50 made my boyfriend crave some foams and powders, so before we left for Christmas vacation in our respective home states, we made a reservation to return. The only time we could get on Saturday night, even with a few weeks notice, was 6 p.m. Which means that despite the terrible economy, New Yorkers are still lining up to pay $200 each for dinner. We were oddly seated in the same exact table as last time, which happens to have a straight view into the kitchen, where we saw chef/owner Wylie Dufresne talking to Chef de Cuisine Jon Bignelli (who…
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Financier’s Bûche de Noël
I figured it was too late to post about my first bûche de Noël experience before I left NYC to spend the holidays with my family in Ohio, but since Blondie & Brownie revealed that Financier is still selling them, it looks like I’m good to go. Being from the Midwest and being very much culturally sheltered, I had no idea what a bûche de Noël was until my office decided on a whim to order a couple of cakes from the downtown Financier Patisserie the week before Christmas. When I called at 3 p.m., the order-taker told me that they were down to a couple of roll cakes, one…
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Restaurant Review: wd-50
It was more than a year ago that I announced my impending trip to wd~50 on my personal blog and got a load of comments from my mostly-Ohioan readership that mostly talked about how ridiculously small and not-at-all-like-real-food the dish in the picture I posted was. I was skeptical, too, to be honest, but it turned out that the meal was fantastic–really, really fantastic–surprising, playful, and memorable. It must have overwhelmed me so much, though, that I failed to write about it, and my boyfriend has been bothering me about it ever since. Now that we have a January reservation to try the current tasting menu, I figured I owed…
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Restaurant Review: Fresh-N-Fast Burgers
I was skeptical at first, but like many New Yorkers, I call the burger from Shake Shack in Madison Square Park my favourite in the city (and maybe tie it with the burger from Cozy Soup ‘n’ Burger in the West Village). So naturally when I heard the burgers from the new Fresh-N-Fast on 23rd St. compared to the ones at Shake Shack, I had to go. I also heard them called blatant ripoffs of California’s famous In-N-Out burgers, so I had to bring along my San Franciscan friend Beth to act as judge. The problem was, um, that Beth had never actually eaten an In-N-Out burger, something which I…
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Restaurant Review: Prime Meats
My best New York friend, Beth, loved Carroll Gardens when she first moved to the neighborhood but now may be regretting it since I found that they don’t make a bad restaurant down there. The most recent meal I forced her into was dinner at Prime Meats, which is getting glowing reviews from everyone, and deservedly so. Prohibition-era decor is everywhere these days, but Prime Meats takes it a step further with a homemade alcoholic punch of the day and waiters dressed in suspenders and handlebar mustaches. Eater NY has some lovely photos of the place in the daylight, but when Beth and I visited, it was all dim chandeliers…
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Restaurant Review: Mama’s Food Shop
I really love when a restaurant inspires huge reactions from my friends, especially when they rely on me to choose the restaurant for us. To my delight, they kept talking about our Friday night trip to Mama’s Food Shop in the East Village for days. Unfortunately, no one was saying anything good. Eating at one of Mama’s tables feels like eating at the apartment of one of your most eclectic hipster friends if you have the sort of friends who keep nude pictures of their mothers on bookshelves at the heads of their tables. And if your friend serves you lukewarm comfort food cafeteria-style from metal pans. I was there…
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Restaurant Review: craftbar
Our first visit to craftbar was so outstanding that my boyfriend and I decided a couple of weeks later to visit for his birthday to try more of the menu. We had opted for the large charcuterie plate to start the first time around and regretted not getting to taste more appetizers, so this time, we went for three starters: Pecorino fondue with acacia honey and hazelnuts The “fondue” wasn’t liquid by the time it got to our table, but the sweetness of the honey was a treat, and the hazelnuts were hugely complimentary. Pecorino-stuffed risotto balls The risotto balls seemed like they’d be easy on the palate, but once…
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Restaurant Review: Motorino Williamsburg (the original, sucka)
I haven’t read a single negative review of Brooklyn’s Motorino yet in the year it’s been open. With my apartment literally around the corner from it, I was as excited as anyone to see a hip, sit-down, candlelit pizzaria open in a neighborhood full of ones you’d never take a date to unless it was specifically because you never planned to ask him out again and wanted him to know it. When it comes to ambiance, Motorino is the best thing the Graham Avenue L train stop has going for it. Dark wood, cozy but not overcrowded quarters, a nice outdoor deck area, and a good-looking waitstaff who isn’t afraid…
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