-
Michael Jordan’s The Steak House N.Y.C. – Steak – Midtown East
If you can get past the fact that it’s owned by Michael Jordan and is called Michael Jordan’s The Steak House N.Y.C. (what?), this place is actually a decent steakhouse with atmosphere that beats the usual Harvard-crimson carpeting and gold-lacquered everything. My boyfriend and I talked casually about visiting The Steak House every time we spotted it overlooking Grand Central Terminal, but it took seeing Chef Michael Vignola on an episode of The Food Network’s “Chopped” to make us seriously consider a reservation. On the show, the chef was super-creative–quite the opposite of what we expect from someone just cooking steaks and lobster all day–and we were excited to see…
-
Babbo – Italian – West Village
It’s hard to get into Mario Batali’s Babbo. They don’t do online reservations, and week after week when I called, they would tell me they were full. At one point, my boyfriend and I said, “Screw Batali! We don’t want his relatively cheap ($75) tasting menu with also-cheap ($50) wine pairings if it means being jerked around like this!” But once we finally did get in, we realized why the place is always full and why our persistence was totally worth it. We sat in the upstairs portion, which has a lovely skylight that made me excited to take photos. The problem was that as the sun set, so did…
-
Souffles Don’t Entirely Suck, It Turns Out
I really, really love chocolate–from the worst mostly-sugar milk chocolate to the bitterest cacao nib–and that’s why I think I don’t care for chocolate cake. Why would I eat chocolate-flavored flour when I could be having a creamy chocolate tart, chocolate ice cream, or even chocolate pudding? That’s why, since I started fine-dining with my wonderful boyfriend four years ago, I’ve avoided the ubiquitous chocolate soufflé and, in fact, soufflés in general. Little did I know, though, that I was denying myself a real pleasure by not forcing restaurants’ kitchen staff to display their technical prowess for me. My first great soufflé was at The Mark Restaurant by Jean-Georges. In…
-
Aquavit – Scandinavian – Midtown East
Two days after Marcus Samuelsson won the second season of “Top Chef: Masters”, my dining companions and I settled in at the bistro of his restaurant Aquavit and prepared to be wowed. Instead, we were merely contented. matjes herring (mild salt herring), roasted yellow beets, scallions, sour cream herring sampler, boiled potatoes, Vasterbotten cheese cherry and wild boar salad sage-roasted Penobscot (Maine?) chicken breast, broccoli rabe, Swiss chard, snap peas, spring onion crème Undersalted! Bland! Only slightly saved by the delicious sauce! smörgåsbord! cold-poached salmon, red quinoa, wax beans, chervil hollandaise Nik and Kamran Jack and Anthony (they’re single and like good food, ladies!) chocolate pot de crème cardamom pound…
-
Happy Thanksgiving!
via UNBREADED May your turkey be as big as hers, ifyouknowwhatImean.
You May Also Like
Rocco Steakhouse Has the Big, Fat Bacon and the Schlag
-
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…
-
Roly-Poly
Seriously, though, if this is attached to your lunch and you go ahead and eat it anyway, you have to understand why I’m weirded out by you.
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
Reviews of the Best Restaurants in NYC
