- 4, american (new), flatiron, good for groups, great for dates, michelin-starred, restaurant reviews, vegetarian-friendly, wine-paired menu
Eleven Madison Park’s Tasting Menu – American (New) – Flatiron
Eleven Madison Park bowled me over as soon as I walked in the door. A pleasant young woman greeted us, and when my boyfriend told her his name for the reservation, she said hello to him and then turned to me. “And you must be Katie,” she said. “I was especially excited to meet you because you’re from Ohio.” We chatted with her a bit about how we respectively ended up in NYC after growing up there, and then she passed us to a hostess to be shown our seats. I began setting the white balance on my camera, remarking on the looming windows on each wall, musing about the…
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Bareburger is Anything But
Lately, all of my friends (and by “all” of them, I mean “two”) have been going on and on about how great Bareburger is. And even before I tasted the burger, I was pleased by the people making it and their commitment to all-natural ingredients like grass-fed beef, pastured poultry, and organic produce. As much as I love my home state of Ohio, my friends there have to hunt for grass-fed beef, while I have easy access to restaurants like this that serve nothing but tasty, tasty, vitamin-rich cowmeat. Now, the astute reader will recognize that I have a bit of a carb problem, so on the days that I’m…
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Degustation Chef’s Ten-Course Tasting Menu – Spanish/Tapas – East Village
Degustation is designed entirely to facilitate a relationship between the chef and the diner. With only 16 seats arranged in a half-rectangle around a bar that encompasses the prep area, you don’t miss a moment of your dinner being made. For better or worse. Do you want to see the plastic storage bowl your rabbit liver came out of? Do you want to look at a whole container of cooked bacon slabs on the counter throughout your meal and know that you only get two tiny pieces? Is that worth it to get to watch your chef so delicately place a single slice of Fresno pepper on top of a…
- 4, american, celebrity chef, gastropub, good for groups, michelin-starred, midtown west, restaurant reviews, weekend brunch
Whole Suckling Pig at The Breslin Bar & Dining Room – Gastropub/American – Midtown West
As a fairly new food blogger originally from three states away, I sometimes feel out of the food-blogging loop. And as a pig farmer’s daughter, I really love me a good pork roast. So it was a delight to be invited to eat a whole suckling pig at The Breslin Bar & Dining Room with one of my favourite food bloggers, Chubby Chinese Girl, and her pals Henry from Ramblings and Gamblings, Tia from Bionic Bites, Addie from Gypsy-Addie’s Food Diary, and other friends who actually eat things without blogging about them. The first thing you notice about The Breslin is just how gastropubby it is. It’s a bar, but…
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La Silhouette’s Brunch – French/American (New) – Hell’s Kitchen
My boyfriend and I ate at La Silhouette last month and enjoyed their tasting menu of citrus-soaked daurade, veal that melted in our mouths, and the biggest chocolate soufflé I’ve ever seen. I gave the food 4.5 donuts but mentioned that the kitchen was still running a little slow with only two weeks of service under its belt, so co-owner Sally Chironis invited us back for a second chance. Ironically, we had been looking for an upscale brunch spot only the Sunday before but had found every restaurant we thought of closed. Had we remembered that La Silhouette is now serving brunch, we would’ve been treated to: Hell’s Kitchen Basket:…
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Cupcake Crew Has What Might Be the Best Cupcake in NYC
While out trying to find a decent banh mi the other day, I happened to spot a food truck I’d never seen downtown: Cupcake Crew. Black with a giant pink cupcake on one side, I knew it was going to be my kind of truck. The menu was small–six cupcake flavors–but that’s great for someone like me who can’t make decisions. I’m usually a vanilla cake/vanilla icing kind of girl, but the cream cheese icing on the red velvet was calling to me with its perfect dollopness and its tiny sugar sprinkles. It was a really good cupcake. The cake was the right amount of moist, and although my first…
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goodburger – Burgers – Midtown East
The only time I’d tried goodburger, my boyfriend and I had ordered it for delivery, and while we didn’t exactly have any complaints other than a half-melted shake, it wasn’t the sort of burger we’d seek out repeatedly. So I was admittedly pleased when I received an e-mail from goodburger’s PR firm asking me to try out their revamped menu and offering up a list of reasons why the new goodburger is a better goodburger: a tastier bun, the freshest toppings, and a burger made with Pat LaFreida beef and cooked on a open flame in a green-certified restaurant. One of their six locations is just down the street from…
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The Modern at MoMA – American (New)/French – Midtown West
The Modern inside the Museum of Modern Art always shows up on NYC’s Restaurant Week list and always gets completely booked well before I’m even aware Restaurant Week is upon me. This summer, my boyfriend and I attempted a walk-in and almost got laughed out of the place, so we decided to plan ahead and save it for our anniversary. Here’s the tasting menu, served in the formal dining room: amuse bouche: porcini- and rosemary-dusted popcorn The flavoring on this was too uneven to make much impact, but we liked the idea of it a lot. amuse bouche: deconstructed vichyssoise: russet potato, leek soup sphere Quite an impressive presentation, right?…
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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…
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The Shackenstein and Doughnut-Custard at Shake Shack – Theater District – American
I went to Shake Shack twice on Sunday. And not, like, for lunch and dinner, which would be totally acceptable. No, I went for dinner and then for a midnight snack. Except that it wasn’t actually midnight yet; it was more like 10:30. Anyway. The first time around, I had a cheeseburger with mayo and a vanilla custard with a Doughnut Plant doughnut mixed in. (My friend Sylvan added her fries to the photo to make me look at it later and think about how dumb I was not to have ordered some myself.) For me, the burger was decidedly less-good than the ones from the Shake Shack in Madison…
Reviews of the Best Restaurants in NYC