- 4.5, celebrity chef, great for dates, japanese, michelin-starred, restaurant reviews, tribeca, vegetarian-friendly, wine-paired menu
The Tasting Menu at Brushstroke – Japanese – Tribeca
A good review can entice me to eat almost anything. David Bouley’s Brushstroke, with its very traditional and structured Japanese menu, isn’t exactly a comfort food haven for this corn-fed Ohio diner, but Adam Platt’s New York magazine review somehow had me craving kaiseki. Partly because I liked that they wouldn’t let him order sushi in the dining room and partly because there’s no way I’m resisting a restaurant once I see the words candied duck breast in a review. the book room Brushstroke is all recycled blonde woods, reclaimed steel from ship’s hulls, and 27,000 paperback books formed into walls inset with Japanese street scenes in the bar area.…
- 5, columbus circle, french, great for dates, michelin-starred, restaurant reviews, vegetarian-friendly, wine-paired menu, worthwhile views
The Extended Tasting Menu at Per Se
Stepping through the sliding glass partitions to the left and right of Per Se‘s unmistakable and infamously nonfunctioning blue door should be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a country gal like me, but I’m fortunate to have a boyfriend with an insatiable appetite for tasting menus (okay, okay, it’s not just him with the appetite). So when I was finally able to make a reservation for my birthday (after an hour and a half of nonstop calling and then holding), he started tossing around the idea of the extended tasting. He’d read that it was a couple hundred dollars more for a number of extra courses, and since we’d also heard…
- 5, american (new), french, great for dates, michelin-starred, restaurant reviews, tribeca, wine-paired menu
The Tasting Menu at Corton – French/American (New) – Tribeca
Corton wasn’t on our restaurant radar for a long time. I knew it had two Michelin stars, and I’d never heard a bad thing about it, but it took my boyfriend seeing someone else’s review before we figured out that this is exactly our kind of place. “Wacked-out modernist cuisine”, he calls it. Like wd-50 and Momofuku Ko before it, Corton’s Chef Paul Liebrandt is making familiar foods unrecognizable and unrecognizable foods fantastic. We opted for the nine-course, $155 tasting menu, with wine pairings. Wine pairing isn’t mentioned on the menu, but sommelier Shawn Paul introduced us to some really unusual bottles and knew when to give us more extensive…
- 5, american (new), flatiron, good for groups, great for dates, michelin-starred, restaurant reviews, vegetarian-friendly, wine-paired menu
Eleven Madison Park Tasting Menu: Redux
The first time my boyfriend and I dined at Eleven Madison Park, I gave the tasting menu a four-star rating. I went in with the expectation that it might be the best meal I’d ever have and came out feeling underwhelmed. The food we had was five-star, but it was the food we didn’t have that left an impression on me. I felt like we hadn’t been served any of the most interesting dishes on the menu, and in all of the moments where we could have been made to feel special, we were reminded that we weren’t. Still, I thought it was a better-than-average experience overall and was happy…
- 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…
- 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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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?…
- 5, american (new), celebrity chef, east village, great for dates, japanese, michelin-starred, restaurant reviews
Momofuku Ko – Japanese/American (New) – East Village
I maaaaay have said some mean things about Chef David Chang in the past. I may have suggested he’s arrogant and that all of the NYC food critics are stuck up his butt. I may have complained about his anti-photo policy and his online reservation system that requires weeks (months!) of clicking just for the opportunity to spend $700 and not eat until 9:40 p.m. on a Monday night. But I was wrong, and on Saturday, Dr. Boyfriend and I had what was so unequivocally the best meal of our lives that I might have to add an extra doughnut to my rating system just to accommodate it. We’d heard…
- 4.5, american (new), good for groups, great for dates, michelin-starred, restaurant reviews, upper east side
What You’ve Read About The Wright is Wrong – American (New) – Upper East Side
I was secretly concerned about going to The Wright inside the Guggenheim Museum for my birthday this weekend. The menu looked classically delicious, and photos of the decor made it seem like a hip 1970s spaceship (it won the 2010 James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Restaurant Design), but the reviews were a little too so-so, and we’d been totally unimpressed by a similar museum restaurant a few weeks earlier. But, you know, I’m always happy to find out for myself how a restaurant rates. Dr. Boyfriend and I decided to do the chef’s tasting with wine pairings, and right away The Wright scored points with me when our server…
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