My friend Anthony took this photo of me outside of Dim Sum Go Go, where my co-workers past and present and I met for our monthly dinner club a couple of weeks ago:
Look how freakin’ excited I am about pork buns! And look how hard Meredith‘s pretending not to know me.
In case you generally hate reading about how surprised I was to find out I’m not completely grossed out by sardines but love furthering your Tom Colicchio fantasies, my latest donuts4dinner.com post is for you.
Yesterday, Dr. Boyfriend and I were walking around 2nd Ave. between 23rd and 34th Streets, delighting ourselves with the culinary wonders of the weekend street fair (warning: jankiest website ever), when we spotted a pickle vendor. Neither of us have sampled many of New York’s pickle offerings other than the full sour and the half-sour, so I suggested we try something new, but as we approached the tent, we were dismayed to see that they were only being sold by the pint.
We passed by pickleless then but found ourselves standing outside a bakery stationed directly behind the vendor later just as one of the sellers lobbed off the bottom half of a pickle and attempted to land the top half in a trashcan. He didn’t watch to make sure it actually landed in the garbage, though, so Kamran and I were the only ones to see it bounce off the rim and roll onto the sidewalk at our feet.
And thus, an addition to my abandoned food page was born.
Tom Colicchio is underrated. Yes, he’s the host of the best show in reality TV history. Yes, he’s a five-time James Beard Award winner. But after dining at his restaurant craft this past weekend, I’m pretty sure he’s actually better than anyone gives him credit for.
The first thing my boyfriend, Kamran, and I were struck by upon entering craft is that the hostesses and servers were actually nice. Like “good evening” and “how are you?” and “thank you for coming” nice with genuine smiles. Kamran theorized that once you get to a certain point in your money-spending, restaurants no longer have to pretend to be exclusive and desirable because they actually are. And we, of course, laughed self-satisfiedly every time someone peered longingly in the windows at us but obviously couldn’t come in.
Mwahahahaha.
No, I’m kidding.
The second thing we noticed is that the menu freaked me out. When Kamran and I first talked about Valentine’s Day dinner at craft, I remember being wowed and excited by every single dish on the tasting menu. But when it was actually put in front of me, it looked like this:
Two of the dishes were seafood (blech), and the course that says roasted and braised Wagyu beef on the online menu said Wagyu beef and Wagyu beef TONGUE on the actual menu. Not pleased. But we were there, and I wanted that Meyer lemon sundae.
As it turned out, of course, everything was great. I thought my first experience with scallops was surprisingly good, but these bay scallops were ten times better. They were the size of cocktail onions and had a thin little crust on one side from searing. The lime broth would have been delicious on any protein, but it was the micro herbs and onion slivers on top that really made the flavor of the scallops stand out.
When our server set down our second dishes and said, “This is a brebis blanche agnolotti with matignon,” I was like, I don’t know what a single one of those words mean. But after a little Googling, I think it roughly translates to ewe’s milk cheese in blanched ravioli with a topping of cooked diced carrot, celery, and onion. (One of you French types can correct me on that, if you please.) Basically, it was long, thin pasta stuffed with a ricotta-like cheese, drizzled in some herby sauce, and sprinkled with some tiny vegetable chunks. I wondered if the sous chefs in the back were constantly talking about how ridiculous it is to send out an entire giant plate with exactly three pieces of pasta on it. I’m sure they never say anything bad about the slices of lamb bacon resting on top, though. They looked like regular (perfectly-cooked) bacon, but they tasted distinctly lamb-y.
The next course was the sturgeon, which I was looking forward to least, but it was done perfectly. Tom’s always talking on “Top Chef” about how seasoning is the most important component of a dish, and I’ve kind of gotten sick of hearing how vital salt is, but the seasoning on the fish was what made it. One whole side of it had been encrusted with a layer of salt, and it tasted GREAT. The blood orange sauce was totally different than anything we’d ever tasted before, and there were two kinds of beets. What? Yes, two kinds of beets. In addition to the dark, earthy ones you always see, there was a lighter kind that looked like hunks of tomato (which I hate) but tasted sweet (which I love).
The guinea hen course was definitely my favourite and is the single best dish I’ve ever had. It was a breast sitting on end and wrapped in pancetta, with slivers of black truffle resting on top. Underneath were grits made with black truffle oil and Brussels sprouts leaves sprinkled about. As soon as our server set it down, I was like, “THESE ARE ALL OF MY FAVOURITE THINGS IN LIFE IN ONE DISH!!!” Poultry, salted cured meat, corn, and Brussels sprouts. If there had been a scoop of ice cream on top, I would’ve died right there. I was so overwhelmed by the first bite that I got chills for five minutes and almost cried. I’m so serious.
The Wagyu course should have come before the hen, because while it too was great, nothing was going to top those grits. Luckily, the tongue was a paper-thin slice laid out underneath the lentils and chard, so I didn’t have to worry about any of the texture issues I usually have with tongue. It was so delicate that it tore apart like tissue, and it tasted like a slow-simmered roast beef. The other piece of Wagyu was perfect in that one side of it was rare and buttery while the other side was crispy, as if Tom knew that Kamran and I like our steaks cooked opposite ways.
Our server told us that the first dessert course was more like an amuse-bouche than an actual dish, and Kamran said, “I’m not amused.” OH! Obvious food humor for the win! It was a tiny glass filled with layers of crushed coconut meringue cookies in the sweet red hibiscus syrup with a miniature dollop of Meyer lemon sorbet on top. Like size-of-your-fingertip miniature. The glasses themselves were so small that our spoons almost didn’t fit down into them. And despite the fact that I’ve had many a conversation about how pointless meringue is, the cookies were delicious and added the perfect texture.
The second dessert course wasn’t nearly as tasty but made up for it by being even more interesting. It was a huge smear of chocolate paste, a crunchy chocolate tart with a liquid chocolate top, and a spoonful of caramel ice cream. The paste looked exactly like icing, so it was a huge surprise to put a big, old glob of it in my mouth and find out that it’s not really sweet at all; it tasted like roasted, bitter fruit and had a grainy consistency. Which doesn’t sound appetizing, but it was, especially when we tempered it with the ice cream. We decided that it was pretty smart of Tom to give you course after course of easily-lovable dishes and then to throw this crazy thing at you at the end that would keep you talking for days.
Kamran admitted that before we visited craft, he sort of thought of Tom as a semi-decent chef who happened to be a celebrity but that after tasting his food, he’s a true believer. The interesting thing about a place like wd~50 is that your plate is filled with things you’ve never seen before, so they all taste new and exciting. But the more interesting thing about a place like craft is that all of the food on your plate is entirely recognizable, yet it’s exciting because it manages to taste better than it’s ever tasted before.
We also loved all of the little extras the staff provided, like the miniature gingerbread cookies and cream puffs they brought after our chocolate course. And all night, we kept seeing the hostesses handing something to each diner as they left, and we were dying to know what it was. I heard one hostess tell a woman it was “for tomorrow morning” and figured it was Tom’s special blend of coffee, but I swore it looked like a cupcake from far away. We couldn’t figure out where the hostesses were getting them, but halfway through our meal, we realized that what looked like a trashcan at their feet was actually a container full of the treats. We kept watching the contents of the container dwindle and kept worrying that they’d run out before we could leave, but Kamran was determined to have whatever it was. It seriously occupied our conversation for two straight hours. The thing we were really concerned about was the fact that we hadn’t checked our coats; most of the other diners had to wait for their outerwear and therefore had plenty of time at the hostess stand, so Kamran was really pressing me to figure out a way for us to lollygag with the hostesses despite already having our coats on. And then just as we were finishing up, the container disappeared. There were exactly two of the little bags leftover and laid out on the hostess stand, and there were two people heading for the door, so we thought all was lost. But then the container appeared from out of nowhere again, brimming with the treats. You can imagine our relief.
As soon as we stood up to put our coats on, the hostess placed two of the bags on her stand and waited patiently for us. They turned out to be muffins bursting with chocolate chips and drowning in a layer of huge-grained sugar. Breakfast the next day had me thinking about Tom for another twenty-four hours.
I’m sad that I was too self-conscious to take any pictures of the amazing food and the entire side of the restaurant that was made up of a weird convex wall covered in a sort of patchwork of similarly-colored brown leather slabs. But I did manage to capture this incredible photo of myself in Tom’s restroom, and that will be plenty to remember the experience by:
And speaking of restrooms, I should mention that the day after our dinner, Kamran told me that he needed to go to the bathroom but didn’t want to poo just to be able to hold our delicious meal inside himself for a little longer. That’s how good it was.
It’s Restaurant Week Winter 2009! A time for all of NYC’s top executive assistants and other underpaid mongrels to make their boyfriends take them to uber-expensive celebrity-chef-staffed venues to live out their wildest foodie fantasies at a fraction of the normal cost! A time for those boyfriends to say things like, “It’s not like I couldn’t afford to go there any day I wanted to,” and to get slapped in the face! A time to consume all the carbs I’ve been depriving myself of since Restaurant Week Fall 2008!
Said boyfriend took me to Quality Meats in the fall for Restaurant Week after I saw an article about the place somewhere deep in the interwebs and thought it sounded dreamy: dark woods, exposed dim lightbulbs, and MEATS. It wasn’t the most well-known or critically-acclaimed of our Restaurant Week ventures, but it was certainly the best.
The funny thing is that afterward, we had to think pretty hard to remember much about our actual meal; all we cared about was getting our hands on more of the bread they serve while you wait. It came in a deep white dish, soaked in butter and sprinkled in salt and an undisclosed spice that Kamran the Boyfriend thinks may be rosemary. And thinking about it had me so excited this morning that I didn’t eat any of the leftover cornbread in my office’s refrigerator for fear of sullying my palate with lesser breads.
Well, the dish it was served in had changed when we went back today, but the bread was still the same. We made up our minds to ask for seconds no matter how full we got, and boy, did we. We tried it first without any butter to savor it in its purest form, but when we both put some spread on our slabs, we looked at each other at the same time with the twinkle of oh-crap-butter-is-awesome in our eyes.
Oh, yeah, and we had some real food, too. The choices were:
Appetizers
Roasted Butternut Squash Soup with Gingerbread Croutons
Seared Diver Scallops with Candied Walnuts and Grapes
Traditional Steak Tartare
Caesar Salad
Entrees
Hanger Steak with Cherry Sauce
Open-Faced Shrimp Salad Sandwich
Baby Back Ribs with Spicy Apricots
Some Sort of Salad Something-or-Other with Seared Tuna
Dessert
A dressed up scoop of:
Pomegranate Pear
Chocolate Rum Raisin
Orange Creamsicle
Double Fudge Mint
Vanilla
I would never have admitted it to Kamran at the time, but compared to the fall menu, I was a little disappointed. Where was my charcuterie plate with the fruit spreads and the array of cheeses? Where was my giant pork chop? And a scoop of some ice cream out of a cardboard box? Not interested.
I really only wanted the soup for the gingerbread croutons, so I went way out on a limb and ordered the scallops, even though I don’t do seafood. And they turned out to be great! Mostly because they were swimming in butter. But also because they weren’t the gelatinous globs I expected but were thinly sliced and browned on the edges. The walnuts were perfect and perished any lingering scared-of-fish thoughts I might have had.
Kamran, of course, ordered the tartare, which arrived plain in a bowl with an egg on top but had a sidebar of sea salt, mustard, onions, Worcestershire, and Tabasco. Here’s a pretty disgusting video of him mixing it all together with complete disregard for his taste buds:
It’s so gross and squishy that my camera couldn’t even bear to focus on it properly.
We both ordered the steak, ’cause it’s a steak restaurant. The waiter warned me that a hanger steak cooked through would be tough, but I told him, “I like it tough,” and you know I do. But no! Apparently the chef was not having it, because my steak came out totally pink. And strangely in two pieces, while Kamran’s was just one.
It was awesome, of course, charred on the edges and dripping with cherry. As was our Corn Crème Brûlée. (Awesome, I mean. Not dripping with cherry.)
That’s right–Corn Crème Brûlée. My two reasons for living, baked into the same dish.
The dessert course didn’t disappoint, and we should have known it wouldn’t. We evidently underestimated the phrase “dressed up” on the menu, because for Kamran’s scoop of pear sorbet, it meant pomegranate seeds on top and stewed cherries and pears on the bottom,
and for me, it meant a chocolate chocolate chip cookie on top and a brownie bowl on the bottom. Plus, this wasn’t one of those spoon-shaped two-bite scoops you’re seeing all over town: this was a bowl full.
It was such a great second experience, and such a super way to start off Restaurant Week. Just look how happy we are!
And fat!
Our two-year anniversary is coming up in a couple of days, and in true Dr. Boyfriend style, Kamran wants to go out for a lavish dinner where the check will amount to my monthly salary. He suggested wd-50 because it’s supposedly one of the best in the world, and I agreed because I saw its owner, Wylie Dufresne, on “Top Chef” a couple of times and am entirely superficial.
So we were checking out the menu last night and were pretty pumped, especially about the 5-course dessert tasting menu. But I’m a little more skeptical now since Kamran found a picture of the pistachio dish today:
Impressive, right? And all this and more can be yours for only . . . $140.
Don’t worry; we’re already planning a trip to McDonald’s directly afterward.
If there’s one thing I appreciate about New York City, it’s that despite the fact that everyone here is thin, everything begs us to be fat. A Salt & Battery in the West Village, for instance, has a daily menu that includes deep-fried candy bars. Which is, you know, the sort of thing you should only be able to get once a year at a county fair if you don’t want to have a heart attack and die at age 32.
And even worse is Pommes Frites, which is an entire restaurant devoted solely to french fries covered in your choice of 25 different sauces. The fries come in cones that are listed as Regular, Large, and Double but should be called Enough for Two, Enough for Twelve, and Enough for the Entire Neighborhood. They’re the giant Belgian fries that you think will be super-mushy but are actually plenty crunchy, even when drowned in Pomegranate Teriyaki Mayo. If you’re looking for recommendations, Kamran enjoys the War Sauce, and I’m a fan of the Wasabi Mayo, though be warned that it will burn your face off. The fry guys are very friendly and will let you try the sauces before you decide on one, so don’t be afraid to sample.
The restaurant itself is a tiny little sliver of a room with the counter up front and a couple of picnic tables in the back. It’s very dark and cozy but usually so crowded that we end up eating outside, either sitting in the two wooden chairs they’ve provided or standing in front of the convenience store next door with the surprisingly impressive array of foreign beers displayed in its window. Like so:
Put this on your List of Things to Do with Katie When I Visit Her.
Kamran: What makes you so interested in abandoned food?
me: I don’t know. I really like food, and I always wonder why someone would just leave it there. I would pick that shit up and dust that shit off.
Kamran: I would do that, too.
me: Really?
Kamran: Yeah, I mean pick it up. And then throw it away.
me: Oh, no, I’d totally be willing to eat it.
Kamran: What about a pepper dropped in the subway?
me: Sure.
Kamran: You’d just pick that up and bite into it?
me: Yeah, absolutely, ’cause you can wash that.
Kamran: You can’t wash off the subway. You can’t wash off New York City. New York City gets under the skin.
This was the very first, some lonesome transportation vegetation spotted on the F train.
Spotted outside Halloween Adventure along Broadway, this one is especially sad for me,
because dropping something after one delicious bite seems so much worse than after not tasting it at all.
My boyfriend and I saw this right outside his apartment building, but everyone there is rich,
so I suppose a lost bagel isn’t a big deal to them. There was a trash can approximately
6 inches from the bagel, it should be noted.
Please find my newly created page for showcasing my abandoned food finds in my sidebar and expect many more to come.
So I pretty much live in the hippest neighborhood in all of New York City–and certainly in Brooklyn–yet I never actually do anything there, because I’m too busy hanging out with Kamran the Boyfriend in his richie-rich when-you-look-out-my-bedroom-window-you-see-the-Chrysler-Building neighborhood. But on Sunday, that all changed on July 27th when I finally went to see the band MGMT at
I was pretty pumped, because my friend Sonya had been forcing MGMT on me for weeks before that to get me ready for the show, and to see them for free seemed like such a I-am-poor-and-I-live-in-Brooklyn-and-I’m-seeing-a-Brooklyn-band rad thing to do on a Sunday afternoon when I’d usually be watching Kamran do laundry. Plus, what beats watching a concert from inside a drained pool?
The gate was set to open at 2, but knowing that a line would form before noon, we decided to show up late with the hope that we’d be able to walk right in. We leisurely ate some faux-chicken buffalo wings and strawberry/peanut butter/cookie “milk”shakes at my favourite vegan restaurant, Foodswings, near Bedford Avenue while some mean stormclouds formed overhead, and then at 3:30, we approached the park.
The line was still huuuuuuuuge. Like, down three blocks and wrapped around the park with eight people across on the sidewalk. Sonya and her boyfriend, Adam, had been waiting since 12:30 and had barely moved. So naturally we cut in front of them, and then two seconds later, Jesus punished us for it by making it pour. Seriously POUR. For, like, an hour. The line looked like this:
and at the end of it, we looked like this:
Almost too horrific to share, right? But I can’t help myself. Plus, we didn’t look nearly as bad as the huge group of girls (+ 1 pimply boy) behind us who had brought the bags from inside boxes of wine and were drinking the stuff out of the spigot. And screaming. Incessantly. This kid near them said, “You girls are drinking wine from bags, and that is fuckin’ badass.” And then they all had a big screamy orgy. They were approximately 16 years old but already had the haggard faces of their mothers, and that pleases me.
The Ting-Tings had played while we were still in line, which was a real shame, because they sounded great. Instead we had to endure Black Moth Super Rainbow, who I will not link, oh no I won’t, because they were that uninteresting. To endure their set, we bought some fruity beer and checked out the intense dodgeball game that was taking place off to one side of the pool:
And then MGMT came on.
They opened with a really slow song, and I was like, “This is a weird way to start a dance party,” but I expected that they were just working up to the awesome stuff. And then they played another slow song. And another. But, like, people were cheering and clapping, and Sonya was smiling her head off, and everyone seemed to be having such a good time. It didn’t make any sense to me. Sonya asked me how I was liking it, and I couldn’t help myself; I blurted out, “This is BORING!” And then I felt bad.
It’s just that I was expecting this and this, and I wasn’t getting it. I had specifically not brought a purse just to be able to dance like a wild woman, and this was not wild woman music. Not liking it made me feel like one of those shallow teenybopper who comes to a show and only knows the words to the single.
With the lame music and the crappy weather, the day felt like this:
But then! They played this, and it was great! And then they played “Kids”, and then they played “Time to Pretend”, and it was glorious! Look at how happy we are, with our wrinkly foreheads:
So in the end, I totally loved the show, and I’m glad we stuck it out. Especially because we got to have Korean BBQ at Dokebi afterward:
And just because I can’t help thinking this is the awesomest thing ever, check out this amateur music video of MGMT’s “Kids”. Soooo good, right?
Last night, Boyfriend Kamran and I were indecisive about where to go for dinner as usual, and it was annoying me to the point that I just wanted to forget the whole thing and eat spaghetti on his couch. When our bus from his work neared the Dos Caminos on 3rd Ave., though, he asked if I felt like stopping there. Of course I did; I suggested it for dinner sometime last week and was still craving it, but I’d already mentioned another Mexican place, and he hadn’t jumped at the chance, so I figured he wasn’t in the mood for salsa. But at the last minute, he said, “Let’s go!”, and it turned out to be THE BEST DECISION EVER.
We’re masochists, so we requested a table on the patio, where the jalapeños could be sure to push our internal juices from tepid to boiling. The host led us along the side of the restaurant and seated us at the greatest booth–facing the street and all the other patrons for our voyeuristic pleasure–with burnt orange cushions to sit on and pillows to lounge with. We settled in, he handed us our menus, and we discovered that it’s the start of Restaurant Week Summer 2008! It’s the two weeks each season where all of the restaurants that usually charge $35+ just for their entrees charge $35 altogether for an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert. It’s great for people like me who aren’t quite sure they’re ready to spend an entire paycheck for some almond-crusted mahi mahi that they may end up hating and a great way to find out if that chef everyone exclaims about is really any better than the guy microwaving the chicken fingers in the kitchen of your local Applebee’s.
We should’ve known, of course, because we spent an entire day at the beginning of the month choosing our restaurants, but our first reservation isn’t until Friday. And we would’ve never chosen this particular place, because it’s somewhere we can go any time, but the Dos Caminos Restaurant Week menu blew me away.
To start, Kamran ordered the Tomatillo, Pineapple, & Mint Gazpacho with spanish chorizo and pickled cucumber, which was cool and refreshing with the sweetest cucumber and little chunks of chorizo that looked like cat treats but tasted smoky and spicy and had the pleasantest chew to them. He had chosen the soup over the pork flautas simply because it looked more interesting, and we’re positive it was the right choice.
I, of course, went with the Croquetas de Queso, which the menu described as “crispy potato croquettes stuffed with cotija cheese” and Kamran described as “gourmet mozzarella sticks”. The cheese and potato oozed from their sides, the orangey-red romesco salsa was a totally new taste for me, and the greens in the center of the plate created a compliment that I didn’t know was possible as far as lettuce goes.
Kamran chose the Hanger Steak Tampiquena (grilled hanger steak, mole negro enchilada, black beans, avocado) for his entree and was really impressed. He’d ordered a steak once before at Dos Caminos and hadn’t cared for it, so I’d dissuaded him from the hanger, but I’m glad he ignored me, because this thing was fla-vor-FUL. The corn tortillas were brimming with cheese and smothered in mole, and the beans were, you know, bean-y and in a big bowl on the side.
My dish was even more phenomenal. It’s like this thing was meant for me, made with all of my favourites: chorizo-stuffed chicken breast, pickled golden raisins, toasted almond rice, and mole de xico. Bliss, bliss, and heaven!
I know I’m supposed to be embarrassed to be a chicken fanatic, but this chicken dish was THE BEST. The poultry was crispy on the outside and moist on the inside, the chorizo wasn’t overpoweringly spicy, and the almond rice was fantastic on its own but even better when mixed with the mole. Just LOOK at it!
Kamran had originally decided on the Mexican Chocolate & Cherry Semifreddo with fresh bing cherry salsita, and I on the Pastel de Elote with mango-blackberry salsita and sweet corn ice cream (because I’m a corn ice cream freak), but when it came time to order, I just went with the first one on the list–the chocolate–to make it easier. We decided to split them 50-50, but when they arrived and we tasted our own and then each other’s, we found that we’d each ended up with the right dessert for us.
The corn ice cream was surprisingly too intense for me (and almost nothing is too intense for me); the chocolate was too bitter for Kamran (even though it wasn’t actually bitter at all and tasted awesome to me). He described his as “corncake with corn ice cream”, and if the cake was a bit dry for my liking, the the little bits of syrupy mango here and there made up for it. The most interesting thing about it was that the ice cream was bordering savory; corn ice creams I’ve had in the past have always been balanced by either a whole lotta sugar or some sort of berry swirled in, but this was straight up CORN-flavored. It was strange and delicious, and like I said, really intense.
Kamran described my dessert as “gross sour chocolate mousse”, but when I called him on it, he said, “Okay, I acknowledge that I am a neophyte when it comes to serious chocolate. I am to chocolate as you are to everything but chocolate.” OUCH! But he’s right–I’m serious about chocolate. I can take it super-dark or I can take it milky light, and the pointed curved piece on my plate was dark with a hint of fruit. The mousse was creamy at first, but when I started working toward the middle of the mound, it became colder and almost frozen; I found out why when I got to the center and found a surprise frozen cherry.
I can’t say enough about how much I enjoyed the meal, especially when I’ve considered the restaurant only good and not exceptional in the past. It was the most pleasant start to Restaurant Week I can imagine, and now I’m even more pumped for our other ventures.
Last Friday night, a couple of my friends wanted to get together for happy hour, so we scoured drinkdeal.com and came up with Benny’s Burritos, because we pretty much want to drink giant margaritas all the time. And giant margaritas we had.
For $3, they’ll give you a tumbler of margarita. For $6, you get a Collins glass. And for $9? The biggest beer mug you can imagine. My friends Beth and Charles and I arrived early to take advantage of the deal, which is only offered at the bar, and by the time I finished my coconut-flavored margarita mug, I was giddy. Poor Boyfriend Kamran showed up all professional-like in his button-down and slacks to find me howling and slapping the table at everything Beth and Charles said.
And that concludes the Requisite Pictures of People Having Fun portion of this entry.
Not to make this a restaurant review or anything, but I have to mention that our food was pretty great. I’m on a corn kick right now and made Kamran share the corn fritters appetizer with me, which was a plate of little fried balls that resembled hush puppies. And the consistency of their filling was pretty hush-puppy-ish, too, only with CORN added. Best thing you can imagine? I thought so. The burritos were mission-style, so they were huge and full of the stuff you usually see as side dishes. I had the Grilled Mango Burrito, which came with enough mango salsa to douse the thing, and Kamran got the Chicken Chipotle Burrito, which was spice-AY.
Adam was in the mood for foosball, so we walked toward B-Side on surprise! Avenue B. Halfway there, Kamran brought up Luca Lounge, the bar he took me to on our first date lo those many months ago, where we admitted to the embarrassing bands we liked and I made a joke about his timing me while I went to the restroom before remembering that old cellphone commercial where the guy who asks the girl if she wants to time him on the toilet was supposedly a douchebag. Kamran described the red velvet Victorian couches, the backyard garden, the whoa-clean restrooms, and our friends were hooked. And then we got there and found THIS:
It was CLOSED! Like, for GOOD! Just then, my best friend Tracey called from Ohio, and when I told her about our bad luck, she reminded me that she and her last boyfriend went back to their first date restaurant on their fourth anniversary, found it had closed, and broke up soon after. NOOOOOOOOOOO! But she’s engaged to someone way awesomer now, so it’s cool. Kamran and I agreed that if this means the end of the line for us, it’s been a good run, and we’ll part without tears and bitterness. Plus, their menu was still lit up outside, and that has to mean something.
We returned to the original plan of B-Side, where we opted for the $5 PBR-and-a-shot-of-the-cheapest-most-painful-going-down-whiskey-you-can-imagine deal. We went to the back room, which was twelve to sixteen hundred degrees but made up for it by having a hugely huge wraparound couch with no apparent rat damage and concert posters for rad bands on the wall. We chugged our whiskey as a group (OR SO WE THOUGHT, UNTIL SOMEONE FOUND A FULL SHOT GLASS LOLLYGAGGING ON OUR TABLE LATER) and then played several thousand rounds of foosball, all of which resulted in outrageous wins for Adam, because he has a foosball table in his office and is a bastard. My camera battery had almost completely died at this point, so I kept turning the thing on for a second and snapping a picture as fast as I could, which resulted in a lot of shots like this:
Sonya and Adam knew I was starting to get a little sleepy and grumpy, so they dragged us to Le Royale for Robot Rock, ’cause I loooove dancing to some electronic indie whatnot. We ended up having to wait in line for 20 minutes or so, during which time the same guy walked by twice with his girlfriend and said mocking things to us like, “Did you get in yet?” and “I heard this place really sucks.” And when we got to the front of the line, they were trying to charge us $10 to get in. And even though Kamran was going to pay my $10 like the gentleman he is, I refused. WE DO NOT PAY TO GET INTO BARS!
Except when the bar is fat cat, which charges a mere $3 for hours and hours of entertainment. Sonya has tried to get me to go there a million times before, but I’ve always denied her because she’s way too excitable about these sorts of things, and I figured it’d turn out to be super-lame. But there’s pool! And ping-pong! And chess! And Scrabble! And live jazz! And a bunch of dorky hipsters everywhere! It’s a massive (at least by NYC standards) basement with a bunch of tables and chairs for drinkin’ and gamin’, individual netted rooms for ping-pong, and the sort of music that makes you feel like wearing a flapper dress and smoking from an obnoxiously long cigarette holder. It helps that I totally killed Kamran at ping-pong manymany times in a row, but that’s neither here nor there. So I started out my fat cat visit feeling miserable and wanting to leave immediately and ended it by being the last one to want to go.
A+!
After a long night of kicking boys’ butts at ping-pong and pool at a local bar, my friends Sonya and Beth and I met up for brunch at Essex around 2 p.m. with my boyfriend Kamran in tow. Well, actually, Kamran and I showed up first and had to wait a few minutes, and I only mention that because two hostesses came by separately to ask us if we were waiting to be seated, which is very rare in this city where people pretend to not notice each other. One of them had wild curly blonde hair cut short and was wearing a vintage-looking pink lace dress (that Beth later informed us was actually from Forever 21), and the other had dyed-platinum unwashed hair and cute thick-framed glasses, so they had every right to act too cool for school, but they didn’t.
The decor was very black/white/red and hip, but the clientele was the same as every other brunch place in Manhattan–a bunch of twentysomething girls in jersey dresses giggling about godknowswhat. (So naturally, we fit right in.) I was amused that they offer a Sunday evening brunch until 8 p.m. after my assertion here that brunch in NYC can last strangely into the evening. Maybe that’s when all of the hip people come in. Or maybe all the hip people got lost, since the entrance to the restaurant is actually on Rivington Street instead of Essex.
Sonya had originally suggested the place solely because they include three drinks with your meal and sell you additional ones for only $3, adding that the menu looked “okay”, too. But the Essex brunch menu turned out to be so full of deliciousness that all four of us had the worst time deciding what to get. Challah french toast with bananas foster sauce? Manchego macaroni and cheese with chicken apple sausage? Chocolate-blueberry pancakes? With mimosas or screwdrivers or bloody marys?
In the end, I ordered The Southern, a biscuit with a sausage patty, scrambled eggs, and sausage gravy. The biscuit would have been too dry on its own, but with the gravy, it was amazing; I couldn’t stop sharing it with Kamran just so I could wait for him to make yummy sounds. Kamran ordered the lobster benedict, which was chopped a bit too small for his liking but still tasted delicious. Sonya ordered the salmon eggs benedict, which arrived with very rare salmon; as someone who doesn’t care for smoked salmon, it would’ve been a pleasant surprise for me, and Sonya eats all manner of salmon, godloveher. Beth ordered poached eggs with chicken apple sausage that she said were “decent”, but Beth is super-picky and can therefore be completely ignored.
The best part of the meal was something that we weren’t supposed to care about, though–the home fries. They were big, soft hunks of potato soaked in . . . I don’t know what. And Kamran, who has the most discerning palate of anyone I know, was just as befuddled. They were sort of orangey-red and spicy, and I could’ve eaten an entire plate of them. Kamran agreed that they were the best, but when I talked to Beth about them later, she said, “The potatoes were okay. I’ve had better.” I said, “Seriously?! Kamran and I loved those potatoes, though I have no idea what was in them,” and Beth said, “Yeah, they were dunked in so much stuff I had trouble finding the actual potato in all the onions and stuff. I like my potatoes a little more crispy and less mushy.” So I guess it all depends on how you take your potatoes, but once again, I vote that we ignore Beth.
The one thing we might have complained about was the drinks included in the meal. Our waitress brought them so quickly that the bartender might have had 50 of them pre-made and lined up on the bar, and going down, they tasted alcoholless. But then we stood up and tried to cross the street pretty unsuccessfully.
Needless to say, we’ll be back.
For the past two years I’ve been in New York City for the 4th of July instead of at home in Ohio watching my family burn off their fingers on sparklers like I’m supposed to, I’ve purposely avoided the fireworks and gone to dinner at Serendipity, first with then-boyfriend Todd, who hated crowds, and then with now-boyfriend Kamran, who appreciates a sugar coma as much as I do but still managed to get me back to his house in time to see the throngs of fireworks-viewers streaming off FDR Drive but not a lot of the show itself last year.
This year, though, Kamran was off visiting his family in California, so I let myself get talked into watching the ‘works with my friends Beth, Emily, Sonya, Adam, Christos, and Chad, and Emily’s friends Jeff and Carrie. Emily and Beth had bought us adult sippy cups on their way to my house, so we stopped off at my C-Town to buy Crystal Light and water to mix in with our vodka and rum like the high school girls we are. I was carrying Emily’s brother’s ridiculously adorable Yorkiepoo in a bag over my shoulder, and the checkout girls went crazy over how cute it was. I thought I was the new star of the grocery store until I came back the next day, and they were all like, “Where’s the dog?! . . . Oh, it wasn’t yours? SNUB.”
We spread out the blankets that Emily and Sonya were so kind to bring in the park between the Brooklyn
and Manhattan bridges
and set to sippin’
and piggin’ out.
Just as the show was about to start, it started to rain pretty heavily,
so everyone got out their umbrellas and totally blocked my view (but in kind of a pretty way).
I’ll admit that fireworks viewed through the Brooklyn Bridge are a bit of a novelty
but after they were over, I was like, “That’s IT?! The fireworks in Ohio are 100 times better!” Everyone just sort of shrugged me off, but I seriously think these people don’t understand how seriously Ohio takes its fireworks. Not only do they use the awesomely pun-y name Red, White, and BOOM!, but they have a whole mash-up of America-themed songs playing on a local radio station that the fireworks are timed to perfectly. Everyone brings their portable radios and sings along, the finale lasts at least 20 minutes, and only one or two people get stabbed every year. Honestly, what is the 4th of July without Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America” playing on a million boomboxes around you?!
Once the totally-crappy-and-in-every-way-disappointing-but-for-the-fact-that-Carrie-served-warm-apple-pie-and-vanilla-ice-cream-in-plastic-cups fireworks were over, we decided that the subway was going to be way too crazy and instead chose to take a quick walk down to the neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, where Chad promised us was a great bar. THIRTY-EIGHT MILES LATER (give or take thirty-seven), we were still walking. In the rain. At night. In uncomfortable shoes. I guess I wasn’t doing anything to hide how cranky I was, because Chad kept saying, “Who’s the biggest trouper here? Katie! She wins the trouper award!” and when I wouldn’t fold up my umbrella and enjoy the rain like everyone else, Emily and Beth started singing to Carly Simon’s tune, “Katie’s so vain/she probably thinks this song’s about her hair.”
The bar, Moonshine, turned out to actually be worth the walk (though I’m not sure you could convince me to do it again). There was an empty couch for us to sit on along one wall with the couch across from us occupied by young men with side-parted hair, one of them in a complete seersucker suit. The jukebox played Bloc Party and then Cat Power and then Devo and then HEART. There was plenty of Big Buck Hunter and House of the Dead
a thick dark wood table for playing board games on
and . . . shoes nailed to the wall?
What more could you want?
Most people see the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade as an opportunity for frivolity in the sand, a chance to bare it all in the sun, the one time they can feel free to be themselves. I, on the other hand, see it as a chance to eat a hell of a lot of hot dogs and judge other girls’ spare tires.
And so I present to you . . .
I took these pictures in the span of about five minutes, because that’s how long we cared to watch the parade before deciding that we NEEDED Nathan’s hot dogs. The stand on the boardwalk had less of a line and more of a glob of people standing around it, the idea being that it was more efficient to push and shove your way to front any chance you got than to actually wait your turn like decent, rational human beings. Luckily, halfway through our 45-minute wait, I heard my name being said behind me with a question mark, and I turned around to see Leah, who was in a couple of my creative writing workshops at THE Ohio State University and could always be counted on for stories about maybe liking girls when the rest of the class was writing crap about trying yoga for the first time. We chatted about her MFA in creative writing and the fact that she’s actually using it to work for a food and travel magazine (swoon!) and how badly I want to go to Columbia for my Masters and my great boyfriend and her great girlfriend and so on and so on.
When my friends Sonya and Adam got to the order counter finally, I let these elderly ladies who had been sort of edging their way in front of me squeeze in behind them. Sonya turned back around to stand with me, and one of the ladies said to her, “You go ahead.” I said, “Oh, she’s with him,” and the other lady said, “Trust me, we know. We’ve been listening to you for the last half-hour. They’re together, your boyfriend’s on vacation in California, that girl has her Masters degree from Chicago, and you want your Masters degree from Columbia. Well, we live right by Columbia, and we could’ve had a kosher meal up there. For half the price.” Sonya and I laughed, but we secretly thought they were totally creepy.
An hour after first feeling the pangs of hunger, we found a grassy knoll on which to lunch and went about our munching
and slurping
and gnawing like the rabid beasts we are.
My chili cheese fries came with a tiny fork, which was a real shame, because I was ready to plunge my entire head into those things until I saw that they evidently expected me to be civil about it. And the corndog? THE BEST ONE OF MY LIFE.
So, yeah, it was a great time. It’s just kind of funny that we went to Coney Island on the crowdest day of the year just to eat some hot dogs that are there year-round.
A couple of Sundays ago, my ladyfriends and I wanted to meet for brunch–and it should be noted here that brunch in NYC can strangely fall anywhere between the hours of 10 a.m. and 8 p.m.–in my neighborhood of Williamsburg, which is uncharted territory for us as far as brunches go. We planned to check out Egg, which New York Magazine named Best Overall Breakfast this year, but their sign-in sheet was packed, and they stopped serving at 2, so we deliberated for a while
and then walked down to the Roebling Tea Room, which you will be incredibly interested to learn is named after the man who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. (And also the street that the restaurant sits on, but that’s better left unmentioned.)
My friend Emily had her brother’s Yorkiepoo (I know, right?) with her because she’d thought we’d be eating outside, and dogs on patios here are as numerous as taxicabs, but luckily Penny happens to be the cutest dog alive and won our waitress over with only a swish of her little hypoallergenic tail. It also helps that pretty much everyone who sees her mistakes her for a child’s plush toy at first, so Emily could just stuff Penny in her bag and let everyone believe she’s the kind of grown woman who’s unable to leave home without her playthings.
We were seated right away–despite the fact that we were a group of six and the place looked packed–in front of the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows that line the front wall and make it evident that the building was once a warehouse of some sort. They filled the room with light and ruined all of my pictures, but it was well worth it.
The walls were covered in green paper with white molding, antiquey sconces, and equestrians on white horses, the tables were thick, dark wood, and the waitresses were neighborhood women with infrequently-washed hair; funny how those things all fit together.
Bridgette ordered the baked cheddar eggs, which came in a little souffle crock next to a bigger crock of grits, surrounded by two huge slabs of raisin toast with apple butter. I’m used to scrambled eggs that I make myself from $1.99 grocery store cartons, so hers tasted dreamy to me, and her grits had a cheesy taste to them that we didn’t expect.
Emily and Beth ordered egg and cheese sandwiches that looked so boring to me on the menu but turned out to be monsters with dense, seeded bread and a folded heap of fillings. They’re a couple of dieting assholes and left the top of the bun untouched, and I was soooo jealous . . . until my pancake appeared.
The menu touted it as “A BIG BAKED PANCAKE (DUTCHSTYLE W RHUBARB & SPICED BUTTER)”, and never have capital letters been so appropriate. It filled the entire plate and more, piled high with warm fruit and a mound of flecked butter that had just begun to pool. The middle was a bit underdone for my taste, but the outside edge was delightfully crunchy, and the whole thing was filled with fruit. At the time, all of my friends and I were like, “Mmmmm, rhubarb!” But, umm, the menu was wrong, and we realized later that it was actually pears.
LaChantee and her boyfriend, Brandon, ordered a couple of salads that had exciting toppings but were still salads and therefore don’t deserve mention. But they did have homemade potato chips, and that’s the only reason I’m still friends with them.
Our food took approximately an hour to arrive, and no one seemed concerned about patting us on the head and thanking us for waiting, but that and the noise level in the place were the only drawbacks. My iced green tea latte tasted like the most delicious grass imaginable (and I mean that in a good way), and LaChantee loved The Lovers Tea, which arrived in a nicely sized pot with strawberries, vanilla, and sweet cream. The prices were very reasonable (and maybe even cheap) for the amount of food we got, and wine and tea list was extensive. After tasting what I did, I want to go back every week until I’ve tried the whole menu.
To wile away the afternoon, we headed to McCarren Park Pool (featured on this past season of “America’s Next Top Model”) for the Renegade Craft Fair and passed two people doing what appeared to be performance art. This pretty much sums up my neighborhood:
The craft fair took place in the pool, which has been drained for more than a decade now, and was rows and rows of vendors selling their homemade wares. Emily picked up enough Christmas presents to give the entire state of New York a happy holiday, but I kept my purchases to one necklace with a glass strawberry (mostly because I’m too cheap to spend $65 on a felted purse). HOWEVER, the fair was totally inspiring and made me want to go home and start making things right away. Those vintage-fabric skirts selling for $200? I could make one for $2. Those greeting cards with the funny phrases? My best friend and I have been thinking up even funnier ones for months now. And those $65 felted purses? I’m commissioning her to make one for me as we speak.
There was also this amazing project called 1 Bite 7 Days, which is going to be a documentary based on the Japanese proverb that says you gain seven days of life for every new food you try. I didn’t get to participate, because I was too interested in chowing down on Mister Softee ice cream,
but I love the idea of it, especially because Boyfriend Kamran has crammed so many exciting new foods down my throat in the year and nearly nine months I’ve been dating him. I think I should get seven extra years, by the way, for agreeing to eat the GONADS OF A SEA URCHIN with him.
Tuesday night, in an attempt to get me to spend time with him before he goes home to The O.C. this weekend to see his family, Boyfriend Kamran invited me to dine with him at Serendipity, the restaurant I convinced him to take me to on our third date right before we went to the Empire State Building for the most cinematic first kiss in history. There was a twenty-minute wait–the shortest amount of wait we’ve ever encountered there, I think–so we sat outside on the green concave benches and discussed the uses of bundle theory and substance theory, which is the sort of thing Kamran’s really good for at crowded restaurants.
As we sat mindlessly staring at the fake cake in the display window, a man in a blue-and-white-striped polo shirt with a shaved head and a very tan body approached the door and attempted to open it from the outside. It didn’t budge, so he pushed harder as an Asian woman with long, frizzy hair approached from the inside, but still nothing happened. We figured that it was a joke, that the two knew each other and that he was trying to keep her from coming outside. But the woman’s face moved from a look of confusion to one of anger as the man leaned on the door with all of his body weight, and we realised he seriously didn’t understand that the door pulls out rather than pushes in. When he finally figured it out, he turned around and looked at us, saw that we were smiling to ourselves about how ridiculous he was, and started laughing, saying, “You knew all along, didn’t you?! You were laughing at me!!!” And that’s when we realised he was drunk.
He came waltzing over to Kamran and–it’s hard for me to use this phrase–bumped fists with him, patted him on the back, and slurred something about a wife and kids while the frizzy-haired lady rushed past us and into her waiting SUV. The guy noticed and motioned for her to roll down her window so he could talk to her, and I was like, No, lady! No!, but she did it, and the guy blew his alcoholy breath all over her, and she chattered on nervously about how she thought he had been holding the door shut just to be mean to her. Kamran and I took his distraction as an opportunity to run for cover in the restaurant, but the guy followed us in a moment later. He shook hands with the man at the host stand, so I thought that maybe he was a regular who was meeting his family there or something, but the host watched him uncomfortably for a few minutes as he touched all of the kitschy items for sale in the waiting area and then quietly asked him to leave.
It’s important here to note that Kamran isn’t the sort of person who tries to get close to casual acquaintances or needs friendships of convenience; he gets combative when participants in reality television shows talk about how much they “love” each other after one episode, and he generally dislikes all other human beings (which is naturally the reason we get along so well). So I could see the “what the hell?!” sweating from his pores when the drunk guy stopped on his way out and full-on wrapped his arms around Kamran’s neck and pushed his body against Kamran’s for a hug. Kamran just smiled out of politeness while the guy buried his face in Kamran’s shoulder and whispered things like, “I’m with you. I belong here.” He stopped on the other side of me and said all surly-like, “That guy’s name is Josh. He looks like a Josh, right?” And I said, “He’s the Joshiest,” because you don’t argue with shaved-headed drunks.
On the way home, we hopped in a cab with a driver whose name was Shiv (awesome!), and he immediately began coughing stuff up from his lungs and spitting it out the window repeatedly. His face was sagging, and his nose was crooked, and the constantly flying phlegm didn’t help matters. Kamran’s stomach was feeling a bit queasy to begin with, so I kept glancing at him with a horrified look on my face, just waiting for him to puke up our Cinnamon Fun Sundae right there in the back seat amidst all those hacking sounds. And then the guy’s cell phone rang. It was this really cheesy MIDI (though it’s decidedly better than this one that I recorded for Kamran and happen to keep on my work computer–what?), and I was like, Jesus Christ, who’s still using that sort of crap as their ringtone? And then I thought, Wait, don’t I know that song? And then I realized that it was the YEAH YEAH YEAHS.
What a frightening, frightening world we live in.
Boyfriend Kamran and I eat a lot of our meals at the Comfort Diner (be forewarned that the website looks to be circa 1997 and was possibly designed by your semi-retarded little sister) near his apartment, because they have down home foods like sweet potato fries and buffalo chicken sandwiches and homemade coconut cakes (not that we ever order cake when there’s a Tasti D-Lite a block away, ’cause we’re not embarrassed to love it).
Anyway, on their green tiled tabletops, they have this weird little mosaic shape that doesn’t really look like anything. Light brown, outlined in gold, and vaguely abstract. In the course of the year and a half we’ve been eating there, we’ve taken to calling it a skewered shrimp. Or “shrump”, which we think is the most hilarious pronunciation ever.
What do you think?
After a long afternoon of doing everything we could to not so much as look outside, Boyfriend Kamran and I decided that it’d be a real waste of his astronomical Manhattan rent if we didn’t take the short jaunt down to Madison Square Park and enjoy the 6th annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, even if it meant melting on the sidewalk two feet outside the door.
Unfortunately, we decided this at 5:30 p.m., and the thing ended at 6, so by the time we reached Madison Ave., the crowds were leaving with heaping takeout containers of pork. We passed some tents on Madison but went on into the park in hopes that the best BBQ would have prime locations there, but we were soon lost amidst beer and dessert tents and lots of laughing, pig-filled sweaty people. When we finally wove our way out, police officers were waving everyone away from the BBQ tents, saying that everything was closed, but some helpful workers directed us around the corner to a lone stand that was still serving. We tipped over strollers and old ladies to join the expanding line, but alas, there was no food left.
Not willing to admit defeat, though, we found a puddle of yelloworange BBQ sauce spread on the street and figured that if we could just get our hands on some half-chewed pork butt, we could work something out:
No? Okay, fine. Instead, we took it as an opportunity to have dinner at Shake Shack, which is a burger institution around these parts. I’d only ever ordered the black and white shake–vanilla ice cream with a hint of hot fudge–in my few visits to the Shack, so I was excited to get my hands on those renowned burgers for the first time.
And they were good, no doubt, in the way that your mom’s burger is good; very freshly-made and very grilled-in-the-backyard with no added spices or marinades. Kamran had the Shackburger, which was lightly smoothed with a layer of sauce that tasted like a very spicy mayonnaise, and I had a plain ol’ cheeseburger with yellow mustard. It was yummy beef to be sure, but it was no ginormous, perfectly-seasoned slab like the one at Cozy Soup ‘n’ Burger, which I’m going to argue is the best burger in New York City until I die.
Our desserts were similarly good. Kamran had a caramel shake that clearly used quality ice cream, and I had the Shack Attack, which was a squat container filled with thick chocolate custard, chocolate-covered cookie dough, chocolate chunks, and chocolate sprinkles. (It supposedly had hot fudge in it, too, but it was either swirled in or nonexistent.) I had a bit of a chocolate overload by the time I was finished and kind of wished that the custard had been vanilla and that the hot fudge had been poured on top of that, but you know, complaining about too much chocolate is ridiculous.
I don’t want to be the lone naysayer when it comes to the place, but I want to give it to you straight–I think Shake Shack gets most of its accolades because it’s cool to like it. Much like Magnolia Bakery, there’s always a massive line outside the Shack, but Magnolia cupcakes really are better than any other cupcake in the city. (Well, at least the icing is.) With Shake Shack, it’s more that it’s in the middle of the the park and affords you the opportunity to eat a decent meal outside without cars whizzing the entire time like they do on the patio of a regular restaurant. Plus, New Yorkers love to talk about how “worth it” long lines are, because waiting around strangely makes things taste better.
I certainly like Shake Shack, and oddly, I think I romanticize the place more than anyone I know. I’m always asking Kamran if we can go there, because even if the food is just good, dessert in the park is great.
The one review of the new Turkish restaurant Savarona that my boyfriend and I read before making our reservation complained that it’s “farther east than anyone should have to go in Midtown”, but we’re well-versed on 1st Ave. and rolled our eyes at that person’s lacking sense of adventure. And then we found ourselves lost on eerily industrial 59th Street, practically walking into the East River under the Queensboro Bridge.
We spotted Savarona’s empty private room first and thought uh-oh, but then the rest of the place came into view, and it was lovely: entirely glass front with two sets of wide open doors, gold lattices on the walls, and a polished black bar. The beautiful hostesses greeted us genuinely and enthusiastically, which is one of those small but important details for me, and the one who led us to our table asked if we had any problems finding the place, which I naturally lied about. I hated that we were seated in the back away from the windows despite the place being only half-full, but I suppose they were trying to spread everyone out. Our waiter met with us immediately and was very friendly, and aside from feeling like he was forcing drinks on us in the beginning–”I don’t really like wine”, I finally had to say–he continued to be attentive and informative throughout the meal.
We went with the $70 chef’s tasting menu against my wishes, because there were two courses where the only choices were seafood-based, and I’m a total fish-phobe. My boyfriend, Kamran, guilted me into it, though, saying that he didn’t feel comfortable ordering it without me. Since each of the six courses had two offerings, we decided to share one of everything and got a few surprises along the way. The first was a plate of what looked like falafel and hummus but turned out to be a meat croquette and babaghanoush.
The croquette (a word that I’ve never in my life used before this moment, by the way) had a super-crunchy skin and this chili sauce that I want to eat on every meal from now on. I didn’t see it elsewhere on the menu, so if you don’t go for the tasting menu, find a way to finagle it from your waiter.
Our first course included a plate of jumbo langoustine with a little pile of mushrooms on one side and more babaghanoush on the other. I was wholly frightened by the word langoustine, let alone the actual sight of the big pinkorange shell, but after wrestling a hunk of it out with my fork and knife, I learned that it was actually very mild. And the ball of crab resting on top of it, covered in a tenticle-like crust that gave it the appearance of a tiny sea urchin, was even better.
The other plate, a modern mezze platter consisting of five small dishes, was much more up my alley: a cube of chicken salad with pine nuts, a very savory yogurt with mint garnish, grilled vegetables, a chilled red pepper salad with walnuts, and grilled cold eggplant. It was all delicious, but the chicken salad and the yogurt were real stand-outs. Kamran and I were using our bread to scoop out as much of the yogurt as we could, and I’m surprised we didn’t use our tongues to lap it off the sides of the bowl.
Our second course was a smoked salmon roll filled with sliced avocado and topped with feta, chives, and red caviar. Although I’ve found recently that I actually sort of enjoy raw salmon, smoked salmon was a little too fishy for me to eat without masking the flavor with a lot of avocado, and you know I plopped that caviar on the side of the plate and made Kamran eat it.
The second plate was a stuffed mackerel roll with a bready skin, a topping that Kamran referred to as “micro salad”, and fried pine nuts. The mackerel was much less fishy than the salmon–although my anti-fish brain made me scrape off the bits of silver that clung to its edges–and was flavoured with something slightly sweet that Kamran first thought was cinnamon but may have been from the currants mixed in. The red pepper emulsion was what really made the dish, though, just as the spicy mustard made the salmon plate. Even as a fish-hater, I was impressed with how well the sauces complimented the seafood flavor.
Our third course was the one I really dreaded, because one plate was a fish called umbrina that I’d never heard of before, and the other plate was a KING PRAWN. Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to put the word king in front of anything having to do with the ocean? The waiter put the umbrina down in front of Kamran, and I thought I was going to have to throw a fit, but then I saw that prawn on my plate was really just a big shrimp and not at all the bug-eyed crayfish-like creature that I’d expected. I played it cool while Kamran dug around in the parchment paper bowl that the umbrina was cooked in
and took a tiny bite of the sole on my plate, which was covered in some sort of yellow sauce so bland that I can’t muster a guess as to what was in it. The sole was flaky and incredibly moist, just as Kamran said his umbrina was. But not really caring for the texture of it, I kind of pushed it aside and took a bite of the risotto under the prawn, which turned out to be wonderful. Al dente, mixed with chopped basil, with fresh basil leaves on the side. To really go for the gold, I chopped off the very tip of the prawn just to say that I tried it, and to my surprise, it was . . . delicious. It had a meatier, less chewy texture than a small shrimp, with a grilled flavor that I didn’t expect at all.
I kept saying to Kamran, “You can’t even imagine how good this is!”, and he kept saying, “The rest of the world has had good shrimp before, Katie.” It was so good, though, that it actually caused me to use the word tasty, a word that I despise almost as much as the word panties. I eventually had to cut off the tail and make Kamran hide it behind his bowl, though, because the moment I thought about it as seafood, I wanted to spit it back out.
The fourth course, which was clearly designed especially for my palate as a reward for making it through the previous two courses, was a plate of two different cuts of lamb and a plate of wild duck confit. I started with the lamb chop and loin, which were cooked just the right amount for me, and even if the chop hadn’t been as flavorful as it was, I still would’ve loved it just for its shape. The loin was little tough for me, but the dollup of young zucchini puree topped with fried potato straws beside it was delightful; so much so that I kept eating it long after I passed the plate to Kamran.
The duck confit was supposed to be caramelized, but Kamran and I didn’t notice it, maybe because we were too busy dipping it in the rich honey and black grape sauce smeared on the side. It almost overwhelmed the duck, but I don’t mean that as a complaint. There was a pile of mushrooms hidden inside a criss-crossed shell of potato fondant that Kamran said tasted like nothing and I thought tasted slightly like pound cake. We decided it was just there for looks.
Another little off-the-menu surprise arrived in the form of a saffron-flavoured jelly that our waiter referred to as a “sorbet”. The texture was somewhere between pudding and Jell-o, the taste was clean and refreshing, and the collection of nuts and currants on top was a nice addition, especially the pistachios. The presentation–a juice glass in what looked like a heavy brass measuring cup–was also very impressive, if you exclude all of the stains I made on the table cloth.
Kamran’s dessert was a cherry bread with an almost-savory vanilla cream, black grapes, mint leaves, and a wild sugar concoction on top that resembled the hair of a treasure troll. The bread was extremely moist, and the grapes were so delicious that I wished I’d eaten them one at a time instead of packing them in together, but overall, the dish was barely sweet at all if you discount the strands of sugar. It was perfect for someone like Kamran who gets easily overwhelmed by sweet, rich foods, but it would have been a let-down for me.
My dessert, on the other hand, was probably the most impressive one I’ve had in New York thus far. The bottom layer was a thick-cut slice of baked pineapple. Then there was a layer of THE most delicious vanilla cream I’ve ever had. Then a thin slice of dried pineapple. Then a scoop of peach sorbet stuck with a sprig of mint. Then that crazy sugar nest again.
It was such a positive experience overall that the things that let me down weren’t such a big deal, but for a well-rounded review, I should mention the following:
1) As someone who can give or take mushrooms, I was disappointed to see them in almost every dish. They were always done well and always looked nice, but I never felt like they added much to the plate.
2) The menu didn’t always deliver what it promised. There was supposed to be some interesting foams on a couple of dishes, for instance, and either they weren’t there, or we couldn’t distinguish them from what was happening on the rest of the plate. And there was supposed to be Turkish Delight served with our very delicious coffee and tea, and while the surprise saffron cup was welcome, we were really interested to see if the Turkish Delight was any different than the kind we buy in cardboard boxes at the candy store. All of this would have been fine, of course, if we hadn’t expected it after seeing the menu.
3) In a couple of cases, we felt like the chef had focused more on technique than taste. The potato fondant shell is the best example of this; it looked cool and probably took some skill, but it didn’t taste like a whole lot to Kamran, and I didn’t care for the stale cracker consistency.
The bill was outrageous by my standards–nearly $200, and I didn’t even have any alcohol–but I was delighted by something in every course, the portions were very large, and the dessert couldn’t have been better, so it was well worth the money for me. Especially since I wasn’t paying. (Thanks, Kamran!) I would definitely go back again for the atmosphere, for the service, for the risotto and prawn, and for that wonderful pineapple dessert.
I tasted my first bit of blogfame this week when away.com featured my Oyster Bar review in a blog post about food and history. And the best part is that the blurb is exactly what I would have written about myself had it been up to me. And probably even better.
You can–and should–read the rest of the post here.
Content © Katie Ett. Proudly powered by WordPress. To bookmark this site, press Control+D.
"Black Hat" theme by Nicki Faulk, modified by Katie Ett. For best results, please view with Firefox. [ Log in ]