Category Archives: restaurant ramblings

Restaurant Review: Savarona

Filed under it's fun to be fat, living in new york is neat, restaurant ramblings
Tagged as , ,

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.


This is entirely faux-serious.

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.

Comment Here

Almost Makes Me Not Hate Seafood So Much

Filed under bigtime celebrity, narcissism, restaurant ramblings
Tagged as , ,

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.

Comment Here

Restaurant Review: Grand Central Oyster Bar

Filed under creepy boyfriend obsession, it's fun to be fat, living in new york is neat, narcissism, restaurant ramblings
Tagged as , , , ,

I don’t like seafood. I don’t like that it’s been swimming around in a cesspool of its own feces, and I don’t like that it tastes like it. But when your boyfriend wants to gulp an entire plate of raw ocean animalia, you don’t argue; you make him take you to the Grand Central Oyster Bar.

The restaurant is underground, cavernous, monstrous, with huge arced ceilings tiled and lined with lights. It feels more like you’re at an expensive wedding reception than on a private date. It’s not really dim enough to be romantic, the tablecloths are a very small-town-diner red-checker, you can hear the slurps of the couple dining right next to you, and the clatter of silverware echoes off the walls. But for some reason, you feel really great being there. Really 1920s flapper-girl-in-a-string-of-pearls. You expect fat cats in suits and top hats to walk through the door any moment. But the unpretentious, jolly kind of fat cats.

The menu is amazing. If you like seafood. In a different life, I would’ve dove right into that caviar sandwich (because what isn’t good on bread?), and a jumbo lump crabmeat cocktail sounds like an alcoholic’s delight. Kamran was intent on our trying the bloody mary oyster shooter and splitting the bivalve platter, but since I can barely stomach the word “bivalve”, we settled on some New England clam chowder. Which was totally delicious, even before I added three bags of oyster crackers to it. It wasn’t fishy at all, and the clam didn’t have the rubbery consistency I expected.

I had planned to play it legit and order the half chicken, but Kamran convinced me that if anyone was going to do fish right, it was “America’s most historic and celebrated seafood restaurant”. So I ordered one of the specials, a sturgeon splashed with rum sauce and golden raisins, hoping that the rum would get me drunk enough that I’d forget I was eating the ocean. It came with some nice buttery vegetables to help clear my palate between bites to keep me from freaking out and this REALLY AWESOME RICE. I don’t have any idea what was in it, but it was a cheesy little ball of hearty warm nothing-else-I’ve-ever-tasted. And hey, the fish wasn’t bad, either. When I asked the waiter if he thought sturgeon was okay for a seafood-hater, he told me that it’s so mild there’s a dish called sturgeon cordon bleu. And he was right for the most part; the ends of the hunk were much thinner and were a little bit browned, and they were actually what I might call “delicious”. The middle was thick and moist, and although it didn’t really taste any different from the ends, the fact that I could see all of the meaty layers freaked me out, so I had to leave a bit of it behind. Still, I was obviously proud of myself:

When I finished, Kamran said that

a) it’s good I have no idea what a sturgeon looks like, or I would’ve been too scared to eat it, and

b) he, a seafood fanatic, wasn’t sure he would’ve had the guts to try it. YES!

And speaking of guts, Kamran ordered the medley of shellfish and ended up being a little overwhelmed by the huge plate of oysters and clams arranged from smallest to largest, mussels, and giant shrimp.

He had been really excited about eating clams after having stealing a really good one from his sister’s plate the last time we were at Balthazar, but the clams on this plate weren’t cooked, and his stomach wasn’t quite prepared for that after a childhood incident involving bad clams that made him sick. The oysters were a suckin’

slurplin’

swishin’ good time, though, and he liked everything else on the plate so much that he had a hard time deciding what to save for last. Although he did spend the rest of the night feeling like slimy things were swimming around in his stomach, so I felt vindicated.

Overall, I’d say the food must be pretty great if the anti-seafood-est person alive was able to handle it with a smile, and the atmosphere was neat if not dark and romantic, and it was the sort of experience that you feel like you can only get in New York. And that’s what it’s all about.

Comment Here

24-Hour Party People

Filed under bigtime celebrity, boobies, living in new york is neat, narcissism, par-tay, restaurant ramblings, why i'm better than everyone else
Tagged as , , , , , ,

The morning of the start of my 24-hour culture marathon, Kamran asked me the names of the other two winners of the Time Out New York contest and the reporter who would accompany us on our outing and then kept singing “white people having a good time” to describe the events involving a group of people called Katie, Colin, Brian, and Meghan. My friends had encouraged me to “wear something cute that’s comfortable but also formal enough to fit in at a club, just in case” but I had rejected all of their advice and gone for Chucks, dark jeans, a very apropos baby blue t-shirt of Kamran’s with a drawing of a writer at a desk with his head in his hands, a black cardigan, and my dogbed-looking cape. I wanted to make sure that at all costs, it didn’t look like I was trying.

I rode the bus down to 7th St. in the East Village to Abraço, which is literally a coffee bar: there’s a counter for ordering on one side, and another counter for standing and drinking along the window that makes up the storefront. Wanting to keep my public restroom use to a minimum, I opted out of a drink and just stood at the window, replying to excited well-wishing texts my friends had left me the night before. A steady stream of people stopped in with their dogs and made familiar conversation with the owner, who had the greatest curly gray hair that flopped in his eyes as he brewed each cup individually from fresh ground beans. Had I been a coffee drinker, I would’ve been in heaven.

A little after 8:30, a tall blond guy with the sort of look that immediately strikes you as that of someone who’d never tell you a lie came in and boomed, “Are any of you here with Time Out?” The girl standing against the wall behind me and I both turned and introduced ourselves to him. He was Colin, the reporter, and she was Meghan, the other female winner. I had kind of expected her to be like me–a little less mainstream, a little more geeky–but she was a normal girl. Like, with regular girl straight long hair and regular girl make-up and regular girl boots and a pretty navy blue coat that any regular girl would own. I usually find these girls uninteresting, and they usually find me weird, but I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, since we were about to spend 24 hours together. But then the first words out of her mouth were, “We’d better not be going to the Panty Party, ’cause I’m not wearing any panties!” And you can imagine how hard my eyes rolled.

Luckily, the guys were great. Colin had the best room-filling laugh and was one of those people who makes friends with everyone he meets, and Brian–who turned out to be Asian, completely wrecking the “white people having a good time” theme–was wearing a homemade shirt to advertise his blog (which I will also advertise here–peasandnuts.com–despite the fact that he refers to me as “another girl” in the sidebar) and planned to Twitter all of our activities for his friends. Our photographer, Jeff, had gone to school at the University of Michigan, which has the biggest and best rivalry in college football history with my school, THE Ohio State University, and had typical twentysomething good looks but was super-nerdy about how much he loved taking pictures and was therefore likeable.

Colin informed us that our outing was actually a contest to see who could go all 24 hours and that there were plenty of activities planned that were intended to tire us out and get us eliminated, so I got all nervous that we were going to swim the Hudson or participate in a 5k run. But it turned out that our first activity was very much the opposite of that–a sit in the sauna at the Russian & Turkish Baths in the East Village, where hairy old European men in tiny swimsuits barked at us to stop taking pictures and close the door so the heat wouldn’t escape.

I wasn’t totally down with being beaten with oak leaf brushes and starting the day all sweaty, so I kept my sweater on and stayed in the sauna for just a moment, which I’m sure resulted in odd photos, but a girl has to have her priorities, you know, and mine was assuring that my hair didn’t get frizzy. Plus, the place was a little shady-looking

and there was a sign that read, “YOU MUST SHOWER BEFORE ENTERING POOL! Persons with sore of inflamed eyes, a cold, nasal drip, discharges, cuts, boils, or any other evident skin or bodily infections may not enter! No urination, discharge of fecal matter, or blowing nose in the pool!” I didn’t want to take my chances on the discharge of fecal matter part. Colin couldn’t handle the heat, and Jeff didn’t want to wreck his camera equipment, so we sat around the café area talking about music and reading articles hanging on the wall about how upset the men were when women started being allowed into the baths a few years ago and they could no longer walk around naked.

Next we went for dim sum at Jing Fong, which was one of my picks. It’s a huge banquet hall with outrageously flamboyant decor that you can only get to after what seems like a two-mile escalator ride upstairs, and there are stages along every wall filled with high-backed chairs that look like they’re meant to be used when the king is visiting. I’m used to pointing and grabbing when the food carts roll around, but as luck would have it, Brian spoke Cantonese to the waitresses and got us all sorts of weird treats like shark fin dumplings, chicken wings in rice rolls, and almond “pudding” that had the consistency of Jell-o but was strangely delicious.


Colin, Meghan, and Brian, for your reference

We tried our hand at ping-pong next at the New York Table Tennis Foundation, which was in the basement of an ordinary office building and was impossible to find if you weren’t looking for it. Three-quarters of the room was filled with kids getting lessons from really intense teachers, so we stuck to our one table and batted the ball back and forth for an hour,

the guys keeping their skillz in check so we girls could keep up. Because while I was ping-pong champion of my 4th grade 4-H camp, I haven’t really kept up my game since then. And Brian made sure I remembered that with this super-intimidating look:

Meghan was wearing this ultra low-cut shirt that wholly exposed her cleavage, and although she kept it covered with a long scarf for most of the day, she took it off for ping-pong and showed everyone that her bra just couldn’t keep those things wrangled. They were hanging down and falling out, and every time she lunged for the ball, all you could hear was the click-click-click of the photographer’s camera down her shirt. I felt a little embarrassed for her, but she seemed to be fully aware of what was going on, so I assumed that she’s one of those “all press is good press” types and applauded her lack of shame.

Next we went uptown to the Morgan Library, where Colin used all of his journalistic savvy to get us access to a closed event with Ian McEwan, who wasn’t talking about how Atonement the book is way better than Atonement the movie but was having a conversation about conversation with a Harvard professor in which they argued that so much of what we say in the English language is insinuated rather than explicitly spoken. Everyone thought it was cool except Meghan, who also accused me of falling asleep during it.

We took the subway fourteen million stops to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for the Sakura Matsuri, or Cherry Blossom Festival, which was also one of my picks and was more beautiful than I could have imagined.

Trees were literally falling onto the pathway with blooms, and petals floated down from every direction, especially when helped along by children with environment-hating parents.

Lots of Japanese girls were dressed in slutty Harajuku costumes, but my favourite girl was dressed as what reminded me of Little Bo Peep.

And now, to complain more about Meghan–she and I had walked together to the ping-pong place, and I learned that she’s from Laguna Beach, where Kamran’s from. I was telling her that he’s Persian and says that Orange County is full of these really slick, greasy Persians who are very much not like him, and she said that she’s also dating a Persian guy from the area. Even though I assumed that he was one of the greasy ones because she struck me as sort of a greaseball herself, I let it go without a word. She and Colin and I had talked about the dynamics of our respective relationships on the subway to the Garden, and I felt like we had a little more in common than I’d originally imagined, but by the time we were leaving the festival, I was done with her. I’m one of those people who generally thinks it’s polite to make conversation when you’re alone with an acquaintance, but she evidently viewed any time when the guys weren’t around as an opportunity to look at her BlackBerry. And while I’m one of those people who at least offers a smile–maybe even a gurgle of a response–when someone says something to me, she’s one of those people who’ll pretend as if you don’t exist. She paid plenty of attention to the reporter and photographer, though, so I expected the article to be entirely about her. But then it wasn’t. Which makes me think that Colin saw right through her.

We needed to catch a cab to Williamsburg, but there were too many people at the Garden and too few taxis on duty at 4 p.m. on a Saturday, so Colin made fun of Brooklyn and everyone else backed him up, since they all lived in Manhattan. It was so weird being with four people who weren’t at all impressed that I live in Williamsburg, which is a source of awe to pretty much everyone else I know. My location defines my personality, apparently.

Once we got to the bar where we were going to watch the Kentucky Derby–Pete’s Candy Store, where we play trivia on Wednesday nights–we found the place was overpacked with hipsters in wide-brimmed hats and southern-belle-type dresses, so we went instead to Rosemary’s Greenpoint Tavern, which only had a handful of old men inside. I put my fake money on Big Brown just because of his ridiculous name, but one of the guys had actually bet what was apparently a large sum of real money and was practically crying when his horse fell behind. Good times.

We headed back into the city to the Upright Citizens Brigade for an improv show, where we had some comfy velvet seats courtesy of Colin’s string-pulling, and where Colin laughed in my ear SO HARD.

I talked to Colin’s girlfriend all about being from the Midwest–she was from Michigan–and living in New York and how each of us reacts to going home for a week while we wasted time at a bar next door until a spot opened up at El Maguey y La Tuna, where I had what was either the best mole of my life or what tasted like it after a few margaritas, though it looks like chunky death in this photo:

Colin got into the Cinco de Mayo festivities with a sombrero,

but there was only a little cowgirl hat left by the time the waitress got to Brian, and he refused. The staff at the place kept emphasizing to Colin that they were the best Mexican in the Lower East Side, and I sort of believe it, because I also had this crazy jalapeño popper that was the most delicious thing I could imagine (until I got to the shrimp hiding in one end of it, I mean). Kamran doesn’t know that we’re eating every single meal there from now on.

The first of the sleep-inducing activities was a midnight showing of Alien at the Sunshine, but I loaded up on Mountain Dew and two different types of chocolate, so coupled with the fact that I’d never seen the movie before, I had no problem staying awake. Meghan knocked herself out of the competition by leaving for a while for a friend’s birthday party, and Brian kept putting his head in his hands but shielding his eyes so none of us could see them, so I tell myself that he totally fell asleep and that I won the contest.

Next we went to Cake Shop for their 3rd anniversary party, and it was PACKED. I was pumped to listen to cool music, eat some cupcakes, and relax among all the pretty people, but it was so crowded upstairs and down that we ended up losing each other, and I couldn’t see the band, and no one was dancing, and it just felt lame. So I texted Colin with, “I’m not having fun,” and went outside to call Kamran in hopes that he’d tell me to leave early. But he encouraged me to stick it out, and I’m glad I did, because next was

KARAOKE!

at Sing Sing, which was also my pick. Colin had a bunch of the guys at the bar mancrushing on him for his boyband ballads and his 90s raps, and I got a round of applause for one of my renditions. Even Meghan-who-hated-me returned to the group from her party and stood beside me so she could put her ear to my vocal cords. Which made me like her just a little, but purely in a superior way. A bunch of my friends were at a club down the street and joined us for the last hour or so, which was so awesome, and I tried to convince them to join us for the rest of the marathon, but they had been awake since noon and thought that was a big deal.

I did manage to get my friend/former co-worker Beth to come to Veselka for blintzes and macaroni and cheese, but only because she was visiting from California for the weekend and didn’t want to waste any time sleeping. Just as we ordered, though, our friend who she was staying with called and said that she had locked her keys in her apartment and that Beth had the only extra set. With her gone and with Meghan having left even before breakfast, we decided to skip the morning church service and Staten Island Ferry ride that were supposed to have been enough to put even Brian with his “I stay awake for 24 hours every Saturday” touts to sleep and call it a day.

I took the bus back to Kamran’s and arrived just as the sun was starting to crawl up over Brooklyn and the East River

and then I enjoyed a much-deserved hour of sleep before heading off to brunch. Because I am invincible.And also famous.

Comment Here