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Restaurant Review: Quality Meats

Posted by plumpdumpling on January 21, 2009 – 8:15 pm

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

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!

Teeny Tiny Foodstuffs

Posted by plumpdumpling on September 11, 2008 – 1:15 pm

Filed under restaurant ramblings
Tagged as restaurant ramblings

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.

Restaurant Review: Pommes Frites

Posted by plumpdumpling on September 8, 2008 – 12:08 pm

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

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.

Lost and Lonely Leftovers

Posted by plumpdumpling on August 27, 2008 – 11:50 am

Filed under administrative, restaurant ramblings
Tagged as administrative, restaurant ramblings

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.

MGMT at the McCarren Park Pool Party

Posted by plumpdumpling on August 6, 2008 – 1:19 pm

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, concerts, living in new york is neat, music is my boyfriend, restaurant ramblings
Tagged as all of my friends are prettier than i am, concerts, living in new york is neat, music is my boyfriend, restaurant ramblings, williamsburg

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

my very first McCarren Park Pool Party!

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:

This picture is cool because a guy is getting hit in the face with a ball in it, but you can’t really tell that at this size.

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: