Tag Archives: restaurant ramblings

Restaurant Review: Roebling Tea Room; Renegade Craft Fair 2008

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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.

We’re Never Leaving the House Again

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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.

Tabletop Shrumps

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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?

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Restaurant Review: Shake Shack

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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.

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Restaurant Review: Savarona

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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.

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