Update on Restaurants to Try for 2014

We are 6 months into 2014 and I decided it was time to update my list of restaurants to try for 2014.  We have done a pretty good job of checking restaurants off the list, but we have a ways left to go.  I would like at least a 50% success rate (plus at least one of the runners up) by the end of the summer, which I think is definitely do-able.  I'm thinking Betony and another trip to Brooklyn to try either Pok Pok NY or Roberta's, but we will have to play it by ear.  I have been very pleased with the meals we had at all of the restaurants on the list thus far; hopefully any other restaurants we visit will be similarly delicious.  If I were to add some new restaurants to the list (or the runners up) now, they would be The Gorbals (Ilan Hall was an early Top Chef winner and I love his show Knife Fight so I am excited to try his restaurant in Brooklyn once it opens this summer), Mu Ramen (their pop-up closed but I think they are also opening a restaurant this summer), Bassanova Ramen NYC (I know very little about this place but it made it on the NY Times list of Top 10 Ramen Destinations in New York and Serious Eat's Best Ramen Shops in NYC - plus their green curry ramen looks delicious), The Gander (we love Recette, so why not try Jesse Schenker’s new restaurant) and Decoy (the Peking duck restaurant by the Red Farm team).   

1. Brooklyn Fare
2. Parm and Carbone
3. Empellon Cocina
4. Pok Pok NY
5. Roberta's and Blanca
6. Fung Tu
7. Alder
8. Mission Cantina 
9. Pearl & Ash
10. Estela 

Runners Up:  M. Wells Dinette, Sripraphai, Perla, Charlie Bird, Toro, Betony, Sushi Nazakawa, The Cecil, Contra

Red Farm

RedFarm was by far my favorite restaurant that opened on the UWS in 2013.  We have been 4-5 times now and every trip I find a new dish that intrigues me.  We have a few standards that we order every time (the soup dumplings, the pastrami egg rolls and the crispy duck and crab dumplings, all of which are pictured).  Those soup dumplings are some of the best soup dumplings I have ever had - the broth inside is more flavorfulThere are a few other dishes that we order ALMOST every visit (the shrimp-stuffed crispy chicken and the bacon-fried rice), but depending on how many people we are there with and what dishes they want to order, they might not make the final cut.   Not every dish is a winner, but I have never left with less than an excellent (and innovative) meal.  Where else can you go to a "Chinese" restaurant that serves pastrami egg rolls and dumplings that look like pac man, horseshoe crabs and/or other little ocean creatures that are actually delicious?  Also, the chef there has the perfect touch with the deep fryer.  I'm usually leery of fried food - too often it comes out a little soggy and very oily.  But all of the deep fried dumplings and other appetizers at RedFarm come out perfectly crispy and tasty.  Some of the entrees and rice/noodle dishes are exceptional (their rib steak is a little pricey, but one of the most tender and perfectly cooked steaks I have eaten in the city and the grilled pork chops can be pretty fantastic), but most of the dishes that I have been less blown away by have been either entrees or rice/noodle dishes.  If you are going to RedFarm for the first time (or any time thereafter), I highly recommend loading up your order with a few different types of dumplings, one or two appetizers/salads and then consider the entree and rice/noodle options. You won't be disappointed.

More pictures after the jump!

Restaurants to Try for 2014 and My Favorite Restaurants of 2013

My restaurants that I am dying to try in 2013 (in no particular order, except that restaurants that have been on the list since last year are at the top) are:

1. Brooklyn Fare (still dying to go - maybe one day) 
2. Parm and Carbone (we made it to Torrisi Italian Specialties and it was amazing) 
3. Empellon Cocina
4. Pok Pok NY (we really enjoyed Pok Pok Phat Thai) 
5. Roberta's and Blanca
6. Fung Tu (I love Nom Wah so why wouldn't I love this upscale version?)
7. Alder (I have made and canceled reservations at Alder 3-4 times now but I am determined to go by the end of February) 
8. Mission Cantina (Alex went but I didn't get to go) 
9. Pearl & Ash
10. Estela 

Runners Up:  M. Wells Dinette, Sripraphai, Perla, Charlie Bird, Toro, Betony, Sushi Nazakawa, The Cecil, Contra

More after the jump!

Another Update on Restaurants in 2013

I know it has only been a month since my last restaurant update, but I had so much to add (and so little to say otherwise) that I couldn't resist posting another update.  Check it out - in the month of September I visited Locanda Verde, Torrisi Italian Specialties, Pok Pok Phat Thai and Boulud Sud.  And today we hit Red Farm after I saw on Eater that it was open for lunch starting today.  I made an emergency phone call to Alex and cancelled our original lunch plans so we could check it out.  I had a minor break from work (not enough to have time to plan and cook meals at home, but enough to make a few dinner reservations) and we went a wee bit crazy.  We also crossed an item off my NYC bucket list last weekend - walking over the Brooklyn Bridge, which is something that I was particularly excited about (hence the picture above).  We have been to Brooklyn, including DUMBO, a few times but somehow we have never visited or walked across the bridge.  We were in DUMBO for the DUMBO Arts Festival on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and after eating lunch at No. 7 Sub in Brooklyn Bridge Park we couldn't resist walking the bridge. 

Restaurants to Try in 2013

1. Brooklyn Fare (still dying to go but it's totally impossible to get reservations and really pricey)
2. Locanda Verde
3. Torrisi Italian Specialities and Parm (should also add Carbone and ZZ's Clam Bar)
4. Empellon Cocina
5. Pok Pok NY and Pok Pok Phat Thai
6. Biang
7. Red Farm (the new UWS location opened today for lunch!)
8. The Marrow
9. Roberta's and Blanca
10. Acme
11. Khe-Yo
12. ABC Cocina

Runners Up:  M. Wells Dinette, Pig and Khao, Sripraphai, Boulud Sud, Yunnan Kitchen, Red Rooster 

Runner Up from 2012: John Dory Oyster Bar

More after the jump!

Restaurants in 2013

I thought that since summer is quickly drawing to a close that I would post an update on the restaurants that I said I was dying to try in 2013 (and one from 2012).  We're not doing quite as well as last year in knocking restaurants off the list but we are trying!  I made reservations at Torrisi Italian Specialties for mid-September so that will take care of another restaurant.  Go us!  And I am determined to hit one of the Pok Poks, Red Farm and Khe-Yo by the end of the year.  I only have four months left so I had better get cracking.  The others will probably stay on the list for at least another year...  There are a few other restaurants that recently opened that I am dying to try, so I added them at the bottom even though they weren't on the original list.

1. Brooklyn Fare (still dying to go but it's totally impossible to get reservations and really pricey)
2. Locanda Verde
3. Torrisi Italian Specialities and Parm (should also add Carbone and ZZ's Clam Bar)
4. Empellon Cocina
5. Pok Pok NY and Pok Pok Phat Thai
6. Biang
7. Red Farm (the new UWS location is set to open in late September so I am determined that we will try it by the end of the year)
8. The Marrow
9. Roberta's and Blanca
10. Acme
11. Khe-Yo
12. ABC Cocina

Runners Up:  M. Wells Dinette, Pig and Khao, Sripraphai, Boulud Sud, Yunnan Kitchen, Red Rooster 

Runner Up from 2012: John Dory Oyster Bar

Of the restaurants we have tried, I have to say that Biang, Acme, Pig and Khao and Boulud Sud were all very different, but pretty fabulous nonetheless.  The Marrow was good, but not quite as good as the others.  Part of that might be due to the fact that we ate a meal that would have been very well suited to a cold fall or winter day in mid-July, when it was 90 degrees outside.  I should mention that we did have a fantastic corn salad there that might be one of my favorite side dishes for the year.  Yunnan Kitchen and John Dory Oyster Bar are probably the next level down.  The meals I had there were good, with a few memorable dishes, but they couldn't quite live up the meals we had at some of the others.

P.S.  I think it bears mentioning that we went to a number of other fabulous restaurants that weren't open yet when I wrote this list, including Mighty Quinn's Barbecue and Uncle Boon's, both of which are serious contenders for my favorite new restaurants of 2013.  This year's list is going to be a little all over the place because there are some restaurants we visited in Austin, TX (random but true) and Europe that definitely deserve to make the list.  

Yunnan Kitchen and Pig and Khao

I'm happy to say that Alex and I started off this year by knocking off two of the restaurants that were runners up on my list of Restaurants to Try for 2013.  If I had my way we would have knocked off at least one restaurant on the actual list if the reservation gods didn't hate me so much.  But we (when I say "we" I really mean "I" since I have been the one making all of the calls) finally managed to get reservations at Acme for this weekend so I am pretty pumped about that.  I tried to get reservations at Brooklyn Fare, Blanca and The Marrow and basically failed spectacularly each time.  Actually, I could have made reservations at The Marrow at 9:00 pm this past Sunday but I decided that was too late for a Sunday night.  And since The Marrow has only been open for a very short while I am tempted to let it mature a little more before visiting.  So I will probably try again this summer.  If the 7 train wasn't in the midst of some crazy renovations on the weekend, we would probably have trekked to Flushing by now to try Biang, but we're going to wait until the planned service concludes at the end of March.  There are other ways to get out there, but I'm not in a huge hurry so we will just wait it out.  I'm hoping that by beginning of summer, we will have tried at least one or two more of the restaurants on our list, not including Acme, Yunnan Kitchen or Pig and Khao.  The most likely candidates are Pok Pok Phat Thai and Biang, but who knows?  If the Red Farm location ever opens on the UWS we might make it there too!  Strangely the two restaurants we have tried are both on the LES.  I say strangely only because we rarely make it down to the LES because it's a pain in the butt to get to from the UWS and not because of a perceived lack of quality restaurants down on the LES.  The LES has a ton of wonderful restaurants - including Pok Pok Phat Thai.  Brooklyn Fare and Blanca might remain wish list items since reservations are impossible to obtain, but such is  life.

More after the jump!

Restaurants to Try for 2013 and My Favorite Restaurants of 2012

My restaurants that I am dying to try in 2013 (in no particular order, except that restaurants that have been on the list since last year are at the top) are:

1. Brooklyn Fare (still dying to go, even more so after seeing the meal that Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert had there on the last episode of No Reservations)
2. Locanda Verde
3. Torrisi Italian Specialities and Parm
4. Empellon Cocina
5. Pok Pok NY and Pok Pok Phat Thai
6. Biang
7. Red Farm (they are opening an UWS location in the old Fatty Crab space and I have really high hopes for it)
8. The Marrow
9. Roberta's and Blanca (also attributing this addition to the last episode of No Reservations and the meal that Anthony Bourdain had there)
10. Acme

Runners Up:  M. Wells Dinette, Pig and Khao, Sripraphai, Boulud Sud, Yunnan Kitchen, Red Rooster

**SPOILER ALERT - Alex and I hit one of the runners up last night and it was phenomenal.  More on that later

More after the jump!

Restaurants in NYC in the Last Six Months

I will be the first to admit that I have been a little lazy with the blog recently.  My posts are becoming shorter and shorter and some just never make it up there.  For instance, Alex and I had two great meals at City Grit (one with Paul Qui as the guest chef and another with Ricardo Zarate as the guest chef) and I never posted about either.  We also tried a number of other restaurants that somehow never made the cut, even though we really enjoyed our meals there.  Sorry everyone.  I know there is no real excuse for being so delinquent.  I have decided to post at least a few of the pictures of the meals I enjoyed most over the past six months or so with some (brief) commentary.  
 
First and foremost, City Grit is one of my favorite discoveries of this year.  It calls itself a "culinary salon," which really boils down to the fact that they host a few dinners a week in a furniture showroom connected to a parochial school (no joke - you actually use the parochial school bathrooms), some of which feature guest chefs from all over the country.  Paul Qui won the last season of Top Chef and we had an amazing meal at Uchiko in Austin earlier this year.  So when I saw him on the schedule at City Grit (and I honestly have no idea how I came across City Grit) I knew we had to go.  We had a number of memorable dishes that night - my favorites were the tuna jamon (raw tuna wrapped in lardo with melon) and the pork jowl (pictured below).  I also really enjoyed the "tomato water" (a tomato consomme with mussels, celery and basil - pictured above) and the sunchoke dashi (pictured below).  So that was Paul Qui.  And then a few months later Ricardo Zarate came to town and I bought tickets to his dinner.  I had never heard of him before, but his restaurants in LA sounded really interesting and we don't have a lot of good Peruvian in the city so I decided to give it a shot.  When the meal kicked off with a kampachi ceviche with leche de tigre jelly, I knew we were in for a fun (and delicious) meal.  The next two dishes - a Peruvian bouillabaisse with crabmeat and a raw quail egg (pictured below, although my picture was taken before they added in the broth) and a scallion and uni tiradito (also pictured below) were my two favorite dishes of the night.  That night I was introduced to a crazy Amazonian fish called paiche that is apparently among the largest freshwater fish in the world and is similar in texture to Chilean sea bass.  The meals at City Grit take forever and the air conditioning leaves a lot to be desired, but it is a really fun experience.

 More after the jump!

Mission Chinese Food

With this post I am officially and gleefully jumping on the Mission Chinese bandwagon.  The place is AMAZING.  One of the best Asian meals - traditional, fusion or otherwise - I have had in a really long time.  If you find yourself anywhere near the LES of Manhattan and you enjoy spicy, interesting food, you should haul ass to Mission Chinese.  And then be prepared to wait because the place is tiny and well worth all of the buzz.  Or you could do what Alex and I did and trek down there from the UWS at 2:30 pm on a freakishly hot Sunday and avoid the wait.  But if you are like us and you are running late (which was only partially our fault) you might give yourself heat stroke or an aneurysm over worrying whether or not you are going to make it before they stop serving lunch at 3:00 pm, so you should weigh your options and decide whether you want to risk missing lunch (and the ensuing depression, etc) or whether you want to just bite the bullet and wait... 

More (including more more pictures) after the jump!

Thoughts on 2012 thus far (including thoughts from our list of Restaurants to Try in 2012)...

 Let's see.... Where to begin?  I thought I was busy last year at work, but last year had nothing on the first half of this year.  This year has been a killer.  But through it all, Alex and I have managed to eat at a number of really good restaurants - including a few from our list of Restaurants to Try in 2012.  I consider it a huge accomplishment that we have made it to three of the restaurants on our list (Empellon Taqueria, Tertulia and ABC Kitchen) and two of the runners up (Ayada and Zabb Elee).  I know I made a resolution to (try) to knock off one restaurant a month from our list, so I am behind schedule, but I am hoping that we can visit a few more restaurants over the summer so that by August we will have made it to... 5 of the restaurants on the list (not counting runners up).  If we hit 50% of the restaurants on the list by the end of the summer I will consider this whole experience a win!  Either way, we are already ahead of 2011, where we only managed to hit 1 restaurant on our list...  And now that we have knocked off a few restaurants, I have come up with a few new restaurants for our list that either weren't open when I debuted the list originally, or somehow missed the cut - Empellon Cocina, Mission Chinese and Lotus Blue (which edged out the other new Yunnan restaurant Yunnan Kitchen by a hair based on the fact that it opened a month earlier).  My new runners up are Pok Pok NY and Red Farm.

More after the jump!

Reasons why jury duty in NYC doesn't totally suck...

Actually, there are really only two reasons.  First, you're not in the office and the days are shorter (now this can backfire because I had to go into the office after jury duty two out of three days, which made the days much longer).  Second, you are right next to Chinatown and every day you have at least an hour lunch break.  So I took it upon myself to eat at a new Chinese restaurant for lunch every day (some old favorites and one new restaurant) and to have a dan tat taste off (my favorite Portuguese-style dan tat at Double Crispy versus the traditional dan tat at Bread Talk pictured above).  For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, dan tat are Chinese egg custard tarts and they are pictured above.  I heart dan tat.  Serious Eats did a taste taste last August and they judged the ones at Bread Talk to be the best, so I had to give them a shot.  In the end I preferred the Portuguese-style dan tat from Double Crispy (I thought the texture of the creamy filling was better as well as the flaky, buttery crust).  I was actually somewhat sad when my jury duty stint ended yesterday because I had one more restaurant (and one more dan tat bakery) picked out to try.  Oh well!  I'm sure Alex and I will go down there soon enough.

Restaurants to Try in 2012 and My Favorite Restaurants of 2011

I have decided to post this list as a means of forcing myself to do my best to eat at all of the following restaurants in 2012 (and to remind myself of some of the excellent meals I had in 2011).  Some of these restaurants have been on my list of restaurants to try for years and I think it is do or die time.  I have had enough of restaurants lingering on my list of places to try for years and years - this year I am going to be proactive about it.  Most of last year's list is going to be repeated here because the only restaurant I made it to was Graffit (which is now known as Gastroarte).  How sad is that?  I am hereby making a resolution to (try) to knock off approximately one restaurant a month, until I get through all of the restaurants listed here.  I say try because we all know how my personal life goes - one minute I have one and the next second I am working nonstop, which makes trying new restaurants a little hard.  But I am bound and determined to try!

My restaurants to try for 2012 are:

1. ABC Kitchen
2. Red Rooster
3. Brooklyn Fare (this might be a wish list item because it is almost impossible to get reservations, but I am putting it on here anyway)
4. Locanda Verde
5. The Dutch
6. Tertulia
7. Torrisi Italian Specialities
8. Fatty Cue
9. Empellon
10. Boulud Sud

Runners Up:  John Dory Oyster Bar, Eleven Madison Park, Zabb Elee, Sripraphai and Ayada Thai.

More after the jump!

Hester Street Fair

If you are like most Americans (or at least if you are like me), poffertjes are probably not something you eat on a regular basis.  Up until a few years ago, I had never even heard of poffertjes.  But Alex lived in the Netherlands for a few years while he was in elementary school so he knew all about them.  As a side note, for those of you who have never heard of poffertjes, they are delicious little Dutch pancake thingies.  During out first trip to Aruba Alex and I happened across a little Dutch pancake restaurant that just happened to serve poffertjes.  I think we had them at least three times the week that we were there.  But they were nowhere to be found in NYC, at least not until a few weeks ago when I got an email from Tasting Table about a couple who had started a business, called the Poffertjes Man, and brought pofferjes to NYC.  Needless to say we were pretty freaking excited.  So we trekked down to the Hester Street Fair this morning, only to find out that they weren't there this morning.  Boo!  Alex said that he looked at the Hester Street Fair website on Wednesday, August 31 and saw that the food lineup didn't include the Poffertjes Man, but he assumed that they were only missing for Wednesday's market.  If he had only looked a little further he would have realized that the market is only on Saturdays.  And they post the lineup for the upcoming Saturday market every week on Wednesdays.  Oops.  So really, I blame him for getting me all excited (and for getting himself all excited), only to realize that they weren't even there today.  

More after the jump!

Meatopia 2011

I love living in NYC.  There are so many things I love about it that I can't picture living anywhere else right now.  I hear that it eventually gets old, but I'm nowhere near that point right now.  Food festivals are among the many things I love about living in NYC and Meatopia is one of the best.  Alex and I had a long discussion on our way back from Meatopia about which food festival is our favorite and we had a hard time deciding between Meatopia and LUCKYRICE Night Market.  In the end I think we decided that LUCKYRICE was our favorite because there was more variation in the dishes we ate there.  Meatopia is obviously all about the meat (which generally meant sandwiches of some sort, or random hunks of meat), whereas at LUCKYRICE we had soups, salads, tofu, noodles, spring rolls, and sliders.  I would say that the quality of the food was the same at both.  We had some really delicious dishes, some good dishes and some forgettable dishes at both.  Not everyone can be a winner I guess.

There were a lot of really good dishes at Meatopia last night.  My favorites included the spicy lamb ribs from Ilili (pictured above) , the Mangalitsa pig's head torchon from Edi & the Wolf (pictured after the jump), the roasted kid goat from Floyd Cardoz (no picture, but Floyd just won Top Chef Masters and I can totally see why) and the Vietnamese-style Mangalitsa ham and bacon pops from Lee Anne Wong.  There were two other dishes that really stuck out in my head as being very good, but didn't quite make the favorites list - the spit-roasted whole sheep served on flatbread with cherry tomatoes from Seamus Mullen (his restaurant Tertulia should be opening soon and I can't wait to try it out) and the mulefoot whole hog pulled pork sandwich from April Bloomfield of The Breslin, The Spotted Pig and The John Dory Oyster Bar (pictured after the jump).  We tried a ton of other dishes, but those were definitely my favorites of the day.  The coolest spread was definitely at Bar Basque.  They made Hampshire pork 7 ways - pork belly, steamed buns, sausauge, ice cream...  We tried their pork belly and clams and their bacon ice cream, both of which were very nice, but weren't among my favorites.  I wish I had been able to try their morcilla sausage (aka blood sausage) but they were out when I wandered by.  Oh well.  But now that I know their food is so good, I am adding the restaurant to my list of places to try.  The same goes for Ilili and Edi & the Wolf.  I recently tried Seasonal, which is the other restaurant by the same people as Edi & the Wolf and it was delicious, so it's no surprise that Edi & the Wolf was so good.  Another thing I love about Meatopia is the demonstrations - while we were there they had butchering demos and Pat LaFrieda was roasting an entire cow.  And they left the head on so it stared at you while they cooked it.  I'm not going to lie - it was kinda creepy, but cool at the same time.

More pictures after the jump!

Tacombi at Fonda Nolita

After my pilates class yesterday Alex and I were wandering around Soho trying to figure out what to eat for lunch.  Generally when I do pilates downtown on Saturdays we head down to Chinatown afterwards for dim sum.  But as I mentioned in last night's post on Pork Souvlaki, Alex didn't think that dim sum was appropriate hot weather food.  He either wanted something cold, or just something on the lighter end of the food spectrum.  First I suggested Cocoron for some cold soba, but then I remembered that there was a taco place nearby I had been meaning to try.  Alex agreed that tacos were appropriate hot weather food (his logic was along the lines that Mexico is hot, therefore the food they serve there is hot weather food).  So I busted out my phone and started Googling for tacos in Soho.  I love Google.  And to be honest, I have no idea how I survived before I had a smartphone.  The ability to Google on the go, or do a Yelp search for nearby restaurants is totally key when Alex and I are wandering around NYC trying to decide where to eat.  And then the maps are key once we figure out where we want to go, but don't know exactly how to get there.  Anyway, after about 15 seconds on Google I found what I was looking for - Tacombi @ Fonda Nolita.  As you can see in the picture above, Tacombi @ Fonda Nolita features an old school VW van parked inside what looks like a former garage.  According to NY Mag the space actually used to be a clothing store, but that is beside the point.  The idea with Tacombi was to replicate the feeling of a taco truck at the beach in Mexico (the original Tacombi, launched by the owner of Tacombi @ Fonda Nolita, was actually parked in Playa del Carmen).  The idea is really interesting and I'm of the opinion that it is totally successful.  When you walk in the first thing you notice is the VW van, but then you start noticing the rest of the decor.  It easily could come off as cheesy, but I think it really works to make the place low key and fun.  After a brief primer on how to order and pay (you buy tickets at the counter and then take the tickets to one of two windows for your food - the VW van has all of the meat and vegetarian options, the window in the back has the breakfast tacos and fish tacos), we picked out 6 tacos (3 from each window) and sat down to eat.

Pictures and our favorite taco after the jump!

The Spotted Pig

There are a few restaurants in NYC that truly live up to the whole "gastropub" trend.  The Spotted Pig was probably the first of those and I believe it remains the most successful of them.  Jimmy's No. 43 and Jones Wood Foundry are two others that immediately come to mind - both of which are quite good.  And there are plenty of casual restaurants that label themselves gastropubs, but don't seem to live up to the designation to me.  According to NY Mag's website, there are 36 restaurants in the city that have designated themselves as "gastropubs."  The Spotted Pig is one of those restaurants that actually deserves its hype - the food is amazing.  Even for lunch the waits can run up to an hour or more.  If you get there early enough (we walked in at 12:10 pm on a Saturday), you should be able to get in pretty easily.  By 12:30 the waits were running 20-30 minutes for a table for two and longer for a larger table. 

Usually when I go to The Spotted Pig I am there specifically for their Chargrilled Burger with Roquefort Cheese & Shoestring Fries.  It is by far one of the most amazing burgers in NYC and those fries are to die for because they fry garlic and rosemary along with the fries so they have this amazing flavor.  Anyway, after taking some summer associates out to lunch at BLT Burger last Friday I wasn't feeling like chowing down on another burger, so I decided to stick with the Market Salad with Sheep's Milk Cheese and a Prosciutto & Ricotta Tart with Marjoram.  Alex got the Fried Poached Eggs with Chorizo Stew (pictured above) and then we shared one of their homemade donuts with strawberry jam and cream for dessert.  Everything was amazing.  The market salad was delicious - full of bitter greens, fresh asparagus, and a few little sprigs of spearmint.  I know that mint in a salad sounds odd, but it was amazing.  The tart had a crazy flaky and buttery puff pastry crust, topped off with some prosciutto, ricotta and arugula.  The entire thing was garnished with more shaved cheese that reminded me of pecorino romano or gruyere.  It was so good.  And then there was Alex's fried poached egg dish.  I have never had chorizo that was so intensely sweet and spicy at the same time.  It was really good.  I have had slightly better fried poached eggs at Nougatine, but it's a very minor complaint because they were pretty great.  Last but not least, the donut.  Yum.  Who doesn't love a homemade sugar donut with strawberries and cream inside?

More pictures after the jump!

Sorry for the extended absence...

Hi everyone!  I'm so sorry that I just disappeared for the past 9 days (and won't be back again until after this weekend), but I haven't had time to sleep, let along think about blogging or cooking for the past two weeks.  Work has been insane - and by insane I mean that last night I was at the office until 3:30 am and it looks like tonight is going to be more of the same.  As I left last night my boss told me to rest up as much as possible since tonight was going to be another late night.  Oh goody.  And as much fun as it would be to blog about the food that I have been eating at my desk every night (some of which has actually been fairly decent), I am going to pass.  And since Alex and I are headed down to Maryland tomorrow for our best friends' wedding (congrats Mark and Robin!), there won't be any posts until next Monday at the very earliest...

But I am going to at least leave you with a picture of some shrimp and grits that Alex and I shared at Char No. 4 in Brooklyn this past weekend.  Alex and I managed to squeeze in a few late dinners out over the past few weeks, including Char No. 4 and Social Eatz.  I thought that both meals were interesting, but I preferred Char No. 4 because I thought that the dishes were more composed.  Social Eatz had some really great french fries and a nice bimbimbap burger (which won the Eater 2011 burger contest), but I thought that they were a little heavy handed with the vinegar in their toasted sesame salad, and their kung pao sandwich and smoked ribs were nothing special.  Those ribs in particular tasted like something you could get at TGI Fridays.  And that is not a good thing.  Nothing at Char No. 4 blew me out of the water, but I thought that all of the dishes were consistently good and their house-cured lamb pastrami was fantastic.  Plus I liked the vibe of the place and overall found it to be a better experience.  For all of you out there who love bourbon and whiskey, they have a really kickass selection and actually offer both in flights, which I think is pretty darn cool.

Cocoron

This is one of those restaurants that you love so much that you are torn between not wanting to tell anyone (for fear that the secret will suddenly be out and it will be impossible to get a table from that point on) and telling everyone because it was just that good.  I know that the friend who told me about Cocoron also suffered from the same dilemma because he has repeatedly told me so.  I wish I could keep this place to myself but it's just too good.  I also wish that it was down the street instead of a solid 30-40 minutes on the metro (depending on trains), but such is life.  It is worth the trip.  As we were walking out the door Alex kept going on and on about how happy he was with our lunch.  I agreed with him.  Lunch was perfect.  Every dish we had was just... well, perfect.

We started with the Daikon Mochi, which their online menu describes as "sticky rice cake - daikon radish, bacon, baby shrimp with yuzu pepper."  The mochi was pillowy in texture, but really sticky and gummy at the same time.  None of those adjectives sound super appealing and I honestly don't know how to describe the texture of it, but man it was tasty.  It was also completely unique.  I have never tried anything even remotely like it.  Then I had the Stamina Soba (pictured above), which involved a little raft of ice cold soba noodles that I dipped into a hot porky broth full of ground pork, some thinly sliced pork, a chicken meatball and shiitake mushrooms.  It was amazing.  The soba noodles themselves were wonderfully chewy and flavorful.  I have never had soba that was this good.  Alex ordered a cold soba special that featured boiled thinly sliced pork (briefly boiled and then shocked in a bath of ice water), freshly grated daikon and a sesame sauce.  As we were sitting at the bar the Japanese family next to us ordered a few bowls of another special - ikura cold soba (soba with huge, plump salmon roe, daikon and shiso leaf on top).  It looked incredible, but my Stamina Soba was so good that I barely had any ordering envy at all.  After all of that ramen I was pretty full, but I couldn't resist dessert.  I was torn between their mochi ice cream with soy bean powder and their black sesame cheesecake, but we went with the mochi.  I wasn't a big fan of the soy bean powder on its own.  It reminded me of pulverized peanuts mixed, but powdery like flour.  It didn't provide a lot of flavor, but it gave the mochi ice cream a nice texture.  It was the perfect end to a great meal.

More pictures after the jump!

LUCKYRICE 2011 - Night Market

On nights like tonight I can't imagine wanting to live anywhere else but NYC.  The food in NYC is amazing - the restaurants are delicious and great food-centric events happen all the time.  This week is LUCKYRICE (a festival celebrating Asian cuisine) and Alex and I bought tickets for the Night Market event this evening.  Night Market was held under the Brooklyn Bridge and is supposed to simulate an actual Asian night market with tons of street food (and more upscale interpretations thereof).  I'm not sure if the food we tasted tonight was in any way street food, but some of it was downright delicious.  Restaurants like Social Eatz (head chef Angelo Sosa was one of the front-runners from Top Chef and Top Chef All-Stars), Umi Nom and Kuma Inn (Alex and I were lucky enough to take a cooking class with chef King Phojanakong last year), Ma Peche (the lone Vietnamese-inspired restaurant in the Momofuku empire, as well as the only Momofuku located outside of the East Village), An Choi, Obao (another one of Michael Huynh's multitude of Vietnamese restaurants) and Spot Dessert Bar (click here to see an earlier blog post on Spot) all participated.  The Taiwanese tourism board also participated and let me tell you, they were ballsy.  As soon as we walked into the event I was like "OMG.  Someone here is serving stinky tofu."  You could smell it from like 45 feet away (maybe further).  I actually walked by all of the tables on that end of the night market to see where the smell was coming from before I finally found it.  For those of you who have never heard of/experienced stinky tofu, the name is well-deserved because that stuff smells terrible.  When I lived in China I would sometimes cross the street to get away from the smell when it was particularly rank.  It smells that bad.

Enough of that.  My favorite bites of the evening in order of preference were the:

1. Chicken and Cabbage Salad Served on a Vietnamese Prawn Cracker (An Choi)
2. Rice Cake Topped with Asian Pork Bolognese (Kuma Inn/Umi Nom)
3. Khao Soi Curry Served on a Betel Leaf (Betel - pictured above)
4. Kalamansi Honey Thai Iced Tea (Spot Dessert Bar)

I also think an honorable mention needs to go out to the Tomato Curry Soup from Social Eatz and a rice noodle dish from Ma Peche.  And the spring rolls from Spring Kitchen were perfectly fried and very tasty.  Also, the stinky tofu was nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be.  They served it fried, which helped to mute the taste, and served it with soy sauce and a chili sauce of sorts.  It tasted like it smelled (only a little less aggressive), but it wasn't quite as foul as I had imagined.  I managed to avoid it for the entire year I was in China, only to give in and eat it under a bridge here in NYC.  I have to admit that Alex was the driving force behind our sampling the stinky tofu.  If it were up to me I would have avoided it.  Life is funny like that sometimes. 

More photos after the jump!

Kin Shop's Lamb and Goat Curry Burger

I know that this picture is woefully out of focus (sneaking in a quick picture on your iPhone will do this to you sometimes), but the burger was so good that I have to post it anyway.  As part of Eater's Burgerweek, a bunch of NYC restaurants that don't typically serve burgers have debuted special limited edition burgers available this week and next week only.  Today when I found myself in the West Village around lunchtime I started thinking about how wonderful Kin Shop sounded for lunch.  And then once I found myself there, I was powerless to resist their Lamb and Goat Curry Burger.  It was freaking fantastic.  Imagine this - a goat and lamb brisket burger patty seasoned with Panang curry paste topped with chili jam, yellow bean aioli, pickled onions and crumbled fried taro root served on a homemade sriracha bun.  The bun was griddled so that it was toasted and crispy on the interior.  Plus it was rather fabulously flavored with sriracha.  And the burger itself was insanely juicy.  It was nowhere near as gamey as I thought it would be.  If I hadn't already known that it was goat I'm not sure what meat I would have thought the burger consisted of, but I wouldn't have guessed goat.  And the fried taro root on top of the burger gave it a wonderful additional textural note.  I'm totally bummed that this burger isn't going to be on the menu after next week, but I'm pretty excited that I got to try it as I might try to rip off some of the components for a curry burger of my own!