Valentine’s Day … it’s yet another day of the year to spend more money on your partner! Valerie is a restaurant located in Midtown about 3 streets up from Bryant Park. My partner was craving crab cakes and aside from ordering from Jimmy’s Famous Seafood, I was having a lot of trouble finding something. They gave me a list, and I noticed that there was crab cake on this menu. I had no idea what to expect on an early Saturday evening when we arrived.

Near where we live, they semi-opened this restaurant on Jackson Blvd at the start of the pandemic only to shut it down pretty quickly. We’ve walked by here several dozen times, and it was never really opened until the last 6 months. Reading online, it seemed they had to change their menu several times for adjustments for some reason, and the menu itself initially seemed basic and not overly attractive. It felt they were trying really hard to attract a brunch crowd, so we have not been enthusiastic about trying.

North Williamsburg just keeps on growing and gentrifying. I had lived here when I first moved to NYC, and 5+ years later, there are even more restaurants within such a small area. Similar to Manhattan, many restaurants are rotating ownership and leases. This restaurant is a relatively new latin fusion restaurant that had opened back in September 2021. It sits very close to McCarren park a few doors away from one of my favorite cheese steak places, Federoff’s Steaks.

We saw this restaurant’s opening relatively recently on an NYC openings blog. I wasn’t sure what exactly was the “Genesis House” or what “curated by Onjium” meant, but I figure post pandemic this was an excellent opportunity to make a reservation for something new to please my gourmand syndrome. The Genesis house is kind of interesting. The first floor is a showroom of Genesis vehicles where you can sit in the cars and talk to the different reps.

We were around the Bloomingdales area running some errands back and forth around the Midtown East area and decided to take the risk of looking for a restaurant without making reservations since we normally eat dinner fairly early. This Quality Italian seems to be from the same owners of Quality Meats and Quality Bistro which are on my list. Quality Italian is a modern take on the Italian American steakhouse tradition, and the prices are probably on the mid to high range.

For my partner’s birthday, I decided on this 2 Michelin Star restaurant located in the Williamsburg area. What appealed to me originally about this was that it was not just another French restaurant. French cuisine is great, but there are so many high end French restaurants around the city. Perhaps I am getting a little burnt out of having the same French tastes over and over, so I wanted something that was less normal.

We have not tried too many Brooklyn restaurants near the Barclays Center area for quite some time due to the pandemic. On this early brisk and semi-cold night, we had an interactive theater outing over at the One Hanson Place building in Brooklyn. After the event was over, a friend that we met at the event impromptly invited us to meet his friend at this restaurant. This was less than a mile away, and since we didn’t have other plans, we decided to try it out.

This restaurant is sandwiched at the cusp of Sunnyside between a AYCE Korean BBQ restaurant and a newly opened Sonic fast food joint. The menu looks pretty traditional Korean, and it’s always nice to try these types of restaurants in different neighborhoods. This one is rarely as busy as its next door neighbors, but I had some expectations of how this would turn out. When we arrived at 5:30 PM on a Friday evening, we were the only patrons in the restaurant.

Flushing is the NYC mecca for Chinese food. It’s at the end of the 7 train line heading east, and it takes about 40 minutes from Manhattan on weekends. Many restaurants and stalls only accept cash, so it’s quite different than being in Manhattan or Long Island City. My partner had a friend that wanted to meet in Flushing to try out Korean BBQ. I thought there would be several near Main Street, but it seems all the decent Korean BBQ places are least a mile east of the Main street subway station.

We had to go to the Upper East to return some items, and of course that allowed us to also explore some restaurants around that area. I recall Mission Ceviche having a stall in the Gainsvoort/Chelsea food hall, but I never actually tried it. They actually have a few locations in the city, and fortunately we were near their Upper East Side location. My partner is a ceviche fanatic, so we thought we’d take a look.