Victor’s Cafe is fairly close to Times Square, but not quite in the Theater District. It’s located on 52nd St near 7th ave, and it has had a steady stream of patrons over the last couple years. What is interesting about this restaurant is that the menu is fairly straight forward, and most of the visitors are people referred by past patrons, including myself. I’m not a fan of Cuban food in general, but this restaurant’s food was surprisingly pleasant.

Cool speak easy spot right next to Bathtub Gin. Seems to be Cuban driven. It has a very jazzy speak easy feel to it. The theme of the menu is pretty cool. On Wednesdays, they have a live cuban band. The bartenders can craft drinks based on what you’re looking for. I think weekdays are probably the best to come here. The music on the speakers is good and isn’t loud, and you can actually hear people.

Astoria is not really a place known for having typical Shanghainese food. I always think of it as having more latin and mediterranean influences to those respective demographics in the area. This restaurant though was surprisingly pretty decent for this area. The drunken chicken I normally don’t find in many restsaurants. Here, it’s not as good as my cousin’s or my mother’s version as it’s WAY too salty, chicken pieces don’t appear cut right, and it doesn’t seem like it was marinated well.

The food here was surprisingly decent. I usually don’t expect many places in Midtown East to be good, let alone Asian ethnic foods. We ordered a pineapple Mocktail and a glass of Hite, which is nothing to write home about. The banchan here was pretty good, although portion size is on the smaller side. You can ask for additional banchan as needed. Here you got kimchi, mixed salad, jalapenos, pickled cauliflower, pickled daikon cubes, and pickled daikon slices.

The vibe here is pretty cool if you’re into old school jazz environments. The walls have a load of records and lots of old music devices. It does get a little noisy, and sometimes people eat really slow to create a wait. It’s not too different than other typical Korean bar/chicken joints where they have lots of alcohol and Korean bar foods. The drinks were ok. Started off with a passionfruit lemonade.

This is located in the backside of Chelsea Market along 14th Street. Basically walk towards Tippler, and it’d be on your right side. Can’t really miss it. It seems to be a semi-throwback to Baja style fish tacos. I got shrimp ceviche, 2 fish tacos, and 1 spicy shrimp taco. I wanted the fish ceviche, but they were out for whatever reason. The shrimp ceviche was pretty good, although I’m not too much of a fan of it being put on a big tostada shell.

This is a very clean sushi spot close to the Broadway subway station off the yellow N and W line. Instead of going all sushi, I decided to mix it up a little with standard Japanese snacks over straight up sushi cut rolls, sorta. The sea snails were cooked in a dashi broth, and were pretty tasty. I think my piece wasn’t cleaned entirely properly because there was some grit, but it tasted ok.

I’ve walked by here many times, but I’ve never actually ate here until now. One of our guests loves this place because of the burger. The prime beef tartare was pretty good. It definitely was tender and tasted like good quality beef. The rotisserie chicken was really tender. If I had to dock it points, it’d be for how salty the sauce and everything was. Also, it was oily too.

I’m not a fan of brunch at all, so this was the first restaurant in the area I was in that seemed interesting to me. I completely forgot it was Easter Sunday, but luckily their prixe fix menu had all the regulars on it. The bread was nothing to write home about. It came slightly on the cold side. The escargots de bourgogne in baby potatoes were actually pretty good.

The cookie dough here is pretty sweet. Tried multiple flavors, but all of them are all pretty sweet. I also used some of the batter and baked some cookies. They turned out ok, though no different than if you to were make regular cookies. One scoop by the way makes about 5 ok sized cookies. Honestly, I thought the one of the better things to get was not the dough itself, but the ice cream sandwich.