We came here on a date night to do the dinner and jazz thing. We purchased our tickets online, then head over. With the tickets, there’s a required minimum of 1 drink per person if you’re not having dinner, or if you are having dinner, there is a required 1 entree per person sans appetizer. On this night, it was the Harold Mabern Trio. The cocktails were ok. It’s been a while, so I don’t quite remember exactly what these were.

This little spot closed to the edge of Flatiron is a decent place if you’re into Shanghainese food and are not close to Chinatown. The passion fruit lemonade was good. You can taste the passion fruit, and it mixed well with the lemonade. The chilled marinated cucumbers were also good too although I felt the cucumbers were not marinated long enough. They were crunchy with an OK kick to them.

This is a surprising decent Korean restaurant in the South Village. Unlike Koreatown BBQ restaurants, this place actually has you cooking the meats just like in Los Angeles. The banchan was on the blander side of things. The daikon was a little watery. The kimchi radish was decent but wasn’t as pickled as other Korean places. The broccoli was fine. Lastly, the kimchi was decent but again not as fermented as other places.

This seems to be a new upscaled Chinese restaurant that we accidentally stumbled into. The decor is very modern and has a slight pretentious feel to it. I learned that the restaurant likes to advertise it hand makes basically all the dough. They gave this waffle like starter. It is similar to those red bean cakes but without the red bean. The dumpling sampler had 4 dumplings. This was a special, so I’ll try my best to remember (top left clockwise): some soup dumpling, some squid ink dumpling with gold flakes, another soup dumpling variant, and shu mai with (crab?

This restaurant is a current trendy Thai restaurant that we had to wait a month for our reservations. It’s actually a little hard to spot your first time. It’s basically where people are standing around aimlessly and down the stairs in a very hard to see nook. If there are no people, look for a sign that has an arrow pointing down to the basement. We opted for the garden/patio seating, and luckily the weather was a perfect mid 70s temperature with very little to no breeze.

Close to NYU, this is next door to its parent restaurant Domodomo. This is primarily a rawbar, meaning somewhat affordable raw seafood. The iced green tea is nice for a warm day. The green tea is quite flavorful, but of course if you want it to be sweeter, you can ask for sugar. We ordered a dozen oysters. Essentially 2 of the following: Half Moon (Cape Cod Bay, MA) : sweet, medium salnity, clean finish Wellfleet (Wellfleet Harbor, MA) : briny, creamy, high salinity Savage Harbour (PEI, Canada) : crisp, sweet, medium salinity Chekbooktook (New Brunswick) : buttery, sweet, delicate Duxbury (Duxbury Bay, MA) : briny, sweet, and buttery finish the daily oysters : can’t remember what the waiter said about these other than being the saltiest of the east coast They serve oysters with your choice of 2 condiments: cocktail sauce, mignonette, wasabi lime sorbet, thai chili, and ponzu.

This is a restaurant located close to the end of the Highline. It’s down on 10th ave at the corner. It’s actually next door to its bar. So if you want to visit this place, don’t open the first door on your left. Open the second door. The sour beer on the top was quite good. It had some flavors of a Guinness but obviously with the sour in it.

We were visiting the Morgan Library on a late Sunday afternoon, and this restaurant was close by and on my list. I’ve always been into old school Korean places where the food was centered around non BBQ items such as bossam and kimchi jigae. The egg soup was served as part of the meal. It’s simply tasted of steamed egg with some scallions on top. Pretty straight forward and pretty good.

Patisserie Fouet is another one of those Japanese French style dessert places where they also have a prix fixe (3 desserts). The yuzu jelly was ok. It is not like the panna cotta pictures on Yelp. It tasted like one of those raindrops that had some yuzu flavors in it. I didn’t care too much for it. The yuzu sugar sugar came with yuzu mousse, green tea sponge cake, Japanese yam, and black sesame ice cream.

Vapiano seems like it’s a chained Italian fast eatery. For the NYC location, the front desk gives you a card, and you walk up to a pasta station if you want pasta or a pizza station if you want pizza. You then tell the cook what you want, and they make it fresh in front of you. They ask that you take the card and tap the screen with it to get it charged with what you ordered.