Tap Nyc

Summary

This is a little quaint Brazilian breakfast-ish shop near 72nd Street close to Strawberry Fields. Their specialty is tapioca, açai, and pão (i.e. TAP). Many of their main products are gluten free, for those that really care about that. The Brazilian tapioca can be interpreted to be a crepe, but other than the shape, the texture isn’t really like a crepe at all.

The pão de queijo is basically cheese balls. These are much bigger than what you would get at a typical Brazilian restaurant. They taste similar to it and were quite tasty.

The carnitas has housemade skirt steak, mozzarella, tomatoes, arugula, and red onions. The tapioca here is different than what I’m used to. I’ve always thought tapioca would be a rice pudding texture, but this one definitely was more of a grainy cornmeal texture. Each bite of it reminded me of Gotham Pizza’s crust. This was pretty good, albeit pretty rich with salt and flavor. You can imagine the carnitas were also layered in a slightly thick sauce similar to BBQ.

The anytime has Brazilian white cheese (queijo coalho), tomatoes, and oregano. This one was actually quite bland. The white cheese wasn’t salty at all, and you’d hope the sweetness of the tomatoes would help carry it. Perhaps part of the problem was I ate the carnitas before this one, so I should’ve started with this one first before carnitas.

The baby açai was very delicious although somewhat sweeter than expected. We got this with granola, strawberries, and coconut shavings. The combination of all this pretty much complements the really hot humid day.

Final Verdict

In the end, I thought this place was pricey, but it was pretty decent. It’s definitely a good stop for some breakfast/lunch or to complement the hot day if you are near Central Park’s Strawberry Garden.

Yelp Jabs

The guy ringing me up was all smiles, but the woman making my matcha cappuccino couldn’t have been bothered to acknowledge me or smile. I usually don’t care too much about this, but the difference was stark.

Don’t forget to smile at this Elitist when you meet them because they don’t care about your smile but will rate you poorly if you don’t smile. Hypocrisy at its finest.

Not a great experience here. I had their gluten free crepe with lox cream cheese and first off it was way overpriced at $15. The crepe tasted like cardboard. I added a star because the filling was ok.

That’s because it’s not a French crepe. It’s Brazilian tapioca.