The Modern is a well known 2 star Michelin restaurant that has an appealing tasting menu. Its sibling restaurant, the Bar Room", is located in the same area as the Modern restaurant, but literally is divided by tall gigantic glass panes. The Bar Room has a more casual feel, where there’s music pumping through the speakers, and it feels more bustling like the general NYC city culture. On the other side of the pane is the extravagant tasting menu, which we also visited.

Avra Estiatorio was a restaurant that we wanted to check out for a while now. Because we were going to watch Gutenberg Musical at 8 PM, this fit perfectly for the opportunity. Avra has several locations spread throughout the United States: 3 in Manhattan, 1 in Miami, and 1 in Beverly Hills. It’s a rather posh Greek seafood restaurant, and it’s very similar to all the other upper end ones, such as Limani and Milos.

My partner was able to secure another show lottery near Times Square. Because I work near here and the fact that they have been able to win so many lottery shows, we’re running out of choices for restaurants. We were walking along 44th, and we stumbled onto this restaurant. After looking at the menu and the ability to walk in without reservations, we decided to try out this restaurant, Hunt & Fish Club.

Mari.ne (MariNe) Hand-Roll Bar is similar to KazuNori where it’s simply a “hand roll” bar. The hand rolls are fairly small, but quite delightful and fresh. You can order them in different flavors, and it’s sure to satisfy anyone that enjoys sushi in hand roll format. We were able to walk in at around 5:45 PM on a Monday evening, but we were told that we had to be done by 6:30 PM due to an upcoming reservation.

We decided to checkout a Persian restaurant, that is somewhat close to Central Park and within walkable distance from my work. This is a new restaurant that has been opened for around 3+ months already. In Los Angeles, they have their share of Persian, so it’d be interesting to see how does NYC fare for this cuisine. The restaurant entrance is a little discreet. The door leads to the second floor which is where the restaurant sits.

We were near this area because we stopped by Nordstroms for some shopping. This area is pretty close to the southern side of Central Park, and we’ve almost tapped out all the restaurants here (or so I thought). Luckily my partner has continued to show interest in Italian foods because I love it. I found this restaurant that wasn’t that far from where we were, and it was also offering a 3 course prix fixe restaurant week menu for $45.

Tempura Matsui is a Michelin 1-star restaurant in Manhattan that specializes in tempura omakase. I had previously gone to another tempura omakase at Secchu Yokota. As I said previously, I really enjoy tempura as a whole, so I am very curious how a Michelin Star tempura tasting compares to a hidden gem tasting. Fortunately, my partner went to see a Broadway show, so it gave me the ability to solo dine at this restaurant.

Taiwanese food is one of the types of cuisines that is seldomly found in Manhattan and just simply cannot compare to the San Gabriel Valley in the greater Los Angeles area in California. I asked my partner before a show if they wanted to check this out, and to my surprise they said yes! Normally they are not fond of this type of food, especially when noodles are around. This is not too far from Broadway theaters.

We were near Broadway and 50th to watch the Back to the Future musical, which was actually surprisingly good. After, we had wanted Thai food, but the restaurant was closed briefly. My partner didn’t use the restrooms at the theater, so I scrambled for another option that had a restroom and found this restaurant off of 54th. We were able to walk in without reservations for 2 at around 5:30 PM on a Saturday night.

We had a show to go to around 43rd and 9th Ave, so we decided to look around the Hell’s Kitchen area. In this area from my research, there seems to be some pretty good Thai restaurants that have been here for a bit or are opening up. We had recently gone to LumLum, which focused on more Northern Thai cuisine. Here in Chalong which is on 9th Ave between 51st and 52nd, they are focused on more Southern Thai.