Clinton Street Baking Company is a very popular and well known destination for breakfast for decades. Word of mouth has mentioned that their pancakes and breakfast items have been delightful to eat. My party woke up early to park in line before the restaurant opening at 9 AM on a Saturday morning. It was definitely a struggle for me and my partner to arrive here from where we live, considering how annoying the subway schedules are on weekends. Right when they open, we were about the 6th small party in line, so we were able to be seated pretty easily.

My partner had another theater show to go to, so I was tasked for looking something near the Theater District. We were watching some random TV show, and they showed lasagna. I don’t remember the context, but my partner wanted that. As we’re still exploring the Hell’s Kitchen area, I ended up finding this restaurant that we were able to walk in since the reservation system doesn’t work at all.

This restaurant is a fairly close walk east of Rockafeller Center. I stumbled onto this restaurant as I was looking for something new and solo-friendly for a Saturday. It turns out that this restaurant has a Friday/Saturday prime rib prix-fixe menu, which has my attention. For $65 per person, you get 3 courses: a caesar salad, prime rib with french fries, and a choice of dessert. That doesn’t seem like a bad deal to me. We were able to make a reservation for 5 PM on a Friday night with no hassle.

We haven’t really explored much from the middle of Central Park and up. My partner’s friends live in East Harlem, which according to Google maps, begins East 96th and goes north. They chose this neighborhood Thai restaurant, Chu Ros Thai, that they adore and highly recommend. We basically took the local 6 train northbound from the N/W junction, which took about 20 minutes to go up. For a party of 4, we were able to walk in without reservations at around 4 PM on a Saturday evening.

Vinyl Steakhouse has been a steak place that I’ve been wanting to go for quite some time. The Flatiron area has been experiencing many new restaurant openings post pandemic, and this was one of them that was appealing. Similar to Turntable Chicken Jazz, this restaurant has a load of vinyls on display, and it plays music as requested. We were able to walk in on a Friday around 6:30 PM without reservations for 2. They seated us at the front of the restaurant.

Frevo was a restaurant that has been on my partner’s list for some time. When we went to Atomix Bar, the chef had also highly recommended the restaurant. The head chef Franco Sampogna is Brazilian and comes from the region that my partner is from. The entrance to the restaurant has a very tiny art gallery, and it’s been recognized on the Michelin Guide with 1 star. We were able to reserve this a few weeks back without any issues.

Bad Roman is located in the Columbus Circle mall on the third floor. The team that created this restaurant also helped create Don Angie, Quality Eats, Quality Italian, other “Quality Branded” restaurants, Zou Zou’s, and more. There was a lot of social media firepower with this restaurant because of how retro it looked in vibe and style. We were able to book a seating pretty easily for 2 at 5:30 PM.

Ambiance & Service

The restaurant is very bustling, with lots of noise and all types of clientele. You will find many on their date nights, and you will find big parties celebrating something as if they were celebrities. The noise level is pretty loud, and you are seated pretty close to other tables. The music is also on the louder side too, but it wasn’t uncomfortably loud. At times it was hard to hear our server.

The Grill was always something on my bucket list not only for a prime rib trolley, but also for Baked Alaska, my favorite dessert. Every place makes this different, so it’s fun to see different interpretations. In addition, this restaurant has always been difficult to get reservations timely, so we were able to book this a few weeks out for 5:30 PM on a Friday evening. The restaurant is located in the Seagram building, and the entrance is located off of 52nd St. You can’t miss it because there’s a carpet laid out.

The nice part about Manhattan is you can always find something and somewhere to eat, no matter where you are in the city. On this brisk, cold night, my partner was running errands in Soho, so I was tasked with looking up something. Of course, it takes me about 30 minutes to find something, and Osteria Morini is what we ended up on. Even though they had restaurant week menus, we decided to just order off the regular menu.

It’s been difficult to find decent Vietnamese restaurants in general in NYC. A lot of them just don’t get the broth in pho right. This one seemed like a more upscale version of general Vietnamese cuisine, and I saw it open less than a year ago on Yelp. It was tough at first to walk in a few times, so fortunately the hype subsided, and I was able to get an easy reservation on Friday at 5:30 PM for 2 people.