A friend was in town, and I saw that Tim Ho was near their hotel. This place was always on my list to try given that it had received Michelin recognition at its Hong Kong location. Given I’ve eaten at numerous dim sum places already, they tout themselves as the dim sum specialists, so I already have high expectations. I don’t remember the drink on the left, but the right was some type of mango cococnut slush.

Pho vietnamese restaurants are generally pretty scarce in the city compared to Los Angeles. If you do find one, they usually don’t give you all the fixins and are timid about their offerings. In Los Angeles, I used to go to a restaurant called Phorage pretty frequently where their broth was very rich, and their meats were rare but tender. So how would this compare? We started off with thai tea and matcha thai.

Normally we don’t care about brunches, but this restaurant was surprisingly good and not too expensive. Located in West Village near the “Friends” place and some touristy spots, this is a very quaint and small shop. If I recall, it only has like at most 5 tables with counters spread throughout the place. This place is small, so set your expectations accordingly. We ordered a glass of orange juice and a One Night Stand.

For this special outing, Yakitori Torishin has been on my list ever since I moved to New York City. I finally had a chance to try this for the girlfriend’s birthday. We wanted the regular yakitori experience as opposed to the select counter experience. The reason is that I just couldn’t imagine the value from yakitori at literally double the cost of a regular omakase. They brought us into the back room, and we were still seated in front of the chefs.

Korean BBQ in NYC is often straight forward. If you want to eat it, you go to Koreatown for a safe bet. If you go away from Koreatown, you risk eating somewhere that may not satisfy that lust. Perhaps the meat would not be as good, or the side dishes would be awful. Fortunately this place in Chelsea was actually pretty decent. I definitely want to preface that the ventilation in this restaurant is not good despite the ducts over the grills, so your clothes will smell.

French dips, let alone good ones, are pretty nonexistent in NYC. I’ve had a good one up in Upper West Side at Jacob’s Pickles, but other that I usually get my cravings by making my own. We just got out of watching the movie theater, and we were reasonably close to this new location. The chef used to work as an executive chef at 4 Charles Prime Rib in the East Village, and they picked a fantastic location on St.

This is one of those once in a lifetime opportunities that we wanted to take advantage of. This would be our first (and maybe last) trip to Chicago, and I wanted to go all out. The night before, we had gone to The Smyth, which was amazing. Tonight we will be going to Alinea, which is Grant Achatz’s restaurant, for The Gallery multicourse meal. We found out about Grant from Netflix shows and his cameo appearances on Master Chef.

I hadn’t done a lot of research for this restaurant other than two things: look for a nice restaurant in Chicago that is Michelin starred and the menu looks good. There were many other Chicago fancy restaurants I could’ve picked from, but looking at the example set menu, this looked like something up my alley. It wasn’t too strict on a direction, and it looked like one of those “we take ourselves seriously but not so seriously” type of restaurant, such as Blanca in NYC.

There are many locations of this pizza chain in Chicago. I’ve had Chicago deep dish before but it’s been a while. I thought this was a safe bet, and it reminded me of how cool eating outside of NYC could be. The regular order of chicken buffalo boneless wings was pretty good. Nothing crazy about it except price point was cheap, and it was good. The batter was actually crispy and not soggy.

We actually have eaten here before, but we totally forgot to take pictures and document. From the best recollection, we remembered this place as being one of our favorite Brazilian restaurants in NYC. So we decided to visit this again to document. The maracuja caipirinha we recalled being really good our first time doing. Ordered it again, and it was nothing but a disappointment. The tartness of the passion fruit tasted sour and borderlinen rotten.