August 23, 2019
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.
August 20, 2019
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.
August 18, 2019
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.
August 9, 2019
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.
August 9, 2019
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.
August 4, 2019
This place is near Stone Street down in the Financial District. I’m always down for a good cheesesteak, and yeah I also butcher the Philly style by ordering provolone over cheeze whiz. The steak special comes with homemade broccoli rabe, provolone cheese, and I also added hot cherry peppers. These are the cherry peppers that are pickled with a nice kick to it. I thought this sandwich was pretty good, though I still prefer Federoff’s in Williamsburg.
August 3, 2019
We were looking for a decent steak place that was walkable from where we were. The best steak house in my opinion in the city is Keen’s Steakhouse, so expectations were set pretty low. This venue is fairly nice. It’s close to Smith and Wollensky and located inside some hotel. This was one of the few steakhouses at this time that had hardly any people, so one can only think that this place wouldn’t be that good.
August 2, 2019
This bar / restaurant is located on the 6th floor in the Ravel Hotel in Long Island City. The view is fairly nice as you can see Midtown from the east, but it is not stellar since it sits slightly lower than the Queensborough bridge and there are 2 smoke stack obstructions as you look towards the Empire State building. We ordered some bottles of Rose and an entree.
July 28, 2019
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.
July 22, 2019
This is easily walkable from the 5th Ave flagship Apple store for some decent casual Korean food. The banchan comes with the bulgogi bento box below. It’s basically that white pickled daikon, kimchi radish, and kimchi. Just a note that their kimchi here is super sour compared to other places I’ve been to. The bulgogi bento box was ok. It came with japchae (Korean sweet potato noodles), bulgogi, fish cake, kimchi daikon, and what tasted similar to tempura potato of some sort.