It’s the evening and where could be a good place to get fairly traditional Cantonese style Chinese food? Dim Sum Palace! We originally visited the Midtown location pre-pandemic, and it was pretty decent. Recently, they opened another location in Long Island City in a dense new-aged Chinese area. We’ve been missing Cantonese-style restaurants, especially dim sum, in this very close quartered area of over abundant boba places and spicy cuisines. We were able to walk in without reservations around 5:00 PM on a Saturday without issues. This restaurant is located in the former Brooks 1890 bar next to the Long Island City court house on Jackson Ave.

Summary

This place is basically chirashi haven.

It’s miso soup.

The uni don came with hamachi and spicy tuna and shiso leaf. I wasn’t too much of a fan of the spicy tuna compared to some other places, but it was still pretty good. The spicy tuna had a very particular flavor that was masked of course when you use soy sauce with wasabi. Otherwise, the fish tasted pretty fresh overall. The butter of the sea was delicious.

Summary

This place is located near the James Hotel. They have an outdoors garden that has a decent view.

The chilaquiles was basically 2 eggs, crema, salsa verde, and crispy tortillas. There wasn’t much else here. I thought it was pretty primitive and uninteresting. The salsa was good, but you wish there was some more meats and maybe avocado or something else to give it a little more flavor.

Summary

This is another restaurant on my list to go. I am not crazy about Italian, but I was hungry and wanted something pretty straight forward.

The lasagna bolognese came with ground beef, béchamel, and tomato sauce. The pasta consisted of several very thin sheets with a thin layer of ground beef between each. Careful though, the lasagna was piping hot. It was pretty good, but I think I would’ve preferred more sauce and more cheese as an ode to the normal lasagnas you’d normally get. Otherwise, I think it was pretty good.

Summary

This post is going to be a big one. For our first anniversary, we treated ourselves to a nice French place that I think is generally underrated and under the radar. Gabriel Kreuthers has been something that I’ve always wanted to try, and it’s rated 2 Michelin Stars in 2019. We went bold with the Chef’s Carte Blanche Tasting Menu. There are a total of at least 28 dishes spread through of what they say is 9 courses.

Summary

This little pizza shop is down right at the edge of South/West Village close to a Shake Shack. The panzerottis are like super thin calzones that are frieds as oppose to baked.

The dough that they use here is really tasty. It’s chewy, has a nice bounce, and has a very nice flavor profile to it. The dough definitely has a distinct flavor to it that makes it taste super fresh. They make and fry the panzerotti for each order, so you can be sure it’s super hot when it comes out.

Summary

This little spot closed to the edge of Flatiron is a decent place if you’re into Shanghainese food and are not close to Chinatown.

The passion fruit lemonade was good. You can taste the passion fruit, and it mixed well with the lemonade.

The chilled marinated cucumbers were also good too although I felt the cucumbers were not marinated long enough. They were crunchy with an OK kick to them.

Summary

This is a surprising decent Korean restaurant in the South Village. Unlike Koreatown BBQ restaurants, this place actually has you cooking the meats just like in Los Angeles.

The banchan was on the blander side of things. The daikon was a little watery. The kimchi radish was decent but wasn’t as pickled as other Korean places. The broccoli was fine. Lastly, the kimchi was decent but again not as fermented as other places.

Summary

This seems to be a new upscaled Chinese restaurant that we accidentally stumbled into. The decor is very modern and has a slight pretentious feel to it. I learned that the restaurant likes to advertise it hand makes basically all the dough.

They gave this waffle like starter. It is similar to those red bean cakes but without the red bean.

The dumpling sampler had 4 dumplings. This was a special, so I’ll try my best to remember (top left clockwise): some soup dumpling, some squid ink dumpling with gold flakes, another soup dumpling variant, and shu mai with (crab?) eggs. All the soup dumplings were OK. The skin was thick, but I think with this stuff I still prefer Din Tai Fung or even some places in Flushing. The squid ink dumpling had good flavors, but nothing really tastewise was miles beyond what you can get at some other Chinese restaurants. The shu mai definitely tasted a little more “upscale” but not that much more mind blowing.

Summary

This restaurant is a current trendy Thai restaurant that we had to wait a month for our reservations. It’s actually a little hard to spot your first time. It’s basically where people are standing around aimlessly and down the stairs in a very hard to see nook. If there are no people, look for a sign that has an arrow pointing down to the basement.

We opted for the garden/patio seating, and luckily the weather was a perfect mid 70s temperature with very little to no breeze.