We came here on a date night to do the dinner and jazz thing. We purchased our tickets online, then head over. With the tickets, there’s a required minimum of 1 drink per person if you’re not having dinner, or if you are having dinner, there is a required 1 entree per person sans appetizer.
On this night, it was the Harold Mabern Trio.
The cocktails were ok. It’s been a while, so I don’t quite remember exactly what these were. The red was definitely a spritz of some sort.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Pictured is the cocktail sauce and mignonette. East coast oysters tend to be more briny and salty than west coast, but the best part of this is that it’s simply not as expensive as other places. The average Manhattan east coast oyster price is $3 per.
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. The sangria cocktail at the bottom was alright. Not my choice, but wasn’t bad.
