Per recommendations for dessert after dinner at Momofuku Ko, we visited Chikalicious. All I know is this place is busy normally with lines outside the door. My buddy and I visited it on a Thursday night, and to our surprise it wasn’t overly busy at all. In fact we got there right at 9:30 PM. There were 2 seats at the counter right in front of the Chef Chika. Yes, Chika is her name.

Expensive for what it is.

Overrated. I don’t get why people think this is good. Rather go to Shake Shack or something else.

Ok spot.

Interesting decor. They have a shark drink where it has a bunch of blood on it. Notice a bunch of people bring their dates here.

Was a Mezcal speak easy place when I went. Decent mezcal based cocktails. It had a change of ownership recently.

Like Ippudo, this was supposedly another must-try ramen place that was highly raved by the NYC food scene. I got to this spot right when they opened, and there was already a small line outside in this frigid cold weather. Inside, they have counter top seating for 1-2 people as well as a some picnic table setups for larger parties. There was no David Chang spotted here, but how was the food?

One of my goals was to knock out some popular Momofuku establishments. SSAM was one of them. The SSAM Bar is on the San Pellegrino world’s 50 best restaurants list at the time of this writing. The service style is basically family style, so there are a lot of sharing plates. Portions are small for large groups probably, but decent sized for small groups 2-4. The decor has a very modern feel to it.

I had a pleasure of visiting Luke’s Lobster in East Village when I traveled to NYC from Los Angeles. What you see here is the “Taste of Main” sample platter. It consists of: half lobster sandwich, half shrimp sandwich, half crab sandwich, 2 crab claws, 1 bag of chips, and 1 bottle of pop. The only comparison I have for this is The Lobsta Truck here in Los Angeles. For those that don’t know, it basically is a food truck that serves lobster sandwiches that are pretty small.