We were craving for an early Italian dinner before seeing a Broadway show. Osteria Delbianco actually has two locations: one on 49th and another closer to Bryant Park. Both locations are really easy to get to. We were able to walk in without reservations at around 5 PM on a Friday early evening. The one appeal to me about this restaurant was that it seemed like a local Italian restaurant, and these typically can be hit or miss.

My partner had another theater show to go to, so I was tasked for looking something near the Theater District. We were watching some random TV show, and they showed lasagna. I don’t remember the context, but my partner wanted that. As we’re still exploring the Hell’s Kitchen area, I ended up finding this restaurant that we were able to walk in since the reservation system doesn’t work at all.

This restaurant is a fairly close walk east of Rockafeller Center. I stumbled onto this restaurant as I was looking for something new and solo-friendly for a Saturday. It turns out that this restaurant has a Friday/Saturday prime rib prix-fixe menu, which has my attention. For $65 per person, you get 3 courses: a caesar salad, prime rib with french fries, and a choice of dessert. That doesn’t seem like a bad deal to me.

Bad Roman is located in the Columbus Circle mall on the third floor. The team that created this restaurant also helped create Don Angie, Quality Eats, Quality Italian, other “Quality Branded” restaurants, Zou Zou’s, and more. There was a lot of social media firepower with this restaurant because of how retro it looked in vibe and style. We were able to book a seating pretty easily for 2 at 5:30 PM.

The Grill was always something on my bucket list not only for a prime rib trolley, but also for Baked Alaska, my favorite dessert. Every place makes this different, so it’s fun to see different interpretations. In addition, this restaurant has always been difficult to get reservations timely, so we were able to book this a few weeks out for 5:30 PM on a Friday evening. The restaurant is located in the Seagram building, and the entrance is located off of 52nd St.

If you visit sample sales frequently, there are 2 nearby the Nomad and Koreatown area. Because the sample sales close at 7 PM sharp, it compels you to look for food during core dinner hours. Fortunately if you go shop right after work and finish around 6 PM on weekdays, foot traffic to restaurants won’t be too bad. Olle is a Korean restaurant about a block away from the sample sale store on 5th Ave.

My partner had won some tickets to watch Appropriate on Broadway starring Sarah Paulson. The show starts at 8, but we had to pick up the will-call tickets by 7:30. I saw this Japanese small eatery was nearby the theater on 46th St, and I thought this would be a decent restaurant to try out since there’s a lot of little things we can order. We were able to walk in on a Saturday evening at around 5:30 PM before it got busy.

It was raining on this gloomy Friday, and we wanted to eat somewhere close to Rockafeller. I recalled we had tried to walk into this restaurant on prior days with no success. I looked them up on OpenTable and saw that they had openings throughout the night. We figured it was worth a shot to try to walk in, and we found success. We were seated next to the door inside a glass section of the restaurant towards the front at around 6:30 PM.

This restaurant is from a renowned Korean chef (Ok Dongsik) and is a 6 time Michelin Seoul Bib Gourmand restaurant. We were nearby at a popular sample sale, and this was on my list for a while to checkout. The menu is very small and is straight forward. We were able to walk in at around 6:30 PM on a Wednesday evening without reservation. They turn over seats fairly quickly even though there can easily be a line of people waiting.

Normally during every Thanksgiving Thursday, I cook for my partner some poultry thing whether it be quail or turkey breast. This year we decided to relieve me the duties of frantically looking for materials and cooking for 6 hours for the 2 of us. Marea was closed for a few months, and we’ve always had this on our list. Because it just reopened in October, I decided to pursue the Thanksgiving tasting menu.