I’ve been deprived of noodles in the city for a number of months now. Sure, there are sometimes where I get some Taiwanese noodles, but I also love soba noodles too. I was around the Columbus Circle area, and I was scouring for some alternative ramen places. This one peaked my interest because their specialty was not ramen but soba also known as buckwheat noodles. Buckwheat noodles are supposed to be pretty healthy for you, and on a summer NYC day like today, it seems like a win when opting for cold buckwheat noodles with a cold dip.

I have always heard of tea rooms, but I never thought much of it. We had heard from friends that they had gone to the Plaza Hotel, across the street from Central Park and had a pleasant experience eating sandwiches and drinking tea. I had looked at reservations before COVID, and it was usually pretty difficult to secure reservations. I did a quick glance and made reservations easily since the city is still slowly, albeit surely, opening up.

My partner saw on their social media that some of their people had raved about this place for lunch. I took a look at the dinner menu here, and it seemed unjustly expensive for what it was. Usually a good indicator of prices starts with oysters. If a restaurant charges $4 for east coast oysters (average price should be around $3), you would expect the restaurant to have higher than usual menu prices. It turns out that the lunch menu prices were way more grounded, and it was a 3 course prix fixe on weekdays.

Le Bernardin is a three Michelin Star restaurant in New York City that primarily deals with seafood. The head chef is Eric Ripert, who is very well known in the higher end spectrum of the culinary world. We actually saw him on the floor with a mask on talking to some of the wait staff. This particular occasion was for a birthday celebration. Our reservation was at 5 PM, and it had to be reserved a month in advance. The spinning doors don’t actually open till 5 PM sharp, so there wasn’t too much of a benefit to arrive before.

For this memorial weekend, we wanted to go somewhere out of town, but we had to cancel plans including non refundable bus passes. I’ve been watching the Cooking Channel as my background noise, and they had an episode of steak. My partner hadn’t been to Keen’s, and I thought this would be a great time to introduce them to it. I had been here back in 2018 for the first time, and it had a very delicious, if not the best, prime rib. Dinner reservations were difficult to make, so we opted for a lunch reservation instead which was quite easy.

Summary

When people say Manhattan has practically endless restaurants, it’s quite true. There’s not enough time, money, and health to try all the different restaurants out there. For this visit into the city, we decided to go after yakitori since that was fairly close around the area we were at. We have had previously been to Torishin, a former Michelin 1-star, so I wanted to show my partner different yakitori places that were less upscaled. This one looked like a good candidate. This restaurant, if it weren’t for the outdoors setup, would’ve been a little difficult to spot because it’s in the basement of a building.

Summary

We were visiting the Edge, which is a touristy spot where you can see the NYC area from 100 floors above, and in this COVID environment, it’s been hard to find some decent outdoor restaurants. We had passed by this place, which is a Jose Andres restaurant, and it seemed interesting. It’s a quasi-indoor place in that you’re eating in the building, but the area feels like you’re in a garage. The garage doors open facing outside, and there are plenty of fans to circulate air. We saw that they spaced out all the tables distantly from each other, so it seemed fine to sit down and eat. This is the Spanish Diner at Mercado Little Spain in the Hudson Yards block.

Summary

For this special outing, Yakitori Torishin has been on my list ever since I moved to New York City. I finally had a chance to try this for the girlfriend’s birthday.

We wanted the regular yakitori experience as opposed to the select counter experience. The reason is that I just couldn’t imagine the value from yakitori at literally double the cost of a regular omakase. They brought us into the back room, and we were still seated in front of the chefs.

Summary

A friend was in town around the Hudson Yards area, and we wanted to look for something around the area. The menu here looked pretty decent, and it was on my bookmarks for quite a while.

The bread came with some type of tomato olive oil medley. It reminded me of bruschetta toppings but more akin to diced tomatoes out of a jar. The sauce itself was alright.

Summary

If you’re around the Rockafeller area and are looking for pretty decent Italian food at a not overly expensive price, this restaurant might be a good candidate. It is located on the 2nd floor of the Nordstrom NYC flagship store near the watches section. We walked in without reservations around 5:30 PM, and we were seated at the bar fairly quickly.

Because Nordstrom doesn’t have the drinks menu online, I’m hoping my memory serves me well. The left is a mai thai, and the right is a mezcal cocktail. The mai thai was doused with passion fruit liqueur which is why I got it in the first place. It wasn’t too strong, and everything tasted very tropically and subtle. The mezcal cocktail had a slight smokey flavor to it. I don’t remember what else was in this though, but it definitely was sweet.