Cafe Zaffri has been opened for just a week and are going through an early preview of their menu. The executive Chef Mary Attea heads the menu by tapping into her Lebanese roots and incorporating Levantine flavors into a modern menu. Along with the Chef, owners Jennifer and Nicole Vitagliano also came from The Musket Room. We were able to make a reservation for Valentine’s Day at 5:30 PM just a few days before because it hasn’t yet been fully discovered by the populous.

I’ve been to Tsurutontan a few times already in various locations including Union Square and Midtown next to Rockafeller Center. When this Japan udon chain first opened in Manhattan a few years ago, there was a massive line because it was the first international location in the USA. The food was outstanding back then, and now it’s gone down a little in quality but still pretty good. This restaurant is known for having mammoth sized udon bowls which will most definitely satiate your appetite.

I had stumbled drunk here back in 2018 not realizing it was a Michelin restaurant. Fortunately, it was on our list to come back to have a more proper dinner where our memory would still function. Our friends wanted a taste of a Michelin type of experience, and in lieu of a tasting menu, we opted for a more shareable format. Reservations are fairly easy to come by, so on a Sunday night, the restaurant wasn’t super full at 5 PM.

I had been here several years ago, and it hasn’t changed much at all. This is a Korean bar type restaurant in Union Square with a myriad of different Korean foods including noodles, rice, buns, etc. The last time I was here, I had ordered a bunch of side dishes and had wrote down typical Korean American bar food. This time around, we decided to try out Korean BBQ. The staff led us up the stairs where there were many tables with BBQ grills in them.

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?

Patisserie Fouet is another one of those Japanese French style dessert places where they also have a prix fixe (3 desserts). The yuzu jelly was ok. It is not like the panna cotta pictures on Yelp. It tasted like one of those raindrops that had some yuzu flavors in it. I didn’t care too much for it. The yuzu sugar sugar came with yuzu mousse, green tea sponge cake, Japanese yam, and black sesame ice cream.

Vapiano seems like it’s a chained Italian fast eatery. For the NYC location, the front desk gives you a card, and you walk up to a pasta station if you want pasta or a pizza station if you want pizza. You then tell the cook what you want, and they make it fresh in front of you. They ask that you take the card and tap the screen with it to get it charged with what you ordered.

This ramen place is near NYU and Union Station, so it’s very accessible. The spicy miso ramen comes with ox bones and marrow broth, spicy miso garlic base, bean sprouts, roasted corn, toasted nori, naruto fishcake, soy braised beef, scallions, and thick wavy noodle. THe broth is super rich, far beyond what I was expecting. It’s not spicy per se, but the soup doesn’t go down super smooth for me.

The croque monsieur was mediocre at best.

Good old boys bar. Think jazzy-ish. Nice place.