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.

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.

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.

We were visiting the Morgan Library on a late Sunday afternoon, and this restaurant was close by and on my list. I’ve always been into old school Korean places where the food was centered around non BBQ items such as bossam and kimchi jigae. The egg soup was served as part of the meal. It’s simply tasted of steamed egg with some scallions on top. Pretty straight forward and pretty good.

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 place is near Stone Street down in the Financial District. I’m always down for a good cheesesteak, and yeah I also butcher the Philly style by ordering provolone over cheeze whiz. The steak special comes with homemade broccoli rabe, provolone cheese, and I also added hot cherry peppers. These are the cherry peppers that are pickled with a nice kick to it. I thought this sandwich was pretty good, though I still prefer Federoff’s in Williamsburg.

We were looking for a decent steak place that was walkable from where we were. The best steak house in my opinion in the city is Keen’s Steakhouse, so expectations were set pretty low. This venue is fairly nice. It’s close to Smith and Wollensky and located inside some hotel. This was one of the few steakhouses at this time that had hardly any people, so one can only think that this place wouldn’t be that good.

This bar / restaurant is located on the 6th floor in the Ravel Hotel in Long Island City. The view is fairly nice as you can see Midtown from the east, but it is not stellar since it sits slightly lower than the Queensborough bridge and there are 2 smoke stack obstructions as you look towards the Empire State building. We ordered some bottles of Rose and an entree.