Tonight was another venture out to the area around Vernon Blvd. There are so many restaurants here to try. This one here is an Italian restaurant near Gantry park. There are a lot of cars for some reason compared to other parts of Long Island City. The restaurant was able to accommodate us as a pair of walk-ins at around 6:30 PM on a Saturday evening easily.
Tony’s Di Napoli is a NYC Italian American restaurant that has been around for a number of decades. It’s probably comparable to Buca Di Beppo or Maggiano, but it is less of a domestic chain than a NYC chain. They serve family style portions, and they have both half and full sizes of many of their pastas. This particular location is located in Times Square, and normally I shy away from this. So how did it go?
Astoria in the last few months has seen an uptick on Asian restaurants that aren’t fusion and are more authentic. This one just happens to be on Broadway near my partner’s old neighborhood. We’ve been around this area before going to eat Shanghainese food. Today, it’s for noodles.
This was the braised beef tendon. It was marinated in chili oil, garlic, scallions, sesame oil, and other things that I probably missed. It’s a very traditional cold appetizer dish. The beef tendon was actually quite crunchy but cooked properly and thoroughly. I’ve been to Chinese restaurants in NYC where the tendons were hard as rock. But here, it’s pretty clear that it was cooked thoroughly.
As usual, the North Williamsburg area is a pretty hot spot for restaurants to eat at. I had lived in this area for about 2 years, but I still come back time to time to get a haircut. Usually after the haircut, I’ll check out something. I’ve been looking for a decent pho place that is close enough to me such that I don’t have to travel to Flushing.
Typically when we walk north on 6th ave towards Trader Joe’s for groceries, we stop by Cava across the street for a snack. We saw this seemingly new interesting restaurant opened with no one in it. The space is very bright, modern, and definitely has a Japanese cafe-chic vibe to it. This dry “ramen” place just opened along 6th Avenue between 20th and 21st Street.
This is another one of those “pick X of this and Y of that” type of restaurant except the theme here is Japanese.
What’s nice about Thai food is they are rarely bad, and they are very consistent even at different restaurants. We were in Cobble Hill after an errand, and this place was relatively close by and open for a late afternoon dinner.
We got 2 different Thai teas. The first was the regular Thai tea and the other is Lychee Thai tea. Both were pretty good. The lychee might be sweet for some, but it tastes literally like the fruit.
Looking on Yelp, we found that this new Argentine restaurant opened up on Vernon Blvd pretty recently in Long Island City. The menu has a lot of interesting and affordable meat dishes. It’s great that this street is opening a lot of cool restaurants of various cuisines. It appears they have a patio in the back that would be pretty awesome once the weather warms up. I can imagine this place being a super popular hot spot in the foreseeable future.
It seems when it comes to hot pot, East Village is a thriving destination. Usually people try to go to 99 Favor Taste because it also has grillable BBQ meats in addition to hot pots. When people don’t have reservations and are quoted a 2 hour wait time, the next logical option is to look for another hot pot place which just happens to be this place since it’s a few streets down.
A friend was in town, and I saw that Tim Ho was near their hotel. This place was always on my list to try given that it had received Michelin recognition at its Hong Kong location. Given I’ve eaten at numerous dim sum places already, they tout themselves as the dim sum specialists, so I already have high expectations.
I don’t remember the drink on the left, but the right was some type of mango cococnut slush. It was pretty good as it wasn’t too sweet.
Pho vietnamese restaurants are generally pretty scarce in the city compared to Los Angeles. If you do find one, they usually don’t give you all the fixins and are timid about their offerings. In Los Angeles, I used to go to a restaurant called Phorage pretty frequently where their broth was very rich, and their meats were rare but tender. So how would this compare?
We started off with thai tea and matcha thai. The primary difference other than the higher cost is that the matcha thai tea has a bunch of matcha powder that kind of counters the sweetness of the thai tea by making it more dull but in a good way. It was actually pretty interesting comparing the 2.