NYC Tastes

Yesterday we hit up the first night of the Gotham Imbiber Cask Ale Festival over at Chelsea Piers. We knew we would be drinking lots of strong beers throughout the night so we started out by ordering some good beer food. And there is nothing better than some big salty hot pretzels to go with the suds. Mr. T and I have been to Chelsea Piers a bunch of times, usually in the summer, to sit out on the patio. While the food on their menu isn't fantastic, the pretzels consistently blow us away. They're so big and buttery! And come with some melted processed cheese for dipping. Yum!! As a special for the beer tasting they offered a cheese plate. This came with 3 different cheeses of which I enjoyed the cheddar the best. It had a smokey flavor that went really well with the stouts we were drinking. Now how about that cask beer! Here is just one side of the menu. They had 39 casks all together and quite a diverse amount. We tried a bunch but these were the two winners in my book. First ...

I had always heard about a delivery service for fresh baked cookies down by NYU and thought that was a great idea. I remember many a night, up late cramming for tests in college and craving some sort of sugar. The company was actually started by some undergrads in Pennsylvania and the business has just grown from there. What a great story! So when I heard last week that Insomnia cookies opened their own store, I ran down and ordered four different cookie to try out. The cookies are fresh baked so they came out hot and ready to go. I was planning to wait until after dinner to eat them, but who could wait with hot cookies! So I bit into the M&M chocolate chip cookie first because it was literally oozing melty sweet chocolate all over the bag! The cookie had a nice crisp outside and warm gooey center. I enjoyed this cookie. The m&m to dough ratio was good and it was a nice size. This is ended up being the winner of the bunch. The next was the Chocolate Chunk. This cookie was also ...

So my Easter wasn't too exciting this year. I woke up on Sunday not feeling well and so we cancelled our family plans. I had gone down to Black Hound bakery the day before to pick up some nice Easter treats. How cute do these look? The one on the right is a Meyer Lemon Easter Egg cake and the one on the right is their Spring Strawberries & Cream cake. I had planned to bring these treats for Mr T's family to enjoy but since we knew we wouldn't see them for a while we decided to enjoy them ourselves late Easter night. And they were fantastic!! The Egg was filled to the brim with Meyer Lemon filling that was zesty, cool and refreshing. We gobbled this up before I got a shot. The strawberries and Cream was just as good as the lemon. Look at those big chunks of strawberry! The cake itself as really moist and light with layers of vanilla cream in between. The white chocolate icing was my favorite part. It wasn't too heavy or sugary and came with some vanilla cake crumbs o...

We stopped by a new Irish bar last Saturday down in the LES to celebrate St. Patrick's day without the crowds. Luckily the Sixth Ward was exactly what we were looking for. After a day of mostly lounging and shopping we walked in around 5:30 and the place was just beginning to get filled up. We sat down and ordered some Buffalo Wings and beers. These puppies came out steaming!!! They were right out of the fryer hot and crispy just like they make them in Buffalo. The sauce was a little tangy, sweet almost, not like a typical hot wing sauce. I almost want to say it tasted a little like honey BBQ but really good. The wings were a good size for NYC as well and not super fatty. A better than average wing I would say. They also had a decent selection of beers including a Bluepoint Blueberry (sign of Spring!), Weinstephaner Hefeweizen and Red Hook IPA. The Sixth Ward itself was pretty cool. The inside reminded me a little bit of a hotel lounge with the back lights on the walls but the roun...

So I took the train up to Chappaqua on Sunday to visit with one of my best friends and partake in the Hudson Valley restaurant week. My friend picked me up at the station and we decided to go out for some pre-dinner drinks and catch up a little bit. Mr. T grew up around this area and I remembered going to a great bar called Peabody’s back when I used to come visit him. I looked it up when I was home and sure enough, they still had a website and everything so we decided to go there. Well Peabody’s apparently changed it’s name to the Quaker Hill Tavern and we must have drove past it about 5 times when finally we figured out that’s what it was. The place itself is still the same. Your typical Irish bar with nice bartenders and a great neighborhood vibe. It’s nice because it’s so close to the train station as well. I asked the bartender when they changed their name and he said about 3 years ago! I wish they would change their website as well! I do love their beer glasses though. An...

Last weekend we got to experience a very special treat. Some non-NY pizza that was actually good! Have a look: Where is this Pizza from you may ask? St. Louis! It’s from a place called Imo’s Pizza which is actually extremely popular out there. One of our friends is from St Louis and she decided to order some half baked pies and have them shipped up here for us to enjoy. How awesome is that. She actually used to work at Imo’s growing up so we had a true Imo’s experience. We started the night off first with another St. Louis culinary delight. Some toasted ravioli’s. These beef filled raviolis were deep fried squares of deliciousness!! I found them to be a lot more satisfying for dipping in the marinara sauce than mozzarella sticks. They kept their crunch and while the inside was hot there was no tongue burning that usually accompanies my mozz stick eating. I had brought along a growler of the Southampton Black Lager from whole Foods bowery This is basically a German style schw...

It was Mrs. T’s birthday this past week so we all got together for dinner at Allen & Delancey. Our reservations were for 6:00 and we walked in as the first people in the restaurant. Now I had been in here once before but only for a drink at the bar. The back is absolutely stunning. I loved walking through the heavy red velvet curtains to reveal exposed brick and a ton of candles! Incredibly romantic. I would describe the style as refined bohemian. If that could be a style :) Now it was too dark to take pictures of anything but here is a picture of the inside courtesy of the Allen and Delancey website. We placed our order while sipping some great cocktails and then our bread arrived. Oh my goodness the bread is divine! They said it was baked to order right out of the oven. They gave us two pieces, one regular white roll and one bacon and sage. I ripped into the bacon and sage and steam wafted up into the air. The top had a nice crispy coating of salt and butter while the in...

We woke up this past Sunday a little too late because of the spring ahead change in time. The plan was to go to Chinatown for dim sum but we figured it was already too late and most of the good stuff would be gone. Instead we headed down to Chinatown Brasserie where we knew we could get some good food, albeit more expensive. We walked in around 1:30 and the place was packed! The entire waiting area was filled and there were no empty table. Luckily there were a couple of open stools at the bar. I decided to try out one of their cocktails and ordered a Bellini martini. This was little too sweet for my tastes. There was way too much peach puree and not enough prosecco. I wouldn't order one of these here again. For starters we got some pan fried crab, shrimp and spinach dumplings. These were a little bland. I was expecting a little more flavor from the crab but there was hardly any inside. I'm not usually a big fan of the sauce they send it with so that didn't help. I thought t...

So I have been on hiatus the last week for various reasons. First being the craziness of my work environment lately and my inability to focus on anything but that. Second Quite a busy weekend filled with awesome food like St Louis style pizza, and meals at Allen & Delancy and Chinatown Brasserie which I will post about soon. But third and most time consuming has been my plight to get a reservation at the new Momofuku Ko. Every second not doing the two above things have been spent hitting refresh on the website. I know I'm a loser and now I am even more of one because I was away from a computer all day and the site went live...No Resy for me :( I leave you with a picture of a fancy New York City restaurant bathroom (guess which one) because I don't feel like talking about food right now.

I don't know anyone who doesn't love a good cupcake. Cupcakes always remind me of my youth. I think of birthday parties at school, where parents would send in their kids with frosted delights to celebrate another year. The best part was seeing what kind of cupcakes came in! Plain old yellow with chocolate frosting..okay A funfetti cake with raspberry frosting- Awesome!! You would be a super cool kid for a day if your mom sent in something covered in sprinkles or maybe stuffed into an ice cream cone! I think that's why when I saw these cupcakes I was super excited. Wow! Look at all those chocolate chips! And could that be...peanut butter icing as well!!! This doesn't look like anything my mom made! But wait- what's that! A Lime Green Cupcake with Vanilla sprinkles! This must be the best birthday party ever! I bite in, expecting a rush of flavor like a Reese's from hell and instead get a bland artificial peanut taste atop an okay cake that needed a little more but...

Mr T had to work all day Saturday so I was on my own. I spent the morning shopping at Trader Joe's and doing various errands that I felt like I needed to get done. Once I was finished with everything I came home and realized it wasn't even noon! What the hell was I going to do with myself all day! I happened to have NY1 on and they did a piece on the Plaza Hotel reopening today. It was like a message sent from heaven! I would go and check out the new hotel! So I grabbed the train and headed uptown to the Plaza. I decided to make a pit stop first at Fika since it was only a block away. I was super excited for my favorite macchiato in the city but unfortunately it was kind of gross. There was a new barista working and I'm not sure what she did but my macchiato was pretty bad. This kind of thing makes me nervous. I told a lot of people about Fika and how much I love it. I really hope no one else goes and gets a bad brew. Oh well..in every one's life a little bad coffee mus...