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Showing posts from May, 2008

Cheese and Meat

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So life has been a little crazy lately and there has been no time for posting- sorry. I should have a break Monday and I have LOTS of good food to talk about :) Until then here's a nice shot of an awesome cheese and meat plate we enjoyed this past weekend at Grape & Grain. Enjoy!!

A New Hershey's???

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I just happened to be in Times Square last week for a work function. If you live in NYC you probably try to avoid Times Square as much as possible. It's just really crowed, noisy and filled with people handing out fliers for everything!! Since I don't find myself there very often I decided to check out a couple places, one being the Hershey store. As I was walking around looking at the usual bars, kisses and nuggets, something caught my eye. A Green Tea Hershey Bar! I couldn't believe it! The bar wrapping was written entirely in Chinese so it's quite obvous they haven't begun manufacturing these for regular U.S. consumtion just yet. We LOVE anything at all with green tea so I bought one and dug in. The green tea had a slight artificial flavor but I still thought it was good. As far as chocolate goes I don't think Hershey is winning any compititions when you have chocolatiers like Maison de Chocolat around, but I grew up on the almond bars so it holds a special p

Lunch at Asiate

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Mr T's sister and husband are moving to Florida in about a month so Kate and I decided to meet up for what may be our last "fancy lunch". There are so many great lunch deals in this town I can only take advantage when I have a day off. Since Kate works from home and enjoys food just as much as me, she's the perfect companion for these excursions! We were a little disappointed with our last lunch at Perry Street, so I was somewhat apprehensive about our next pick Asiate. I have heard very mixed reviews but figured the view should hopefully make up for anything bad! I showed up right at 1:30 for our reservation and the hostess started to seat me at a table in the middle of the room. There were a few tables open right at the corner of the wall to wall windows and she happily obliged when I asked to be seated there. I didn't get any good pictures of the restaurant so I borrowed some from the Asiate website. The view is really stunning. You can see all the way uptown a

Sweet Little Brooklyn Treat

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I was out getting my lunch the other day at work and decided to stop at Lassin and Hennigs to check out what kind of prepared food they had that day. I walked inside and started to head to the back salad counter when I was distracted by a new bakery item. Red Velvet Cupcakes! They looked so freakin good I bought one immediately and ran outside to eat it without even buying any lunch! Wow! This cupcake did not disappoint. The frosting was your classic cream cheese but it had a stronger tang to it than usual. They definitely used a little more sour cream in their recipe rather than extra sugar which was good. The main thing I was surprised about was how moist the cake was! I mean it was super moist. One of the best textured cakes I have had in a while. The flavor was nice as well. I find most Red Velvet's in the city have either too much of a chocolate flavor or none at all. This was perfect with just a hint of cocoa. But that's not even the best part! They come in two sizes- reg

Solo Dining at Les Halles

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The weather was so nice last Thursday I decided to take myself out to dinner. Mr T was out of town on business so I figured I deserved some good food and quality alone time with a big juicy steak :) Les Halles happens to be right near my apartment so when I saw there were lots of open tables outside I had a seat. I came here once about 5 years ago, before Anthony Bourdain became so huge and the place wasn't overrun with tourists. I remember thinking the fries were unbelievable so I was pretty excited to try those out again. I sat down and waited for a little over 10 minutes for the waiter (kind of a long time when the place is empty). I asked him about one of the glasses of wine and he proceeded to try and upsell me from a $7.50 glass to a $17.50 glass of wine! I politely refused his suggestion and ordered a very nice Côtes du Rhône. As I was contemplating my dinner order the bread arrived. It was pretty average bread basket but the butter took it up a notch with its rich creamy te

Cookies!!!!

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So I have yet to meet the person that dislikes cookies and I hope I never do. I saw on Eater yesterday that Ruby et Violette was reopening and I just happened to be in Hell's Kitchen for work so I ran over on my lunch break. The space is small and narrow but they have a few cute tables for you to sit at and the white decor makes the space feel a little bigger than it is. I walked in about 12:00 and was cheerily greeted by all the women behind the counter. I had no idea what kind of cookie I wanted...which was perfect because they were doing a cookie tasting!!! Okay free cookies! This already the best day ever! I took a bite of the Homerun which was a chocolate based cookie with Baby Ruth candy bar chunks and caramel apparently imported from Italy. This was good gut very sweet. A little too much for me. The other two I ended up tasting though I ended up buying. The first one on the left is called the Perfect cookie. Why perfect? Because it really is the perfect balance of semi-sweet

Degustation Continues to Wow

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Mr Trekker and I went to Degustation back during the very first month it was open and it blew us away. The space, the food, the price- everything! We swore up and down to make it our go-to restaurant for the future. Well somehow it fell off our radar. Luckily though, a recent chowhound thread brought it back into my mind and I'm happy to report our visit Friday night was everything we had remembered. Degustation really isn't a restaurant in the common sense in that all 16 seats sit around a bar with the cook and kitchen being the center of the show. The night we were there I was happy to see the same chef from last time. Although he actually spent the night training someone else. A woman ended up cooking most of our food and it was just as wonderful. Last time we had done the tasting menu so this time we just decided to order a bunch of dishes and split them between us. We started out with one of my favorites from last time the Croquetas. Four little balls of fried balls of che

Hallo Berlin

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For some reason I really seem to be hitting the German spots hard these days. We were meeting Mr. T's sister and brother-in-law for dinner Thursday night and she suggested Hallo Berlin. We got there right about 6:00 and took the last outdoor table. We were all having trouble deciding what to order so we went with the Sausage sampler platter. Look at all those sausages!!! My arteries are clogging up just thinking about them! I was surprised to see that they came all cut like this but it ended up being better for sharing. We also got some herring which was actually really good. I grew up in a Polish household so my herring consumption was quite large. This was very good for herring. Much better than I could have imagined. The potato pancakes were kind of meh...No where near as good as Zum's and really a little mushy. The fries were just like the pancakes- a little too soft and lacking an overall crunch. If I'm going to injest this many calories I want to hear the fried crisp