NYC Tastes

I was having a serious craving for mussels last week so we walked over to Petite Abeille, a Belgium bar and restaurant in Stuyvesant Town.  Petite offers three different kinds of mussels; Mussels Marinieres with white wine & garlic, Mussels Basque with roasted peppers & chorizo and Mussel Grand Mere with cream & bacon.   Both Mr. T and I ordered our usual Marinieres but when our food arrived it was quite obvious they had brought us the Grand Mere instead. I figured this would be an easy thing to fix so I grabbed our waiter and proceeded to have this conversation: Me- "I think we received the wrong dish we ordered the Mussels Marinieres." Waiter- "Yes that's the Mussels Marinieres" Me- "Ummm...But this has bacon inside" Waiter- "All of the mussels have bacon or chorizo." Me-  "But we ordered the white wine mussels" Waiter- "All of the mussels have white wine" Me- "But this one has...

I was trying the chase the late day sun Friday night and really wanted to catch some rays and have a few drinks. We decided to head over to the east side near Sty Town and check out a few neighborhood places we haven’t been to in a while. As we walked around I couldn’t believe how different that area felt. It used to be filled with lots of families but now it seemed to be all young professionals. I wonder if that has anything to do with the selling of Sty Town? We passed Petite Abeille and realized they had a bunch of tables outside so we sidled up and got ready for some tasty beers. Petite Abeille is a cute Mussels and Frites place that has quite an impressive list of Belgium Beers. My first beer of the night was a De Koninck. This beer poured a medium amber with very little head that rapidly dissolved. For a Belgium beer this is really light weighing in at only 5% ABV. Unfortunately what it lacks in alcohol it also lacks in flavor. I never really tasted anything. M...

My parents came to visit for the weekend, which is always the best excuse to eat out for every meal of the day! Thursday night we went to Alta and had a fantastic meal. We showed up right around 8:00 with no reservation and were seated immediately right near the fireplace on the first floor. We ordered too many things to write about but I'll give you the favorites of the table. Spinach salad with dried cherries was great- those 2 flavors go together so well together. Goat cheese w/ honey, confit of pork tenderloin, lamb meatballs and Moroccan spiced cashews (so good we ordered 2) were all fantastic. The 2 potato dishes, one with paprika and one with trout creme fraiche I wouldn't order again. Just not very tasty. Overall though a great meal. My only complaint was the pacing of the dishes. We got about 5 dishes at once literally 2 minutes after we had ordered. They kept coming in this sort of fashion. There was barely enough room on the table for them all. I wish they would ma...