Chris C.'s Profile

I typically cycle through only a few breakfasts, one being waffles, the other being cereal and the last one being Pop-Tarts, in fact, Pop-Tarts were the only thing I ate for breakfast for the entirety of seventh grade and senior year of High School. So with that in mind, I can VERY safely say, it would be very hard for me not to absolutely fall in love with a place called "Pop-Tart World".

I went here because for some reason it became the water cooler story on all the mainstream NYC television stations a couple of days ago including ABC, NBC and CBS making it on to both the evening and eleven o'clock news alongside a very substancial article in the nationwide New York Times. With that kind of coverage, I have to say I was expecting a transcendental experience in to the realm of Pop-Tartology and bask in the delight of the sugary breakfast staple that pretends to have vitamins and minerals in it.

Now, the first thing I want to get out of the way, was that I was not able to try the Pop-Tart Sushi, it was completely sold out. In each network spot, it always seemed to get the most attention but I was able to try a couple of their other "designer" Pop-Tart cuisine, if I can even go as far to say that.

The dishes don't really seem too out of the realm of what I'd see my stoner friends make in Freshman year of college when having the Microwave was the extent of your non-mealplan cooking. The Pop-Tart Sushi is a crushed up Pop-Tart wrapped in a Fruit Roll Up, it is the kind of dish that I feel someone can make VERY easily for about a tenth the price they charge.

My friend ordered the Pop-Tart Ice Cream sandwich which had chocolate ice cream in the middle and on top of two fudge Pop-Tarts. The chocolate ice cream on top was just the right shape and consistency to look like a turd and from what my friend said, it was tasty but nothing really special. While my Pop-Tart Mocha brownie was slightly more appetizing, it tasted mostly like what you can make from a Betty Crocker pack with some crushed up chocolate Pop-Tart thrown in the batter as an afterthought. It didn't really have much of an impact on the taste, but it was apparently their second best seller behind the so-called sushi.

There really was hardly a place to really eat your Pop-Tart abomination besides for a little elevated platform of sorts on the back that might be able to hold about ten people if you are lucky and most of the real-estate went towards selling overpriced T-shirts. There was also a vending machine that would make your own custom box of Pop-Tarts but honestly there weren't more than six flavors in the machine. I would have liked it more if this could have been a chance to try some of the discontinued varieties of the toaster pastry.

They have music in the place, and flashy lights, but even when I was in there at 7 o'clock as soon as I sat down to eat, they said they were closing. This place is incredibly gimmicky and even by Times Square standards it is hardly even worth checking out. After the initial media blitz wears down, I can't really see much of a reason for anyone to go back here.

...the bags they give out there look like a Pop-Tart...I guess that is pretty cool...

Don't let the "organics" on the sign fool you, this is more or less a standard deli with all their other products feeling like a mixed bag.

This was the place I'd go for lunch during the first week of my internship  in Dumbo before realizing that Front Street Pizza had better food and was a better value being only a few blocks away. However, save for an occasional food truck, this is one of the few options you really have if you want to eat on a somewhat reasonable budget.

I thought their sandwiches were good and large despite being a couple of dollars more than I'd normally comfortably pay for a sandwich but at the same time I did feel it had a bit more meat than I was used to. I can't really say the same for the Potato Salad here which tasted anything but "fresh", I'm guessing it was sitting out by the salad bar for a few hours.

Yet, I've still been here a few times after that first week of not knowing what I was doing. In this post CompUSA world, it is one of the few places to pick up Bawl's Energy Drink, and I think the little area to eat in the back wasn't really too bad either.

Ultimately, this is a decent place to go if you want to pick up something small, they take a bit longer than you'd want for them to prepare a sandwich for you but it is a bit better than the Spanish place across the street.

Just avoid the salad bar.

Satisfies the quasi-sleazy Mexican food itch that Castro's can't scratch. While I would never recommend this place above Castro's, I'd still go here from time to time when I wouldn't want to walk nearly a mile to go to Taco Bell. The pricing is a little lower than Castro's too, so if you are a poor college student and want to save a couple of bucks this is a good choice.

The inside is a bit dumpy and you can even look over to the flower shop next door through the wall. I'm guessing it is a small mom and pop place. The register has a lot of children's drawings around it and it seems like despite the modest looks that it is a popular place with the locals. If I haven't been at Pratt for a few years and known from experience that the place is only a couple of years old, I'd swear it has been the same since the '80s.

Castros is definitely a much better place to go to sit and eat as the place isn't really that good in terms of atmosphere but when it comes to take out, this place is a great candidate. Unlike Castros, nothing here is loaded with cilantro so I don't really need to make a special order to get the kind of food I want. The Pork and Chicken tacos I've had here have both been great, I prefer the seasoning of the pork a bit better but they sit well and are filling for their low price, making it an ideal food for finals.

I've had the Nachos with Jalapeño peppers the second time I went here and they were surprisingly light and not that spicy, I enjoyed it a fair bit and was really full after eating it, which for less than $10 is definitely worth it.

So while this isn't a good place to go with friends to sit down, the only real flaw I can think of is that it is only a block away from Castros which has far better food. On its own merits however, the food here is really solid and I don't think you can really go wrong eating here unless you are sensitive to Mexican food or something.

My roommate wanted to go here because it was the first result on Google when he searched for a place with Mapo Tofu in New York City after reading 4chan late at night. Not sure if the pricing is really that good for a college budget but as the last place I ate at before packing my bags at the end of the year, it was a decent place to stop by.

I went with five other people and we decided to split some mapo tofu, orange chicken, dumplings, jellyfish, eel and beef stir fry between all of us. The place was mostly full of Chinese people at the tables, some dressed up at the seats. Despite the sort of generic exterior, this felt fairly legit for Chinese eats outside of Chinatown.

The tofu was a bit spicy but definitely well seasoned, while the orange chicken and dumplings weren't really too different from what I've had at cheaper chinese take-out. I was pleasantly surprised by the sweetness of the jellyfish and the eel and the stir fry were spicy in a lurking way I didn't expect, but I definitely came back for more of both of them.

One of the people I went with came straight from China to Pratt maybe only two years ago and was really pleased with the menu. He's usually the kind of person to criticize the take-out my friends eat on a semi-regular basis so the fact that he approved of this place says something. So my guess is that if you really like Chinese food, like the kind that is not in the same category as fastfood, this place will definitely deliver. With water, the total wound up being a fairly reasonable $16 with tip between all of us, which is actually not that bad for the amount of food we got.

So why am I giving it 3 stars? well, after I ate my food, when I went to the bathroom the sink was broken. While one of my friends had some purell on them, I highly doubt the cooks here have been washing their hands. Which means, unless the cooks wused the kitchen sink, I've gotten piss in my Chinese food...YUCK!

Hopefully, by the time you go here they'd have that problem fixed but I can't say I wasn't taken back on my way out of the place.

I went here when I was going to see a splatter film over at Japan Center about a giant robot house that vomited Kimchi in one scene; this place really set the mood quite well for later that night.

The menu here seemed really really authentic, almost to a flaw. I'm not afraid to admit that I needed to ask my friends for advice over what to order here. I wound up settling on the Katsudon. Despite the fact that one person received their curry rice about 4 minutes before everyone else, I had very little complaints about the actual service. They even offered to give us a private room before we got seated, but we figured we didn't really have enough time for that.

While I don't think it would be really hard to ruin Katsudon, it came out quite delicious, while I'm not really sure I could say the same thing about the sushi, I'm not too much a sushi person so I really couldn't judge.

The menu is a bit on the expensive side, but from what I've seen in comparison in midtown, it seemed pretty par for the course.

A worthy visit if you are checking out galleries around SoHo but it doesn't quite have enough stuff to really warrant going out of your way to see. The gallery consists of a really densely packed room with comics lining the walls, it is a bit hard to really make-out an order for how they are sorting out their collection but the gallery is small enough where you can forgive it for being a bit disorganized.

A lot of the staples that I was expecting to see were here, Charles Schultz, Robert Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Ralph Bakshi, Charles Addams and Gary Baseman all had a few pieces on display and the gallery did a good job balancing out the old and the new. There are also some TV screens showing animation from independent animators such as Bill Plympton and a few studios nearby but this feels more like an afterthought.

There were also some pieces on display from recent SVA grads that I felt were a little out of place. The first reason being that they were all printing out from a digital copy in Photoshop which greatly takes away from the appeal of seeing the piece in person, I'd rather have them display some of the pencil drawings next to the piece so I could get a better sense for the creative process. Likewise, I don't really see the significance in displaying these apart from the fact that SVA donated a lot to the gallery itself.

My other issue with the gallery was that they did not have much in the way of supplementary text, while I guess one could argue that the pieces should speak for themselves but I was hoping for a bit more context after paying the $5 suggested donation.

Overall, despite being a bit rough around the edges, I'd still recommend checking this place out if you have any interest in comic art because there are enough gems in the gallery to make it worth seeing. I'm just not sure if I'd really visit this place more than maybe once a year.

Is it the best pizza in Stamford? yes, easily, but it hardly holds a candle to Brooklyn's best. While it is fairly easy to recommend this sketchy pub with a penchant for Pizza, there are a few caveats I have to get out of the way first before praising their pizza upright as the second coming of Jesus.

To get things out of the way first, it will likely cost somewhere around ten dollars a pizza and the chances are one of their standard sized pies could only be considered adequate as a heavy lunch for one person and even then, they seem to only have a few ovens going at once and they seem to be perfectly comfortable pushing overpriced beer on you while you wait 20-30 minutes for you to complete your order. Even the most crowded pizza places in Brooklyn wouldn't take more than 10 minutes...maybe 15 to get a pizza done...and 15 minutes would be disappointing.

The second thing being that their menus don't have prices listed anywhere and they have the audacity not to take credit cards. Be sure to hit up the ATM before going here, especially if you are paying for a group ahead of time. This may not be a good place to get take-out either because in a matter of fifteen minutes, these pizzas can change from close to godliness to a general greasy mess.

But oh, those pies are VERY close to godliness when they actually come. Usually I'm not a big fan of this style pizza, I felt both Pepe's and Grimaldi's were both highly overrated upon my first impression but here I really felt they did a good job perfecting the thin crust without burning it necessarily, the sauce has a bit of a kick to it and tastes especially well when the cheese starts to melt in with the sauce as you are eating it. The toppings are a bit of a rip-off, they could have put on a few more pepperonis on the pie for the price I was paying but ultimately I can't complain too much.

The place is incredibly sketchy on the inside, filled with cops and firemen from the neighborhood enjoying the pub. The area the place is in was a lot less...er...poor...when my grandfather went here but there is something amiable about them sticking to the same location since the '30s.

If you live in Stamford or are visiting, this is definitely among the few local digs that are worth their hype...the place just isn't perfect, and I wouldn't want it any other way...

While some of the CRT displays and interactive projects on the top floor feel a bit gimmicky and dated by 2010 standards, the eccentric collection on display here is enough to make the $5 suggested donation and 45 minutes of your time totally worth it. At first glance, this museum gives off the vibe of a children's museum with colorful large buttoned kiosks taking up the majority of the real-estate here...the fact that a lot of the pieces look pretty beat-up on top of that doesn't do much to eliminate that vibe either.

In general, a lot of the interactivity offered in the displays feels a bit dated in the YouTube-era where practically anyone with a copy of iLife can replicate most of the stuff on display here without breaking much of a sweat, but I'm sure it would be a blast for the 14 and under set.

Yet, the real gems lie when you really dig deep into their collection of memorabilia , the highlights include one of the Chewbacca masks worn during Star Wars and one of the miniatures used for establishing shots in Bladerunner. Likewise the 3D zoetrope at the entrance is really cool as well.

But really, for me the real thing that pushes this museum over from a 3 to a 4 would be the fully functional arcade they have on the lower level. While I find it a bit depressing to see that arcades have become such a relic that you'd literally find one in a museum, they have a good selection of machines on display and they covered a lot of the history of games in a really fun way with their home consoles in the area too.

Ultimately, I don't think this museum really has enough cool stuff to give a, adequate film geek any knowledge that they don't already know but at the same time, I had so much fun that I didn't really notice anyway.

This place falls somewhere between a sketchy Chinatown DVD shop and a Best Buy, mostly filled with good deals but some of their video game prices are a bit more questionable. The 2 for $10 DVD deals here where the main attraction, my roommate picked up a few Godzilla (most were 2 disc special editions) movies and I got a two-pack of Total Recall and Terminator 2 for well under $20 (I owed him five bucks afterwards).

Their selection of video games is strange, they carry all the same new releases that your average Gamestop would have but they also have a few Japanese titles sprinkled throughout the selection and tons of extremely sleazy looking accessories from Chinese companies I never heard of for the DS.

Everything is presented like a used car salesman here, huge clearance signs line the store but if you actually look through the bins, there are a few rip-offs inside. For example, they had the Burger King Xbox 360 games in the bin at the "blow-out price" of $6...these titles, at the time of the promotion were only $3 each and you can find piles of them at practically any Gamestop for a dollar. Likewise, some of their Wii titles were listed there for $60 as opposed to the typical $50 tag.

So before you buy anything here, you might have to do a bit of homework first or go with someone who has a general idea of how much things show cost...but on the other, I was able to get two awesome Schwarzenegger action movies on DVD for less than the price of lunch...and I can't rag on a place that offers such a glorious deal too much...

If I didn't have to pay six bucks for a 12 oz. Hot Chocolate, this would be a great place to hit up when you are in Bryant Park but as it stands, my impressions are a bit mixed. The place was fairly small and the menu was pretty direct with mostly hot chocolates and coffee listed on it. You could buy some chocolate separately as well but it was all prepackaged and wrapped up, so I'm not really sure how visiting the location is any different than ordering the chocolate online.

I felt the menu was a bit confusing, with "Lily O'Brien's Signature Hot Chocolate" and "The Lily: a Hot Chocolate with the Trimmings" listed right on top of each other without any clear distinction between the two written on the menu.

By the time I actually ordered "The Lilly", I understood what they meant. The Lilly was the same thing as the signature cocoa with nuts, marshmallows, bits of chocolate and a few other mystery toppings on top. Despite the expensive price tag, it was a really great cup of hot chocolate, but I'm not sure if I'd go through it again. My roommate ordered a Hot Chooclate and a Blondie which amounted to ten bucks and then proceded to finish it within six minutes.

This is the kind of place where I am not exactly sure who it is for. On one hand, it gives off a bit of a spunky impression (the place was only playing songs by The Killers when I was in there) but on the other, the price tag is way to high for anyone to really consider visiting this place unless it is a very rare occasion.

Definitely an interesting place, and I understand most of the food in Bryant Park is expensive, but I'd need more than a small individually wrapped chocolate given at the register to quell the feeling of being ripped off.