albert "smoovebert" o.'s Profile

It hasn't broken 50 degrees on the thermometer today, officially ushering in Fall and a few weeks of underdressing/overdressing as I get used to the new season and the weather changing. Udon West has been around for a few months now so I'd been there a few times before today, but all my experiences have had a little mental note attached to them, saying "MAN, I BET THIS WOULD BE GOOD ON A COLD DAY".

I put my hunch to the test today and walked in to see that a lot of other people had the same idea as I, huddled over bowls of udon and curries and rice bowls (the three things they serve at udon west). What to choose? Would I get the combination Beef Bowl and Udon set? I'd had this in the past, beef and onions over rice (think yoshinoya beef bowl but legit) and a bowl of udon, all very tasty but too much food for lunch. Udon with tempura? Again very tasty, but even though the noodles are silky, tasty, and filling, not quite at the level of comfort food I was seeking. No, I'd have to go with the FRIED CHICKEN AND CURRY UDON (kara-age curry udon), which are fried chicken tender sized strips of fried chicken sitting atop a generous helping of japanese curry and udon noodles and broth. Although this is more of a typical udon broth with japanese curry mixed in rather than the plain noodles swimming in curry that I was used to having in LA, it did the trick and was still plenty hearty for me. Add fried chicken (can you really ever go wrong with fried chicken?) and I was in heaven, especially when the bill came out to be less than $10.

"What in tarnation is a chinese sandwich?" I asked myself when I first read about Mantao in one of the zillion foodiot emails I get per day. I literally get so many of these things that they all become white noise, completely indistinguishable from one another. Either that, or I have a terrible memory due to excessive head trauma from MMA training. Whichever reason is the true culprit, we'll never know, but in any case, I forgot what the supposed draw to Mantao was when I made the quick walk to Mantao for lunch from The Behemoth Advertising Agency Where I Spend My Waking Hours®.

I blindly ordered the $9.95 Combo Box, which came with 2 sandwiches of your choice, a salad, and shrimp chips, choosing braised sa and the beef/kimchi fillings for my sandwiches. These fillings came sandwiched (hence the name!) between 2 pieces of doughy, steamed bread reminiscent of what momofuku and ippudo pork buns get wrapped in, but slightly thicker and covered on one side in sesame seeds.

The braised pork sandwich featured a nice fatty piece of pork with hoisin and cucumber (maybe cilantro as well, i forget) that was again, like a momofuku pork bun in a way--and delicious!  The beef/kimchi sandwich was not as good, the beef was a bit stringy and gray looking, and the kimchi was not as crisp and tart as, well, as good kimchi is. The side salad was your basic mixed greens with a nice carrot/ginger dressing, and the shrimp chips were as strangely addictive as they always are.

I've since returned, trying a variety of sandwiches but return to the staple braised pork sandwiches again and again. Excellent new addition to my otherwise dismal midtown east lunch options.

WOW, what a pleasant surprise Destination was. Drop-Off Service (next door) was unbearably packed, so we stopped in here for some drinks. We luckily nabbed the seats next to the open window for some great Ave. A people watching and proceeded to *ahem* take full advantage of the happy hour (til 8), and lingered til well after happy hour ended.
Almost as an afterthought (since we had so many half-price drinks under our belts), we ordered some of the sliders, buffalo wing lollipops, and pretzels to nibble on. Holy mother of jeebus, it's a good thing we did, because those sliders were amazing. Chopped bacon mixed into the hamburger meat, covered in a sort of spicy mayo and served in buns that were airy, soft, and almost sweet. The buffalo wing lollipops (buffalo wings stuffed with blue cheese and perched on celery sticks) were so good that the kitchen ran out, and the pretzels were also a surprise, soft, warm, and buttery. *sigh*

insta-favorite.

Picture this if you will: It's Thursday and once again, you've overindulged on the booze Wednesday night. Of course, on your way home you maybe had a couple of slices of pizza or a cheeseburger, or a couple of tubes of street meat (hot dogs, you perv) and you're not really hungover but you feel like a bloated piece of crap.

Well, Hale and Hearty's got a bunch of soups that are less than 200 calories.  I can't think of any other reason to eat here, because really the soups aren't worth the price in either quality or quantity. I only eat them because I don't want to be a fat tub of goo.

The food here is bland, Mexican-style tourist trap food served with indifference in a space that prominently features garish decor both inside and out. At this point, let me just add that I am originally from Los Angeles, where cheap, delicious, and authentic Mexican food abounds. I know NYC is a long way from Mexico and I know that a lot of people insist that it is impossible to find good Mexican food in NY, but I actually think those people are wrong. I HAVE had good Mexican food in NY, unfortunately, just not here.

Honestly, although I didn't know much (if anything) about Gonzalez y Gonzalez, I was excited about the possibility of finding a decent Mexican food place in the city, so when a friend and longtime NY resident took me there recently for dinner, I went with an open mind and an eager and empty stomach. The chips that came to the table quickly after being seated were warm (at least), but somehow tasted about two minutes away from being officially stale. Scooping up lifeless, watery "salsa" with these chips did little to help matters. This, and my "tourist margarita" were probably the highlights of the meal.

Sensing imminent danger, I went to my safe place, fajitas. Fajitas are generally something impossible to screw up. Even if the meat wasn't lovingly marinated with a handmade marinade and all they did was open up a packet of "fajita seasoning", it is a colossally impossible task to screw fajitas up, so when in doubt, I go right to fajitas. Unfortunately, this didn't go over so well. Though called "steak" on the menu, they had the texture and toughness of rubber, yet had a taste redolent of liver. The accompanying flour tortillas were obviously mass produced, and were hard and flaky on the ends, and the cheddar cheese definitely tasted like it came out of a plastic bag. Luckily, the sour cream was fine, and the guacamole? I have nothing bad to say about it.

Two (generous) stars, because 1.5 is not an option.

I've been coming to Angel's Share for about 11 years now.  While other cocktail-lounges-of-the-moment have come and gone, not much has changed at Angel's Share, expertly made cocktails in a cozy, quiet atmosphere (no standing, and no more than 4 people in a group) in a semi-hidden location accessible only through a bustling Japanese restaurant on the second floor of a rather innocuous building.

Service is efficient, the ice cubes are huge, and while the liquor selection is not the largest in the city, it is perfectly curated. I must agree with about half the other reviews here, a snowy winter evening here is transcendental. Highly recommended.

Full service BMX/Fixed Gear/Skateboard shop sans attitude. Friendly, knowledgable, and fully stocked with complete bikes, bike parts, clothes and accessories.  Everything you would possibly want in a shop.

Recommending a Thai place is sort of like recommending a brand of bottled water. They are so ubiquitous and generally of similar enough quality that it would take a seriously transcendental experience for me to put any serious weight behind a recommendation.  You might be asking "well, 4 stars... that's probably transcendental, or close to it, right?" No. Not really.

Don't get me wrong, Holy Basil was good, real good. But like I said, real good only gets you so far with Thai food of a certain ilk. Once you get to a certain price point in Thai food, that's when things like ambience and the like begin to factor in. Unfortunately, most Thai places start to tart it up with pumping house music and tacky pseudo-modern trappings. Luckily Holy Basil shows some restraint here with it's warm decor and welcoming service, steering clear of the "modern Thai" pitfalls that plague many other restaurants in the "step above delivery Thai" price range.

So, for the generically good Thai food and restrained ambience (and full bar), Holy Basil gets 4 stars. BOOM!

I've only had one thing here, and that's the roast pig over white rice. I'm guessing that ordering roast "pork' over white rice will probably get you the artificially red soy sauce/honey/ginger soaked pork over rice, but roast "pig" will get you the chinese 5 spice roast pork belly with the layers of delicious fat and crispy cracklin skin, which for my $6 is the way to go. For that $6, you get a decent amount of meat served over white rice and a scoop of chinese cabbage, tasty, quick, and wallet-friendly.

Stopped into Resto recently (rather reluctantly) when my dinner plans for the evening didn't quite work out as planned. You see, although I live in Murray Hill (sigh), I don't really frequent any of the local dining or drinking establishments because frankly, I don't really take them seriously because of my assumption that they cater to the excessively post-college lifestyles of my fellow residents. Luckily, fate had me without a dinner reservation one night, so my dinner companion and I gave Resto a chance, and it came through with flying colors.

The atmosphere was very gastro-pubby, which is to say it was like a modern, more austere version of a pub, think wooden floors and tin ceiling tiles with a long, dark wooden bar dominating the right side of the room and a long banquette with tables lined up  against it on the left side of the room, and you get the picture ambience-wise. It gets a bit noisy in there, so be prepared to do a lot of leaning-forward across the table to be heard. Oh well, the better to gaze into your eyes, my dear...non?

We leafed through the extensive drinks menu (which comes inserted into a large hard-bound book) and had a few questions about some of the beers and wines, and the server was knowledgable and was eager to offer helpful suggestions (though he pretty much had to yell because of the ambient noise in the room--remember the tin ceiling tiles and wooden floors).

We ended up sharing the shrimp and grits to start, which were incredibly tasty and were served with some fried green tomatoes--not a bad start. My lady friend had the burger, which was eerily reminiscent of the burger at Irving Mill (definitely not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination), and I had the moules frites, (since I was in a Belgian influenced gastropub, why not do as the Belgians do?) which were pretty tasty albeit not as brothy as I would have liked, leaving the mussels that didn't have the good fortune to be swimming in the saffron infused chorizo broth a little dry. We finished with a waffle ice cream sandwich (vanilla ice cream, which was incredibly real-vanilla tasting) and we were done.

All in all, a solid dinner, and I plan to return enough that I become a local, since I'm local already. *ahem* come on, you know what I mean.