Veritasty: Truthfully Delicious

It's about that (only) time of year that the team at Veritasty gets to go on vacation! Earlier this month, we went on a cruise on the Norwegian Breakaway to Bermuda.  Have you guys ever been to Bermuda??  I was moderately excited before we left, but I ended up loving it!! Bermuda is a British Territory out in the Atlantic Ocean.  I, along with a few people I've talked to, had the misconception that the island was somewhere in the Caribbean, but nope - Bermuda is 600 miles due east of Virginia.  Its culture, though, is a mix of British, Caribbean, and American...and you see that reflected in its food too. Our first day in Bermuda was the super-duper active day...biking the Bermuda Railway Trail!  We biked about 13.7 km (from the Dockyards to Gibbs Lighthouse) first thing in the morning and we were starving by lunchtime.  The Henry VIII Restaurant, a funny looking Caribbean/English pub with a crimson facade and white balustrades, called...

I am very proud of the fact that Brooklyn is the next happening place in New York City.  This means that I can go outside and find plenty of fun things in walking distance that people come here from much farther to experience.  Brooklyn's popularity was evident at the recent Tasting Brooklyn food event by Social Fix. Have you ever been to Gowanus?  It's a neighborhood in north-west Brooklyn, known for its namesake canal and highway and general sketchiness...until now.  Last year, we gathered the courage to actually walk around Gowanus and found a gentrifying, culturally rich, beautiful, walkable area.  Dinosaur BBQ has an outpost there, and Ample Hills Creamery is opening a huge storefront there in a month or so.  There is a strange, intriguing building right off the Union Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal called, simply, the Green Building.  The brick facade is painted a very peaceful grass green. Besides just being a colorful backdrop fo...

I scream, you scream, we all scream for Ample Hills Creamery! New York City and I are in love with Ample Hills Creamery.  Never before have I seen such creative, unique, and delicious flavors of ice cream as I have at this cozy ice cream parlor in Prospect Heights.  I have not, like the guys over at Serious Eats: NY, tried every single flavor .  Actually, this is a Sisyphus-ian task because Ample Hills continually invents new flavor combinations based on both seasonal ingredients and on - get this - pop culture and current events.  Anyway, I am wholeheartedly a fan of Ample Hills and I am very excited to check out their new Gowanus location in the spring!  Doubly exciting, they released the Ample Hills Creamery cookbook yesterday! You can get your standard ice cream flavors at Ample Hills, like chocolate, vanilla, cookies & cream, and mint chocolate chip.  Then, there's your best-selling Salted Crack Caramel: salted butter caramel ice cream b...

Today, one of my interns brought a tray of assorted baklava to the office.  To reiterate how my previous post started: "Sugar crash is a very real and very brutal thing, my friends." Turns out her parents own Hookah Nuts, a store in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that sells hookah and nuts.  Along with a bunch of hookah devices (although they are colorful and kind of elegantly shaped, I find them scary looking, like some sort of medieval torture instrument) and bins overflowing with nuts, they also sell dried fruits, candy, knickknacks, paddywhacks, nougat, and delicious baklava, the topic of day's ode.  Side note: their nougat is also amazing, but I could rhapsodize about that in an entirely other post... Look at that macro phyllo dough action!  The delicate sprinkling of ground pistachios!  The glisten of sticky syrup!  Finally, the pièce de résistance (one you cannot see in the picture), is the ever-so-subtle hint of rosewater infused in the bakl...

Sugar crash is a very real and very brutal thing, my friends. Today is the first day of spring and today is Macaron Day NYC 2014 !  You couldn't have asked for more perfect weather for the annual macaron scavenger hunt, organized by Chef Francois Payard and inspired by Jour du Macaron in Paris.  Bakeries, patisseries, macaron-eries all across the city participate in handing out complimentary macarons, with the added charitable aspect that a portion of any macaron purchases during the day will be donated to City Harvest. Behold, my macarons (which I think are some of the food porn-iest things to photograph, for some reason.  Those feet!  That bulge!  Such colors!  Ooh la la): Francois Payard Bakery / Francois Payard Patisserie  orange blossom  passionfruit  avec CHEF FRANCOIS PAYARD! Mille-Feuille Bakery all the goodies salted caramel Sugar & Plumm  raspberry Bisous Ciao ...

Grand Central Station is one of those classic, iconic New York City landmarks with which I have only recently fallen in love.  From the ceiling constellations to the glitzy Apple Store to the shopping galleries and market stalls aplenty, there's certainly something for everyone from wide-eyed tourists to frazzled commuters to, well, me.  One of the special offerings at Grand Central Station is the Grand Central Oyster Bar down in the lower level. If the train station upstairs is beautiful, then Grand Central Oyster Bar is super-sexy beautiful.  The restaurant is nestled in the tiled vaults of the station.  It is lit with an amber mood lighting that renders the Instagram filter unnecessary.  There are three distinct sections: the restaurant proper (where we dined), a grouping of lunch counters where they presumably shuck raw oysters right in front of you, and a big sports bar alcove off to one end. I found the waitstaff to be very friendly, knowledg...

" One of my favorite places in the world is Italy.  One of my favorite places in New York City is Eataly." How I started my previous post about Eataly , the massive food emporium across the street from Madison Square Park and the Flatiron Building.  Eataly has multiple stellar restaurants, including a rooftop restaurant/beer garden called Birreria. Although a trip to Birreria is perfect on those lazy summer evenings, they apparently invested in some heat lamps so you can enjoy the beer flowing all year long. A lazy summer evening to Birreria also ensures you will be drinking and dining with a huge audience of people, though. When we visited, the bar was extremely crowded and noisy with the after-work corporate crowd.  I had a glass of prosecco at the bar (wine list curated by Joe Bastianich) and a sip of the locally-brewed cask ale beer.  By locally-brewed, I mean they brew beer in big ol' tanks beside the restaurant and serve out of giant barrels beh...