Spot Dessert Bar

They say there's always room for dessert...

We tried out a dessert place on St. Mark's Place called Spot Dessert Bar tonight, thanks to a swell Living Social deal and a glowing recommendation from Serious Eats: New York. Their menu was pretty extensive, covering savory and sweet food.  I was also really impressed that their menu's photos reflected what the real food looked like, and not just stock images.  Everything looked and sounded incredible.  Our Living Social deal covered $20 worth of goodies, and with macarons on the menu, we obviously knew we had to try those.  Dessert was the Yuzu Eskimo and five macarons.

The Yuzu Eskimo was a beautiful, artfully arranged plate with fanned out slices of ice cream on top of a bed of crushed Oreo cookies.  On the side was a raspberry foam and a strawberry.  It looked almost too pretty to eat!  I imagine really fancy restaurants serve dessert on par with Spot Dessert Bar's, at least on plating design.  The yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit, was reminiscent of key lime - very fresh, light, not too sweet, not too overpowering.  I could have done without the Oreo crumbs and strawberry, but I also enjoyed the raspberry foam. I've never eaten molecular gastronomy stuff, and I imagine they're full of foams.  This raspberry foam was really tart and balanced the ice cream really well.  The one kind of down side was that there was a piece of plastic or Seran wrap stuck to one slice of the ice cream...what is with us and unwelcome discoveries in our foods?!

 

 

Next, the macarons.  They were a little bigger than others we've had.  Alex bit into the chocolate caramel one and made a Ron Weasley face again...which worried me.  He said it was good, but tasted like coffee.  Not good for me, but that's another story.

The other macarons were: Oreo, red velvet, raspberry rose, and vanilla green tea.  My first bite into the Oreo one imparted a really strong cream cheese taste in my mouth, almost like a really light cheesecake.  It also didn't taste much like Oreos at all; I don't know where they got that from other than the cookie part being speckled with chocolate cookie crumbs.  SPEAKING OF THE COOKIE PART...the macaron cookie had a good shell, but...the inside of the cookie was cakey.  We might as well have been eating small bites of cupcakes.  It wasn't bad...but it wasn't a macaron!

 

This was a pattern in all their macarons: they all had cakey interiors and cream cheese filling.  The red velvet was equally indistinct of any taste besides cream cheese.  The raspberry rose cleverly had rose-flavored cream cheese, and the raspberry note did a nice job of making the otherwise-bitter rose flavor a little sweeter.  The vanilla green tea also had a matcha-flavored cream cheese filling, and matcha powder dotting the surface.  I liked this one the most of all because there was a stronger green tea flavor initially before a mellow taste of cream cheese.

I think now that we've tasted Spot Dessert macarons, we can definitely sample other things on their seasonal menu (i.e. I'm not sure the macarons are worth revisiting).  The Yuzu Eskimo was really tasty, and some of the other desserts sounded really intriguing.

Spot Dessert Bar
13 Saint Marks Place