Veritasty: Truthfully Delicious

This week, the Food Film Festival comes to New York City!  Do you love food?  Do you love films?  Do you love festivals?  I mean, you can't possibly answer "no" to any of these. http://thefoodfilmfestival.com/about/ Last year, we had the incomparable experience of having dinner in a movie theater at the " I ♥ Japan " night.  The Food Film Festival allows filmmakers to create food-related shorts and then serve the foods featured in their films to the moviegoers.  This is like Smell-O-Vision to the n-th degree!  I had some chicken wings and ramen that I still dream about today.... This year's events are: Wednesday, October 23 - KINGS OF BBQ Barbecue is one of the most beloved, food-porn-worthy, yet hotly contested segments of American cuisine.  The films that will be shown talk about mixing diversity into barbecue styles, as well as bringing barbecue abroad to diverse places to satisfy American tastes. Thursday, October...

I love the idea of a beer hall...in theory.  Mostly because I don't love beer (though I'm working on changing that!).  But, I do love the culture of a beer hall and I definitely do love beer food.  So when I got some local NYC news email about this new Flatiron Hall in the city with a bazillion different beers AND a fantastic food menu?  Count me in! Actually, honestly: what hooked me was the fact that this email ingeniously name-dropped Flatiron Hall's chicken tikka masala wonton.  (Pause for effect) My love affair with chicken tikka masala began in London and persists.  The chicken tikka masala wontons, I have to admit, are a little bit of a misnomer.  The image that I conjure is of a thick curried chicken in a fried wonton, but the chicken tikka masala wontons are more like spiced shredded chicken in a fried wonton.  Which isn't to say they aren't good...in fact, they were super good!  I especially loved the mint yogurt sauce tha...

Last month, Veritasty went to one of our favorite food fêtes (which is also the benchmark for our birthday; HAPPY 2ND BIRTHDAY VERITASTY!), Pig Island.  This year's Pig Island was a little more like Pig Pier since the venue changed from Governor's Island to Red Hook, Brooklyn.  Red Hook is a northern neighborhood of my beloved borough, which is now most famous for IKEA and Steve's Key Lime Pie and Brooklyn Crab .  The waterfront where Pig Island was spread out was gorgeous: you could simultaneously see little patches of greenery and park benches right next to the very industrial oil rigs rising out of the Hudson River.  Pig Pier made us very happy campers. One of the first stalls we came across hawked Southern Belle barbecue sauce.  While these fruity sauces (for example, blueberry and mango flavors) would be a good accompaniment to any barbecued meat, these brilliant southern belles served up the sauces in delicate floral teacups, with slices of sausage ...

[Sorry we've been on a hiatus!  Life has been quite busy for the both of us, but now we are back and dedicated to bringing veritasty things to you!] Isn't it funny how sometimes you walk by a place so many times, you cease to realize it's even there?  For four years at NYU, I'd walk past The Smith on 10th Street and 3rd Avenue on the way to or from class and I never noticed it, much less dined there.  Fast forward a couple of years later when now, at his nice cushy midtown corporate job, Alex tells me that he frequently gets lunch and/or dinner at The Smith up on 53rd Street and 2nd Avenue.  I looked up the menu and saw crave-worthy foods and proverbially smacked myself for overlooking this restaurant. So this summer, I rectified my mistake by visiting the Midtown East location with my girlfriends and our boyfriends.  It was probably happy hour time, which explains the extremely noisy ambiance.  I wasn't a fan of having to shout our conversations,...