Veritasty: Truthfully Delicious

We came, we saw, we conquered some grilled cheese sandwiches at The Big Cheesy.   The event was held in a really cool gallery space in SoHo.  Five competitors offered some creative and scrumptious grilled cheese sandwiches, and Goose Island poured three different IPAs.  We were given orange ping pong balls to put into tall plexiglass columns to cast our vote for The Big Cheese of The Big Cheesy 2015. First up was Mrs. Dorsey's Kitchen representing Brooklyn.  Their grilled cheese had: mushrooms sauteed in truffle oil, onion bacon jam, arugula, and grape tomatoes.  Oh, and mozzarella cheese!  It was a solid sandwich to start, with lots of my favorite flavors (truffle!  mushrooms!  arugula!!!).  The only thing I could nitpick on was that there may have been too much going on at once, and I forgot I was eating a primarily grilled cheese sandwich. Next was Hudson Common with a french toast grilled cheese.  This sandwich had...

I've never appreciated - and I mean deeply appreciated - a good french fry until now.  Thank you, Sir Kensington, for reaffirming my love of fries. This weekend, we checked out the Fries of New York exhibit.  A small gallery space was decked out with glass domes, like a Victorian museum exhibit. Each dome housed a metal prong that propped up a luscious lacquered french fry from the 80 or so restaurants featured. In terms of shape, many were a simple classic cut fry of varying length and width.  Then, there were some chunkier steak fries, like the ones from Katz's Delicatessen.  One beautiful specimen was an entire potato, cut into a spiral, from Twist & Smash'd in Astoria.  A few were made from different starches like sweet potato and yam.  Many were covered in different seasonings like sea salt, rosemary, parmesan, and truffle. I would have suffered a lot of tummy growling had there not been Home Frites fries with Sir Ken...

Seven courses.  Four cocktails.  Two very satiated brunch eaters at the Stanton Social, check. Stanton Social is a restaurant by Chris Santos, the sister establishment of Beauty & Essex .  Both restaurants are geared towards tapas-styled dishes made for sharing.  The decor of Stanton Social is modern, sleek, and definitely exudes this sexy Ne w Yorker attitude: dark brown wood, plush banquettes, whitewashed exposed brick walls, glass chandeliers.  It was mercifully empty by the time we arrived, but I could imagine that during a busy service, it'd be almost impossible to navigate the rather cozy dining area. We purchased an Amazon Local deal for seven dishes and two cocktails each, such an amazing deal that I bought another one for brunch with my friend.  Our server announced that she had never seen anyone complete the whole brunch.  Challenge accepted!  How hard could a few tapas plates be? First, we started off with dessert: cara...

When I was in high school, the closest thing that I did that made me feel like a cool/grown-up/classy/precursor-to-hipster/New York lady was have dinner with my friends in the Lower East Side repeatedly.  Specifically, at the tapas restaurant 1492.  It left a weird imprint on my soul that made me yearn for it, now, more than four years later. The restaurant's storefront is almost like a hole in the wall. When you first walk in, a mirror hanging diagonally from the ceiling over the bar gives you a really trippy view.  There are small, cozy tables all the way through the restaurant and even in a quaint garden courtyard inside.  When I came once for a friend's birthday, we sat in the garden and sipped virgin mojitos under the summer sky and beneath a string of twinkling lights.  I felt so fancy!  This most recent visit, we went on a Monday evening and I'm sad to say we were the only patrons in the restaurant.  We sat at a small table inside and s...

I love walking through the Lower East Side.  There are a million things to see.  I wish I had more eyes, noses, ears, and stomachs so I could see, smell, hear and taste all the different things that the LES has to offer.  Although it's becoming more gentrified now, there was a time not that long ago when mostly Eastern European immigrants inhabited the Lower East Side, giving rise to the stereotypical tenement houses of New York City at the turn of the century (19th to 20th, mind you).  Thankfully living conditions aren't that  terrible now, I think. The cool thing is that remnants from that time exist in the form of restaurants and stores: Katz's , Russ & Daughters, Yonah Schimmel's Knishes , Pomme Frites ...wait, sorry that was just a shameless plug for my other post, hehe. Up the block from Pomme Frites is a tiny diner called B&H Dairy.  Alex and his dad were craving old-school Jewish diner food, so I tagged along for the adventure.  B...