Veritasty: Truthfully Delicious

Are you recovering from a very indulgent Valentine's Day/President's Day Weekend?  I sure am. This weekend, we tried out a restaurant right under Alex's office building called Le Relais de Venise: L'Entrecote.  I've always walked by, seeing a chic French bistro and thinking it'd be completely over our budget.  I was quite wrong! This restaurant's schtick is that they serve only one thing: steak frites.  You get a salad, sliced steak, and french fries for a fixed price of $28.75.  The salad of mixed greens and walnuts has a quirky, unusual, and very delicious mustard dressing.  For the main course, you can choose your steak blue, rare, medium, or well-done.  The first serving comes with a heaping pile of shoestring fries and the steak covered in a secret sauce.  Once you finish your plate, they bring you a second serving of both.   Funnily enough, the reason this blog post has no photos is that...the steak sauce is extremely not ...

This summer, one of my girlfriends was on a very health-conscious diet, which was great for her but difficult for us to pick places to eat.  One of the places we discovered turned out to be a great find right around the NYU area - Ellary's Greens.  The restaurant has opened just recently and has a shiny awe-inspiring ambiance.  You feel like you're sitting under the canopy in a rainforest: a green metal trellis filters the light down through leaf-shaped cut-outs.  The menu has a variety of vegan, vegetarian, and omnivorous options. The first time we ate here, I had the stuffed zucchini with quinoa and yogurt and the chicken sandwich with arugula and lemon ricotta.  The stuffed zucchini looked like vegetarian sushi.  It was light and refreshing, although it lacked any flavor of yogurt and instead came on a pool of tomato sauce.  I'm not a big fan of quinoa but having it stuffed in the zucchini masked the texture well.   The sandwich was...

What more could you ask for on a Friday evening than the company of your closest friends, beautiful weather, pizza, and ice cream? Last Friday night (TGIF), I had just those four things as I dined at Peppino's in Park Slope.  Peppino's is a brick oven pizzeria with an intimate, rustic-looking dining area.  Eight of us were gathered around a table, practically salivating after a long walk to get there.  We split a meal, family style, consisting of an antipasta dish, two salads, and three small pizzas (margarita, alla vodka, and diavolo). The food was pretty standard Italian cuisine, which reminded me how good simple food with unpretentious ingredients can be.  I had a bite of mozzarella, a bite of sundried tomato ( very  good), some Caesar salad, some mixed salad with balsamic dressing, a slice of margarita pizza, and a slice of pizza alla vodka.  I had all the quintessential tastes and colors of Italy: tomato, basil, cheese, balsamic, vodka (just ...

Every time New York City's Restaurant Week rolls around, Alex and I try to visit at least one place (e.g. Le Cirque last summer and Smith & Wollensky earlier this year).  I've previously expressed a whole lotta love for Restaurant Week, but my thoughts have changed a bit as I've realized $90 on a meal for two people is kind of steep and in our chronicles of foodventures, we have had so many great meals for far less.  Still, it's a good excuse for us to dress up pretty for a night out! I've been wanting to dine at Fig & Olive for a while and tonight I finally got my wish.  It was a nice dinner, but there was room for improvement.  Fig & Olive, as you might gather from the eponymous foodstuffs, focuses on Mediterranean cuisines, a sort of hodgepodge of Greek-Turkish-Italian-Moroccan-style foods.  The decor in the restaurant is a modern take on natural earthy elements and is pretty inviting.  Sadly, once the dinner rush picked up, the dining ...

Peter Xavier Kelly beat Iron Chef Bobby Flay during the Battle of the Cowboy Ribeye.  Bobby Flay, losing at a grilling competition?!  His victor has got to be good.  We found out just how good last weekend at a dear friend’s surprise graduation party. The restaurant X2O Xavier’s on the Hudson is up in Yonkers, a nice train ride from Grand Central on the Metro North.  The décor is lovely, minimalist, and reminiscent of the sea – wavy and curvy glass fixtures – which is appropriate because it sits right at the riverside.  Everything was elegant and beautiful, including the food! First we started with Caesar’s salad and bread.  The bread was interestingly trapezoid-shaped and dusted with a cinnamon-y sugar.  The salad was delicious, if not very remarkable. Then, we picked different items off the menu for appetizers and entrees.  I had wild mushroom ravioli and Alex had the shrimp and asparagus tempura.  My ravioli were a...

There's a restaurant on Union Square called Max Brenner: Chocolate by the Bald Man.  If that's not intriguing enough, I don't know what is. Max Brenner serves a lot of incredible food that relates to - what else - chocolate!  You don't really go to Max Brenner to eat savory food...you go there for Belgian waffles, chocolate fondue, and the dessert pizza!  Their food is really a feast for all your senses, from the beautiful plating to the bold flavors to the heat radiating from the marshmallow-roasting mini-stove (seriously).  The sauces that accompany a dish (chocolate, caramel, syrup, etc.) come in Erlenmeyer flasks (seriously).  Many times, I've wanted to lick my plate clean, and the plate of my dining companion (seriously).   I am unlike most people, though: I go to Max Brenner for their savory food and then share a dessert.  Their savory dishes are American comfort food and diner food, but elevated to an elegant and modern level. ...