Veritasty: Truthfully Delicious

I just had my mind blown after my birthday dinner at Beauty & Essex!  It was quite possibly the most fun dining experience I've had in a long time! Beauty & Essex is, as the name suggests, beautiful and located on Essex Street in the Lower East Side. It is one of two restaurants by Executive Chef Chris Santos, also known as the lovable tattooed judge on Chopped.  The concept of both Beauty & Essex and The Stanton Social (his other restaurant in the same neighborhood) is to have little plates for sharing: tapas, but without the pigs ears and with a whole lotta fancy. Why is Beauty & Essex beautiful?  The restaurant will puzzle you, surprise you, and take your breath away, quite literally.  Its marquee is a dingy, falling-apart sign that looks like the covering fell off the neon letters, a leftover from the wild days of New York in the 80s.  I wouldn't be surprised if they intentionally made the ampersand dangle at an angle.  The vesti...

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...

If you're ever in the mood to have more food than your stomach can possibly stomach...head over to Cafe Espanol.  We've been here a couple of times as per Alex's suggestion.  Each time, I've had enough food to last me around three full meals. Cafe Espanol is a dark, crowded restaurant on Bleeker Street. They have cute tile mosaics and murals on the wall.  It is darkly lit and quite romantic.  They serve authentic Spanish food like paella and tapas and seafood dishes.  I've had a few different dishes and I can attest that whatever I've eaten has always been delicious. The first time I came here, I had a seafood paella.  When the waiter brought out some rice and shellfish on a plate, I was a little disappointed.  I didn't just get rice and shellfish on a plate! But...my eyes lit up when he set down something else on the table next to me: a heavy, sizzling cast-iron skillet with the rest of my paella in it.  Legit!  If you add up the tot...

Cheeeeeeeeeeeese Balls Euz-what-di?  Euzkadi!  It's a small Spanish/Basque tapas restaurant in the East Village and we had a Groupon coupon for it.  $25 for $50 worth of food = score! It turns out that the $50 cushion was necessary, though. The dishes here are fairly expensive, and the portions sounded (and turned out to be) very small.  Each dish was, on average, $10, and the waiter recommended that for two people, four to six dishes would suffice.  Funny how for "Asian tapas" (dim sum), you can probably feed like 10 people with $50. The restaurant was darkly lit and decorated really strangely, with cave drawings all over the ceiling and walls.  Otherwise, I wouldn't have found the ambiance very pleasant, but for some reason, it matched the style of Spanish tapas. UnKosher Croquettes The bread bowl that was served was accompanied by an olive tapanade, which was surprisingly delicious. The bread was nice and chewy, and the tapanade - tho...