Category

restaurants

  • My Worst Restaurant Experience Ever

    It’s not every day that you have your worst restaurant experience ever. Mine happened a few weeks ago, upon my return from Seattle and Cape Cod. Literally: it was my first meal back and the food gods rightly punished me for making a waste of it.Park Slope has two sushi joints I frequent: one is…

  • Applewood

    Applewood

    Here’s some unsolicited advice, reader: if you want to enjoy a nice dinner out, don’t plan it. I think the unhappiest experiences people have eating out are cases where it’s overplanned–the expectations are so high that something’s bound to disappoint. But when you wander out of your apartment, as Craig and I did last week…

  • Recent Meals at Adour & Prune

    Recent Meals at Adour & Prune

    Brillat Savarin famously said, “Tell me what you eat, I’ll tell you who you are.” As much as I’d like to believe that most people go through their lives believing this, my hunch is that most people don’t think it’s a character-defining moment when they sprinkle Splenda into their coffee. Instead, I think many people…

  • Bone Marrow at Blue Ribbon

    Bone Marrow at Blue Ribbon

    When people ask me, “How do you come up with stuff for your blog all the time?” I have a ready-made answer: “Camera.” “Camera?” “Yes,” I say. “I try to carry a camera everywhere I go” (sometimes at my own peril) “and then if I eat something notable or I stumble into somewhere notable I…

  • Valentine’s Day Dinner at Insieme

    Valentine’s Day Dinner at Insieme

    Fancy dinners are funny things: you think you have to plan for them, make reservations, get dressed up, when in fact the idea of a “fancy dinner” is just a construct; the truth is, a talented chef with a nice restaurant wants nothing more than for you to pop in at the spur of the…

  • The Seven Stages of Dining at Per Se (Craig’s Birthday Lunch)

    The Seven Stages of Dining at Per Se (Craig’s Birthday Lunch)

    The First Stage: Shock The original plan was to take Craig to see the play “Speech & Debate,” which he’s been eager to see, and then to dinner at Soto–a Japanese place in the West Village, praised as the second best new restaurant of the year by Frank Bruni in The New York Times. And…

  • Moim

    Moim

    Last we spoke about restaurant reviews, I’d sworn them off (see here) with the caveat: “If I go out to eat and have a spectacular meal, of course I’ll tell you about it.” Well a week ago that happened right here in Park Slope at a place called Moim.

  • My Critical Condition

      In the introduction to John Lahr’s 1996 book “Light Fantastic: Adventures in Theatre” he writes, “Criticism, of course, is a kind of performance, but with this difference: the artist puts his life on the line, the critic only his words. This is not to minimize the significance of the activity, but to place criticism…

  • Perry Street

    Perry Street

    If you leave a restaurant happy, does it matter if the meal itself was anything but perfect? Yesterday I had this very experience at Perry Street, Jean-George’s oft-ignored Greenwich Village outpost where savvy diners can enjoy a three-course lunch for $24. I’d been meaning to try Perry Street for a long time–ever since it opened–but…