NYC Restaurant Reviews - donuts4dinner.com » i am a country bumpkin

The Time I Threw Up in a Restaurant and Everyone Saw

donuts4dinner — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:30:26 +0000

I mentioned in my review of the chef’s omakase at Yasuda that despite my overall excellent showing in an all-seafood meal, there was one slip-up that night. My boyfriend was taking notes at Yasuda because he’s an encyclopedia of fish names, and I was no doubt going to be writing down things like “Motown shrimp” instead of “botan shrimp”. Well, at this point in the notes, he writes, “Katie loses her shit.”

Let me explain first that I’ve been having trouble with oysters since about my second one. The first time I tried one, at Momofuku Ko, I didn’t even think about it; I just gummed it a little, swallowed it, and put a gold star on my shirt. Every subsequent oyster has given me pause, though. I actually like the flavor of them, which is the really maddening part, and I don’t consider their texture snot-like or anything along those lines. Something about them, though, just subconsciously goes to work on me, and I have a hard time keeping them down.

Well, at Yasuda this night, I actually didn’t keep mine down. We told the chef to give us whatever he wanted, and he started us slow with progressively finer tunas and then moved into some more adventurous clams and shrimp. I’d heard that the oyster Yasuda serves is this giant, sprawling thing that they slice smaller pieces off of, but I didn’t think that bothered me. And the actual appearance of my oyster was like a nice, creamy alfredo sauce. There were some black, stringy parts, but it’s not like I haven’t seen that before.

So I downed the thing like usual and immediately knew it was going to give me trouble. I gagged a little but told myself, “You ARE going to eat this oyster.” Like there was any alternative. So I took a swig of water to force it down, and instead, a bunch of rice came back up. It felt like all of the rice from all of the previous pieces of sushi, each grain still fully intact. I buckled down and again told myself that I was going to swallow it again, laced with bile as it probably was.

And then I just full-on vomited into my napkin.

I held it to my mouth in an attempt to disguise what was going on, but I’m sure it was pretty obvious to everyone as I abruptly stood up, all wild-eyed, trying to remember where the bathroom was from my only other visit years before. A server rushed over to pull back my chair for me, and I’m sure I looked like an idiot still holding this napkin up to my mouth as I ran to the back of the restaurant. I felt like all eyes were on me and that they all saw the creamy oyster bits dribbling down my chin.

It was such a traumatic event that I can’t remember if I threw my napkin in the bathroom trash or if I tried to salvage it and nonchalantly bring it back to the counter with me, but I hope for everyone’s sake that I didn’t carry a bunch of vomit back into the restaurant. My boyfriend just told the sushi chef that I must not have liked oysters as much as I thought, and I felt up for anything again once it was out of my system, but for the rest of the night, the chef would ask, “Is salmon roe okay? Is eel okay?” before serving us anything remotely adventurous. And I felt like a dumb white girl from the Midwest.

I thought the experience might ruin me completely for oysters and was really troubled to imagine a life in which I not only don’t ever get to enjoy that briny, fresh flavor but in which I also have to annoyingly ask that chefs leave the oysters off of my dishes. Luckily, I’ve had two since then and have just learned to chase them immediately with a glass of water. Which sort of defeats the whole purpose of eating them for the flavor, but hey, at least I’m eating them.

Celebrities of the Chefing World

plumpdumpling — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:00:38 +0000

I truly, legitimately thought on my way to my boyfriend’s from work a few weeks ago that I was about to come face-to-face with super-studly chef Eric Ripert of Le Bernadin fame. I realized I had no idea what to say to him and quickly started trying to think of some food-related witticisms. “Don’t tell him you don’t like seafood!” I reminded myself.

It turned out to be some other super-studly man with gleaming hair, and I was off the hook, but it got me thinking about how weird it is that even I get a little excited about food celebrities. Understand that I don’t care about movie and TV stars at aaaaall. I keep a list of celebrities I’ve seen while living in NYC on my personal blog just because I like the stories behind my interactions with them, but I don’t read celebrity gossip magazines, I’m scared that shows like “TMZ” exist, and I have no idea why anyone (my boyfriend!) would watch a single moment of the Oscars or the Emmys, especially to look at the clothes.

However.

I got off the bus at 14th Street on Monday to walk the rest of the way back to my boyfriend’s apartment in my quest to work off some of these tasting menus, and a few blocks later, I came upon wd~50′s Wylie Dufresne with a little boy sitting on his shoulders. (I assume it was his son, but you can assume whatever you like.)

I immediately pictured myself marching up to him, hand extended, and saying, “I named yours my absolute favourite NYC restaurant the other day. Your foie gras filled with passion fruit still comes up in conversation between my boyfriend and me about once a week. I think you’re the most inventive chef in the entire world. Here’s the link to my blog. Do you do wine pairings? I suggest your dessert tasting to new foodies all of the time. Do you hate the word foodie, too?”

And then I realized that wow, Wylie Dufresne does not care about any of that stuff. So I kept on walking. But of course I immediately called my boyfriend and squealed.

this is how Wiley looks if you stop him in the street
and try to make pointless conversation

I guess I react toward chefs like most people react toward moviestars. And I guess it’s little sightings like these that make my boyfriend’s tiny Manhattan apartment and what he pays for it worthwhile.

Brownie Batter: Decadent, Shameful

plumpdumpling — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:30:45 +0000

On my last night of Christmas vacation in Ohio, my best friend, Tracey, and I invited my cousin Bethany and our friend Michelle over to her house for cards, videogames, boytalk, and other things girls in Ohio do. Tracey and I decided to make brownies for the occasion, and by that I mean we poured a box mix into a big bowl and added an egg.

Tracey kind of hinted that she wasn’t entirely interested in actually cooking the brownies, because like cookie dough and oysters, brownie batter is best eaten raw. I said, “Well, maybe we can separate half the batter and only cook a small batch.” And she said, “. . . or we could not cook it at all.”

And so we didn’t. We scooped the batter into sundae glasses, put them in the refrigerator to chill, and decided not to tell Bethany and Michelle what it was until they’d taken a bite, lest they think us gluttonous freaks and not give it a chance. Of course we got too excited in the end and had to tell them it was brownie fetus, and they reacted to it quite well, considering. We all sat around Tracey’s kitchen table for hours, playing Euchre and watching the batter stick to our upside-down spoons.

Referring to it as “pudding” made three of us feel much better, but Tracey had no shame, and neither does Faith of An Edible Mosaic, who shares her recipe here.

Photo by An Edible Mosaic

Just Another Thing to Be Snooty About

plumpdumpling — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 16:30:14 +0000

I just saw a review of a restaurant in which the woman complained that her server didn’t know to bring her a black napkin to match her black pants.

Pardon my ignorance, but is this a thing? Should I be embarrassed about the countless times I’ve sat with a white napkin on my black pants? Should I also be expecting restaurants to have a stockpile of sequined and gold lamé napkins, too?

Seems a little ridiculous to me, but I am a farmgirl.

Why You Don’t Want to Eat Your Vegetables

plumpdumpling — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:00:48 +0000

I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life right now, and OMG, you guys. It is wonderful. My eyes have welled up with tears so many times over the way we treat the people who grow our food and the way I myself left my family farm to move to NYC.

Here’s my favourite discovery from today:

Our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we’ve accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: “Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self.” You’d think we cared more about the idea of what we’re eating than about what we’re eating.

And it hit me–this is probably why I like vegetables so much better in a restaurant than at home. I always figured I was just a simple woman too easily won over by the charms of being cooked for and served to. The tray of plain steamed vegetables at Yakitori Torys (now sadly closed) literally made my mouth water, and the all-vegetarian meal we had at Kajitsu is still one of my most memorable.

I never cared at all that Tocqueville bases all of their dishes on what they can buy at the Union Square Greenmarket, but I’m sure now that a good part of the reason I want that $25 prix fixe of theirs every weekend is the fresh vegetables.

I guess the moral of the story is that we should be growing our own food, directly supporting the people who do by buying from a local farmer’s market, or at least only buying foods we know are in season in our areas. I’d love to hear about it if you’re doing any of these things!

Eating My Weight in Fryer Grease

plumpdumpling — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 15:30:12 +0000

I flew home to Ohio last night for a week of the

CIRCLEVILLE PUMPKIN SHOW!

Which some people like to refer to as the “Circleville Pumpkin Festival” or the “Circleville Pumpkin Fair” or the “Podunk Hillbilly Gourd Celebration“.

But they are wrong. It’s a show if I’ve ever seen one.

While there, I plan to

EAT EVERYTHING I ATE LAST YEAR ALL OVER AGAIN.

(And more.)

Shrimp Heads as Homewrecker

plumpdumpling — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:30:40 +0000

Dr. Boyfriend and I both have birthdays this month, and we want to eat delicious foodz on our special days. For mine, I made us a reservation at The Wright, which is the restaurant inside the Guggenheim Museum. (Click on the link and look at how beautiful it is! I don’t care how good the food is, ’cause I’m going solely for the decor.)

For his birthday, he was thinking about going for an elaborate sushi dinner at the best place in town, but it just so happens that I saw a Momofuku Ko reservation open for that day and decided to snatch it up and try to convince him it was time to go.

In case you’re unaware of the ridiculousness of getting into Ko, it involves logging into a reservation website precisely at 10 a.m. every day, selecting lunch or dinner and the number of people in your party, clicking on every available timeslot, and finding out that they’ve all been taken in the time it took you to move your mouse to them. And you can do this over and over again for weeks without ever getting a reservation. Each night’s spots fill up literally before the clock hits 10:01.

But I got us one! And it’s for lunch, which lasts an extra hour . . . and costs an extra $50! For a total of $175!(!!)

The other ridiculous thing about Ko is that Chef David Chang famously doesn’t allow photos. My blogfriend Chubby memorably drew her meal on a notepad with a Sharpie, but other than that, you rarely, rarely see any of the food they serve. So to be honest, I had no idea what I was getting into.

The website says, “We try our best to serve delicious American food,” which I imagined meant, you know, lots of red meat. But then Dr. Boyfriend IMed me with this:

And then he sent me this photo from VIP in the City:

Which is just mean, right?

We spent the next two days dancing around the issue of me not wanting to eat shrimp heads while I secretly showed the photo to everyone I knew and asked if they thought I could handle it. Their answers ranged from “shrimp heads are delicious” to “those freaky tentacle things scrape the top of your mouth and make you BLEED”, but I kept going back to what Kamran and I always say about challenging foods, which is that anything you’re being served in a fine dining establishment is edible at the very least and more than likely is actually life-changingly delicious.

This morning, Kamran announced out of nowhere in the midst of my watching “The Biggest Loser” before work, “If you’re not going to eat that shrimp head, you can go ahead and cancel our Ko reservation.”

I said, “I’m going to try to eat it! I really want to eat it! But I can’t control the weird things my brain tells me about eating shrimp eyes! An irrational fear is still a fear!”

And he said, “The way you’re reacting to this is making me seriously consider whether or not you can handle what they’ll serve us at Per Se.”

I said, “Don’t threaten me with Per Se! Shrimp heads are objectively gross!”

And he said, “If you feel that way, cancel the Ko reservation. And while you’re at it, cancel The Wright, too.”

So we broke up.

No, just kidding. So I went to work, and we apologized to each other over IM, and he sent me a more recent review that didn’t include any shrimp heads whatsoever. There’s a chance I might have to eat the dreaded SOFT SHELL CRAB, though. I’m so scared.

Look Hotter and Get a Better Table

plumpdumpling — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:00:07 +0000

I saw a great Q&A on Chow.com today entitled “Too Frumpy for the Good Seats?” in which a woman asked if she and her friend were relegated to the old people’s section of a restaurant’s dining room because she wasn’t dressed like a tramp.

This is something I wonder to myself allllllllllllll of the time, because while my boyfriend always pairs snazzy blazers with cute t-shirts and sweater vests and looks better than anyone else everywhere we go, you’ll never see me in a cocktail dress and stilettos. I would hope I still look nice, but my style trends more toward granny-in-pearls than hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold.

So when we got seated in no man’s land at Fig & Olive, for instance, I had to wonder if it was because they were keeping their more drunk, less taking-photos-of-their-food patrons in the front where the expansive windows were. And now I know I was right.

The only time I think I’ve ever asked to be moved was when they tried to seat my friend and me directly in front of the kitchen doorway at Serendipity 3, and even then, I barely cared. If I have a specific seat in mind, I’ll always note it in my OpenTable reservation, or I’ll just put something general like, “It’s my birthday, and I don’t want anyone watching as I consume an entire ice cream cake by myself, so please seat us somewhere private!”

I’ll tell you what, though–I feel pret-ty hot now about the fact that Nougatine put us right in front of their big windows facing Central Park the other night.

Why My Boyfriend Won’t Take Me to One of NYC’s Best Restaurants (and Why It’s Not My Fault)

plumpdumpling — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:30:49 +0000

Sometimes I feel bad about reviewing food when I have such a huge bias against some major dish components:

• seafood (except crab that I don’t have to pull out of the shell myself)
• mushrooms (except when I can’t tell what they are–like their essence in a foam(!) or tiny pieces of them concealed in a ravioli–because I don’t hate the taste but the appearance)
• tomatoes (except when they’re heavily cooked)

Mostly I feel this way because Dr. Boyfriend refuses to take me to Per Se until I can not only stomach but actually enjoy all of the foods they’re going to serve me there. He’s withheld the place from me for so long now that no matter how good it is, it’ll never be as good as I’ve made it out to be.

But my best friend sent me a link today to an article on The Kitchn asking what foods people have tried to like but can’t.

And I rejoiced! It turns out that everyone hates seafood and mushrooms and tomatoes! And I love the distinction the post draws between not liking something and trying to like something but failing. No one wants to hate certain foods! My life would be a thousand times easier if I could just eat and enjoy everything. But I haven’t been able to yet, and I don’t have to feel guilty about it anymore, and Dr. Boyfriend can suck it!

(But please suck it after you’ve taken me to Per Se, Kamran. Thank you.)

Enjoying a Diet Coke After a Meal Does Not Make Me Lowbrow

plumpdumpling — Mon, 17 May 2010 16:00:19 +0000

My boyfriend and I had just finished a 3-hour, 9-course meal at Seäsonal. He had ordered a coffee, and I had ordered a Diet Coke, and our food was quietly digesting as we discussed what I should do with my life.

The table next to us, which was approximately six inches from ours in true NYC fashion, had been mostly well-behaved all night. Two of the four people seemed to be dating, and the guy had brought along a British friend who was new to the city, so the girl had brought along a friend for him. One of the girls had graduated from culinary school, but she wasn’t being obnoxious about it. They seemed like not-horrible human beings.

But then two more friends arrived. The girl had a Latina-Jersey accent, and though I originally thought she was dating the guy she came with, she was soon working all of the men at the table. The guy was just generally loud and annoyingly thought it was appropriate for him to go over the success of their dinner’s wine pairings with their waiter. The final decision: not successful.

I could deal with all of that, though. What I couldn’t deal with was the way he then started in on the girls at the table for drinking coffee with their desserts. He chided them for not being as sophisticated as he was with his red wine, and then he added, “But the worst is people who drink Coke at nice restaurants. This isn’t McDonald’s.”

Naturally I took a sip of my drink at that moment and said, “Mmm, this Diet Coke is delicious,” but he didn’t pay any attention.

NYC Restaurant Reviews - donuts4dinner.com » i am a country bumpkin

The Time I Threw Up in a Restaurant and Everyone Saw

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