Dr. Boyfriend and I were trying to decide where to book a dinner reservation last week and saw that Fig & Olive has nearly 700 reviews on OpenTable, which is more than everything else we saw by a long shot. After going there on Friday night, I understand why.

The place is just plain meant to appeal to a lot of people. The menu is interesting but not adventurous, the prices are high enough to keep out the riffraff but low enough that you wouldn’t feel bad about taking a date here even knowing she wasn’t going to put out, the lighting is low, the furniture is plush, the service is neutral, and no one’s pretentious.

We both ordered from the prix fixe menu, which is your standard 3 courses for $36. Even after I added a $6 supplement for my filet mignon, I thought it was a great deal. Here’s what we feasted upon:

chicken samosa with cilantro, Greek yogurt, bell pepper, scallion, cumin, and harissa oil

Wikipedia tells me that phyllo dough is sometimes used for samosas in the West, so I’m refrain from calling this dish blasphemous, and even if it was too soft to be the kind of samosa I’m familiar with, it was delicious, and the only thing wrong with it was that there was only one. The harissa oil and yogurt combo was spicy-good that I had to use our leftover bread from the complimentary olive oils they served us to sop it up.

steak tartar of ground filet mignon and NY steak, shallot, caper, parsley, mayonnaise, olive oil toast

My boyfriend’s favorite part of this was the big caper berry on top, which I had never tasted before. I don’t care that much about capers, but caper berries are delightfully pickley.

grilled beef tenderloin, Herbs de Provence olive oil butter, fingerling potatoes, snow peas, onions

We were scheduled to go to a steak house the next night, but after I finished this filet, I said, “I’m not sure I can eat steak without butter now.” The little pat of herbed cow juice melted all over my meat, soaking into it and leaving the herbs behind on the seared exterior. The potatoes and peas were an afterthought, but it didn’t matter. Steak snobs would be aghast at the fact that the server didn’t ask how I wanted it cooked, but it came out perfectly medium, and I sort of like a chef who refuses to cook food anything but the right way.

grilled shrimp and scallop paella in pimentón (Spanish paprika), saffron rice, eggplant tapenade, bell pepper, tomato, garlic

My boyfriend didn’t much care for this paella, to be honest. It was definitely delicious–the paprika-sodden rice alone was mouthwatering–but he expects a paella to be full of all sorts of treasures for the unearthing. This was rice with a few vegetables and sea meats sprinkled on top. The flavors were there, but the portion and presentation were off.

berries pot de crème

This was a very creamy, slightly-vanilla custard with a blanket of strawberries and blueberries cooked down to their sweetest point. A chunk of very crusty cake accompanied it and made for a nice texture addition.

dessert crostini with blueberries mascarpone on shortbread with microbasil

Dr. Boyfriend’s dessert looked a little too simple to me, frankly, and I was secretly glad that I’d been the one to get the pot de crème at first. But simple as it was, it was special. The creamy cheese with the crumbly bread, the syrupy-sweet berries with the savory basil? YUM.

Overall, I wouldn’t say Fig & Olive is a place I’d send my pickiest foodie friends, but it’s great for casual dates, meeting with friends (as nearly everyone there seemed to be doing), and having steak covered in butter. Not a place you’d go if you only had a weekend in NYC but a place you’d go to take a break from the formality of more-expensive restaurants.

I’ve already told you how much I like the ubiquitous New York black and white cookies. But look what we found at the grocery store!:

It’s a black and white cookie cake! I was a little worried that it wouldn’t be as delicious as the cookies, because it’s not like I eat cookies because I like dough; I want icing. And lots of it. So the icing-to-bread ratio had me skeptical.

But no! It’s moist, almost sticky with sugar, with a slight lemony flavor. The fact that the bread is so NOT dry made me feel like maybe I could even eat it (gasp!) without the icing at all. But I obviously wouldn’t, especially since the icing was about twice as thick as it is on a regular black and white cookie.

I bought mine at the Amish Market on 45th Street, but I’ll bet they’re available at the other locations, too, and maybe other places in the city? Let me know if you’ve seen ‘em!

I ate the KFC Double Down and have lived to tell the tale.

A co-worker told me about this amazing concoction of two chicken “filets” that act as bread for a sandwich of bacon, two kinds of cheese, and the Colonel’s special sauce a couple of weeks ago, and I was counting down the days until it was released. They say this thing is so meaty it needs no bun, but it also apparently needs no lettuce, tomato, pickles, nor onion. That’s right–this thing is UNAPOLOGETICALLY UNHEALTHY. And that is what I love about America.

Apparently this is what everyone else loves about America, too, because all ten to twelve people in line with me at the KFC near Grand Central were speaking with European accents. At first I thought, “HaHA! See? Everyone else is just as fat-crazed as we are!” But then I realized they were actually probably like, “We’re only here on vacation for two days. What’s the craziest, most ridiculously indulgent American thing we can eat?” Thank you, KFC.

As I walked home from KFC, my paper bag swinging beside me, I couldn’t decide if I felt

a) totally dirty, or
b) as if I had Willy Wonka’s golden ticket in my hand.

As soon as I bit into the Double Down, though, the concerns about my well-being melted away. The chicken was flecked with herbs on the outside, bright white on the inside, and juicy allllllllll over. The two strips of bacon, unnaturally pink as they were, were just the right amount of crunchiness, and the cheeses were that perfect sort of half-melted you only get at fast food chains. I understand that people are afraid of this mysterious Colonel’s Sauce, but it was just a sort of Southwestern blend: spicy, peppery, slightly orange-colored.

The sauce was abundant, though not so much that it made the “sandwich” messy, and I really could see myself eating the thing in public without too many shirt-spills, despite its unusual composition. One was definitely filling enough, which is a good thing, since it cost as much as a value meal at any other fast food joint.

And I got the grilled version, which means my arteries only half-collapsed ten minutes after I finished, and I only half-hated myself in the morning.

Don’t be fooled by the look on my boyfriend’s face as he eats his seseri, or grilled chicken neck, at Yakitori Torys. This is actually his favourite thing on the “Chicken Limited” menu.

That, the crispy chicken tail, and the chicken oyster sell out fast and are well worth arriving early for. I can’t speak to the grilled soft knee bone, though, as it’s been sold out every time we’ve been there in the past two years.

The place also has the best decor for taking faux-serious photos.

Charlie Palmer’s Métrazur was an obvious Restaurant Week choice for my boyfriend and me: we’ve passed by it a million times inside Grand Central, we’re interested in Palmer’s restaurants in general, and I wanted the Sichuan spiced pork tenderloin on the Restaurant Week menu.

As far as atmosphere goes, not much beats Métrazur. Located on Grand Central’s East Balcony, it overlooks all of the chaos of commuters rushing to their trains, but the immense space overhead captures all of the noise and leaves the restaurant cozy and quiet. It was definitely unlike any other restaurant’s decor.

I made Kamran pose like this, just so you don’t think he often sits around in public with his mouth agape.

Crab and lobster cake, mango, shaved frisee and radish salad, brioche “Melba”, lemon butter nage

Crab is literally the only seafood that makes my mouth water, and this was one of the finer crab cakes I’ve had. The breading on the cake was thick and crunchy, as was the brioche. The nage (or broth) was super intense and basically overwhelmed all of the other flavors, but it was a lemony, buttery, and rich as all get-out. The cake was good enough on its own that it didn’t need the nage, but lemon and lobster go so well together.

Roasted butternut squash soup, pumpkin seeds, applewood smoked bacon, caramelized onions, créme fraiche

Hands down the best butternut squash soup I’ve had, but how could it not be with all of the bacon hiding on the bottom of the bowl? After one bite of this, I understood why everyone makes such a big deal about squash soup, and I was still thinking about it two courses later and wishing I could have more of it instead of my dessert. And I don’t not eat dessert.

Sichuan spiced pork tenderloin, gingered butternut squash puree, baby bok choy, maple soy glaze

When I ordered this, the waiter asked me how I wanted my pork cooked, and I said to him, “No one has ever asked me that in my life.” HOW DO I WANT MY PORK COOKED?! I WANT IT COOKED THROUGH, THAT’S HOW. I asked for medium well so it wouldn’t come out grey, but it came out completely pink, and I didn’t die, so I guess the chef knows best. There was definitely not any bok choy on my plate, and the squash puree was more texture than flavor, but the maple soy glaze was sweet and yum-MY. And the pork itself was spiced to perfection.

Lamb shank, sweet potato gratin, Brussels sprout leaves, black trumpets, red wine jus

Maybe you can’t tell from the photo, but this was a giant portion, especially for Restaurant Week. My boyfriend had to share part of it with me, and even then, he was packed full. Now, if you really love the sort of gamey taste of lamb, this was not the shank for you, but if you love a slow-cooked beef roast, this was the best lamb shank you’ve ever had. My boyfriend found one big pocket of lambiness, but the rest of it was delightfully mild enough to showcase the other flavors on the plate.

Bittersweet chocolate torte, passion fruit, candied orange, clubber cream

The best things about this for me were the smear of super-sweet passion fruit and the whipped cream (whatever “clubber” means). The torte itself was creamy, slippery chocolate with a crispy cookie crust, and it was nice, but it was another in a long line of desserts meant for non-gluttons.

Key lime pie, tropical fruit compote, chocolate nibs crisp, Italian meringue

This was a light, refreshing finish to a rich, heavy dinner. I don’t usually care for light and refreshing and am a huge chocolate person, but this was the superior dessert. The pie was very well done, with a nice key lime custard and a crunchy shell. The crisp tasted like sesame seeds to me, oddly, but maybe my palate was still recovering from the passion fruit in my dessert. I did really like this pie in the end, but I didn’t feel like the same care that had been put into that crazy-delicious soup was evident.

Aside from our completely indifferent and slow server, we were extremely happy that we finally tried Métrazur and that the food exceeded our expectations. I’d go back for the atmosphere and the squash soup any time, and with their every day $44 prix fixe menu that includes a bottle of wine, I can.

I was just living my life one day, heading to pick up dinner at Boi to Go–a Vietnamese fast-food-type offshoot of the original Boi just a few blocks away from my boyfriend’s apartment in Midtown–when I saw that the location had closed early. Horrified that I might have to dine on another slice of tasteless pizza, I read the sign more closely and found that an even newer Boi had opened on 3rd Ave. between 44th and 45th. It meant backtracking three whole blocks, but I decided to give it a go.

That was half a year ago, and I’m still loving it just as much as I did that first day. Everyone talks about the banh mi, but the best thing there is the lunch box. I get mine with pork, noodles, sesame-basil sauce, and all of the vegetables. The end result looks like this:

That’s a massive pile of thin rice noodles, lightly coated in sauce and hidden beneath mounds of lettuce, corn, carrots, onions, basil, and . . . okay, actually, that’s from a time when I got the chicken meatballs instead of the pork. The pork is marinated until it’s the color of molasses and then cut into thick, chewy strips, while the chicken meatballs are juicy and meaty rather than bready and dry.

The bowl as a whole is basically impossible to eat. It’s crammed so full of ingredients that you end up dumping half of it on the floor in your attempt to eat it, and it’s clearly not meant to be finished in one sitting, but I always have to. I try to save my favourite ingredients to eat last and end up with a bowl full of pork bits with, like, one noodle to accompany them, but that’s part of the charm.

Also part of the charm is the great service. When I go in after work to pick up a bowl for dinner, the woman working behind the counter always greets me with a smile and a hello, remembers what I like to order, and insists on stamping my buy-so-many-get-one-free card even when she has to wait ten minutes for me to dig it out of my cavernous bag.

I haven’t been able to find the Boi Sandwich menu online, so here’s a scanned version courtesy of my office copier:

Larger version here.

Larger version here.

I love that this place feels a little hipper and a little friendlier than most takeout joints in Midtown. The food is delicious, the value is excellent for the freshness and quantity of ingredients you get, and the service is attentive. The only bad thing about the place, really, is that the counter is a solid piece attached to the wall at both ends so that to get out from behind it, the poor workers have to crawl under it. Strange.

I’m sure I knew what Tao was all about by virtue of watching this past season of “Celebrity Apprentice” and seeing how many times Dennis Rodman recommended it, but the Restaurant Week menu somehow made that seem unimportant. It became important again, though, about five seconds after I walked in the door and heard the thumping club music and saw the crowds of yuppies and tourists holding drinks in the waiting area.

After an uncomfortable fifteen-minute wait where we were bumped into multiple times despite leaving plenty of room around us for people to get by, my boyfriend and I were led upstairs, across a bridge, and to a booth along one wall. Kamran ordered two TAO-tinis for us (a super-girly raspberry drink served in a martini glass to make it look more masculine, $12.50), which were very alcoholic and delicious.

We drank them as fast as we could in an attempt to forget how annoyingly trendy the atmosphere was and prayed to the giant two-story Buddha statue in the front of the restaurant for our appetizers to arrive quickly. And they did.

I had the pork potstickers and thought they were really good aside from the completely unnecessary baby greens on top. The spicy sauce was good enough to be eaten on its own by the spoonful, and the side of each dumpling that was seared brown and crispy made me want to not share them.

Kamran ordered the TAO Temple Salad simply because he was trying to choose the healthiest option, but not only was he disappointed in how unexciting the salad was, but there were fried dough strips on top that made it unhealthy, anyway. I thought the dressing made it bearable as far as salads go, but I only had to eat one bite before I got to go back to my potstickers, so maybe I’m biased.

My entrée was truly, truly delicious. The wasabi-crusted filet mignon was what had drawn me to the menu in the first place, and it only exceeded my expectations. I’d asked for it to be cooked medium-well, as I don’t care to see my meat bleed, but the chef as usual had insisted on sending it out still very red. And of course it was perfect. The wasabi crust on top had the consistency of sugar crystals and enough spice to please me but not so much that it made my nose run. The beef was tender and flavorful, and the portion was huge.

The real standout was the pile of onion rings on the side, though. I hadn’t expected them, which made them all the more delightful. They were sweet, they were buttery, they were crunchy, and they had chive blossoms poking out of them. They were undoubtedly the best onion rings I’ve ever had and are worth the $35 dinner prix fixe price tag themselves.

Kamran ordered the Chilean sea bass, and for someone who doesn’t make much to-do about great food, he was very intent on making me try it. I’m the type of person who hates seafood so much that I’ll spend twenty minutes picking all of the clams out of my clam chowder, but I have to admit that this fish was awesome. It was extra flaky on one side and extra crispy on the other, and the crust that gave it its crisp was so delicious that I held on to a hunk of it to eat after my steak was gone.

Desserts seem to err on the side of caution during Restaurant Week, but the banana bread pudding I ordered was no slouch. It wasn’t actually bread pudding at all, though. It was banana pudding (as good as the kind you get at Magnolia Bakery) with a layer of vanilla wafer cookies underneath, a layer of cookie crumbs on top, and a tempura-battered banana to boot. The fried banana and the banana pudding were both so good that I had a hard time figuring out which to save for my last bite. Kamran was ridiculously jealous.

Kamran ordered the ginger fruit having no idea what it was but figuring once again that it was the healthiest option. It turned out to be a huge dish of the sweetest, freshest fruits with a scoop of ginger sorbet on top. The lychees were the finest I’ve had, and all of the fruits were so sweet that the sorbet didn’t seem to compete with them. I couldn’t necessarily taste the ginger, but Kamran assures me he could, and he does have the superior palate, after all. My picture’s too dark to see the dish, but we’ll always have the memory of it.

On the way out, I got into a scuffle with a guy on the bridge who wouldn’t move to let me pass by (“Take it easy, girl.”), but that’s the sort of thing I expected from the clientele. I commented to Kamran that it’s a shame there were so many people there who probably couldn’t appreciate the food at all, but he called me a snob, so I guess I’m alone in thinking that.

Aside from my astonishingly negative thoughts about the too-loud, too-obnoxious atmosphere, my dining experience was top-notch. I don’t have a bad thing to say about my food, the huge loft-like space was surprising to find in Manhattan, and the waitstaff was accommodating. I’d love to go back sometime, although maybe at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday night.

The sign outside of Sakagura is a perfect representation of the restaurant as a whole: to use one of my favorite clichés, it’s like putting pearls on a pig. Maybe I’m squeamish, but I had my doubts about the place when I discovered I had to walk through an office building, past a security guard, and downstairs to the basement through a cinderblock hallway to get to the dining area. The restaurant was nicely decorated, with lots of bamboo and spot lighting, but I couldn’t help feeling that the dark look was less trendy and more meant to hide the fact that we were sitting in a dank back room.

From the moment the bottle of sake arrived, though, it didn’t matter. My dinner date, Kamran, and I had settled on what was supposed to be some milky, nutty, dense sake that I’d hoped would sit on our stomachs like a glass of Guinness, but our server steered us away from it and instead suggested their seasonal sake. After seeing the giant spread for it in the sake menu, I figured she was just required to push it, but it turned out that light, sweet, and springy was totally befitting to the meal we were about to have.

If anyone can read that label, please do and get back to me.

I was glad our friend had taken us to a genuine sake joint a while back and taught us to drink from boxes, or this would’ve been completely befuddling. In case you’ve never had sake served this way, your server will overfill the box, letting some sake slosh into the bowl. Without looking like a cheapskate, you can totally tip the contents of the bowl back into the box and finish it.

Our first dish was a quad of tori tsukune or chicken meatballs ($6), which I’d really like to become a connoisseur of. I’ve had them from at least five different Asian joints at this point, and I love each more than the last. These were much more meaty than bready, just the way Kamran likes them. (I, on the other hand, am a carb glutton and want everything to taste entirely refined.) But dipped in salt, I could’ve made an entire meal of these things:

Our second dish was the entire reason we went to Sakagura in the first place: the jaga dango, described as “mashed potatoes coated in sweet donut batter fried crisp” ($6). This was real, live donuts 4 dinner:

And it was good, of course, because everything doughed and fried is good. The problem was that the dough overpowered the mashed potatoes. It ended up being one flavor, one color, and one texture:

And I’m not complaining! But I guess I just wanted some butter or some truffle oil thrown in. You know, to make it completely un-Japanese.

Our next dish was not for the faint of heart. It was listed on the menu as “buta kakuni, Sakagura’s special stewed diced pork” ($4.50), which had me expecting a measly spoonful of pork bits, but all of the reviews suggested it was the best thing on the menu. What arrived was a two-inch by two-inch by two-inch square of what resembled brown gelatin. But it was actually a thick layer of fat with a thin layer of pork underneath. Followed by another thick layer of fat and another thin layer of pork. For someone raised to cut every bit of gristle off a hunk of meat, this seemed devilish.

And it tasted it, too. The dab of spicy mustard on the side of the bowl, the sprinkling of microgreens on top, and the sweet liquid the pork was resting in formed one of the most mind-blowingly delicious dishes I’ve ever had. Some of that mind-blowingness may have come from the shock that it didn’t taste as disgusting as it looked, but I can’t argue with the fact that the fat literally melted in our mouths.

When my dumpling was finished, I tried to drink the remainder of the liquid, but it was just too intense for me. And I’m the kind of girl who likes chocolate bars made with 85% cacao, so intense is something I do well. It was just so porky yet so candied, so savory yet so sweet. I asked Kamran to finish my bowl off for me, which left him with this look of delight on his face:

Next, we had the gyu miso nikomi, which was “shredded beef back ribs stewed in miso topped with grated daikon radish” ($6.50), and it was another pleasant surprise. I like beef, and I like radish, but I had no idea what grated radish wetted with some miso broth could do for the texture of some tender beef. And the shisho leaf! I could have eaten that alone by the poundful.

The final savory dish was the tori karaage, “deep fried chunks of chicken marinade in sake and ginger infused soy sauce” ($7). Had it been the only plate we’d had, it would’ve been great, but after fatty pork and radishy beef, it just couldn’t compare. Although I certainly appreciated the lovely lemon sculpture:

After all of that food, we really didn’t have room for dessert, but there was black sesame crème brûlée with black sesame ice cream ($7)!

It was a sort of thin sesame cookie/biscuit/brittle over sesame ice cream over a very complex crème brûlée, but it was all oddly un-sweet. In a way that we liked. It wasn’t a dessert for everyone, certainly, but I doubt that any of their desserts are. Coffee gelatin, anyone?

Truly, it was a fantastic experience. We raved about it for hours and then days and can’t wait to go back.