I’ve been sick for a week now. Thanks to all the cold medicine I’ve been hitting or the immense amounts of godknowswhat up my nose, I haven’t been able to taste anything since last Wednesday. But my little cousin was in town from Ohio, and I couldn’t not take the poor kid somewhere cool.
So we went to “Top Chef” contestant and should-have-been-the-winner Angelo Sosa’s new casual burger joint, Social Eatz. If you can get past the fact that a Z has been added to every item on the menu–BURGER’Z! TACO’Z! SIDE’Z and SWEET’Z!–it’s actually a really cute, neighborhoody kind of place with what I understand is pretty tasty food.
I, of course, couldn’t verify the tastiness for myself thanks to my cold, but here are some photos to get your mouth to watering:
None of us could resist ordering this burger after seeing the giant banner proclaiming that it won Eater.com’s Greatest Burger in America competition, and while I think the New Yorkers in the bunch still walked away with our Shake Shack and Blue 9 bias still intact, the Ohio kids really thought it was the best they’d tasted, and nobody argued that it was one fine burger.
For me, it was a little too small when compared to the half-pounders you get at places like Cozy and Jackson Hole. For my boyfriend, it was a little too juicy, which is totally a not-real complaint when it comes to burgers. And for my cousin and his friends, the fact that they won’t add cheese to the burger was a major blow.
But why would you need cheese when the soft egg bursts all over the burger and then solidifies into this?
Hot dogs in this town always let me down. I know I’m the only one left, but I’ve never been to Crif Dogs in the East Village or Bark Hot Dogs in Prospect Heights. Yet I somehow expect that the hot dogs elsewhere will compare to my expectations of those places. I want a hot dog PILED with crap. I shouldn’t be able to pick it up unless I want to lick it off my shirt later. The diner in my hometown in Ohio serves hot dogs with chili, cheese, and onions for $1. ONE DOLLAR.
This was a sausage lounging on a thin bed of relish for $8. I won’t judge it, having not been able to taste it, but the look of it did not bowl me over.
Even with all of my sickness, I got a hint of citrus when I bit into one of these guys. That, I think, is a very good sign.
I’d be a terrible food blogger if I rated the place on presentation alone, but certainly everything looked good enough to entice me to try again when my cold subsides. And I don’t think I’ll have a problem getting in again: the place was nearly empty at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night. Maybe it’s the out-of-the-way location or the way it seems caught between wanting to be a sports bar and wanting to be a trendy Asian joint along the lines of Sea in Williamsburg or Spice Market in the Meatpacking District. I never mind not having to wait in line for a seat, though, and just hope the eatz are better than the socializing.
My boyfriend noticed that the latest Eater.com Heatmap included newcomer Tenpenny, which has been getting rave reviews for its pretzel bread, lobster gnocchi, and giant rack of pork.
The only problem is that all of the reviews we saw were filled with terrible dark, grainy photos where the bread could’ve been barf and the pork could’ve been poo, so we were a little unsure about what we were getting into. At $68 for six courses and $115 for seven courses with wine, though, we were willing to give it a shot.
So greasy! So yummy!
We were so amused when the first course turned out to be an appetizer sampler, because these were exactly the three we were most interested in and had considered ordering additionally just to make sure we got to try them. Talk about exceeding expectations.
The chips were extremely crispy, puffed little slices of potato. The very spicy chipotle one was my favourite, and although I did like all three of the flavors, I think the other two appetizers were more delicious and complex, and I’d be more apt to order them again.
Not that you can do anything wrong with artichokes, but frying them is particularly great because all of the layers get crispy. I’m used to smaller, firmer types of roe that aren’t so juicy, so the way these little trout babies popped so easily between my teeth and leaked out all their fishy goodness was a little surprising. Not unpleasant, but surprising. This was certainly the most challenging of the appetizers, ifyouknowwhatImean.
My grandmother makes a ham loaf that’s celebrated among my family members on every holiday. Up until recently, I didn’t get it. Why would you grind up ham and form it into a little sauce-covered turd when an unadulterated slice of ham is as good as it gets on its own? Well, I got over the mindblock a few holidays ago, and now I look forward to the ham loaf as much as the next gal. I was going to miss Easter back home in Ohio this year, but wouldn’t you know it, Tenpenny is serving my grandma’s famous ham loaf.
Only their sauce hardens on the outside of the croquette, making it sweet and crunchy. It’s just the perfect little bite of ham, and I could’ve easily eaten a plateful of these on my own.
I like vegetables, but usually only when they’re served alongside an intimidating slab of meat. I have friends who don’t eat green things. I have friends who literally don’t eat vegetables period. But this was a plate of vegetables that I truly believe could win anyone over. They were heavily dusted with dehydrated ranch flavoring and tasted like junk food. It was like eating a bag of chips, except that every once in a while, you’d run into a fresh radish.
The mix of raw and fried, sweet and spicy was brilliant. We loved the contrast between the soft carrots with their tops still on and the crunchy sunchoke “soil” underneath, which were like bitter bacon bits. I would definitely, definitely order this again, and I wouldn’t even care if there wasn’t a hunk of meat in my future.
The puree garnishing this dish was far more vegetabley than anything on the last plate, funnily enough. We loved the texture play of the granola-like crispy chicken skin, the slick scallop, and the chewy chanterelles. Like most kids, I grew up avoiding black licorice, but I’ve come to appreciate anise as an adult, and it was used especially well here.
I could not wait to taste this. I truly love gnocchi, and I was so excited to see how the soft little dumplings would interact with that special segmented rubbery thing that lobster has going on. The gnocchi were the lightest little pillows of hash-brown-y flavor, and I loved the added texture the sear on them provided. Plus, that earthy, rich truffle in the sauce? Come on.
Now, you know I’m no sucker for fish, but you drop a dehydrated lemon with all of its condensed tart flavor on top of a piece of perfectly-seared halibut, and I’m sold. This was one of the better fish dishes I’ve had with those soft onions and artichokes underneath. I’m still pretty anti-olive, though, and the bitterness of the paste on the side of the plate was too much for me, especially since it looked like sweet, sweet chocolate.
I’m not sure if my picture of this didn’t turn out well because I was trashed or if it’s because it’s just a hard dish to capture with its plate-spanning girth and ceiling-reaching height. Either way, what you see doesn’t in any way compare to what I tasted, which were tender, well-crusted slices of pork complimented by a what amounted to an apple pot pie.
When we saw “savory apple pie”, we thought, Yeah, right, but it really, truly was not sweet! I think a lot of its non-dessert-ness came from the caramelized onions inside. It was just such a great play on pork chops and applesauce that we were sad when the pie ran out.
Dessert was a little tray of two salty walnut financiers, melt-in-your-mouth hazelnut truffles, and gummy strawberry pate de fruits. Now, even as a dessertphile, I didn’t mind that this was the only sweet course. Most tasting menus, no matter how many courses they claim to be, include a little plate of petit fours much like these after the actual dessert course, but having not seen the dessert menu, I thought maybe they just didn’t do sweets. My boyfriend was disappointed, but I said, “Hey, if you’re not good at them, I’d rather you not try to fake it.” But I later looked at the dessert menu online and saw that they have a lime tart and a chamomile panna cotta, which both sound like totally real desserts!
How could you do that to me, Tenpenny?
Another thing Tenpenny did was mess. us. up. They did a great job with drink pairings, but it was almost too good. They started with a cocktail–a Negroni–gave us a white wine, and then slipped in a few reds, all of which were nicely paired. Then the pork rolled around, and we got both a beer and a shot of bourbon. Then the dessert tray came with two liqueurs! All in all, it was nine drinks, and the best part was that Managing Partner Jeffrey Tascarella told us, “We start out with small pours, but if we see that you’re enjoying something, we’ll bring you more.” HA!
We went from this a couple of courses in:
to this at the end of the night:
And that’s after they had taken away many, many glasses. “It’s criminal!” we said on the walk back to my boyfriend’s apartment. “They should be arrested for that!” But we sure did enjoy it.
Tenpenny is casual and cool, with exposed brick on the walls and Wilco and Radiohead on the speakers. Chef Chris Cipollone‘s dishes were all so outstanding that we had a hard time choosing our favourites. Was it the homey pork with the unexpected savory pie? Was it the vegetables that were so good they should be considered junk food? Was it the lobster with the gnocchi? I don’t know, and I want them all again. I’m hoping that Tenpenny’s unassuming location, the Gotham Hotel, will keep all the other eaters away, but this is a restaurant deserving of its hype.
The only time I’d tried goodburger, my boyfriend and I had ordered it for delivery, and while we didn’t exactly have any complaints other than a half-melted shake, it wasn’t the sort of burger we’d seek out repeatedly.
So I was admittedly pleased when I received an e-mail from goodburger’s PR firm asking me to try out their revamped menu and offering up a list of reasons why the new goodburger is a better goodburger: a tastier bun, the freshest toppings, and a burger made with Pat LaFreida beef and cooked on a open flame in a green-certified restaurant.
One of their six locations is just down the street from my boyfriend’s apartment, so we piled on our winter wear last weekend and went out for what turned out to be a pretty darn good burger experience.
Despite the restaurant’s novelty name, this is a serious burger. The fact that the patty is grilled instead of griddled hits you immediately, both in the lightly charred taste and in the way the outside is slightly crunchy to contrast the extremely juicy pink center. The restaurant doesn’t offer American cheese, to my horror, but the mix of white and yellow cheddar was clearly superior. All of the toppings–I got “the works”–couldn’t have been more fresh, and both my boyfriend and I absolutely loved the grilled bun.
The shoestring fries were your typical fast food type. I’m more of a steak fry girl, but I know some people like ‘em small and crunchy. Next time, I’m absolutely getting the cheese fries or chili cheese fries.
After tasting this, I made a mental note to never order a shake for delivery again. My Black Cow was real vanilla ice cream with nice big squirts of chocolate syrup down the sides, and my boyfriend’s Cookies & Cream was chock full of chocolate bits. They were both so thick it was hard to drink them through their straws, which is just what I like in a shake.
The big picture is that this is a really, really good burger. This is the kind of burger that satisfies that specific better-than-fast-food burger craving that all New Yorkers seem to have and try to fight. And the great thing about goodburger is that, at least in my experience, it’s never too crowded. It’s not a big to-do to go there. It’s the kind of neighborhood joint you can pop into
Here’s the fine print: goodburger isn’t Shake Shack. The goodburger is a couple dollars more expensive than the ShackBurger, the fries are a few cents cheaper, and the shakes are about the same price. But a lot of the reason Shake Shack is NYC’s most talked-about burger has nothing to do with the food itself. The goodburger is as good as the ShackBurger, and it’s probably better for people who like grill marks and something other than super-processed American cheese on their patty. But Shake Shack has the power of marketing on their side. If I’m going out for burgers with my friends, it’s more likely that I’d choose to sit outdoors at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park or to enjoy the sights outside the Times Square Shake Shack while I munch. The goodburger in my neighborhood looks more like a generic diner than some interior designer’s modern magnus opus.
The thing goodburger has on Shake Shack, though, is that you’re never going to have to stand in line in the sun or the rain for an hour for goodburger. There aren’t throngs of tourists taking up the sidewalk outside the door of goodburger, and no one’s making websites with a dedicated webcam showing how long the line is. I’m sure that’s not goodburger’s favourite thing about itself, but none of its customers are complaining.
Soba Totto is one of the true gems of Midtown East: it’s delicious, simply but beautifully appointed, and surprisingly not overpriced. My boyfriend and I were pleased to both find ourselves with a day off last week so we could finally enjoy Totto at lunch. We were totally in the mood for chicken meatballs and were sad to find that they don’t serve yakitori at lunch, but it forced us to try something we may have liked even better.
I was worried I might actually be playing it too safe by ordering this. I’m trying to push myself to eat more seafood so I stop thinking of it as fishy-tasting and start thinking of it as normal-tasting, and where better to eat more of it than at a Japanese restaurant? But as soon as I mixed that egg into my rice and took a bite, I knew I’d made the right decision. It had the comfort factor of a warm bowl of chicken noodle soup but with the taste factor of a much more expensive meal. The finely-chopped chicken was so much more enjoyable to eat than your usual chunks, and I liked that the seaweed gave it a hint of ocean flavor.
My boyfriend ordered a dish much more appropriate to the restaurant. It was, you know, kinda fishy, but I was pleasantly surprised at how balanced it tasted. Even the roe blended right in to the salmon meat. Kamran called it “very fresh and eminently salmony”.
A bowl of soba came with each of our meals, adding another degree of hominess. The earthy buckwheat was a great compliment to the meal, as the flavor won’t overpower whatever it accompanies. Mine was hot (and I think topped with a slice of fish cake–eek!), but my boyfriend prefers the cold variety.
A shot of the meal as a whole shows you just how much I got for $15. Our combination meals were served with salad, pickled vegetables, and even more pickled vegetables on top of the already-too-much chicken with rice and hot soba. We could’ve shared this and still had plenty left over.
I’m still thinking about this meal a week later and wish I didn’t work aaaaaaaaaaaaaall the way downtown so I could have it every day. I’m only giving it 4.5 donuts instead of 5 because a) I secretly wanted the appetizer that comes with the meal to be the corn tempura of theirs I love so much, and b) I haven’t had enough donburi to know if this was as good as I think it was.
I have basically a nonstop craving for the Quesadilla Enorme from Baby Bo’s Cantina in Murray Hill. There’s always a crazy wait to get into the place, so discovering that they deliver to my boyfriend’s apartment is the best/worst thing to happen to my midsection in a long time.
The Quesadilla Enorme is a giant tortilla splayed out and covered in cheese, potatoes, a dark rich BBQ sauce, and your choice of protein, covered with another tortilla, grilled until the edges get perfectly crisp, topped with dollops of guacamole, creamy chipotle sauce, jalapenos, and sour cream, and served with chips and salsa OMG.
I always order the pork version, but I’m preeeeeetty sure the kitchen staff had something else on their minds last time I got it:
5 donuts: transcendent experiences
4.5 donuts: extremely awesome meals
4 donuts
3.5 donuts: good eats
3 donuts
2.5 donuts: food I could have made
2 donuts
1 donuts: dinners not fit for the dogs
