• cheap eats,  great for dates,  red hook,  restaurant reviews,  seafood

    The New Red Hook Lobster Pound

    If you live outside of NYC and know about the neighborhood of Red Hook, it’s for one of two reasons: the IKEA or “The Real World: Brooklyn”. It became one of my favorite parts of the borough to visit after my I convinced my roommate to drive us down there one summer night at sunset when I was trying to make him my boyfriend and thought cramming key lime pie on a stick in our faces would be very romantic. I figured out in the process that Red Hook is really only a 45-minute walk or a 15-minute bus ride from Downtown Brooklyn, enjoys beautiful views of Manhattan, and also…

  • oyster bar,  restaurant reviews,  seafood,  west village

    Pearl Oyster Bar’s Hugely Chunky Lobster Roll and More

    I went with my friends Nik and Jack to Pearl Oyster Bar solely because I’d read a Chowhound thread about the lobster pot pie they were making for two weeks only. Apparently this thing was such a big deal that they’d sell out of it within moments of opening the doors, so we rushed to the West Village on a Monday night right after work and tried to order the lobster pot pie before we even saw the menu. Of course that was the only night they’d decided to take a break from making it. Luckily, Pearl Oyster Bar happens to be known for its lobster roll, and in fact,…

  • 4.5,  celebrity chef,  french,  great for dates,  michelin-starred,  midtown west,  restaurant reviews,  seafood

    Le Bernardin – Seafood/French – Midtown West

    For the longest time, the list of restaurants in NYC with three Michelin stars was three long, and there was one I couldn’t visit: Le Bernardin. My boyfriend, god bless him, didn’t want to drop a few hundred on a bunch of fish that he knew I’d only complain about, even after he went to the restaurant with a client and came home unable to stop talking about the things he’d seen. But after proving myself capable of continuing to gulp down guppies even in the face of great adversity recently, he finally relented and invited me to the three-course, $70 lunch. And just as he suspected, I’m going to…

  • 2.5,  restaurant reviews,  sea meats are gross,  seafood,  upper east side

    Flex Mussels is Weak – Seafood – Upper East Side

    Flex Mussels gets pretty good reviews. It has four stars on Google, four stars on Yelp, four stars on Menupages. So when my boyfriend insisted that I eat a steaming pot of mollusk in exchange for getting to try some of Executive Pastry Chef Zac Young‘s famed creations, I thought I was probably safe. We showed up at 7:55 for our 8 p.m. reservation and were asked to wait. Not a big deal. A couple came in after us and were seated immediately. Fine. Then another. And another. Even though we were standing right beside her, my boyfriend thought maybe he needed to mention to the hostess that we were…