I had high hopes for the second week of Restaurant... Week. (Officially, the "week" is actually two... in some cases, the special menus continue through the end of summer.) On my list were Morimoto (check!), Blue Smoke (schedule conflict) and Savore (too lazy and too full). What I did manage to do, fancy-new(to me)-restaurant-wise, was impressive, though not as extensive as I'd planned. Oh well, in this city, every week could really be restaurant week, so SnackHands will look forward to more good eating outside the confines of the short list.
ANYWAY,
Morimoto: My friend T and I went here for lunch on Tuesday. It appears that the place has a fixed-price menu all the time, so they weren't really doing anything super-exciting to whet our RW appetites. We went for the regular menu instead and both got the Kobe Beef Bento Box:
The Bento Box was only a couple bucks more than the restaurant week lunch price, and it was quite a bit of food. From the upper left corner going clockwise, we had: vegetable tempura, a few pieces of Kobe beef, miso soup, a mixed-green salad, a couple pieces of a spicy tuna roll and a few pieces of sushi. The sushi was so tender and delicious, and the beef was pretty awesome too. The salad and miso were also good. Two pieces of the veggie tempura were slightly problematic: there was a mushroom stem in there that was impossible to bite through, as well as a piece of asparagus that was stringy and slid out of the tempura batter when you tried to bite into it. As T said, "Iron Chef would totally lose points for this!" Overall, though, I was quite happy with everything - the service, the food (including what I saw on the tables around me) and the amazing... bathroom:
Yes, I'm a spaz and I took this photo of the wall behind the toilet in the bathroom stall. It was one of those things that you see and almost gasp about, but then you remember you're in a bathroom, so you play it cool. And then you shut the door and take a photo and post it on your blog. Don't say I never gave you anything.
Blue Smoke was next on the list and I had a willing eating companion with a weird work schedule. We didn't think we'd make it before closing time, so we opted for a non-RW alternative instead: Cafe Habana.
This is a tiny place in Soho that I actually visited years and years ago for, of all things, a burger. This time around, I went for the Cuban food it's known for. I started with their famous (for good reason) "Grilled Corn Mexican Style" and a margarita on the rocks. For my main course, I had their roast pork with black beans and yellow rice. My dinner-partner-in-crime had the same, and when the plates hit the table, they were a perfect mirror image of each other. If ever there was a time to be the dork who whips out her camera at the table, it was then. But since I already gave you a bathroom photo, you are going to have to use your imagination on this one. Think about a creamy-white oval plate loaded with shredded pork on your left, and yellow rice and black beans horizontally dividing the other half of the plate. This food was incredible. Typically, I skip the rice and beans because I find them to be "eh," but the mixture of these three perfect elements was food heaven. I would have licked my plate if there had been anything left on it to lick. Viva la Cafe Habana!
I will say, it's lucky for Cafe Habana that their food is so exceptional because the service was not. After sitting down, we waited so long for our waitress that my fellow foodie went up to the bar/counter to see about drinks. Seeing this, our server promised she'd be "right there" and, after another five or so minutes, she was. She took our order and disappeared. Our corn showed up first, our drinks showed up a bit later, and our food showed up pretty quickly after that. Despite the fact that there are about 15 tables in the whole place for 2 waitresses, she seemed ridiculously busy and/or preoccupied. And, frankly, I've never heard a person drop more plastic cups during a one-hour-period in my life! I hope it was just an off night for her because I'm dying to go back and have more pork. Maybe I will have to go there in the future only when I'm traveling with some sort of band, because those types seemed to be taken care of without any difficulty. Or maybe I'll just start carrying a trombone case around with me.
It was a blast to explore all these places, and NYC is loaded with approximately 9,082 more that I'm dying to try. How I do that without going broke and gaining a thousand pounds, I'm not sure. But where there's a SnackHands, there's a way.
After all this fancy Restaurant Week-ing, I'm off to Wisconsin. Be prepared for reports from the Heartland, sure to include extensive dissertations on cheese, bratwurst and beer.
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