donuts4dinner.com » neighborhood – midtown east
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.
Restaurant Review: Tao (Restaurant Week Summer 2009)
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.
Restaurant Review: Sakagura
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.