neighborhood – NYC Restaurant Reviews | donuts4dinner.com

Dinner last night at Boutros, which we passed on our way to another restaurant but couldn’t resist once we read the menu! The first photo is of their version of a tiramisu, but I started with the Thistle and Smoke cocktail with mezcal, Cynar, lemon, and honey. Then we had the house bread with za’atar herbs. All of the small plates on the menu looked so good to us that we shared a bunch instead of ordering an entree: roasted beet hummus, labneh crudité with vegetables and za’atar, burrata with figs and hazelnut/vinegar spread, fried rice with beef sausage, Brussels sprouts, egg, and enoki mushrooms, and grilled octopus with potato…

Dinner last night Speedy Romeo, and my friends and I could not stop talking about how good it was! I’ve heard good things about this pizzeria for years but didn’t have a reason to visit until we went to the @dvnny1 gallery opening and needed something for second dinner. We started with the mozzarella appetizer with wood-fired butternut squash, raisins, brown butter, and toast. Then we had the St. Louie pie with pepperoni, sausage, and pickled chilis, and the Kind Brother with bechamel sauce, wild mushroom, smoked mozzarella, egg, and sage. We still weren’t full, so we had the Dangerfield with bechamel sauce, pork-veal meatballs, ricotta, basil, and garlic chips.…

Tried out the new Hill Country Food Park in Downtown Brooklyn! Hill Country BBQ was always our go-to neighborhood spot, so life was ROUGH while it was closed down for renovations, but I absolutely love the new food stall concept. I can get all of my favorite sausages and brisket at the Hill Country stall, then grab a grilled cheese and tomato soup from Bluebonnets, have a spicy slice with Kreuz sausage, onions, and roasted red pepper from Austino’s, and finish up the night with a scoop of my favorite NYC ice cream from Van Leeuwen. The space is huge and airy and open with plenty of seating, and it’s…

Before we visited the new Eleven Madison Park, I read the best article about the most earnest things about the redesign, and they’re just adorable. My favorite is the stairstep leading up into the dining room, which is made of all of the old kitchen’s steel appliances, melted down into an inch-high plank. They paid an artist to make that for them. And you have to read Chef Daniel Humm’s Instagram post about it. Like, come on! You’ve never seen anything more earnest. And earnest really is the best way to describe it. I honestly just don’t think these Eleven Madison Park guys are doing anything more than trying to…

If you’ve ever thought, “Boy, I sure love Eleven Madison Park, but wouldn’t it be great if the chef instead used his immense skills to make me a chicken parm?”, Mamma Guidara’s is for you. It’s Chef Daniel Humm’s take on classic red sauce dishes, named in loving honor of his co-owner, Will Guidara’s, mom. On Sunday nights, the NoMad Bar transforms into one of those red-checkered-tablecloth joints from the 80s, and although the decor is a little chintzy (in the best way), the food is just what you’d expect from a three-Michelin-star chef. And it’s only $74 for four courses that seem more like eight or ten by the…

I’ve followed my favorite NYC chef from his West Village restaurant Louro to his taking-the-city-by-storm soup venture, Good Stock, but what made me first fall in love with Chef David Santos‘s cooking were his secret home supper clubs, which he called Um Segredo (“a secret” in Portuguese). Well, they’re back, and they’re not so secret anymore! In that they take place right out in the open at the Good Stock on Carmine Street. But the same secret feel is still there: just you and five others in the tiny store front, gathered around a table while Chef Santos cooks directly in front of you, offering insight about each of the…

Had you asked me a week ago if I had any interest in Nordic cuisine, I would’ve given you something like a polite, “Sure, I’m interested in all cuisines!” And then, you know, gone back to eating my tacos. But if you’d prefaced that question by mentioning that the chef at Agern, the restaurant inside of Grand Central Terminal, has a restaurant in Iceland called Dill, I might have thought differently. I LOVE dill. And it doesn’t hurt that the owner of Agern is the same guy who helped found Noma in Denmark, which has been named the best restaurant in the world, oh, I don’t know, four times?

Last year, I spent a week on a yacht touring some of the islands of Greece with my boyfriend and three of his friends. One of those friends was visiting NYC last week from Romania, so I wanted to take her someplace new and well-rated. A co-worker happened to mention Bowery Meat Company to me that very week, and not only had the New York Times given it two stars, but it had meat right in the name.

I try to avoid carbs and sugar in my day-to-day life, so I never let myself have cereal for breakfast. I can’t tell you the last time I ate it, but I’m guessing it was in college, and it was probably something with “fiber” in the name so I could feel like an adult. But I secretly love cereal and was delighted to learn that Kellogg’s NYC opened in Times Square and that I’d need to eat a huge bowl of the stuff in the interest of reviewing it. The sacrifices I make, you know.

Chef Gabriel Kreuther left the Michelin-starred Modern a couple of years ago and took his pastry chef with him to open up his new namesake space in the Grace Building across from Bryant Park. Beloved from the get-go, the restaurant earned a Michelin star of its own in its first year, but having tried the 4-course, $125 tasting menu a few weeks ago, I can’t imagine that it won’t gain another star or even two in the coming years. It wasn’t as fussy as the three-Michelin-starred favorites in the city thanks to touches of whimsy here and there in elements like a stork-patterned wallpaper (the stork is a symbol of…