BEST/WORST 2009

BEST/WORST 2009

The absolute best, and the flat-out worst, places we've eaten at this Anno Domini, 2009.

This blog isn't for recipes or food news. I don't speculate about what will be opening in some empty storefront next month, I don't write up a new way to smoke salmon, I don't schmoozily interview chefs or restaurant managers, I don't get paid by Oxo to shill for their new potato peeler. I have a tiny niche. I eat out (mostly), posting 57 times this year about 58 different cafes, restaurants and bars.

Occasionally, I'll be approached by some hungry soul desperate for a place to go with a friend, a lover, a coworker (or boss) or their parents, or... Anyway, what better way to separate the good, the bad, and the mediocre than by combing through these most recent five dozen reviews to come up with a thoroughly unoriginal bestof/worstof list. What I think are the top. What I think are the bottom. The ones I found to be fantastic. The ones I found to be... not so fantastic. The ones I wouldn't hesitate to point you in the direction of. The ones that surprise me that they're still in business. And here they are, in no particular order.

**********

THE BEST

Best Restaurant
GRADISCA

Gradisca, sitting on a cute tree-lined West Village street, beat out Five Points (but barely) largely because it was a bit less stuffed-shirt and because the service was just so good. The waiter knew the whole menu as though he wrote it, didn't hover over us the whole meal but still kept our water glasses full, and was a nice, jovial guy. The food was impeccable. From the melt-in-your-mouth appetizers to a roast pork tenderloin that has yet to be matched since I dined there this past summer. The atmosphere was light and warm, the wine was good, the meal superb.

Best Bar
DUTCH KILLS

Dutch Kills, the LIC speakeasy, wins out for best bar. Its small menu may be intimidating for those who don't already know what they want, but the drinks are great, cheaper than what any other hidden bar would charge, and they'll create something for you custom if you ask, so don't feel intimidated just because you don't know what genever is. But more than that, you have to give them points for the contrast. Just a couple blocks from the subway, down a seemingly destitute and potholed industrial avenue is this lonely neon sign blinking "BAR". It looks like the kind of place hoods use to drink cheap booze and score cheaper hookers, but inside is this wood-lined, relaxing and cool, dimly-lit escape. With no irritating line.

Best Almost-Free Food
VEGETARIAN DIM SUM HOUSE

Great food is easy to find in New York City. Great food that they practically give away is considerably harder to come across. So when you discover a place like the Vegetarian Dim Sum House, you jot it down in your ledger as a place to return to. If you cringe at the thought of a purely vegetarian meal, get over it. The dim sum here is insanely good and the volume you get is massive. Even the small bowls of soup come with smaller bowls so you can divvy it up. It may sit on a block that you could swear was the love child of an alleyway and a garbage dump, but VDSH will positively give you the best meal for your money in Manhattan, if not the whole city.

Best Coffee
JACK'S STIR BREW

Often, coffee is coffee is coffee and if you've had one cup, you've had 'em all. Sure, there are the snobs who swear by Stumptown and the anti-snobs who swear by Dunkin, but forget the coffee wars for a minute and walk over to Jack's for a mug of Farmer Dan and a scone. The most perfect pairing of caffeine and sugary sweet dough NYC has to offer this side of a blue cup and a glazed ring.

Best Burger
FIVE NAPKIN BURGER

Having not eaten anything here but the hamburger, I can't (and won't) vouch for anything else on the menu. That said, Five Napkin Burger's signature Five Napkin Burger, with an inch and a half of medium rare beef, sauteed onions, and a blanket of Gruyere cheese is so absofuckinglutely delifuckinglicious I can't even find the words to defuckingscribe it.

Honorable Mention:

PETAL BELLE

When cafes like Petal Belle close, my heart sinks. A more delightful place staffed by delightful people (serving amazing waffles) does not exist. And certainly not anymore. There are so many places that have the reputation for being quintessentially New York. Cafe Lalo, for example, is famous because, in its Upper West Side brownstone overlooking the sidewalk and its large trees and its passers-by, it's supposed to be the kind of place we urbanites go for a relaxing confection and a coffee and can hang out with friends and unwind. But in reality, it's a mob scene with lines down the block, crowded tables, and by the time you finally get a seat, you're lucky not to be sharing the table with another group and their elbows. Petal Belle was the real thing and their passing is a regrettable, if not shameful event.

**********

THE WORST
(congratulations...)

JOHN'S ITALIAN RESTAURANT (John's of 12th Street)

This red sauce Italian restaurant is laughably bad. Putting aside the tacky interior, the talky and bored waitstaff, and the candle display that belongs at the altar of a cult that meets in the basements of abandoned churches, this was one of the few restaurants I've been to that managed to do just about every dish wrong. That they accomplished this feat while, with a straight face, charging what they do puts them right there on top... sort of.

PIZZA TRUCK

This is pizza in shape only. Sauce that tastes like it came from a Ragu jar on a dough that isn't cooked all the way and under only half the cheese of any other slice in the city (for $2.50!!!) is revolting only partly because the pizza tastes like shit. What truly gets me is that there are so many great pizza joints in our burg and this venture survives exclusively on those among us too lazy to walk the extra block. I promise you, in this city, you'll find a better slice. In fact, let your wallet do the walking. Go to 2 Brothers Pizza in the East Village or in Chelsea. The pizza's a buck ($1), and while it's not the best pizza in town, it's vastly (vastly vastly) superior.

ROOM SERVICE

Room Service found its way onto this humble list for being one of the most miserable dining experiences I've been lucky enough to have had this year. Some of the food was decent, to be honest. But I'm being generous by describing the majority of the rest as mediocre. If I was a complete jerk, I'd have been complaining to the waitress (providing she was ever around) through most of the meal. Tables that are too close together, shitbag customers you want to stab with a bright red plastic chopstick, and music so loud you need to yell add to the fun. But I get the impression that Room Service doesn't really care. See, they think that they're a club. And they certainly want to be one. Clubs are crowded. Clubs are loud. Clubs draw in the most obnoxious of us and encourage getting sloppily drunk. Clubs don't care about the food they serve so long as it looks good on a plate and gets paid for. All room service needs is a dance floor and a strobe light setup and they're good to go. But in a bad way.



So there we go. Some of the restaurants I liked the most and some of the ones I regretted giving my money to. I look forward to 2010. HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Read more...

JOHNNY MACK'S

JOHNNY MACK'S

1114 Eighth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(718) 832-7961

Clearly, I'm a guy who loves to eat out. But one thing that I've noticed it that there aren't too many places that don't have some gimmick to get you in the door that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the food's any good. Maybe it's a one way mirror in the bathroom that allows you to watch people have dinner while you pee. Maybe its fifty stories up with a great view and spins. Maybe the waitresses dress really sexy. Maybe it's a hidden place that no one's supposed to know about but that everyone does. Maybe it's owned by a celebrity. Maybe that celebrity has a Food Network show with an annoying tacky catchphrase. Maybe it's just so expensive you'd have to be bat-shit-crazy to eat there.

Johnny Mack's is pretty much devoid of pretension and gimmick. It's a bar, a restaurant, a local place with wood and brick walls, clean bathrooms, nice (and pretty) waitresses, and it won't suck your wallet dry. It's the kind of place you can go and hang out at with friends, eat good food, and drink good beer. And you still get cloth napkins.

I walked in with Pike the other night. Setting the tone for the rest of our time there, "when you walk in and hear the Black Crowes playing, that's the sign of a fine dining establishment" he said. Classic rock, comfort food and German lager is the Cliffs Notes of the two hours that followed. We started off with a quick round of Buffalo Wings. It's hard for me to walk into a bar and not get Buffalo wings, even though they're often made poorly and the best ones I've ever had have yet to be replicated. But actually, Johnny Mack's wings were pretty damn good. Spicy but not such that your taste buds have burned off, and sweet but not in a syrupy way.



For dinner, Pike ordered the Angus Burger with Bacon and Provolone, served with a side of fries. He loved this burger. Loved the burger, loved the fries, loved the diet Coke, loved the cutesy little plate it was on, loved the... okay, I exaggerate. He didn't mention the plate. But you get the point. My dinner was the Buttermilk Fried Chicken, served with greens and honey corn bread. Also good. And big. I couldn't finish it and had to bag up a good part of it to go. It was very moist under that crispy, peppery batter, which is a good sign that you're cook knows what he's doing and that he's not doing it to something that had been frozen solid fifteen minutes ago. The honey cornbread was sweet, but a bit dry. You know what would have gone great with this meal? That white gravy Southern restaurants dump on everything. Mmmmm...

For dessert Pike eyed the Chocolate Mousse. Rich and sweet and with a big Redi-Whip rose on top, it's pretty much what you'd expect it to be. As for me, I knew what I was getting from the minute I opened the menu. The Guinness Float, a pint o' stout with a few scoops of vanilla ice cream sitting dreamily on the surface. This dessert is exactly the kind of thing that no fancy restaurant could ever serve. Can you imagine some socialite with a vanilla foam mustache? Or a model dripping some froth on her Gucci miniskirt. My Heavens! Truth be told, it's too easy a concept for the chichi places to even ever think of to begin with. But shit if they aren't missing out. The trick here is not to drink it right away. Let that ice cream soften a bit. Let it melt into the Guinness and thicken the already heavy consistency. Then let it be one of the best things you've ever drunk.

Three drinks, an appetizer, two entrees, two desserts, two coffees, a cupcake*, tax and tip came to $91.

*Yep, they sell cupcakes. Pike got the Red Velvet to go for his girlfriend.

Read more...

CUPCAKESTOP

CUPCAKESTOP
Fifth Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Street
New York, NY 10010
n/a

Burger fever, cocktail fever, cupcake fever. These are but a few of the culinary fads that, like a swine flu of calories, have been spreading across NYC in the past few years. Cupcake fever, the oldest, hasn't slowed down. A buddy of mine gets his girlfriend red velvet cupcakes from a bar in Brooklyn, of all places. So the other day after I took the R train to 23rd Street, and happened to notice the bright white CupcakeStop truck with it's loud cupcakestop.com logo plastered across it,, I naturally had to give it a try. I mean, if you can't get freshly baked desserts out of the side of a truck, where can you?

Cupcakestop calls itself "NYC's first mobile gourmet cupcake shoppe". This implies that there's competition from other trucks filled with sweet confections, which there is not... but there may well soon be. Our fair metropolis is a little behind on the times. Philadelphia, DC, Baltimore, San Francisco and New Haven already have cupcake trucks. I almost feel like we're behind the curve on this one.

The CupcakeStop truck sells regular sized and mini-sized cupcakes, so I bought a variety pack of the minis and tried a bunch (but with fewer calories).

The simple standards, Red Velvet and Vanilla-Vanilla, were both very good for cupcakes one eats hours after they were made and sold outside of an office building. The frosting wasn't so sweet that your teeth hurt, but neither was it quite as smooth as you'd get at Buttercup or Billy's. The Mint Chocolate Chip was good but not amazing, as there was just a hint of mint present and the chocolate chips not placed atop the frosting had sunk in the batter down to the bottom. Really, it was more like another vanilla-vanilla, but with green frosting and chocolate chips. Finally, the Chocolate Peanut Butter, which I liked, but liked the least of the four. I think it was the peanut butter frosting, which was very sweet and very rich. It was like eating a chocolate cupcake coated in Skippy. If you that flavor appeals to you, then this just might be your cupcake, but I'll stick with the red velvet.

One final note, I recommend getting the full-sized cupcakes over the mini-sized cupcakes. The minis were a little dry, probably due to their small size (and the fact that I ate them about four hours after I got home). Get the big ones for maximum softness.

A variety pack of twelve mini-cupcakes (three of each pictured above) cost $12.

Read more...

GOODFELLA'S

GOODFELLA'S
1817 Victory Boulevard
Staten Island, NY 10314
(718) 815-8500

Staten Island, "The Borough of Parks" according to the sign by the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Staying here until relatively late the other day meant needing to find a place for dinner. The thing about dining in Staten Island is that it lacks... what's the word I'm looking for? Ah, yes, "variety". Let's put it this way, you'd better like Italian food. If not, you just might starve. In fact, a quick drive down Victory Boulevard might lend one to think that there's some sort of odd zoning rule requiring every restaurant to serve pizza or pasta. And Goodfella's, the place Dudeman and I chose to sample the fare of this particular evening, is no exception. Indeed, it's name alone conjures up a handful of stereotypes reminiscent of Fat Tony making marinara sauce in a federal prison.

The unfortunate name aside, Goodfella's is everything a family-friendly pizza place could possibly ever be. There are no groups of college kids lined up down the block the way Grimaldi's has them. There's a bar, but no loner drunks. There's an Olive Garden feel to the place, but with a brick oven and no guys in suits (yes, dear urbanites, people DO wear suits to Olive Garden).

Though there is a regular menu, Goodfella's is known mostly for its pizza, since they occasionally win the "best pizza in the world" award. Naturally, as the first Staten Island restaurant that I've written about, trying some of this award winning pizza was on the top of my list of things to do, though I was sorely tempted by their brick-oven wood-fired porterhouse.

Dudeman ordered the a large Old World Style Pizza with Extra Cheese. A good starting point for pretty much any pizza place, let alone one with a reputation, is whether they can make a normal plain pie. The what you might order when you have your friends over and no one can agree on the toppings so you get none pie. What differentiates Old World style from the regular pie is that the mozzarella is laid on in slabs instead of being shredded. This means that there are some places where the cheese is a rarity and places where it's the defining power of the slice. I prefer it. I adds depth to an otherwise regular plain of cheese and sauce. And it was good. No one won't enjoy this pie.

My pick was a specialty pie, the Sally Pie, which they claim won the award for best pizza in the country in 2001. This non-traditional pizza comes topped with lemon-garlic chicken, rosemark potatoes, mozzarella, cheddar, mushrooms, caramelized onion, and a cheddar scallion sauce. And it's a good pizza. Would I give it the best in America prize? And would I make it my go-to pie for when a pizza craving comes along? Probably not. But damn if it isn't different and certainly worth trying. I can see myself returning the next time I'm around and trying some of their other creations, that's for sure.

Large standard pies are $15 plus toppings. Large specialty pies cost $22.

Read more...

TONDA

TONDA
235 East 4th Street
New York, NY 10009
(212) 254-2900

I killed the extra forty-five minutes nursing a Guinness at One and One. The sparsely populated bar, music, amicable bartender and a crossword puzzle helped quell my frustration at the fact that Speeds was late, yet again. A fact not helped by the rain. As I came down to the last few sips, she arrived and we moseyed our way slightly uptown to Tonda, a trendy Italian restaurant with a penchant for thin crust pizza.

Tonda, this particular Thursday evening was pretty deserted, and though it did fill up some by the time we left, they were never full. The atmosphere is dark, moody, almost eerie, extremely sexual without being romantic, and accentuated by the She Wants Revenge albums played by the staff. The corner has a somewhat cozy sofa and chair section where you can enjoy cocktails from the massive bar or apps from the menu with the person you want to hook up with. The rest of the dining room, the dim glow of the tealights absorbed by the chocolate-brown wood of the tables, is for dinner.

The first thing we ordered was a round of Fried Calamari, a staple of dinners at both Italian restaurants and dive bars alike. And I'll be honest, you couldn't distinguish the fried cephalopod served here from that which you'd get at your standard Famous Original Ray's Originally Famous Original Pizza by Ray. It was good, but generic. We ate all of it. However, the same cannot be said of the Seared Rosemary Scallops, which were fantastic. Four large scallops with the texture of soft butter skewered on a spear of fresh rosemary with the subtle hint of orange.

Between the appetizers and the entrees, I decided to get a pizza. We went with a simple Margherita Pizza to nosh on. Unfortunately, we also decided to go "healthy" and get whole wheat crust. Big mistake. It was like eating pizza on a shelf of sandy cardboard. I know this would have been good had I tried forgotten that there are some things you don't pretend can be good for you. Like Buffalo wings, french fries and tequila shots, Pizza's is not health food. We should accept it for what it is: a damn tasty luxury good that we eat in moderation. I took the leftovers to my parents later that night.

I ordered the Italian Roasted Chicken, a roasted half chicken with green beans and rosemary roast potatoes. It was perfect. There's absolutely nothing I can think of that could have been done better with this dish. The skin was just the right amount of crispy, the meat was tender, the green beans still had their crunch, the potatoes were soft without being soggy and there was a healthy level of drippings that everything could be dipped into at the bottom of the plate. The only question I have is what makes this "Italian"? I swear I've had the exact same thing in French and American restaurants in exactly the same way. Speeds ordered the Arugula and Parmagiano Salad, which was literally an arugula salad with Parmesan cheese. Good, but let's not kid ourselves, it's a salad.

For dessert, Speeds and I ordered coffees as we always do, and followed that up with the sorta solid food that is a big slab of Tiramisu. Tiramisu has about a hundred variations and is almost never bad, though, almost never perfect, either. And that was the kind we got. On the one hand, very very good tiramisu. On the other hand, there was so much cocoa powder on top that I started to cough because I was inhaling it like smoke from a Lucky Strike. This necessitated scraping the cocoa off and forsaking that top layer.

Two drinks, one pizza, two appetizers, one salad, and an entree, two coffees and a dessert came to $79.50 plus tax and tip.

Read more...