#fine_dining

Restaurant Buddy's and my stay were overlapping in NYC so we HAD to go eat something good together. 

I walked the High Line which basically ends at Del Posto, a fancy one Michelin starred restaurant. The inside a little bit stiff, it looks like an old French brasserie, but modern, or, erm, American. Service was very good, but not very relaxed. 

Overall, I was a big fan of all the pre and post courses, but I felt the actual courses could have been a little bit better. 

Before we even ordered, we were brought these beautiful and delicious amuse bouches. There was a cauliflower soup, and yes, the Margarita style rim was truffle! There also some funny little fingers with also a ton of truffle and a sweet and velvety crab brioche. 5 jujus.

The bread service was also quite awesome, in particular with the lardo butter on the right! So good! 

Our starter was the Vitello Tonnato. I'm neither a fan of veal nor tuna, but the other options were a salad (duh) and some stuff with $10 or $15 supplements. So I figured I would try at least once in my life that dish. It was pretty big and pretty good! The veal was very thin, there were some funny crunchy black things. 4 jujus.  

For the main, I chose the two style lamb. On top of the lemon, there was delicious slow cooked lamb belly. the other one was a more traditional lamb chop. I was disappointed with the veggies with garbanzo. 4.5 for the lamb and 3 for the side. 

Very cute how towel infused with lemon and thyme so I could clean my hand after pressing the caramelized lemon. Yes. Seriously. 

Restaurant buddy got the salmon with cauliflower and squid. I was surprised that the squid were served cold. I wasn't so impressed by the dish, though I only had a small bite. 

We shared the carrot cake. That had actual carrots in it! It was quite good interesting, but the parsley ice cream was a little too green for me. 4 jujus.

With the butterscotch semifreddo. Quite good but did not leave huge memories. 4 jujus.

Time for mignardises! So good! There were some truffles (well more like shavings from a truffle!) and some candied grapefruit that was super sweet and tart at the same time. 

With vanilla ice-cream lollipops in crispy chocolate and mini donuts.  

The presentation was super cute, and very theatrical. 

Having dinner at Schwa is not your usual fine dining experience. It's a lot more complicated, it's a lot more crazy, and a lot more fun. 

First, the reservation: Schwa is hard to reach. They only pick up the phone when they feel like it. Try between 1pm and 5pm during the weekdays I would say. They are abrupt. And they are known to cancel last minute. 

Once you got your reservation, you need to buy a bottle of Jameson. Not because it is BYOB (well it is BYOB, so you will need to buy other stuff too), but because you need to give it to the chef. Don't ask. That's how it works. 

The music was crazy loud. The staff is even crazier. We had shots with the chef at the end of the night, both at our table and in the kitchen (from the Jameson bottle). The bathroom is in the back, you need to go through the kitchen. 

Of course, the food was crazy. Lots of flavors. Lots of surprising things. Some were great, some were good. 

It was definitely an experience. And it was worth the price. 

Disclaimer: this dinner happened a year and half ago, so please forgive my faulty memory. 

#1 was some sort of cocktail/drink. 

#2 was awesome: it was a reconstructed Tom Ka (Thai soup). Just great! 5 jujus.

  #3 was a ravioli dish. Probably with some tuna flakes on top. 

#4 was a eat-without-your-hand truffle ravioli! Yummy and so fun to eat. 

#5: mhhh another ravioli. with some butternut squash I think. 

#6 was cool. Can't remember well what it was though! Some foam obviously. And some roe too (I love roe).

#7 had salmon. The presentation was hilarious. 

#8:???

#9: I LOLled when I saw that one. It was foie gras, it was good, but WTF happened to the sauce?? 

#10: Tamarind something.

#11: this one had some type of poultry I think. 

#11: horchata and crispy treat. 

#12: I LOLled again. The presentation was hilarious. I think it had bourbon.

#13: French onion soup lollipop. Pretty cool!  

#14: last bite before the shots in the kitchen! 

So it was restaurant week and my restaurant buddy C and I were in the mood for trying something new. I was in a celebratory mood so we figured, why not try ING, $44 is a good price to try it. The yelp reviews on the restaurant week were pretty good too. 

ING is the sister restaurant of Moto, and they are famous for giving the miracle berry. More on that. 

The first course was a beet salad. Well I hate beets. I really do and they are everywhere in winter in Chicago, which is a real bummer for me. Anyways as you can see on the picture there is a little pink pill by the lemon. That's the miracle berry pill. We were instructed to try the beet (which I did, meh) and then have the pill dissolve on our tongue and then bite on the lemon. The lemon was so sweet! It was pretty awesome and surprising. The beet salad was rather uninteresting though, even though the beet tasted better post-pill for me. 2 jujus for the salad, 4 jujus for the miracle berry.

So the menu was called Dali. I guess the clocks give a hint there. While I think the idea is kinda cool, in theory, I wasn't very impressed by the result. So we had a potato, some Spanish omelette, butternut squash (?) and mushroom. The flavors were good but it wasn't exceptional either. 3.5 jujus

The main was a garbanzo stew. Well cooked, good flavors, very earthy, but seriously, a main of garbanzo beans? Not my idea of fine dining. 5 jujus for the taste, but 2.5 jujus for the dish in the context of find dining.

The dessert was this weird, gimmicky thing that didn't taste very good. There was some turon, pistachio and some blurbs of other things. It really didn't taste good at all and the flavors were not coming together. 1 juju

So that was supposed to be the end of the mean. And frankly, we were still hungry. I do not need to eat much to feel content (as long as it is good hehe), my friends M&S (or S&M, not sure which one is worse!) always complain that we don't order enough food for them to eat).

Because we looked disappointed (we might have said something too!), the waitress brought us another dessert, which actually was much better than the first one. Very good! 4 jujus

Despite the extra dessert, the experience was rather disappointing in the end and did not made us feel like coming back again. Oh and also, they decided to store our coats outside, while it was -10 C outside... We had to wait 10 minutes for them, and then were frozen to death because they were cold as ice. Seriously, why?