SYCRoberts's Profile
Top 5 Most Overrated in Manhattan
Absolutely agree with NYC hot dogs. They are exceptionally bad, most uneatable. So inferior to any frankfurter you can eat in a nowhere gas-station in Germany, for instance, as well as many other places in Europe.
Agree with Carnegie Deli/Stage Deli. Katz is declining as well.
I would add:
NYC pizzas:
Despite the perception it is very hard to eat good pizza in Manhattan. Thousands of pizza places in NYC, most serve lousy pizzas. Lowest quality of cheese and horrible toppings. Many pizzas are really scary to eat, especially the pepperoni disks drown in industrial glue named “cheese”. These horrible pepperoni discs seem to me poisonous, a real threat to the public’s health.
Manhattan Cheesecakes
Represent the epitome of how-not-prepare (good) cheese cakes and how not to bake in general. I believe the monstrous sizes intend to put the eater in a coma before he can realize how bad it is.
Please tell me the restaurant that has blown you away within the last 6 months...
I was underwhelmed at Marea, most dishes are mediocre. I am a savvy eater and cannot understand the fuss around this restaurant. My friend, a foreign food critic, was very disappointed with Marea as well. I ate at many top restaurants in Manhandle in last 8 months. The only restaurant that blew me away (3 times !!!) is Bouley were we ordered chef specials. No chef in NYC can compete with a good day of David Bouley. It is also one of the most beautiful restaurants in NYC.
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Marea
240 Central Park South, New York, NY 10019
Best NYC Chocolatiers
Pierre Marcolini. Very expensive but this is the price of the Tiffany of the chocolate world.
Palm Two Steakhouse
Any difference between Palm and Palm Too (both on East Side)?
Thanks
Best restaurant around W.46th Street?
Le Bernardin - Fish - 3 star Michelin 4 stars NYTMES probably the best in NYC
Esca - top fish
Taboon - great Middle Eastern
Palm West - Good steaks
Gordon Ramsay - at the London hotel
Sugiyama - Sushi
grilled whole fish.....rec's please
Great whole grilled Branzino at Taksim, 1030 Second Avenue (Between 54th& 55th Street) . No grilled Octopus though.
http://www.taksim.us/info.html
Eleven Madison Park goes off the rails
Oh boy, the restaurants business is tough. Disappointments are inevitable.
The service at Eleven Madison Park is consistently one of the best if not the best in NYC. We ate there recently (again) and were astonished by the perfect service, a service that you get only in much more expensive restaurants like 3 Michelin start establishments in Europe.
You sent a message to the waiter at the begging of the meal that you would like slow pace. The pace was probably too slow and your waiter was not attentive enough. Maybe you just scared him off by your initial dissatisfaction?
In any case, the manager’s behavior by offering you such a generous compensation was perfect.
I would not describe this incident with such a bombastic negative title “Eleven Madison Park goes off the rails”.
NYT Article on the "Fat Pack"
Mr. Shaw represents a sever case of a food lover that is also a food addict and a compulsive eater. His eating preferences of meat and saturated fat represent the basic attitude of most American toward fruits and vegetables which is very narrow minded. Even in top restaurants you cannot get a good vegetable salad as you can eat in any ethnic Greek, Turkish and Midwestern restaurant.
Food addiction is a disease that usually results with obesity or other disorders such as bulimia (mainly with women). Many food addicts understand the consequences of overeating but cannot stop it (like alcoholics) and some develop a denial mechanism of questioning all the scientific evidence gathered so far about overeating and about inherently damaging food like saturated fat and carbohydrates, using past (and possible future) scientific mistakes as a reason not to trust current scientific knowledge. There are normal people that eat everything but do not eat excessively (without any special effort to diet). The main problem of compulsive food addicts is that we all must eat thus it is so hard to fight food addiction. Part of the problem is the culture that we live in. The French eat horrible food health-wise but most are slim since they eat small quantities. Americans eat large quantities and are addicted to sweet taste due to the food industry crime of loading food products and beverages with sugar.
I fight obesity for many years. I am a food lover that eats everything but I have always been disturbed by top chefs that ignore any health considerations and load everything with excessive amounts of saturated fat (butter, lard, margarine etc.) and/or processed sugers.
As the abandon use of drugs and alcohol in the sixties killed so many people at young ages until it became cool not to smoke and destroy your body – the same should apply to food lovers.
The future of food lovers eating must be health sensitive. A cool foodie should be slim and adore vegetables, fruits, fish and other healthy food. Fat steaks, pork belly and alike should be limited to special occasions.
Pam Real Thai on 49th street & Ninth Avenue
The results of two recent visits to Pam Real Thai on 49th street & Ninth Avenue are:
:
The oxtail soup was excellent (worth a visit) and the Tom Kha Gai soup (sliced chicken breast, mushroom in galangal and coconut milk) was fairly good. The rest was a complete miss. The whole fish, red snapper (Fish Pam's Style Chili Sauce in chili sauce and cilantro), that could have been a hit, was, in two visits, fried to death. The Pad Thai was horribly sweet and oily, the Som Tum (Green Papaya Salad) was just okay but with too many peanuts. I had a better fried Tofu in other places. The rice pudding with Durrian should have been a show of authenticity but was...a dangerously sweet mish-mush of rice pudding with Durrian . The Thai Cream Brule was …sweet. The Taro balls in Coconut Milk desert were tasted but left uneaten to avoid a reversed hypoglycemia.
Pam Real Thai could have been the real thing - they try. But, sadly, the problematic execution makes it another miss in an endless series of disappointing Thai restaurants. It seems that Sripraphai remains, fortunately or unfortunately, the only choice. The periodical trips to Jackson Heights continue to be unavoidable.
Thoroughly fed up with Whole Foods in Raleigh
You are absolutely right about Whole Foods. I am willing to pay for good quality but I hate to be ripped off so bluntly. I relocated to Cary NC from NYC area where I rarely shopped at WF since there are so many other choices with fair prices. In Cary there aren’t enough choices so I shop at WF just for stuff that I cannot get anywhere else. I try beat the rip-off system of WF by buying there only things on sale or items with reasonable price. Sale at WF doesn’t always mean reasonable price so one have to be careful not to fall into the trap.
I recently compared WF prices of the Cary NC store to Dean and Deluca in Washington DC, a place that caters to the very rich (I never buy there anything) and to NYC stores such as Fairway, Zabar’s and other in the NYC boroughs. In many cases Whole Foods is more expensive. The WF Cary NC store “dares” to be more expensive then Manhattan top gourmet stores! Sounds like a bad joke.
It seems to me that WF owners do not respect their customers and vendors which they furiously milk. I know from one of WF vendors that their margins are huge and unfair. Nobody that I know likes WF except few super rich that are lucky enough not to care about money at all. Regular people shop there since it is, in many areas, the only place to buy good quality of certain foods but WF pricing policy doesn’t make most of their customers loyal – they would jump happily on any other good and fair alternative.
Food is love and WF, despite their name Whole Foods, offers just the sex with camouflaging the love part. Foddies are sensitive people and whenever foodies can find real love – a food vendor that loves its customers and tries to make them really happy - they’ll walk away from the WF types.
I have a friend that calls WF the “What-Have-I-Done-Wrong Store” since any of her attempts to pass through the cash registers without suffering a painful monetary loss fails miserably.
People hate WF and love Trader Joe, Costco, Fairway in NYC area and other stores that give their customers honest deals. The best is Costco – excellent quality for the lowest (unbelievably low!) price.
WF rip off is so offensive that it explains the utmost thrill of so many in the Cary and the Triangle area when they heard that the good guy, Trader’s Joe, is coming to town, almost like the Messiah of the foodies, although TJ’s does not offer a large variety of produce. The lines at Trader’s Joe that has just opened in Cary are endless. The scene of empty shelves at TJ (shoppers emptied the store in few hours) is surrealistic. I heard that locals petitioned TJ relentlessly, for years, to choose Cary as the place for its new store in the Triangle area and their wish is now fulfilled. Is TJ the dream store? No, but it is a dream in a place like Cary. Why is this happening? Since people are so much fed up by WF and others as well - Fresh Market and Harris Titter that charge killer prices as well.
I wish that the recent openings of TJ in Cary and Costco in Raleigh would teach WF, Fresh Market and Harris Titter a tough lesson. I will never buy at these stores what I can get at Costco and TJ, even for the same price. I assume and hope others will do the same.
Unfortunately I would not be able to avoid WF completely but Costco and TJ’s will reduce my visits to WF significantly – what a relief.
Coffee machines
Thank you all for the links to resources and the good advises.
After a long research work I purchased La Pavoni Europiccola.
The recipient of the present is ecstatic.
