New York Series - Cull and Pistol

http://cullandpistol.com/

There are two things you see a lot of in New York, oyster bars and lobster bars, so you can imagine my excitement when I discovered a combined lobster and oyster bar when wandering through the Chelsea Markets.  We had been looking to visit an oyster bar for most of the holiday, especially considering how cheap oysters were in New York.  I had been regaled of wondrous tales of oyster bars that had happy hours where the tasty molluscs were a dollar an oyster, but had yet to be in the right place at the right time.

We had been wandering around Manhattan's West Side for a while looking for something to eat for dinner and incredibly, not finding anything that we felt like eating.  The Chelsea Markets had become a bit of a default position during our two week stay in the area, so we decided to head back to the markets and see if we could get into the Lobster Place.  The Lobster Place is a bit of an institution in New York, a place where you can go and pick your own lobster (and most other seafood options) and get it cooked on the spot.  There's no formal dining area in the Lobster Place, it's just benches and standing room only.  Unfortunately, when we arrived the place was packed and doing our usual thing of not wanting to wait we left a little disappointed.

New York Series - Colicchio and Sons the Tap Room

http://www.craftrestaurantsinc.com/colicchio-and-sons/

It was getting towards the end of our holiday in New York and we had ticked off all of the restaurants that I had researched and wanted to visit.  Of course this didn't mean we had visited all of the  best restaurants, it just meant that we had to get back to the drawing board and get a new list of great dining spots to visit.  We were still in our apartment in Chelsea, which opened up most of the West Side districts to continue to explore.

It was SC who had the idea of visiting Colicchio and Sons one afternoon when we were a bit stumped for a restaurant to enjoy for a dinner.  Once she mentioned the Tom Colicchio restaurant, I got pretty excited.  We are big fans of Top Chef and Colicchio is the main judge on the show, so we felt as if we knew much about the Colicchio vision about food.  It was time to put the vision to the test, so we quickly made a booking for later on that night and proceeded to make our way to the restaurant.

Colicchio and Sons is located on 10th Avenue, just behind the Chelsea Markets and was a relatively short 20 minute walk away from our apartment on the corner of West 25th and 9th.  Amazingly, after such fantastic weather for our first three weeks in Manhattan that included a heat wave, the rain had settled in, so we had to huddle under an umbrella on the way to the restaurant.  When we eventually arrived at the restaurant, we were a little wet, but the staff didn't seem to mind and welcomed us in warmly.

New York Series - Aureole

http://www.charliepalmer.com/aureole-new-york

I have said it before, there are a lot of distractions in New York.  I would wager I am not the first person to say this out loud, and I certainly won't be the last.  I had grand plans of getting to New York, visiting a heap of great restaurants and then at the end of each meal going back to the hotel and diligently typing up the post and getting it online.  Ha! Right, it didn't work out that way.

Aureole was one of the first restaurants we visited while in New York.  We had landed in Midtown and were enthralled by the size and scale of the area.  Times Square is a hive of activity for what seems like twenty four hours a day, and that's just the beginning of the great stuff happening in Midtown.  We actually walked past Aureole a few times before we decided to check it out, but it had been on my radar from the moment I noticed that it was a Michelin Starred restaurant within walking distance of our hotel.

Aureole is the first restaurant of New York legend and multi award winning chef Charlie Palmer, who heads up the Palmer Group.  Chef Palmer graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and quickly worked his way up to the world famous River Cafe in Brooklyn.  Aureole opened up in 1988 and was the foundation of a chain of amazing restaurants right across America.  Charlie Palmer has been honored by the James Beard Foundation a couple of times and has was named the best chef in New York in 1997.

New York Series - Daniel

http://danielnyc.com/

With so many options for fantastic and amazing restaurants in New York, it's sometimes hard to decide on which one to visit.  We found ourselves with only a few days left on our amazing Manhattan holiday and wanted to go out with style.  We had already been to two of the best restaurants in New York, and coincidentally the world, in Eleven Madison Park and Le Bernadin, so how could you top that?  There are six three Michelin Starred restaurants in Manhattan, so that left four for us to choose from.

The Michelin guide has two ratings, one is the well known 'star' rating, but there is also the lesser known 'comfort' level.  The highest rating for comfort is five ribbons and is considered 'Luxury in the traditional style' and there are only two restaurants with both the 3 star and 5 ribbons.  So that left our choice between Thomas Keller's 'Per Se' and Daniel Boulin's 'Daniel'.  While we really wanted to check out Per Se, at the end of a month long holiday to one of the most expensive cities in the world, and at $290 per person for food only, sanity prevailed.

Not that Daniel is inexpensive, but Daniel offers both Degustation and a la carte, which provided a much more sensible option for us.  The tasting menu kicks in at $220 per person and there is a three course prix fixe a la carte option at $116.  Even better, because we were booked in for an early start, there was an option of a three course prix fixe, with matching wines, for only $130 which is amazing value.  

New York Series - Meatballs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meatball

America is a melting pot of different cultures, which leads to an interesting approach to food and restaurants, especially in a city like New York, where there are hundred of different cultures all mixed together.  What's also interesting in New York is that foods from other countries and cultures get adopted and then taken as their own.  Of course this is true in many countries, there something unique about the way New Yorkers adapt food and grow its popularity. This can be seen with all sorts of food, most notably Pizza, but I also noticed that the humble Meatball also gets the New York treatment.

When wandering around New York, I kept finding Meatballs on the menu of many restaurants, and in fact found a restaurant chain dedicated to the humble fare.  Many countries have a variant of the meatball, countries like China are made with pork and usually steamed, while Danish meatballs are a mix of pork and beef and are often fried.  Many European countries have their own types of meatballs and each lay claim to having the original meatball, but the style of meatball most common in New York closely align with Italian Meatballs.  

In the United States, meatballs are most commonly associated with spaghetti, as in spaghetti and meatballs. There was a large number of Italian migrants that entered the country in the early 19th century, who assimilated the humble meatball dish (along with Pizza) into what is now known as Italian American cuisine.  I managed to get to a few restaurants in New York where Spaghetti and Meatballs were the focus and found that while there were similarities in the dishes, there were some very different approaches to this almost ubiquitous food.

New York Series - Balthazar

http://www.balthazarny.com/

Almost everyone who gave me their New York list of places to see or do included Balthazar in their list.  This is not much of a surprise, Balthazar is pretty much on the top three of everyone's food list and is by far one of the most popular restaurants in New York.  For Brisbanites that's not a complete surprise, inside it looks almost exactly like on of our best restaurants, Tartufo.  There is a pretty good chance that the team that established the restaurant before Tartufo took over, Belle Epoque, used the popular New York dining spot as the inspiration for the interior.  It's uncanny.

Balthazar is located in one of the coolest streets in SoHo, which is one of the coolest districts in all of Manhattan.  There are so many great restaurants and shops in SoHo that you could spend a whole month just in that one area and still not see everything.  It's also bordered by other great districts, Little Italy to the east, Greenwich Village to the north west along with burgeoning suburbs like TriBeCa nearby.  It's often compared to London's SoHo and with good reason, both places attract a certain type of person that brings colour and excitement to an area.

We had spend quite a bit of time wandering around and exploring Soho and had thought about going to Balthazar a few times, but each time we went it was so packed we decided to go elsewhere.  I finally decided to bite the bullet and make a reservation for dinner, thinking that if we went a little earlier in the evening it would be a bit less hectic.  Boy, was I wrong.  We turned up for our 5:30pm reservation and the place was still packed and crazy, with barely a table available.  Even though it was busy our reservation ensured we had a great corner bench spot, even though out table was only a little bit bigger than a postage stamp.

New York Series - Burgers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger

When coming the the US and in particular New York, one of the restaurants that was recommended most to me by friends was the Shake Shack, usually accompanied by a statement that these were the best burgers in the world.  I had a pretty good idea that 'burgers' were popular in the US, I mean, the biggest burger company in the world started out in San Bernardino, California.  Once I actually arrived in New York, I started to get a bit of a sense of how ubiquitous the humble hamburger was.  There are burger joints 'everywhere' and most menus, even in some of the nicer restaurants, have a burger on the menu.

Just what makes the burger so popular and in the States?  I thought I would try to find out by getting to as many different burger places that I could (and my waistline would allow) and find out for myself which was the best burger joint in New York.  Now I understand that this is a personal view and that everyone will have their favourite burger and favourite burger joint, this will be a totally subjective view of burgers.

I wanted to find out more about the humble hamburger, so I took to the internet (thanks Google) to find out a little about the background of a food most of us take for granted.  There is quite a dispute about who invented the hamburger but there is a common theme amongst many of the 'origin' stories that some Germans from Hamburg were involved.  One of the more interesting stories was that Louis Larsen created a hamburger in 1900 and sold it to some 'rowdy' sailers from Hamburg, Germany, and they named it after themselves.

New York Series - WD-50

http://wd-50.com/

There are few restaurants around the world that excite me as much as WD-50.  I love experimental chefs and restaurants that push the boundaries of food and one's perception of dining.  Of course there have been the better known restaurants that are seen as the absolute pinnacle of experimental dining, such as elBulli, Fat Duck and Noma, but I personally put Wylie Dufrense's self named restaurant, WD-50, in the same category.

Located in Manhattan's Lower East Side, the restaurant is named WD-50 after Wylie's initials and the street number, 50 Clinton Street.  It's not a huge restaurant, seating around 65 people, but it is a very intimate restaurant that is only open for dinner, seven days a week.  There is an exciting vibe in the area that feels gritty and real, with narrow streets and lots of action occurring at all times of the day and night in any of the great restaurants or bars and clubs.

I had always planned to visit WD-50 and early on in our trip to Manhattan, we had scoped out the restaurant when were were checking out the Lower East Side.  There is so much to explore, I was pretty stoked when we first 'found' WD-50.  It's very unassuming from the street with an exposed brown stone facade with the only clue that this was one of the cities best restaurants, a small neon sign that barely lights up in the daytime (but as I would find out, was like a beacon when the sun finally set).

Off to New York City

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City

FoodMeUpScotty is hitting the big apple!

After heaps of planning and saving we are finally off to the US of A and in particular New York and even more specifically, Manhattan!  For those of you who love my regular updates, don't fear as I will be continuing to post from New York and have lots of yummy American treats lined up.

I am pretty excited to be visiting some of the best restaurants in the world when I go to Manhattan so keep an eye out for posts from some Three Michelin Starred restaurants while I am away.  But it won't all be about fine dining (well, a lot of it will be) but some good old fashioned street food and American classics, like burger joints, hot dog stands and delis'!

If you have any favourite places in New York that you fondly remember and want me to visit then just leave a comment after this post.  I can't promise I will fit them all in, but I promise to try!

I will still be posting photos to my Instagram and Facebook accounts, so keep an eye out for photos of delicious looking foods!

@FoodMeUpScotty