One of the things I love about living in NYC is that on any given night you can end up at a totally fun and new place that you've never been to before. So on a random Saturday, Aarti asked if I wanted to see her co-worker's wife (aka Ana Gasteyer) to a show at The Caryle Hotel. I normally wouldn't have thought about it but why wouldn't I go? The show was at 10:45pm on the UES, so we met up with a few of her friends for a late dinner right before hand. I've been in NYC a long time now but the UES is still a totally new place for me. Luckily I didn't have to pick a place and her friends made a reservation at Seamstress for us at 9pm. Phew.
The place has a bit of a confusing identify - it can't figure out if it's a bar or restaurant. It's too loud, dark and packed to be a restaurant but you do have to be seated unlike a bar. The menu is kind of a mish mosh of appetizers and entrees - we got the crispy potato wedges ($7) to start because we were starving and then also ordered the fried cauliflower ($10), butternut squash risotto ($16), cheese board ($17), roasted garlic and tarragon flatbread ($6) and chicken breast ($18). The potato wedges were huge, it's like all they did was cut the potato in half and threw some spices on it. It was good at that moment because I was starving but it wasn't anything much more than satisfying bar food. Next came the cheese board, which had a nice combination of cheeses, apples and crackers. I wished they had told us what kind of cheese was on there but it was a mix of hard and soft cheeses - it's so hard to get a cheese board wrong. I had envisioned the flatbread to be a long piece of flatbread but instead it was cut up into thin plain strips - I almost mistook it for free restaurant bread, so that's never a good sign but taste wise it was covered in garlic so that's always a winner.
It seems like the new kale of the season is fried cauliflower and here it was served with sage and a cheese dip - so sort of like a chicken wing but made out of cauliflower which is a much healthier version. Lastly came the risotto and chicken - both larger entree sized dishes. The risotto had a tomato base and was mixed in with lots of veggies - it was quite filling and comforting but it's not a traditional Italian risotto dish. The presentation of the chicken was pretty disappointing except that the waitress did warn us that it was served plain with no sides which is exactly how it looked. I feel like if you're going to serve an entree with no sides, then don't put this one small piece of chicken on a huge plate to make it look sad. But the good news was that the chicken was actually really delicious. It was covered in herbs and it was a breast but it had part of the bone in to make it super juicy. If you paired it with the risotto, it made of a lovely bite of food. The menu felt like a laundry list of bar food versus a restaurant with a theme or vision.
Overall, it was a great place to kick back and have a few cocktails and snacks before the show. It's a fun environment and I liked the cutting/scissor visuals decorating the place. I just wished it wasn't suffering from an identity crisis. Oh well, at least I'm diversifying my blog and adding another restaurant to the UES category! Total bill: $33/pp with tax, tip and drinks
Photo Credit: Yelp
No comments:
Post a Comment