Where Colin Ate: Crevette, Raf's, Banh Anh Em, Seoul Salon
Plus: one of the city's finest tavern burgers (it shouldn't be a surprise)
Colin Camac (aka @resyguynyc) is officially Blackbird’s “Strategic Sales Lead,” and unofficially is our resident insider’s insider. He is out, on the town seven nights a week, sniffing out the city’s best joints, skateboard in one hand, martini in the other.
Like a good movie, a memorable meal lingers. You keep thinking about it the next day, and the day after, and the day after that — and so on. At least I do, and I think all restaurant heads do. That is, if the place strikes the right chord. And then, of course, the craving hits you soon enough. In startup speak, that creates the flywheel. Restaurant does a great job. Guest loves restaurant. Guest comes back. Rinse and repeat. I hit a few such places last week.
Colin
Crevette
📍West Village
🍽️ Seafood
In a room that feels made for daytime service, Crevette launched Friday lunches to kick off the holiday weekend and a friend and I decided to check it out. The menu was the same as dinner with the addition of two specials which were both very much worth ordering. The first being a version of patatas bravas made with Chef Ed’s delicious chips and served with both chili sauce and aioli as well as a sunny side up fried egg on top. The other lunch exclusive item was a really tasty merguez frites sandwich on a toasted baguette with roasted garlic yogurt and parsley salad. It was basically a slightly more refined version of a late night kebab you’d find in Europe. Along with those two we added the delicious tuna bites laid over guindilla pepper and a perfectly crispy potato — like a bite-sized nigiri. I also recommend the Sicilian sashimi (a la Swan Oyster in SF) that I believe was made up of salmon, scallops, and tuna dressed with oil, onions, and capers that is the perfect light bite for Summer.
Seoul Salon
📍Koreatown
🍽️ Korean
A friend was craving Korean and after my quick pre-dinner snack at Seoul Salon a few weeks back I was eager to return. The place just feels like a party and is ideal for group dining or celebrating basically anything. We decided to go deep on the “cold food” section of the menu and it did not disappoint. We started with the incredible soy scallop over gim rice with an egg yolk on top. The egg mixes with the earthy rice, adding richness to offset the sweet scallops — an absolute highlight. Following that, we got the Korean beef tartare, served very cold and cut into small strips which added a nice texture to the dish, which also had gochujang and an eggy sauce. The cuttlefish was sliced into thin strips topped simply with sesame oil and green onions. It had spicy chili sauce on the side as well as nori for wrapping. The texture was perfect and using some of the leftover gim rice from the scallops was also a fun addition to the nori wrap. My personal favorite dish of the night though was far and away the self-explanatory spicy raw crab noodles that came with gloves and a QR code, featuring a small how-to video of how to eat them. The noodles came topped with halved raw crabs slathered in the spicy sesame chili sauce. As instructed, I gloved up and gently squeezed the crab from each shell onto the noodles before depositing the shells in a bucket provided. The last step was to mix the noodles with your gloved hand to incorporate all the meat into the sauce. It was an incredible bite and a dish I have been craving again since the meal — definitely a fun experience.
Corima
📍Chinatown
🍽️ Mexican
Finally made it back to the always awesome Corima, now sporting a fresh new (and well-deserved) Michelin star. I met a few industry friends at the bar and went with the a la carte experience. Corima is progressive Mexican restaurant offering both a la carte and tasting menu options as well as a great wine list and incredibly well curated agave selection. I have done the tasting and a la carte and I would highly recommend checking out both options. Since we were a group of three, we ordered about 75 percent of the menu and left the place absolutely stuffed. Chef Fidel is one of the people leading the flour tortilla comeback in NYC. For years it seemed like everyone was working with corn, nixtamalizing in house yada yada and flour became an afterthought. Along with Chef Fidel, pop-ups such as Los Burritos Juarez, and Bordertown have been leading the comeback, showing how amazing flour tortillas can be. The version at Corima is a must order. The tortilla serving as the bread course is made with sourdough and served with a recado negro butter, which is made with the traditional Yucatan spice blend. We started the meal with the seasonal plato marisquero, a plate of clams, oysters, and mussels, each topped with their own unique salsa, as well as head on prawns and dry aged kampachi. Besides me spilling the salsa bruja down the front of my new shirt on my first bite it was a great way to start the meal. After that, we were sent a dish from the tasting menu that was basically a corn husk chawan mushi topped with chile Colorado, which was a really special dish using traditional Mexican flavors with Japanese technique. The corn husk custard made the whole thing taste like a chile Colorado taco but the form was completely different. It’s one of those dishes you think about the next day. The hamachi collar (if you’ve been reading for a while, you know how much I love them) was a great version and was even better if you wrap some of the meat in the tortilla that should still be on the table. We also had the duck enmoladas covered in a rich black garlic mole and cotija. Don’t skip the desserts!
Banh Anh Em
📍East Village
🍽️ Vietnamese
Since the moment it began its preview meals last month, Banh Anh Em has been slammed. They work off of a waitlist-only system where you scan a QR up front and add your name and number to a waitlist. You soon receive a text and can monitor your wait until they text you to return. It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done and is fairly efficient. The food, however, is fantastic! I went to one of the early preview lunches and was blown away by everything I had on the somewhat limited menu, so I couldn’t wait to come back to check it out now that it is fully open. The tables are pretty tight and food comes out fast and furious, leaving the table quickly full of dishes. But that would be the only slight complaint as everything I had was really well done. I’ve said previously—and am happy to confirm—that the OG Banh Mi here is the best banh mi I have ever had. I added a bit of the chili sauce condiment from the table to spice it up a bit, but it is really an amazing sandwich. The bread, made in house, is perfectly crispy on the outside with a pillowy soft texture on the inside making it the ideal vehicle for the pate, meats, and pickles on the sandwich. We followed that with scallops served on the shell in a chili butter-like sauce that was both sweet and rich. Then came the Rau Muống (morning glory) in garlic sauce as well as Xôi Xéo, which was a wonderfully glutenous sticky rice with shaved mung bean, pork floss, and fried shallots that played off each other nicely. However, the star of the show here is the multi-tiered Bánh Ướt Chong, which translates to “stacked wet rice cakes” and comes with a rack of plates, each holding a single rice roll laid out with fried shallots on top. Around the rack are several plates of toppings to complete your DIY rice roll, including char-grilled pork jowl, a garlicky sausage, green mango, herbs, and a funky mắm nêm (fermented fish sauce). It is such a fun and delicious bite, and you can customize each one in a variety of ways. If you don’t mind the wait, this should definitely be on your list.
Raf’s
📍Noho
🍽️ French/Italian
Raf’s has been one of my favorite daytime spots for a while now. It’s a great place for breakfast or lunch meetings, or for grabbing a few pastries (or a quick solo lunch by the office). A few of us from the office went to grab lunch, and fresh off their 2-star review at Cafe Zaffri it was as good as ever. We started with the selection of breads for the table, and I still think the butter with the truly excellent Occhipinti olive oil is such a slick move and awesome with the bread. We also shared a really good fennel salad with favas, pistachios, and ricotta salata. I ordered a very springy sourdough tartine with ricotta, favas, basil, and mint underneath a nice pile of shaved cheese. It was a light, salty, and earthy bite that was perfect for a lighter lunch. I also had a bite of their lunchtime-only burger that was decadent as ever, made with dry-aged beef, gruyere, and tarragon aioli on a sesame bun.
Aldo Sohm Wine Bar
📍Theater District
🍽️ Wine Bar
For as long as I have been a fan of Le Bernardin, I had never up until recently had a bite at its sister restaurant Aldo Sohm Wine Bar, which sits directly across the corridor from LB. Earlier this week I had a meeting uptown and we decided to check it out. The lunch menu is tight with great snacks and charcuterie that would pair perfectly with the incredible wine list, but the real star of the show is the $17 two-course menu made for the Midtown lunch crowd. I ordered a really solid tarte flambée a la carte for the table and went with the 2-course special to check out the deal. I started with a really tasty potato and leek soup served chilled and followed it with a chicken caesar salad because, you know, health. I would definitely come back again and check out more of the menu, including a BLT my friend got which looked fantastic.
Quick hits, Pop-ups, New openings
Blackbird Presents: F&F Pizza Sessions, Featuring Christian Petroni & Mark Iacono
📍Carroll Gardens
🍽️ Pizza
Last Tuesday we had the first in a series of pop-up pizza parties at F&F in Carroll Garden. “The Franks” have put together an insane list of pizza chefs from around the world to throw four epic pizza parties this spring and summer. The first on the list was Mark Iacono from Lucali and Christian Petroni. The events take place in the backyard of Frankies/F&F and move through to F&F Restaurant as well. The Franks provided a bunch of their pizzas from the shop as well as apps like sausage and peppers, mozzarella balls, and a small charcoal grill serving skewers of beef, shrimp, or squid topped with salsa verde. In the back of F&F, Mark Iacono himself was slinging his classic plain cheese pies as well as a tomato slice topped with garlic and capers for the crowd. It was great to see how well his pies held up coming out of an electric oven rather than the live fire he cooks with at the restaurant. The pizza was just as special and it was really fun to see him doing his thing in a different space. Christian Petroni was serving his Sicilian-style slices in the F&F Pizzeria space and they were game changers. Thick almost focaccia-like finger slices with his 18-hour sauce over mozzarella with some grated parm over the top that had the perfect chew and a deep tomato flavor. It was a great night with some of the absolute best in the business. I can’t wait for the next one!
JG Melon
📍Upper East Side
🍽️ American
After an unfortunate burger incident at another UES stalwart, a friend and I decided we still needed to scratch our burger itch and popped in to JG Melon on Saturday of the holiday weekend. Within about 10 minutes I had a martini in hand and we had scored two coveted seats at the bar. The burgers are as good as ever here and the place has charm in spades. It’s not my preferred style of burger but for the tavern style fans this is pretty hard to beat.