Where Colin Ate: Foul Witch, Superiority Burger, Wild Cherry, Ceres
Plus: our columnist tailgates (with cocktails)
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.
Last week, I went to one of my all-time hidden gem spots that I have been going to since the mid-aughts. I also hit a very underrated joint, as well as some really exciting new openings. So many good bites last week, make sure to check these places out, especially the ones that don’t get as much buzz as they deserve.
Colin
Tsukushi
📍Midtown East
🍽️ Japanese
Before hitting the Deltron show for night two, my friend Lala (Put it in My Mouth Pod) and I decided to get back to Tsukushi in Midtown East. Tsukushi is an old-school homestyle Japanese restaurant that serves a six-course non-sushi omakase that changes daily. It has been one of my favorite best-kept secrets for a little over 20 years now, since I first read about it in a Peter Meehan 25 & Under review for the Times. I immediately knew I needed to check out this spot, and I went back almost every week for several months. Catering mostly to Japanese businessmen, it was an incredible spot to go, whether at dinner time or late at night, as it kept really late hours, which was perfect for my restaurant schedule. Since then, the restaurant closed for a few years before reopening again on 50th and 1st several years back, and I try to make it up there whenever I am craving the special type of comfort food that I only seem to find there. Chef Norihiko Manabe now does all of the cooking himself with one server, at least on the Monday I was there, manning the dining room. The meal is always simple and very delicious, starting with fresh vegetables, sometimes cooked, marinated, or raw, and going into a small sashimi plate before a “house special dish”—usually a soup or stew of some sort—before leading into cooked fish and then meat. Tsukushi very much feels like you stepped into someone’s home, and the delicious food and simple preparations feel like a warm hug. Bonus points for the fact that you can buy bottles of iichiko Shochu, and if you don’t finish them, they will label it with your name for your next visit.
Superiority Burger
📍 East Village
🍽️ Vegetarian
Superiority Burger is always a fun choice when on the east side. After a quick work meeting at El Camino, a block away, a friend and I walked into SB and were able to snag the last two seats at the dining bar (not the back bar), which is my favorite place to sit at the restaurant. Sure, the burger and sandwiches on the menu are all great, but the real beauty of this place is the rotating market specials, at least one of which always blows me away. On this visit, my surprise favorite was a dish simply called “chunked pumpkin,” which was pumpkin cooked down in chunks as well as mashed with chili paste, Thai basil, and amazing little fried pieces of halloumi. It was a dish I have been thinking back to all week, and it was so fun to eat with the bits of halloumi coming off as fancy fried cheese curds. TFT (Tofu Fried Tofu) is a perfect example of the vegetarian-style junk food with well-sourced ingredients that the restaurant is known for. The spicy mayo and slaw really gave the sandwich a fast-food feel, but it was so much tastier. Sweet and sour beets with scallion cream cheese and crumbled pretzels were a revelation when I first tried it a few years back in the smaller location, and they remain so today. I have already gone on and on previously about how perfect the French fries are here, and if you still haven’t had them, they are now available at dinner time as well. Still, my favorite things at Superiority are always the desserts. I always make sure to get a gelato/sorbet combo, which on this visit was frutti di bosco sorbet and graham cracker gelato, which was predictably incredible as well as the “fancy dessert” special, which was a play on s’mores.
Foul Witch
📍East Village
🍽️ Italian
I had been itching to get back to Foul Witch as I think it is probably the most underrated restaurant in lower Manhattan, but also because, since my last visit, they started a really interesting aged beef program. Last week, I had a good friend come back to town and was looking for a fairly last-minute Friday night res, and this was the perfect place for a 5:45 p.m. res before he hit a show at Webster Hall. We started with the house focaccia with butter as well as the Fire & Ice. This is the best way to start a meal here, and the Fire & Ice is an old-school Roberta’s classic that is still a must-order. A fiery n’duja spread thick on the plate and covered with creamy burrata, which you then eat with the bread…it can’t not be good. Following that, we hit their twist on a Caesar, which is a shaved celery salad with anchovy and pecorino that I need to order on every visit, and I find it completely addicting. The pasta is always on point here and this visit was no different. I always order the sweet and savory veal tortellini with amaretto, but on this visit, we also added a fantastic cappelletti with Futsu pumpkin, buffalo milk butter, and prosciutto. The cappelletti was earthy, sweet, and salty, balanced really nicely, and a great dish for the season. Finally, for the main event, the restaurant offered both an 80-day aged Double R Ranch rib steak as well as a vintage (seven-year-old cow) 70-day dry-aged steak. Chef Carlo recommended we do a side-by-side to be able to really compare and see the differences aging has on an older animal, and it was a great experience. We started with a really well-cooked 80-day, which was cooked long enough to render the fat and give the steak a really nice bite. You could taste the nuttiness and funk that comes with age, and it was one of the most flavorful steaks I have had recently. For the vintage, it was a much different textural experience with a bit more chew on it and a deep beef flavor that you don’t get from just aging. It’s hard to explain without tasting it but while it still has the normal aging flavor, the way the meat tastes is just so much beefier. Foul Witch is still one of the best East Village spots around and one of the last remaining great restaurants that you can book without too much hassle.
Quick hits, Pop-ups & New openings
Shifka
📍NoHo
🍽️ Mediterranean
Shifka is the new pita shop from the Sami & Susu team that just opened on the Bowery. I was invited to an early preview and was really impressed with what I tried. Both sandwiches were really fantastic, and I think this is an amazing addition for a quick bite in the neighborhood. I first tried the lamb kebab pita, a juicy meatball of a kebab served with amba (pickled mango condiment), aioli, roasted onions, peppers, and topped with both a pickle and shifka pepper. The meat was bursting with lamb flavor, and I loved the aioli, adding a bit of an acidic kick. Even better was the spicy harissa chicken, tender roasted chicken topped with sumac onions, yogurt, and parsley, also with the pickle and shifka pepper. I loved how spicy it was and hope they keep the big flavors, as it was delicious.
Ceres
📍 Little Italy
🍽️ Pizza
After months of hearing the hype, I finally made it down to Ceres in Little Italy after seeing their clam pizza special online. Once I showed up around 4:45 p.m., it was clear that the Clam Pie (only 15/day) and I had not fully understood the demand or how to order it before I randomly showed up. Either way, I had already arrived, so I decided to order their standard cheese pie, which I was told would be about an hour. After a stroll around and a quick stop at the Shifka pre-opening (see above), I walked back in to pick up my pie. The pies are nicely charred, crispy and thin, topped with a fresh grating of cheese on the finish. I loved the deep flavor of the crust and think that this is one of the better pies in the city. I’ll definitely be coming by to check out the clam pie in the next few weeks.
Wild Cherry
📍 West Village
🍽️ American
From the incredible team behind Frenchette, Le Rock, and Le Veau d’Or in partnership with A24 at the Cherry Lane theater comes Wild Cherry. The room with fewer than 50 seats already has the feel of the next downtown hot spot, and the menu is chock-full of hits. We started with the classic dish of oysters with chipolatas that this group has on most of their menus, and it is about perfect. If you’ve never tried, it’s an absolute revelation how perfect an oyster pairs with the tiny sausages. One of my favorite dishes of the night was the scungilli, simply described as also including “celery onion.” In actuality, it was a whole conch shell filled with the thinly sliced sea snail with celery, onion, and celery leaves all swimming in a beautiful black pepper vinaigrette. It was so good, and a dish I can’t wait to eat again. The kitchen also sent us out a really good scallop dish with melon that accentuated the gentle sweetness of both in a really great way. Lastly, a new downtown burger has entered the chat, and it is very much my style in its simplicity. The thick patty is cooked to medium rare with a nice char on the outside, placed on a brioche bun with sauce choron (a tomato-spiked bernaise), clothbound cheddar, and some thinly sliced raw onions. Wow! I can’t wait to come back and crush the rest of the menu.
What Colin Made: Cocktails for a tailgate (Fish House Punch)
📍MetLife Stadium
🍽️ Cocktail
Playing the Eagles this week, I went with a classic Philadelphia cocktail called a Fish House Punch. The Fish House Punch goes back to an early social club of gentlemen fisherman drinking and barbecuing at their clubhouse (the Fish House) and goes all the way back to at least 1794 (according to cocktail historian David Wondrich), with the recipe remaining pretty much the same since then.
I started this recipe the night before by making a lemon oleo saccharum, which is just a fancy way to say I muddled the peels of 8 lemons into 2 ½ cups of sugar and let that sit at room temperature overnight. A few hours before I was going to build the batch, I added 16oz of boiling water to the mixture and mixed it up with a whisk to basically create a fragrant lemon syrup and left it uncovered in the fridge until cool.
To the syrup, I then added:
1 750ml btl of Smith & Cross Rum
12oz of peach brandy
12oz of VSOP cognac
96oz of water for dilution
Traditionally, this should all be served from a large punch bowl filled with a massive ice cube to keep it all cold and so that it dilutes slowly, but as I was tailgating, I added it into several plastic quart containers to be poured over cups with ice and topped with freshly grated nutmeg. It was a boozy and slightly fruity-flavored cocktail that tasted very on-brand on the first crisp fall football night of the year.
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