Where Colin Ate: Wenwen, Laser Wolf, Sip & Guzzle, ILIS
Plus: Partying with Parisians and the perfect hot dog
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 was a busy one. Here’s a three-part rundown: first, my flight out of Montreal was delayed by a day. I made do. When I finally returned to New York, I went all out with a few new friends—the team behind Cypsèle, one of the buzziest new restaurants in Paris (opening soon!). Kebabs, dumplings, pizza. It was a good time.
Colin
Part One: Encore Montréal
Antep Kabab
📍 Montreal (Downtown)
🍽️ Turkish
For one of my “last” meals in Montreal, Ryan Gray (Nora Gray, Elena, Gia) recommended Antep Kabab, a small Turkish Kabab shop which happened to be just a few blocks from my hotel. Apparently, he had eaten sandwiches there 3x this week and was full-on addicted. That was all I needed to hear to make sure it was a must-visit on this trip. I was with my friend Jan Warren, who was the birthday boy we were here to celebrate, and I met him at the shop. Standing outside, I immediately loved this place. You could smell the grilled meats before walking in the door, and it had my mouth watering. Ryan said the chicken was the move, so I went with the chicken sandwich. The sandwiches are served on a house-made sesame pita-type bread that is piping hot and an incredible vessel for the sandwich. Each sandwich gets a yogurt spread, tomatoes, onions, and a slightly hot pepper sauce. The chicken was cooked absolutely perfectly, and it all came together as one of the best sandwiches of this type I have had in recent memory. Put this spot on your list for the next trip out.
Paul Patates
📍 Montreal (Pointe-Saint-Charles)
🍽️ Diner
For my supposed actual last meal of the trip, Jan and I decided to double down after the sandwich at Antep Kabab and hit up Paul Patates, one of the classic snack bars in the Point St. Charles neighborhood of town. The place is totally bare bones in the best possible way. This was my second time checking it out, and it is totally worth going to if these types of places are your thing (as they are mine). We went pretty classic with me ordering a steamie, fully dressed, Jan a toastie, the same way, and we split a poutine, adding chopped raw onions. Best way to end an amazing trip…or so we thought.
Le Violon
📍 Montreal (Plateau Mont-Royal)
🍽️ Seafood
I was supposed to leave Montreal on Monday night, but unfortunately—or fortunately—every flight into NYC was cancelled. We were stranded. The good news was that this extra day gave us time to check out Le Violon, another amazing spot that we weren’t supposed to be able to fit in for this trip. I shot Chef Danny Smiles a text, and we were lucky enough to get a late spot at one of the best new restaurants in town. I checked it out on my last visit when they were brand new and had a great meal, but watching restaurants really settle in after their opening months is really fun, and this place was no different, as this meal was on another level. We chose to let the kitchen cook for us, and it was definitely the right call. We started with a tuna tartare that was equal parts tuna and perfectly just-in-season tomatoes, swimming in nice olive oil with toasted bread on the side, which tasted like a really nice pan con tomate. Lobster with asparagus, covered in hollandaise, is another can’t-miss dish. Punched up with tarragon, it may have been the best lobster dish we had all week. We finished the starters off with the beef tartare with bulgar and tahini and other Middle Eastern spices, almost giving it a raw beef shawarma flavor. For larger plates, we had the guinea fowl ballotine swimming in jus and covered in spinach, as well as perfectly cooked lamb chops over a pile of brightly flavored peas. Both were fantastic, but the bite of the night was the most perfectly fluffy ricotta gnocchi with morels that was decadent and light all at the same time. I would eat this every day if I could. We finished running the gamut of desserts with the affogatto ice cream being the standout for me. This meal made me thankful that the flight was canceled.
🏆 First Annual ‘Where Colin Ate’ Montreal Poutine/Steamies Rankings
Disclaimer: This is a very non-scientific and fluid ranking that will most likely change from trip to trip based on where I went. All of these places are great and classics for a reason. This is only a list of the things I tried on this specific trip.
(For the uninitiated: A ‘steamie’ is a steamed hot dog loaded with mustard, onion, and slaw. Poutine, a.k.a. disco fries, are fries smothered in brown gravy and cheese curds.)
Steamies:
Green Spot—this was number 2 for me on last visit’s list, but this trip the more coarse cut cabbage really hit for me.
Montreal Pool Room—pretty much the platonic ideal of a Montreal dog. No notes, just preference. This was my favorite last trip.
Paul Patates—Another really tasty dog, it just felt like it didn’t live up to the other two.
Poutine: all ordered with raw onions on top when available (the best way IMHO)
Montreal Pool Room—perfectly squeaky curds and really deeply flavored brown sauce.
Doubles Late Night—probably the best brown sauce of the trip, docked for no raw onions, but was really good.
Paul Patates—texturally really great with a sweeter flavored sauce that was a nice change from the rest.
Part Two: Back To NYC
Laser Wolf
📍 Williamsburg
🍽️ Israeli
I had family from the West Coast who asked me to plan dinner for six of us to all get together. Naturally, I picked one of my favorite spots for both locals and regulars alike, Laser Wolf in Brooklyn. Laser Wolf is a great option because not only is it one of the absolute best views of Manhattan, but the food is delicious and not insanely expensive, as most restaurants with this type of view tend to be. If you haven’t been, Laser Wolf is a restaurant—just like K’far and Jaffa downstairs—coming from James Beard Award-winning Chef Michael Solomonov out of Philly and run by Boka Restaurants out of Chicago. With all of that firepower, you know it’s going to be great, and it really is. The idea is you just choose your main dish from a selection of skewers and other proteins or veg cooked over live fire, and the rest of the meal just happens around that. Every table starts with a large tray of seasonal salatim (salads) and pickles surrounding the best hummus in NYC and accompanied by piping hot pita. The flavors are all amazing, and you get as much of each as you would like. I also highly recommend adding a side of their fries, as well as the pomegranate-glazed chicken wings. The highlights for me from the mains were the sneaky good chicken shishlik, the lamb and beef kebab, the dorade, and the grilled eggplant. Every meal always finishes with some soft serve as well. I have never not left here absolutely stuffed, and it felt so good to get back after way too long.
Part Three: “Chef’s Night Out”
Sometimes work is tough, but sometimes part of your job is to take out Marcin Król and the team from Paris’s upcoming Cypsèle restaurant and show them a great time in NYC. The Cypsele team is in town to do a several-day preview of their upcoming restaurant at the Blackbird Club in the Village, and we had a great night.
Wenwen
📍 Greenpoint
🍽️ Taiwanese
We started off at Wenwen, Chef Eric Sze’s popular Taiwanese restaurant in Greenpoint, right as they opened at 5 p.m. I was ordering for the table and didn’t want to go too crazy due to the long night ahead, but we started off with a bang. The first dishes to hit the table were all hits and got the meal going in the right direction, starting with the numbing celtuce salad, crispy and tangy with Szechuan pepper, red vinegar, and garlic. The dong bei salad came next, which was another textural hit mixing in wood ear mushrooms, tofu skin, cabbage, carrot, and peanut chili oil. Crispy tofu was another really fun dish with fried tofu, crisp on the outside and soft in the center, with pickled cabbage and cucumbers on the side as well as garlic soy paste. These dishes all made way for the larger plates, my favorite of which were the absolutely killer cold peanut noodles arranged like a fancy LA salad in rows, but bouncy, chewy, and nutty all at once. The whole striped bass, deboned and resting in a vinegar-forward sauce, is always a hit, but my favorite dish may have been the lo ba beng, a rice bowl with jammy eggs, pork belly, peanut butter, and mustard greens. You mix the egg into the rice to create bites that get everything together at once.
ILIS
📍 Greenpoint
🍽️ Seasonal North American
After Wenwen, we took the short walk around the corner to slip into ILIS for some drinks and a few snacks. Ilis is the forward-thinking, hyper-seasonal restaurant from Chef Mads Refslund and is one of the most incredible spaces in the city. The large doors swung open on a steamy Friday night, and we made our way to the large communal table by the bar. Another fun thing is that the team is currently running an $85 tasting menu for the Summer months, which is an absolute steal. Ilis also sneakily has some of the absolute best, most unique cocktails in the city with a program put together by my good friend Bobby Murphy, formerly of Existing Conditions and Next in Chicago. The standout for me was the Passion Fruit, which combined tomato, gin, and cappelletti, and was a really bright, delicious cocktail. For snacks, we went seafood heavy with the famous clam flask, filled with clam juice and tomato, served from a clam shell bound together with rope for a striking look. With the flasks we also ordered some local oysters, each served with a single cherry tomato that we were instructed to squeeze over the top of the oyster before eating the skin. It is a really fun, nice touch and tasty bite. We then received the tuna bone served raw topped with nasturtium leaves and oyster shells on the side to scrape the bones clean. Soon after the bones were removed from the table, they were returned for a second presentation of the underside of the bone, quickly warmed up, and topped with seeds that gave it a nice textural contrast. Such a fun presentation and the second course really put it over the top.
Sip & Guzzle
📍 Greenwich Village
🍽️ Japanese / Cocktail Bar
After cabbing it back to the city, we headed to Sip & Guzzle, another fun and experimental bar, where we had the downstairs bar seats reserved for a few cocktails. Besides two well-known bartenders leading the place (Steve Schneider and Shingo Gokan), the kitchen is led by Mike Bagale, who is a big name in his own right, having formerly worked at Alinea and being credited with creating their viral “balloon.” The downstairs bar, Sip, I go to far less than the upstairs Guzzle, which is more of a raucous and fun bar scene. Sip is much more in the Japanese style with a more upscale loungey feel. We all started with a round of cocktails, and I opted for the Tomato Tree, which, according to the consensus around the bar that night, was one of the best cocktails anywhere. The drink combines tomato water, gin, and shochu and is topped with a marinated cherry tomato and a lightly salted rim. I need to order it on pretty much every visit. We paired that with the viral mochi “fry” and the volcano roll, served as a nori cigar with coconut rice on one side and spicy tuna on the other. We finished up the meal with the insane brown butter waffle cone soft serve, which tasted like a sundae version of Cinnamon Toast Crunch in a nostalgic twist that I loved.
Emmett’s On Grove
📍 West Village
🍽️ Pizza
To round out a classic NYC night—with a strange throughline of Chicago—we decided to get some pizza, in this case, tavern style, from one of my favorite spots in the city, Emmett’s on Grove. We worked our way into the always-crowded bar area and were eventually able to get seated in the back, accompanied by a round of martinis and a “Hot Papi” pie topped with pepperoni, onion, jalapeños, and paprika ranch. There isn’t a better way to end a night.
Quick hits, Pop-ups & New openings
F&F Pizzeria
📍 Brooklyn
🍽️ Pizza
For this month's F&F Pizza Sessions, we had some of my favorites out in the backyard of F&F slinging pies and hanging out. These events truly are so fun and a great chance to eat some really great pizza from around the world, as well as get up close and personal with the chefs and restaurateurs behind the places who always end up being the best people. Last week brought Frank Pinello from Brooklyn’s own Best Pizza, serving a selection of his pies (his white is still a gold standard) as well as Ryan Gray and team from Elena in Montreal. The Elena team brought one of my favorites from the restaurant known as the Dani, topped with spinach and sesame seeds. My favorite slice of the night happened in the second “pizza area” which is the back pizza oven at F&F restaurant where the team is just cranking a random selection of their house pies out and had a grandma style pie with an aged cheese—I wish I had a better description—that I hadn’t tried before and really enjoyed. There’s one more session planned for this summer, and I highly recommend joining as these events have been a highlight for me.
Aquavit
📍 Midtown East
🍽️ Scandinavian
A tradition that started years ago with a really good friend from Sweden, I have tried to keep up each year by going to Aquavit for their special Herring Festival lunch menu in July. The menu starts with a buffet of all different styles of herring—matjes, dill & cucumber, Summer herb, rose hip, etc.—served with priest cheese, flatbread, and potatoes, which is all you can eat. It is quite literally a herring lover's dream. For the mains, you can choose between a crispy herring schnitzel or the famous Swedish meatballs served with lingonberries and creamy mashed potatoes. The dish of the day, though, is a $25 addition of new catch Holland herring—the best there is—which is in season for a few weeks a year and is served with brown butter, sour cream, trout roe, red onion, and crumbled priest cheese. It is an amazing dish that I can’t wait to come back for next year!
National Hot Dog Day (Emmett’s On Grove)
📍 West Village
🍽️ Pizza
For National Hot Dog Day last week, the only thing getting me off the couch was the fact that Emmett’s on Grove, for one day only, was serving their amazing Chicago dogs (typically only served at the OG Macdougal location) for free with the purchase of a martini. Two of my favorite things all in one. It was a deal I couldn’t resist.
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ILIS has been on my go to list for TOO LONG