Life has been crazy!! We are well into our busy, travel season and work is really picking up. All great things, so no complaints here. However, the last two weeks have been so busy that planning meals, cooking and blogging has been near impossible.
We had a lovely trip to New York City where eating healthy was easier than anywhere else we travel to. I, of course, forgot to bring the nice camera to most restaurants we ate at (amateur), so you’ll just have to visualize all the yummies this time. I am still getting used to this blogging thing. A couple of tasty highlights from the trip are as follows: lunch at Risotteria, on Bleeker Street in the West Village, one of my all time favorite gluten-free restaurants that I always make a point to hit when I am in the city. Mark is always a trooper here and orders something gluten-free too, so we can split plates and try two different items from the menu. This time we had an olive puree pizza with soppressata, mozzarella and hot peppers and an oven dried tomato, arugala and pesto panini. Both were super fabulous and I literally was at the table moaning in complete contentment. It isn’t everyday that I can go to a restaurant and have basically whatever I want from the menu. I ate only a small piece of the pizza as it was a bit too salty for me, though very tasty. Between the huge list of gluten-free risottos, pizzas, paninis, their multiple gluten-free beers, a large list of gluten-free desserts and the fact that they bring gluten-free bread sticks to the table, this place is top-notch in my book.
Another great meal that I had was at the Roebling Tea Room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I am eating very little meat these days, and when I do, I prefer to eat grass-fed, antibiotic free, free range, (etc) local meat that came from a farm I can trust. This can, obviously, be very hard when traveling, so I tend to just avoid meat these days when I am out. Our friends Karen and Tabie from Two Arms Inc., suggested the Roebling Tea Room that was a short walk from McCarren Park, as they have always enjoyed their brunches. When we got there and I got to looking at their menu, I noticed at the bottom of the menu it said “Our meat is in the program”, when we asked our waitress what this meant, she explained that all of their meat was from local farms, was all grass-fed and free range. This made me so happy and I decided to order their Hangar Steak. This was an amazing decision as it was some of the best steak I have ever had and it was perfectly cooked. Another highlight of the Roebling Tea Room was their creative cocktails. I went with the Fresh Ginger Fizz which was darkrum, fresh ginger, lemon and for me, ginger ale (the original called for ginger beer, but they were unsure if it was gluten-free).
Our last night, we decided to celebrate a great weekend in NYC with our great friends, Allison and Craig from Strawberryluna, by heading to Tom Colicchio’s restaurant Colicchio & Sons in Chelsea. I had been there two years ago when it was CraftSteak and was ranting and raving about it to the rest of the crew. As a whole, we were all a bit let down, to be honest, though there were definitely highlights to the meal. The best dish being the Butter-Poached Oysters which were out of this world, a delicious bite of oyster like nothing I had ever tasted. Overall, I had missed the original menu from CraftSteak and we all felt that compared to all the other great meals we had while in the city, everything was a bit overpriced considering the quality. (Sad to say since I have a huge lady crush on Tom Colicchio.)
Though this post is short and not necessarily a great travel review, seeing as I forgot my camera at the few moments it would have been nice to have it, it was still a fabulous trip with some great meals that I wanted to share.
