superfacilmente

 Now that I have moved back to New York, a city that I have explored quite a bit over the last few years, I am constantly coming upon shops and restaurants that I frequent often. Unlike my experiences in Argentina, I have old standards. which I go to again and again while I wait for whatever particular obligations that I have.

Such was the case this morning, when I got up, went biking throughout Prospect Park, and generally relaxed in my new Park Slope digs. I truly love the apartment I am in and will be sad to see it go in a few months, so I spent the morning just taking in the paintings around Brownstone, many of which are probably famous and I just don’t know it. Currently, my job of part-time teaching is spoiling me. I have so much time on my hands on a given Wednesday that I ended up not leaving my house until 2:30 PM. I hopped on the Subway in search of a movie near where I am taking classes on w. 13th St. in Manhattan. However, finding no movie theaters with available showtimes, I ended up going to a few restaurants and coffee shops and bars to pass my time between searching. So, that all being said, I thought I would start a new section of this blog, named above that would provide a venue for restaurants, places of interest and other recommendations based on my wanderings in a particular area.

Here are today’s recommendations:

Better Burger (178 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.) Part of an NYC chain, this burger joint used to serve, among other things, ostrich, which gives you an idea of the high quality of the burgers here. Still good for those who want something akin to ultra chic fastfood. And the food is pretty cheap.

Bar Six (502 Sixth Ave. at 14th St.) Great place if you want a classic NYC cafe. There’s a little bit of everything for everybody and strikes me as a place for New School students, professors and travelers into the village.

Spain Restaurant & Bar (113 W. 13th St. at Sixth Ave.) By all means one of the best local hangouts I have found thisarea. Spain provides just about everything that you want to hangout with your friends. Head immediately to the bar for cheap drinks and to be plied mini-appetizers, all on the house, for hours and hours and hours.

Cinema Village (22 E. 12th St. image care of warsze flickr) A great local film center with adorably small theaters. It’s a classic place for indie flicks of all sorts and often shows at least one highly recommended movie each week.

A short review here. I went to El Gato Negro as my fever was doubling or tripling because I desperately wanted some tea for my throat. The place is in every guide book, fairly easy to access via subte and so off I went. I found the tea quite passable and varied. El Gato Negro has in its front window all the various spices and leaves in open trays. It’s probably the most spices you will see in BsAs. It definitely showed in the tea and made this sick blogger a tiny bit better. The decor was classic older style BsAs like any older parilla or bar. The cost was a little steep, but not bad. A cup of tea, a cafe con leche and a postre or two are about $40 (U$D13). So maybe not a necessity for those on a budget, but a nice cup of tea during the winter is always a good thing.

Well in our first installment of Rest ‘Raunt Review, we took a look at the delectable, if not somewhat expensive sushi at Azul Profundo. To continue with that general theme, I traveled to one of the hippest spots in town, featured very prominently in the Timeout: Buenos Aires, Peru’s contribution to the world of fusion: Osaka.

Now not only was Osaka in Palermo, which as we all know features the hippest of the hip restaurants but it was the first restaurant where we were not able to be seated. Apparently reservations pile up much further in advance, so we opted to stay at the soon to be closed sushi bar, where we could watch the sushi chefs carefully clean up their fishy wares and eventually pack away their knives. Still, we had access to some delightfully delicate “Tiraditos” (thinly sliced and garnished raw fish) in a style called “Mi Peru.” Really they were just so mouth watering, you couldn’t pass them up. I would argue they might even be better for the novice sushi eater than sashimi or sushi itself as they were heavily garnished.

In addition, we opted, instead of a meal to have some tapas and soups. The highly recommended duck-filled samosas, I didn’t love, if only for semantic reasons. They tasted much closer to a fried wonton than a samosa and absent were the curries that often make the fried appetizer so good. However, the “Scallop Philly” which featured each scallop in its own clamshell shaped bowl, was very tasty and I really enjoyed, by contrast, the mild curry put into our Sopa Pad Thai, which tasted again, unlike the dish, but just perfectly blended the curry with the coconut milke and had large chunks of chicken.

Trying not to skimp on the meal, we also enjoyed two desserts. An almost too sweet crepe with honey and ice cream (which really is hard to describe just with the few ingredients on the site) and a corn pudding that was surprisingly rich and took Kira about 20 minutes to eat as a consequence. We were also getting rather full by that point and were positively stuffed when we left. Again, the prices, like Azul Profundo, were positively astronomic. Without a main course we ended up paying $180 (U$D 60) and so we will be dining on empanadas at least for the rest of the week, but it was worth it!

Check out a detailed review of Osaka at Saltshaker

If there is one thing that I tend to miss most down here it is good Asian food. For a homegrown New Yorker, born with chopsticks in my mouth and some deliciously bad Chinese food in those chopsticks, finding a replacement has been hard, and expensive. The “Bad” Chinese food in NYC doesn’t compare with Bad Chinese here, which, while good, doesn’t quite have the same variety as pizzas, parillas and other Argentinian fare. While, various Chinatown establishments can take up the slack, I usually find a bit lacking. Of course establishments like Sudestada (expect a review at some point soon) can satisfy my hunger for Asian fusion, for a bit of a price.

Such is the case with Azul Profundo (Maure 1643. 4777-6815) which I see right now is part of a chain of Sushi Bars and Restaurants around the city. The inside of the place was fairly dark and arriving very early after an early concert (roughly 9pm or so) fairly abandoned. The staff was nice, helpful, clean and so on.

Not sure what to expect, we decided to go all in and order the works including a healthy portion of Niguiri and two specialty rolls: The Crispy and Ichigo Rolls (the latter because it just sounded strange).

The Niguiri was fairly heavenly (though it may have just been a long time) with the tuna, salmon, etc. melting in the mouth and being delicately placed organized for us and the crispy rolls tasty, if somewhat ordinary made up of lovely langostinos which were fried and then had a dash of wasabi infused somewhere in there. It must have been a very small dash, because I mostly just tasted the shellfish.

I guess by far the best thing by far were the Ichigo Rolls, which consisted of salmon being placed next to, of all things, strawberries and cream cheese (I believe) wrapped in rice, seaweed and slices of cucumber and finally topped with caviar. The flavor was absolutely fantastic. The taste of salmon was well complemented by the sweet burst of cream cheese and strawberry and unlike anything I have seen in the states. While perhaps not giving the people at Blue Ribbon a run for their money, it still was pretty darn good and compared to the prices at Blue Ribbon, which if I remember rightly charges about U$D10-12 per roll.

That being said, for BsAs, Azul Profundo is not cheap. The whole meal (12 rolls of various Niguiri, 9 Crispy Rolls, and 9 Ichigo Rolls) along with a green tea and bottle of watter ended up costing about $125 with tip. Compared to last night’s pizza, we definitely paid a lot, but if you have a hankering for sushi, you can’t do much better and we definitely left very very stuffed.