Archive
NYC: Blue Hill at Stone Barns (Apr. 2013)
Authors: Victor, Monte, and Simon
Exec Chef: Dan Barber
Date: April 25, 2013
We’ve wanted to try Blue Hill for a while now, and I finally made the reservation back in May. It’s located at Stone Barns around Tarrytown. It’s really easy to get there from Manhattan; you just take a train from Grand Central to Tarrytown on the Metro-North line, and then you just take a short 5- to 1-minute taxi ride from the train station.
We got there early, so they said we could just walk around the farm and check the different areas out. It’s pretty neat to be able to walk around and see different (and delicious) animals.
Look at these adorable, living lambs! (We had some DELICIOUS lamb later hahaha.)
Anyway, there are several tasting menus for dinner (with the max number of courses at 12), and we went with the 12-course “Farmer’s Feast”. We had been waiting quite a bit to eat here, so we wanted to try everything they had to offer for spring!
NYC: Empellón Cocina: The Push Project: Part IV (Nov. 2013)
Author: Victor
Chefs: Alex Stupak and Grant Achatz
Website: http://empellon.tumblr.com/tagged/push-project
November 7, 2013
Push Project Part IV: Grant Achatz
This is the last Push Project of the year, and Chef Stupak decided to go out with a BANG. He asked his former boss/mentor, Grant Achatz, to collaborate with him, resulting in one of the most hyped dining events of the year. Thomas Keller and Grant Achatz are basically gods in the American culinary scene, so having one of them as a guest chef in a meal is pretty darn amazing.
Anyway, enough rambling. Let’s go look at the food!
Tokyo: Sushi Bar Yasuda (Sep. 2013)
Author: Victor
Chef: Naomichi Yasuda
Website: http://www.sushibaryasuda.com/index_e.html
Date: September 17, 2013
After Shimada, I started to crave some sushi. I was going to get some really good sushi for dinner on the 18th and 19th, so it was probably silly of me to get sushi on the 17th haha. (Oh well, I’m pretty impatient.) I wanted sushi right that day, so I called Yasuda that day and made same-day reservations.
Sushi Yasuda has a reputation of being the best sushi restaurant in NYC (outside of Masa), and the sushi has generally been pretty great the few times I’ve been there. The environment there always feels rushed, though, as sometimes they will limit your dinner to maybe an hour or an hour and a half. The chefs in that restaurant also feel less friendly compared to some of my favorite sushi-ya in NYC (such as 15 East).
Sushi Bar Yasuda, his new restaurant in Tokyo, has a very different environment from the NYC restaurant. It’s a lot more intimate, as it’s a sushi bar with only eight seats. In contrast to the NYC restaurant, where several sushi chefs make the food for the sushi bar and several tables, Chef Yasuda is the only one preparing the food here, and his wife handles the drinks and bills. There’s also no rush at all in this restaurant. Yasuda would mention several times that the NYC restaurant would often give customers a time limit for their meal and that there would be no such restriction here—we were free to take as long as we wanted.
It’s a really small operation, and it feels like he’s just running a restaurant as a hobby instead of to make money. His NYC restaurant was wildly successful (and continues to be), so he can afford to do this as a “retirement” gig haha. He seems to largely cater to foreigners now, as he mentioned that the majority of his customers are foreigners who have heard of him.
(If you’re curious about why Chef Yasuda left for Japan, the blog “Do You Even Eat” does a pretty good job of giving an explanation in this post.)
Anyway, let’s discuss the sushi! The sushi here is considered to be mid-level in terms of prices. 12 pieces of sushi cost 3,800 JPY (about $39 USD), and the price is adjusted if you ask for more pieces (most people tend to do that). That price ratio is NOT expensive at all by Japanese standards, and the result is that the quality of the fish simply won’t be as good as some of the top sushi-ya in Tokyo.
He still goes to Tsukiji Market every day to select his fish (though not at auction hours), and I think he feels some pride in the fact that he handles all the food himself. (He chooses the fish, cooks his rice, and prepares the sushi for you. He’s able to exercise more culinary freedom now in ways that he couldn’t back in NYC.)
Monte
Victor
tadv3
Happy Noms 