Aldo Sohm Wine Bar, NYC

For our anniversary we met up at the newly opened Aldo Sohm Wine Bar (www.aldosohmwinebar.com) across the courtyard from Le Bernardin where Aldo is also still the sommelier. This is a nice space with bar, sofas and high top tables. Small plates menu accompanies the wine selections. We started with a bottle of champagne and ordered the four cheese sample from Murray's Cheese as well as fennel salami and truffle mousse pate. We added to that the much raved about foie gras lollipops and the truffle pasta with grated yak cheese. Finished off the experience with a half bottle of red wine.

Overall a really nice addition to midtown - a sophisticated happy hour with lots of men in suits unwinding with bottles from the well balanced list. But you have to get there early - by 6 PM all the seats are taken and it's standing room only with little space left over to navigate around patrons all waiting like vultures for a table to open up.

Word of adivce - if you do get there late, immediately see the hostess if you can find her and get your name on the list for a table. It is not first come, first served.

Charleston Eats! Peninsula Grill

A few weeks ago Alan and I tagged a few days in Charleston to the end of a family Myrtle Beach trip. Packing in a couple of new restaurants & bars was easy from our centrally located historic Inn on Kings Street (King's Courtyard Inn, 198 King Street - highly recommend).

To kick off the weekend we popped over to Peninsula Grill for a glass of champagne and an appetizer. This was a repeat - we'd been there for dinner at the bar back in September of 2012 and remembered it fondly. We shared the Lobster “3 Way” ~ Lobster Ravioli, Lobster Tempura, and Sautéed Lobster with Warm Tomato Basil Vinaigrette. Plus lots of warm, soft, fresh bread to mop up all the broth. Excellent dish! We paired this with a glass each of bubbles: Taittinger "la Française", Brut, Reims N/V and the Dumont Pere et Fils, Brut Rosé, Aube N/V.

Because we already had dinner reservations elsewhere, we kept ourselves to the single dish. Still a great looking menu and a popular place that fills up quickly. Give it a try it you're in town but if you've been there before and remember the extensive by the glass champagne list from a few years ago, be prepared to be underwhelmed.

~ July 2014

Bar at the Modern, NYC

Patty, Alan and I met up after work for drinks and lite dinner at the bar at The Modern in mid-town. We've eaten there once before and remembered it fondly so going back was something to look forward to. We got seats at the bar and ordered a few different plates to share including slow poached farm egg "in a jar" with Maine lobster, mushrooms and sea urchin foam; foie gras terrine with muscat gelee and toasted brioche; spicy steak tartar with quail egg and beer braised pork belly.

I don't have pictures for this one but the food was again quite nice. The spicy tartar had a nice kick to it without being too much to handle. The farm poached egg was more soupy than I expected it to be but the flavor was nice. The winner that evening was the pork belly. You really can't go wrong with pork belly.

The bar at the Modern is a fun place - lots of people watching - big comfortable bar stools so you can settle in for a few drinks while you sample the menu. Recommend it to anyone looking for an upscale bar scene in midtown.

Jenn's Rating: 86
Zagat: 26-26-25

Manning's New Orleans

When you are traveling over a major holiday there won't always be a lot of open restaurants or bars. This was the case for us on Thanksgiving Day. After waiting a stupidly long time at one of the only open places serving breakfast (Camillia's in the French Quarter) for simple eggs & hash browns (never got our order of toast), we scoped out a place to have drinks and watch the afternoon football games.

Lucky for us our first choice, Manning's on Fulton Street was open. If you haven't been and love sports, this is a pretty awesome bar. A big place with tables along one side, more tables in the center of the restaurant up half a level, a few dozen recliner seats down in front of a massive, full wall TV screen (13 feet by 7.5 feet), huge bar and an impressive outdoor patio with another incredibly large TV screen. Besides the two big ones, there are another 30 or so flat screen TVs along every available inch of wall space showing all broadcast games.

The menu is a mix of southern comfort and Creole dishes in the spirit of bar food. We settled into a table with great views of the big screen to catch the second half of the first game -Houston vs. Detroit. We ordered fried, hot chicken wings and the blue crab and spinach dip served with baked focaccia chips. The wings were really good served with a traditional crumble of blue cheese and blue cheese dressing for dipping. Alan's only comment regarding the half a dozen wings on the plate is that he wished there were twice as many. I liked the crab and spinach dip but we were mixed on the focaccia chips...they were in between soft and crunchy which made for an odd texture.

We kept the drinks coming through the first game and by the start of the Dallas vs. Washington match we ordered round two of appetizers. This time I went with a classic Caesar salad of romaine, organic chicken, romano cheese, house-made croutons, olives and a creamy, thick Parmesan Caesar dressing. Excellent salad - great flavor on the dressing! Alan picked the corn-fried Des Allemands catfish chips served with a ravigote dipping sauce. These were fantastic! Perfect little fried bites and a sauce that was thick and flavorful. The catfish was moist and flaky and really good.

We killed about three hours at Manning's that afternoon and the crowd swelled, calmed and swelled again with lots of groups coming in wearing their team jerseys and ordering beer by the bucket. The only downside was that the restaurant seemed understaffed and the service was sketchy. Our empty glasses were not cleared away even as new drinks were being brought out and a general sense that you needed to actively seek out your server if you wanted something. We chalked this up to it being Thanksgiving Day and wouldn't hold it against the restaurant. Definitely a fun place to hang out if you're down there looking for a place to watch sports.