All you need to know is that I fully enjoyed my burger and fries and iced tea. I wanted a 2nd burger after that.

- Shake Shack 11 Madison Avenue, New York inside Madison Square Park

I was with my sister, Bonnie, and I was having trouble thinking where to eat for dinner in my own neighborhood. She was flying back to LA that night and I’m always paranoid about getting to the airport on time. I was trying to think of a place that wouldn’t take us foooorrrever but didn’t really feel like getting a banh mi at Hanco’s like last time. Then my sister said she was going to pay for dinner….then OK let’s go to Bar Tabac, why not? It was around 6pm on a Monday night when we walked in and the restaurant was nearly empty with only 2 tables being occupied. The mood was very mellow. We were seated towards the back. Once I sat down I could smell it. That smell, so familiar. The smell of the restroom yep. Right behind me was the hallway to the restroom. The whole time there all I could smell was the restroom soap, I guess thats better then…..eh anyways.

BURGER! Yes that was what I wanted and got with a slice of American cheese, plus $1. It was also the cheapest thing on the menu. My sister got 2 things Lamb Kebab Brochette with chermoula sauce and Scallops Brochette with soy balsamic dressing and parsley

That soap smell was pretty damn strong..

Our food came, hooray! Oh and my burger came with a side of salad nice. From just looking at it, the burger looked mighty tasty with a brioche bun. I picked it up and took a big bite, I was hungry, and was glad to find that it was cooked medium rare just like I ordered it to. Another thing that made this burger good was how well it held itself together. I was able to hold it with one hand and my other hand was free to pick up the fries. Look how it was able to stand on its side! Incredible!

As for my sister’s food, she said the scallops were tastier than the lamb. The cubes of lamb were a bit chewy. I took a bite of both and agreed on the chewiness of the lamb but actually preferred the taste of the lamb over the scallops.

I left this place feeling satisfied, full and like I have accomplished something GREAT. Finally I can check this place off my “some day” list. Do you have a restaurant you live so close to but never been?

I took the A train down to Brooklyn Heights and walked over to the Manhattan Bridge. They said it was under the archway but I had no idea where that was. Luckily I found it by the obvious extra numbers of trucks and vans that were parked on the streets. Man the archway. Never knew existed until I saw Hellboy II and there I was standing where Hellboy was standing. Ah nerd. In the beginning there weren’t much to do since the spot for the ice cream truck was being occupied. We just kind of stood around. Finally the spot was cleared and Doug parked the truck in their assigned spot. Then we got everything ready and spread out for the samples we were going to pass out. Doug and Bryan wanted to try few flavors of milkshake, green tea, chai and black tea. The matcha powder didn’t work so well, it wasn’t strong enough and the milkshake just tasted like well a milkshake. But we did find a winner the chai tea milkshake!


While waiting for 6:30pm, a girl from another vendor came over with a cup of Maker’s Mark cocktail and gave it to me. It was super delicious and stroooonnggg. I was happy! How do you scoop ice cream into small cups while being slight tipsy, very quick. Scoop scoop scoop scoop scoop sccoocooccoppp done!

We had samples of vanilla ice cream with ginger syrup and curry powder, vanilla ice cream with curry coconut flakes, vanilla ice cream with wasabi peas, chocolate ice cream with cayenne which I kept saying Kanye the whole night, chocolate ice cream with sriracha and the chai flavored milkshake.

It was so hard to pass out ice cream sample during the beginning of the event because people are programmed to want desserts after their meal. I had to push the samples into people’s faces but later in the evening people kept snatching the samples. You know what that means though the quicker I pass the samples out the more time I got to check the event out. I heard from a lot of people the pork belly with a side of oyster from The Setai in South Beach Miami was “life changing” so OF COURSE I had to try some. It was pretty darn good, not sure about the life changing part or maybe as usual I ate it too fast to enjoy it.



As you know I hate crowds or standing for a long time for my food so I was only able to eat a few things. I had a barbecue rainbow carrot buns with carrot hoisin sauce from Dirt Candy it was delicious but they had no plates. Instead they handed the baos on napkins which got stuck to the baos. Curry-Ya was passing out cups of rice with curry sauce, pretty standard Japanese curry. Karen, friend of Big Gay Ice Cream guys, was the other helper brought all of us a rice ball from Oms/b which was pretty good and some shrimp curry from Hachi that need a bit more kick to it. Then towards the end of the night market, Doug told Karen and I that we can stop making samples so I went to get more food. By now most of the crowds either left or were in line for ice cream. Someone told me to try the fried chicken from Baohaus and I did and it was only okay. It was a bit salty and since it had been sitting in the tray for a while it wasn’t so crispy. My final bite came from Kampuchea a pork meatball numpang with pickled veggies. It was pretty good and I really needed something substantial after all those single bite foods.


Finally around 10:30pm we were told to stop serving ice cream and started cleaning up our area. I had a great time helping Doug and Bryan and even though this was the first time for Luckyrice to hold such an event I thought it went pretty well. I really want another Maker’s Mark cocktail right now.

Short version. DON’T GO THERE!

Long version. I was really there for the tater tots but in the end even that was only ok. Howard, Steph and I walked into an empty place with dim blue lighting. Howard got the veggie burger with tater tots, which he ended up eating everything but the buns. Steph got a chicken dog? I think and said it was meh. I got a regular burger with tater tots and a side of onion rings with a root beer. You can see from the image, that burger was overran by unnecessary lettuces and onions. Oh and they don’t ask you how you want your burger but I got mine as medium. But the one thing we all agreed why our burgers and dogs were just not very ultimate were the cold buns. Why? Who thinks a cold bun is good? Come on! The frakkin’ hot griddle was there cooking the burgers! How much trouble is it to heat up the buns?

- Ultimate Burgers and Dogs 243 Degraw Street, Brooklyn