I have seen photos of how the citizens of Cincinnati eat their chili. I have seen it on the Anthony Bourdain show and I have had friends described it to me when they went to Cincinnati for a long weekend but it wasn’t until last Monday that I finally came face-to-face with it.

Every last Monday of each month, Edward’s in Tribeca does a Cincinnati Night where you’ll get to eat some of the popular Cincinnati food items. Of course the one thing everybody goes for is chili from Skyline Chili. Chili from Cincinnati isn’t as thick as regular chili and they add cocoa powder into it to give it a bit of sweetness. Besides Skyline you can also get ribs from Montgomery Inn, pizza from Larosa and ice cream from Graeter’s.

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Oh Thanksgiving oh Thanksgiving. Why did you have to be over so soon. For the past 2-3 years I have spent my Thanksgiving vacation down in Virginia at my friend’s parent’s place. It felt like an actual vacation. But this year I stayed in NYC and went to a little Thanksgiving dinner my 2 friends were having. It was fun and all but it went by too quickly. Another thing I did different this year was that I made something for Thanksgiving dinner. Since I wasn’t at my friend’s parent’s place I emailed his mom to get her recipes for the apple pie and candied yams. To bring a little bit of what I was missing about Thanksgiving to this dinner.
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Spam and eggs over rice, yep. That’s the dish my mom makes when she gets too lazy to cook. Fried the slices of spam till nice and brown. Then cook the eggs. When done put both on top of steamy white rice. Though my version, picture above, I had to use old rice so I heated it up in the pan till I get crunchy bits on the bottom. I like to add Maggi seasoning, which I grew up calling soy sauce, over everything on the plate then lots of ground black pepper. Yum!

I heard of Freemans before but there were never much news about this place so it dropped out of my radar. Until recently my friend suggested this place to have his birthday dinner. My friend told me last time he ate at Freemans, the waitress gave them attitude so obviously my expectation for this place went from not-much to below-zero OUCH!

Couple hours before heading out to Freemans, reservations were made for 9:45pm on a Monday night, I did what anyone would do before heading out to a new restaurant for the first time, I researched the place. Found a lot of positive remarks for their artichoke dip. So Freemans was situated at the end of an alley (Freemans) which was actually kind of cool. It gave off this mysterious, you’re-no-longer-in-manhattan kind of vibe UNTIL I saw Kirsten Dunst lighting up a cigarette and that brought me back down to my below-zero level of expectation. Thanks Kirsten Dunst!! Once we were seated I quickly realized Freemans is not my type of restaurant or I’m just not the type of client Freemans was tailored to. Everyone in there was very SoHo, if that makes any sense. They were tall, skinny, well dressed, and model-like.

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Good prime sirloin REALLY REALLY good prime sirloin

First time I read about this restaurant, I thought the idea of changing their menu and decor to reflect the seasons sounded pretty interesting but few websites thought it was all just a gimmick and usually these types of restaurants lack substance. It’s a nice idea to rotate the menu according to the seasons and what’s available in that season but I never thought about trying this place unless someone suggests to go there. So when Howard decided to have this birthday dinner there I said sure (though secretly I was more excited when he suggested Perilla before deciding on Park Avenue Spring, hahaa).

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I never heard of a torta before. When you think of Mexican food you think burritos or tacos or tamales. It’s also said to think that many people believes Taco Bell is the real thing…*sigh. Anyways, it took my friend in LA to tell me about tortas from King Taco, she’s not a big Mexican so for her to rave about this beef torta I had to go try. I don’t really remember how it was since it was 2 years ago but I’m sure it was good, haha..ha. So one late drunken night, my friends and I were in search for food. Some of us went straight to the pizza place while some of us were attracted to the pretty green neon lights. We decided to go into Tacos Nuevo Mexico because there were enough seats for the 6 of us and I didn’t feel like having pizza. And damit, pizza places don’t serve margaritas! Going through the menu, it’s a pretty big menu, I saw TORTA! HHmmmmmmm…….Mexican sausage and egg torta, DONE! Again, writing this right now trying to think back what the torta was like is difficult. I only remember it being very good but was looking for the egg. I didn’t see no egg but it was good. So this time I went for the roast pork torta (next time I should get 2, 1 torta barely fills me up) and I have decided that the bread of the torta was what made this sandwich so good. The bread was soft and chewy. I’m tempted to ask them where they get their bread from.

- Tacos Nuevos Mexico 491 5th Ave btw 11th St & 12th St

Posted by Donny