X-cellent food in NYC! (aka "x" is an annoying letter in the English language)

I think I will have to again scribe a fairly concise blog entry tonight. My nerves are all strained from Cisco and just having to wait on incidents that could decide a decent part of my immediate future is causing me to yo-yo from wound up high anxiety to extreme exhaustion. Today my supervisor and three other people in my area (though those three are on a different budget than I am) learned that they were being let go at the end of the month. However, nothing whatsoever has been said to any of my four coworkers or me. We are silently going crazy and would really like to just hear anything tomorrow, be it good or bad, just simply to know what's going on. Once we learn we are naturally going to eat out to celebrate either the miraculous last minute save of our jobs (for another 3 months or so) or our triumphant escape from Cisco to move on to better and brighter opportunities.

Until that happens, it is time for more NYC meals.

Moving right along to my dinner on April 22nd, I was finally able to meet with my cousin Ann who lives in Manhattan and works at the New York Public Library as a legal assistant. I'll dig up a photo of her later as the best ones were all taken on her camera and are hidden somewhere in my e-mail. My next culinary experience was to be a Japanese restaurant by the name of Katsu-hama, a restaurant that specializes in one of my favorite dishes; they served all sorts of Katsu, or Japanese cutlets.


Ah...tabetai (I want to eat it). While this restaurant was probably not run by Japanese owners, this was still easily some of the best tonkatsu (pork cutlet) I have ever had either in the US or in Japan and it wasn't that expensive either. The restaurant was small, but neatly arranged, and I felt that how they arranged the meal was also a nice, Japanesque touch. They brought out beautiful plates like this one, but also served our sake in a small box filled with water and flower petals, and had us crush fresh sesame seeds for our sauce. While katsu is fried and my stomach had been feeling queasy all throughout my time in NYC, this was a fantastic meal where both my taste buds and stomach went home happy.

Or rather I should say, they both were so thrilled that they decided I needed to continue on my journey to attempt to completely satisfy them, as well as fulfill another pilgrimage of my family's culinary traditions in NYC, and like Katz's Delicatessen, easily one of my favorite places on the face of the earth as I have experienced it so far. So my cousin and I moved on to this mysterious place in the East Village...

I love bakeries. Real bakeries, not the supermarket or Little Debbie's kind. The traditional family owned kind where all baked goods are made day of (or are sold at a significant discount) and there is no use of sodium benzoate, artificial flavors or colors, or, god forbid, dough conditioners of any kind. I find this kind of bakery to be very rare in the US, because they are difficult to run as a business, minimally appreciated outside of the cities, and then probably hurt even more by the recession as they are considered more of a luxury item than the much cheaper mass market products at the nearby grocery store. However, despite all of that Veniero's Pasticceria & Caffé has managed to survive since 1894. There are many other very good bakeries in NYC (the Chelsea Market from a previous post contains some), but Veniero's, which focuses primarily but not exclusively on Italian style desserts, has become a family favorite. I literally dream about their pies and cookies and I have no pictures except for this one because I ate everything else so fast.

I'll have to find the exact name for it but this berry and apricot tart was out of this world amazing. Paired with some light coffee, it was the perfect dessert to end a good day in NYC. I already want to go back there to eat more...