Archive | September, 2012

The Australian

13 Sep

I have passed by The Australian nearly every day for the past 5 months on my walk to and from work.  I decided it would be a good place to meet up with a friend for a quick drinks and a bite.  We arrived during happy hour and found that they had live music. Some very good rock from the 90s kept us happy the entire time.

We started with the Aussie Sliders which came with seasoned mini beef burgers, topped with pepper jack cheese, served with beets.  We went with no cheese (due to my allergy).  These had nice flavor.

Then we tried the Grilled Kangaroo Skewers, which came with four roo skewers, basted with tamarind barbecue sauce and grilled rare, served over a bed on julienned carrots and cucumbers and dusted with toasted and chopped cashews.  I thought it would be fun to try something so novel!  We were both surprised how much it tasted like tender steak.  Quite good.

But the real reason I was there was for the pavlova.  Not a lot of places serve pavlova, and I’m kind of obsessed with it, so we had to get it.

It had a really nice passion fruit sauce around it and a big pile of whipped cream.  The pavlova itself was quite good, with a crunchy shell and soft give in the center.  Pavlova isn’t a complex dessert, but this one was executed well and tasted great.  Thumbs up!

Overall, The Australian is a better than average bar. It has all the makings of a run-of-the-mill establishment, but the food is interesting and flavorful, they have live music, and they have pavlova!  Score!  I’m curious to try some other things on the menu and have a full meal there.

Total Nom Points: 6.5 out of 7

The Smith Restaurant: East Village

11 Sep

My friend had a spare ticket to a concert at Webster Hall and mentioned that she really liked the Restaurant, The Smith, around the corner. I had heard good things, so away we went.

We started with some oysters, which were quite good.

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She got the 15 Hour Pork (a Monday special).  It looked quite good and she seemed to like it, but it didn’t seem to thrill her.

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We split some brussels sprouts, which were roasted nicely with a good crispy.  Very good.

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I actually ran into a bit of an issue with my allergy. While most of the dishes seemed pretty safe, it turns out they use peppers in a lot of their sauces and seasonings.  I had very few options to choose from, but I decided to go with bibimbop (one of my favorite Korean dishes). It was nicely fresh with sushi rice, edamame, shitake, bean sprouts, pickled carrots, spinach, and a sunny side up egg.  It was pretty good, but definitely lacking in depth of flavor. I’m pretty sure they had to leave a sauce out, due to the peppers, which probably had a good bit of flavor.

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I don’t think I could really give The Smith a fair shot since I couldn’t eat most of the dishes. But the fact that the dish I did have was kind of bland made it seem like they focus on spice for flavor instead of relying on doing good things with good ingredients.  I won’t put this as a stake in the ground, but my take on it was entirely average.

Total Nom Points: 5.5 out of 10

Total Nom Points: 5.5 out of 10

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ZoneManhattan Week 2 Weigh In and Update

9 Sep

Week 2 has me 9 pounds down and Mike is 8 down!  We have both noticed that our clothes are fitting better.

For the first few days, we both had headaches.  But we realized we were both taking a supplement and when we stopped, headaches for both of us ended.  Now we’re feeling good, though Mike seems to be a bit hungrier than I am.

We ran into a snag with the site, however. Turns out, even though they seem to have the renewal process fully online, Mike’s 1st day of the renewal came with no food delivery. He called to find out that they didn’t store our credit card info and needed it again to restart the program.  I called (my renewal was set for the next day) and was told the same thing.  There was no way for us to know this was an issue had we not spoken to them.  Why no one called us about this, we have no idea, and the woman that answered the phone didn’t seem all that concerned.  I even wrote to their help desk to mention that this was not a good user experience, but they also seemed to care very little.

It’s a shame because we’ve really enjoyed the rest of the program.  Customer service should be on top of that. It can be as easy as putting a note on their site to call them once you submit the renewal.  Right now it just says “Thanks for renewing. A nutritionist will be in touch shortly.”  But we heard from no nutritionist.  I also find this weird… why wouldn’t they call to check up on us? See how it’s going? Ask if we want to keep our calorie count the way it is?

It seems they have a great product and delivery has been good so far, but their customer service could use some fine tuning.

Luckily, we don’t need to deal with that too often, so 1 more month is ahead of us!

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