NYC Restaurant Week Summer 2014: General Assembly

1 Sep

We really enjoyed our meal at General Assembly when it was newly opened, so when we were looking for a place to go with my coworkers for lunch during Restaurant Week, this was an easy choice to return.

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One of my coworkers selected the Tomato and Watermelon Gazpacho, which was poured tableside.

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She really enjoyed this.

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Another coworker got a house dip: the house-made ricotta with local honey chili oil. Another hit.

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I went with the stone fruit salad. The peaches and prosciutto were a great combination and the greens were perfectly dressed.

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As for entrees, some got the Skuna bay salmon, which they really enjoyed.

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I got the roast chicken with pommery mustard sauce.  I usually don’t love mustard, but this was a great compliment to the chicken, which was nicely crispy yet juicy.

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And of course we all had to split a side of the corn creme brulee.  I absolutely love this dish and find myself dreaming of it for a long time after the meal. It is a must order.

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We had been leisurely with our lunch and suddenly we were short on time to get back to the office for meetings.  So we asked for our desserts to go.  We all got different eclair, including a peanut butter and chocolate, a key lime meringue, and a cherry and pistachio.  All were incredibly enjoyable and made the afternoon at our desks just a little sweeter.

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We really enjoyed our meal and being able to take advantage of it during Restaurant Week made it so we could go on a regular day, rather than saving it for a special occasion.  Everyone left the meal saying how much they enjoyed it and I keep recommending General Assembly to visitors. It is just a solid place to go where the service is always good, the food is always just a little special and out of the ordinary, and it seems to be a very good crowd pleaser.

Total Nom Points: 8 out of 10

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Where has NYCNomNom been?

1 Sep

People said it a million times: Home ownership is stressful. Home renovations are even more stressful.

Turns out… there is more accuracy in those words than anything I’ve ever heard prior.

We have been in for a month and every spare moment has been occupied by home… stuff.  There is just so much to do, and the fact that our contractor was awful, fell off the face of the earth for 3 weeks, then came back to “finish” and still did a ton wrong sure didn’t help.

But we are getting there.

We have a bathroom with a cabinet (so there is storage).

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We have a brand new walk-in closet in the bedroom, converted from 2 smaller, “L” shaped closets (before and after pictures):

And we have a newly designed kitchen! We kept the appliances and cabinets and swapped out the floor for a black and white checkerboard (which I’ve wanted all my life), soap stone counters, and a dark red wall. I LOVE the kitchen.

HOWEVER, our contractor did this all wrong and we are still not quite right.

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In fact, a new set of contractors are here right now to do some of the last fixes in the apartment, including regrouting the entire backsplash in the kitchen (because the last guy did it wrong), sealing the kitchen and bathroom (since the last guy did that wrong, too), and hanging all the bathroom racks (we’ve been using a wire hanger as a toilet paper holder for the past month):

Slowly but surely, we will make it.

But right now I’m taking advantage of a day off to post some reviews that have been waiting in the wings for weeks. I’ve missed blogging a lot, so hopefully I can get back on track now!

EDIT: Some more photos of what was finished on Monday…

The finally finished kitchen:

Bathroom hardware (all pipe bars/shelves done custom by Etsy artist David at Splinterwerx):

 

 

And the entrance to our apartment, surrounded by artwork from my family… Grandpa Axel’s violin sculpture on the left, 2 pictures by my Great Aunt Dinah (who is 100 years old and still making artwork!) flanking the door, and a sign from our wedding drawn by my mom in the center of the door.

More to come!

Organizing My Life and a little NPR

15 Aug

In a quick departure from restaurant reviews (more coming soon!), an interesting story on NPR struck a cord with me this week.

I really love organizing and lists.  I love crossing things off my lists even more.  I am always the one nagging my office manager to order bigger white boards and more dry erase markers.

As I’ve taken more and more cooking classes, the idea of “Mise en Place,” or the practice of setting out all the things you need to make a recipe before you start, and thinking through each step along the way to make sure you can do it efficiently, is something I really hooked onto.  It goes along with the idea of working clean.  If you take an extra few moments to clean up what you were just working on before moving on to the next step, you will wind up with much less of an overwhelming pile of dishes/scraps/knives/counters to clean when you are done cooking.

I think about these ideas in other areas of my life… I set up my work presentations by thinking through what I’m trying to say and the putting blank slides into PowerPoint to outline my thoughts before filling it in.  As I unpack our new apartment, I put things I just took out of boxes back INTO boxes if I don’t know where they  should go yet, so as not to wind up with a trail of unknown items as I go.  I am pretty famous for booking itineraries for vacations using Google Docs to collect all the info, laying out the outline of the days and then filling it in with a combination of scheduled activities and ideas for unscheduled activities (I love planned spontaneity).  I just feel calmer when things are in place.

A friend of mine shared with me this clip on NPR by Dan Charnas that talks all about the importance of this theory and it is inspiring me to find more ways of organizing my world:  http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/08/11/338850091/for-a-more-ordered-life-organize-like-a-chef

Who doesn’t need more organization in their life?

Even Thomas Keller agrees:

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