let's do brunch: kittichai

It's been brought to my attention that people who work in kitchens generally loathe brunch. I've been on the receiving end of a disapproving "Oh, you're one of those people" comments followed up with a self-explanatory picture of some cook's tattoo featuring a popular brunch item and the words "Fuck brunch." I sympathize. I would be pissed off too if I had to drag my hungover ass to work on a weekend afternoon to make other hungover bastards some poached eggs.

But I can't help it. I am one of those people. I like brunch. And if it's a boozy brunch, I might even have to use the word love.

I thought my feelings about the Sunday afternoon we spent at Kittichai illustrate my unconditional love for the boozy brunch quite well. It's certainly not the best meal you'll ever have in your life, but there's just *something about unlimited cocktails, food involving eggs and the company of friends that makes me so happy.

*and by something I do mean unlimited bubbly

At Kittichai, $25 gets you a brunch item and unlimited Bloody Marys, bellinis and mimosas. The brunch choices are:

• Smoked salmon, grilled naan bread, classic accompaniments  
• Asian five spice french toast, thai basil and fruit compote
• Kaffir lime leaf pancake soufflé, lemongrass butter
• Eggs benedict, penang curry hollandaise with morning glory 
• Kittichai omelette, thai sour sausage, jumbo lump crab
• Kittichai Pad Thai, shrimp, garlic chive and peanuts

If your main goal is to day drink and maybe have some eggs, go for this option. The servers are excellent at keeping your glasses filled but the food is pretty lackluster. The most enticing thing on our table were the eggs benedict but since Anthony Bourdain has scared me off hollandaise for the rest of my life, I wasn't having it.

While the yellow curry potatoes on the side were tasty, my Kittichai omelette was frankly quite tragic. I've never seen such rubbery eggs outside of an airplane ...

But by then I'd already swigged a lusciously spicy Bloody Mary and a bellini so I really wasn't too upset.

If you're not feeling like too much of a lush, I would suggest foregoing the boozy brunch prix fixe and ordering a la carte. The chili-smoked hanger steak and eggs plus either a Bloody Mary or a Thai iced tea should be a great combo. We ordered the chili-smoked hanger steak to share and I am still salivating at the memory of it.

To cap off our meal, we ordered the banana spring rolls with burnt honey ice cream, which erases all sadness over inadequate omelettes.

With a few strategic a la carte orders and A LOT of bellinis and mimosas, we ended up really enjoying our brunch. See that's how it is with love: you don't need perfection because you will find a way to make it work.

Kittichai is located at 60 Thompson Street, New York, NY. Phone (212) 219-2000 for reservations.

designer for less: missoni for target

It took superhuman self-control but I managed to clear out of the Target website with just two things: the sleeveless shift dress on the left below and those cute printed shorts on the right.

My shipment arrives sometime next week so I'll let you all know what the real deal looks like. The website keeps going down but I had a few precious minutes of good luck at around 1:30pm today. As of that time, there were still a good amount of shift dresses, shorts, skirts and bags. The hoodie above is still haunting me but I decided I don't need to be in head to toe zig zag, do I? The adorable Missoni bike is all but a memory but there are still iPhone cases, homeware and luggage all ready to wreck your budget ...

If you're able to get on, make sure to shop as quickly as possible as the website is still pretty shaky! Good luck!

the plaza food hall by todd english

When we were young, a food hall (or food court, as we call them in the Philippines) was akin to a culinary Switzerland—a place where my parents could take all the kids with dissimilar cravings and feed them without too much drama. All our folks had to do was give us money and we could get whatever it was our tummy desired: pizza, tempura, hamburgers, Mongolian stir-fry, halo-halo. And we could all still sit down at one table and eat as a family. But food halls in the Philippines are very much like their traditional American counterparts: usually located in a shopping mall and chock full of fast food stands—not exactly what one would think of as haute cuisine.

My view of food halls changed somewhat when I got to eat at Marché in Singapore some years ago (funnily enough, Marché actually hails from Switzerland). Built to give you the feeling that you are eating in a European market (or in some parts, a Swiss chalet), the ingredients are fresh and the food just-cooked.

Lately here in New York, the idea of what a food hall is has been turned upside down in my head yet again. In recent months, a few gourmet food halls have popped up in the city that are bears little resemblance to your momma's food court. Last night, I ventured with a big group of friends into The Plaza Food Hall by celebrity chef, Todd English. This food hall boasts eight specialty food stations as well as numerous gourmet delights to tempt any foodie shoppaholic.

My friend Jammy specifically requested the table in the demo kitchen when she made our reservation so our party of 7.25 (myself, three couples and a baby) had plenty of space to devour food in. Boy, did we need that space because we ordered quite a bit of food!

The Restaurant Week menu was available and seemed to be a good deal. The lunch menu includes 4 pieces of fried oysters with caviar creme fraiche, lemon zest and micro cilantro as an appetizer.

Add to that a Bianca pizza and a mini cheese cake for dessert and it's definitely not a bad deal for $24.07. For dinner, they change it up with half a dozen fresh oysters, and a choice between the Bianca pizza or roasted prime rib for the entree, plus the same cheese cake dessert. You could do worse with $35.00.

Seduced with the bounty of choices from the meat and seafood grills, the sushi bar, the dumpling station and the pizza station, we decided to order a la carte. My mom always tells me I shouldn't make decisions about food when I'm starving and she's always right. In a state of starvation, I went with the Food Hall Burger and its half pound american kobe beef pattie, fried onion, grilled bacon, roasted tomato and gorgonzola, all slathered in barbeque sauce.

It was good but the prime rib sliders, described in New York magazine as "piled with ribbons of tender meat, dripped with a rich Fontina dressing, and served on fresh brioche buns", probably would have been a better choice. Three of us ordered this burger and while it did the job, it wasn't the best any of us had ever had.

I didn't dwell on this too much though because the mac n cheese blew my mind. Is there anything better than macaroni, pulled pork and caramelized onions all slathered in melted aged cheddar? Ok lots of things are but none come to mind while you're dishing bite after delicious bite of this goodness into your mouth, I promise.

I had my hands full (literally) with my massive burger plus the mac 'n cheese so I didn't really get to taste everyone else's food. Consider the rest of the post as food porn. Coco and JM ordered the special: a flat bread pizza with pork belly bits, green onion and sriracha.  

Jammy and Sancho ordered one of their favorite pizzas: fig jam, prosciutto and gorgonzola on a rosemary crust.

There were a couple of rolls from the sushi bar on the table, too, but I haven't had a yen for sushi in awhile so I didn't try any of them. Thought they looked pretty (and yes, I'm sorry that's all I have to say about them). Mica had the lobster roll in the picture below while Jammy had the dragon roll further below. 

All in all, a very good meal. It's hard to find a chic place where one can eat good food at reasonable prices, get seated as a fairly large party painlessly and not be rushed out. So I'm grateful to The Plaza Food Hall for providing a bunch of high school friends and their significant others a great spot to catch up over a good meal.

The Plaza Food Hall by Todd English is located at 768 Fifth Avenue (at Central Park South), New York, NY 10019. Phone (212) 986-9260 for reservations.

cocktail hour: angel's share

One of the things that makes summer exciting: the profusion of bright and shiny new summer cocktail menus. As taken as I am with winter-perfect concoctions involving whiskey, egg and spices, there's something exciting about a refreshing tipple made with vibrant summer fruits. A couple of weeks ago, my cousin Melissa and I went to St. Mark's Place to enjoy the grilled goodness at Yakitori Taisho and then have some delicious cocktails at Angel's Share. Angel's Share is a speakeasy of sorts that's only accessible through the Japanese restaurant Village Yokocho. They have some truly exceptional Japanese bartenders that take their craft very, very seriously and I just love it there.

It was a humid Tuesday evening so I immediately gravitated to this summery drink: Watermelon Man. Made with organic cucumber-flavored vodka, fresh watermelon juice and a sprig of basil, it was deliciously refreshing and deceptively strong.

Melissa picked the Velvet Scene, a drink apparently conceived by pastry chef Chika of Chikalicious. This effervescent drink contains Tanqueray gin, fresh kiwi and fresh grapefruit juice made just from the sweet pulp, all spiked with a bit of honey and lavender.

The most memorable drink of the night, however, was the Cheek to Cheek, which had us so intrigued that we didn't want to share. It starts out typical enough for a cocktail: white rum, muddled berries, fresh lemon juice and white cranberry juice. But then Vincotto is added in—slow-cooked, non-fermented grape reduced until its sugars have caramelized. And then comes balsamic honey, yoghurt and mascarpone foam, and suddenly you're in dessert territory. Is it a cocktail masquerading as dessert or vice versa? I don't know, but it is decadent and delicious.

If my evening at Angel's Share was any indication of how the rest of the summer will turn out, it's gonna be a sweet, sparkling and deliciously tipsy one!

Angel's Share is located at 6 Stuyvesant St., 2nd fl, New York, NY, 10003.

cocktail hour: clover club

I find that a very well-made cocktail can be as satisfying as a delicious meal. So when I read about the first ever NYC Cocktail Week going on from June 15-29, I was beyond excited. Adding to the anticipation was the fact that some of the city's best cocktail bars are participating: Clover Club, Death & Company, Employees Only and Lani Kai. The deal is that you get two cocktails plus an appetizer for just $20.11—pretty sweet considering most specialty cocktails at such establishments run from $12-16. The event benefits City Harvest's fight against hunger and The Museum of the American Cocktail's efforts to preserve mixological history—and I do so enjoy drinking for a cause!

The problem is that what I love about going to these cocktail bars is the experience of perusing extensive cocktail menus or in cases when there is no menu, spilling obscure cravings to the bartenders and waiters and allowing them to surprise me with something incredible in a glass. This doesn't necessarily lend itself well to the restrictions that understandably come with Cocktail Week's prix-fixe arrangements.

I trekked over to Brooklyn one Thursday night to join my cousin Melissa and her boyfriend Ben for cocktails at one of their favorite spots: Clover Club. We went there brimming with excitement at the prospect of Cocktail Week but our hopes were quickly shot down when we were told that the special menu was only served before 7PM and after 10PM. We asked to take a look at the menu, nevertheless, to see what was being offered. On Clover Club's NYC Cocktail Week menu:

COCKTAILS (Choose two)
New York Sour
Bulleit Rye Whiskey, lemon, orange juice, red wine
Cloister
Tanqueray No. 10 gin, herbal liqueur, grapefruit, lemon juice
Hotel Nacional Special
Zacapa 23 Rum, apricot liqueur, lime juice, pineapple juice
Jack Rose
Applejack, lime juice, grenadine

APPETIZERS (Choose one)
Crisps
All right, so they are potato chips ...
but they are tossed in duck fat and
served with a truffled crème fraiche.
Deviled Eggs
Classic deviled eggs, served three ways:
topped with smoked paprika & garlic breadcrumbs,
crispy bacon croutons and mushroom duxelles.
One of each. 

These drinks and snacks sound lovely enough but once I browsed through the extensive cocktail menu, so many wonderful things jumped out at me and I realized that I would not have been happy sticking to the abridged Cocktail Week menu. There were so many intriguing drinks waiting to be tasted and I didn't mind paying a few extra dollars for that privilege. For my first drink, I chose the signature drink, the Clover Club, and with my first sip, I fell in love. Any place that has an egg white in its signature tipple is clearly my soulmate. The Clover Club contains gin, dry vermouth, lemon, raspberry syrup and egg white, and is oh so very delicious ...

I can't recall what Ben's drink was but it was bright, refreshing and perfect for a humid summer afternoon ...

After tasting Ben's excellent drink choice, I thought I'd follow suit for my next drink. Ben ordered the Barrymore Room off the menu and I did the same. This was definitely my kind of drink with rye whiskey, an egg white and some mysterious but delicious friends comprising the drink. I seem to be embroiled in a love affair with rye whiskey and egg these days (I recently had a particularly delicious concoction in Milk & Honey involving rye whiskey, champagne and an egg yolk! LOVE.). It's out of control.

For her second drink, Melissa chose the Blush Baby, which seemed very promising with its mixture of rum, demerara syrup, lemon, blackberry, raspberry and rosé wine. From the look of it, you expected a drink just bursting with berry flavors ... but it tasted kind of watery. It was just okay.

For his last drink, Ben ordered the much maligned and mistreated Mai Tai. If you've only had this in, say, a Cancun all-inclusive resort which shall remain unnamed with an odd fellow named Greg, you'd probably hate the stuff. At its worst, a Mai Tai will contain cheap rum, artificially-flavored juice and that godawful darn sweetener. Over at Clover Club where the ingredients are legit, the Mai Tai sparkles with rum and fresh lime juice and makes you just want to lay out on a sandy beach somewhere with cocktail in hand.

Cocktail Week or not, I thoroughly enjoyed my evening at Clover Club. Admittedly, the Clover Club would be quite a trek for a Manhattanite and I'm quite sure that even a serious cocktail enthusiast from Manhattan would rather squeeze into one of the tiny cocktail bars in the city for a tipple rather than trek out to Brooklyn. I live in the Financial District, however, which is a skip and a hop to Brooklyn so I am much more inclined to come back for more. I thought that the Clover Club's expansive digs dressed in vintage sofas and leather booths were a nice, relaxing change from Manhattan's lilliputian bars where you sometimes have to battle for seating space. The existence of this gorgeous bar with even more gorgeous drinks definitely adds to Brooklyn's ever-growing draw on me.

Clover Club is located at 210 Smith St between Baltic and Butler Sts, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn (718-855-7939)