1st day...

Paulo is sprawled half naked on the bed as I am typing this and it is taking all of my self control not to lose my dinner... and what a dinner...

So highlights, lowlights and generally humurous moments of the past day. We'll start with what may be the smartest move for this trip for me... Before I left I decided to pick up the Michelin Guide for NYC for 2009. I belive Tish's response when she saw it was "My god you are single minded"... after which she spent the next 15 minutes persuing... she also used it to decide where we were going (but all in good time)

Plane was a little delayed getting in but after a brief delay we were off to the Big Apple. Paulo is seemingly fixated on how similar everything is to GTA... I have a slight fear that he may randomly start beating people up...

The cabbie we had was nice and pointed out certain "landmark" places to eat on our way in... I think he had me pegged. Just down the street from where we are staying is apparently a gyro stand that has been opened for over 30 years... when we drove past there was quite the line up (even at midnight).

Our condo is really in an amazing location. It's right beside the Ed Sullivan Theater, where David Letterman films his nightly show. And right around the corner of our condo was the restaurant that Tisha had decided we were going to dine that evening. It's called Omido.


Now this place doesn't have the noteriety of a Nobu, or a big name chef like Moto, or Masa but it's definately some of the best sushi I've ever had. The flavours were clean, fresh and well put together, while the presentation was both aesthetically pleasing and definately enhanced the dinner. One of the things I particularly enjoyed was that every item on the plate was edible and part of the taste of the plate. There was no decoration for decoration's sake. The shaved radish gave an accent of color and a slight bite to the dish...

So what did we have? After a slight debate we chose a variety of dishes that catered a bit to our tastes and agreed to share. First up edamame beans. Difficult to mess up, but in a slight twist it tasted like they splurged a bit and instead of just kosher salt, or sea salt, it tasted very much like fleur de sel...

I should note at this point we had a seat in front of Chef Takase and we watched as he prepared our meal. Next up was a Maguro tartare... Nice firm rich red tuna was diced up and mixed with green onion and I think ponzu sauce before being served over some avocado. Very tasty and proved to be an excellent precursor to the sushi to come.



For the sushi proper, we ordered one of the signature rolls and asked the chef for a presentation of his choice of sushi and sashimi. We weren't disappointed.

The first signature roll was with a grilled black cod, cucumber and fried shredded taro. This was served with a ginger soy sauce.

We got another signature roll with the chef's sushi plate, a lobster roll done with soy paper and avocado. Different and very tasty. As well the sushi and sashimi plate offered a variety of different sushi's all carefully choosen by the chef as we watched and presented a variety of flavors and textures. Of particular note, he gave a generous helping of uni as one of the choices... very much to my tastes :)

After this, we notice one more signature set of rolls being plated for another table. It peaked our interest so we ordered it. A combination of different raw fish, fois gras and vegetables, topped off with gold leaf (yes gold leaf you read that right) was a perfect finish to an amazing dinner.

www.omidonyc.com


While not a famous or lavish place, the food was great!

Anyways it's almost 2 in the morning here, so I'm gonna sign off.