Mini Food Tour (Ice Cream Overload)

Two of Phil's cousins from out of town came to visit, so we spent the day in the city to hang out. Our first stop was to a Shanghai restaurant near the Elizabeth Center in Chinatown. It's a little hole in the wall restaurant with not much seating room, but their food was decent. They even had soup dumplings, which were pretty good. Lucia looks like she's enjoying them.

We also ordered some drunken chicken, and vegetarian duck (basically tofu skin stuffed with mushrooms).

And a plate of rice noodles with veggies.

With our bellies semi-full we debated what to do next and finally decided on getting some ice cream at the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. This ice cream place has all kinds of "asian-inspired" flavors from the traditional green tea and red bean to almond cookie and lychee. This place has been around for a while, but this was my first time...at least as far as I remember, which isn't necessarily saying much...

Everybody was craving ice cream. Ray looks like he's in ice cream heaven.

Phil and I got the Lychee and Almond Cookie flavors to try. Both were delicious, but I think I liked the Almond Cookie better. We'll definitely be coming back here again!

Then we continued on our way uptown in search of more food. On our way we passed an interesting new looking building with a giant rainbow colored "hell yes" sign. Apparently it's a new museum - though I'm not sure what kind of museum. Maybe Phil and I will come back to check it out sometime.

The next stop on our mini-food tour was a french fry place called Pommes Frites. They sell Belgian fries with different sauces. They're open 24 hours and are apparently very popular with the late night bar hoppers.

Everyone was a little exhausted from all the eating and walking, even the thought of more food was tiring...

Ok, maybe not that tiring...

We ordered a large order of fries to share between us. It might not look like a lot, but that paper cone certainly holds a lot of fries.

We ordered a sampling of 3 different sauces - roasted garlic mayo, peanut satay and pomegranate teriyaki mayo.

We also met up with Phil's sister at Pommes Frites. She had just finished her GRE exam and was super excited about her score. And what better way to celebrate than with food!

Next on our tour was a place called Momo Fuku Milk Bar. Momo Fuku has different restaurants, like a noodle bar and ssam bar. The Milk Bar is a soft-serve ice cream and pastry place that uses cereal milk as their main ingredient. What exactly is cereal milk? It's milk that has had cereal soaked in it for an extended period of time until the milk takes on the flavor of that cereal.

In addition to their soft-serve ice cream they had other desserts, like cookies and cakes. The cookies looked really tasty. They have a "Compost cookie", which is made of potato chips, pretzels, coffee grounds, oats, graham cracker crumbs, chocolate chips and butterscotch chips. They also have a "Blueberry Cream cookie", which basically tasts like a blueberry muffin.

Phil was set on ordering some cookies, but was outraged that they would charge over $1 for cookies...that is until he spotted "yesterday's cookies"! Day old cookies for half the price.

So he ordered 3 - the compost cookie, the blueberry cream cookie and the cornflake chocolate chip marshmallow cookie. My favorite was a tie between the compost and blueberry cream.

Lucia ordered the cereal milk soft-serve, and a slice of chocolate chip cake. The soft-serve definitely tasted like left over cereal milk, which was a little strange. Phil was convinced that someone must have eaten the cereal from the milk and got grossed out. The cake though was very good. It had layers of passion fruit curd in between. Normally I wouldn't think of mixing anything chocolate with passion fruit, but it tasted rather good.

After we filled our bellies even more with food Phil and Lucia decided to be silly in front of the milk sign at Momo Fuku. How does Lucia freeze in mid-air like that?

Then we took the long walk back to Lucia's apartment. On the way we passed a taiko group performing on the sidewalk. It made me think of the Icho Daiko taiko group back in Cleveland. They even had a skit of an old lady with a fake hunchback pretending to wash rice in the river.

We also passed a temple closer to Chinatown that was offering food and paper money in the street. I don't think there were any holidays on the lunar calendar for this weekend, so they might have just been performing a regular offering. Seeing offerings on the street outside a temple is not something new in Chinatown, but what was strange about this one was they were offering a whole goat! Whole pigs, chickens and ducks are something that you see a lot, but never a whole goat. It was huge and almost looked like it could have still been alive!...freaky...

We finally made it back to Lucia's apartment, exhausted from all the eating and walking. Phil and his cousin Alex settled in for a nap before it was time to head out again for dinner. It seems Phil isn't the only one who has post-meal naps. Must run in the family... ^__^

Whew, so much eating and it was only the start of the weekend!