Driving a Steak Through It

Chef Louie's Steak House and Lounge
601 E Havens Ave
Mitchell, SD

Hours: Dinner Only
Food: Steakhouse
Alcohol: Full Bar

There's not a lot in South Dakota.

I mean, the whole country's populated enough that if you're on an Interstate, there's never the situation I've heard described where there's literally no gas for 300 miles or something, but South Dakota's pretty empty once you're west of Sioux Falls until you're all the way out to Rapid City.

So you start getting some pretty weird monuments.

The most famous of these is certainly Wall Drug, a bizarre tourist trap out West River whose signs can be found hundreds of miles away.

So on a recent drive from Northern Nebraska to Pierre, I was pretty much at a loss of places to go eat. It was after eight, and there weren't any restaurants within 10 miles, according to my GPS.

But out of the corner of my eye, I saw Chef Louie's Steak House, which looked interesting. After making sure they weren't closed, I decided to give it a whirl.

It's in the town of Mitchell, which is probably the biggest town between Rapid City and Pierre, which ain't saying much (Pierre's only 13,000).

Mitchell is home to the Corn Palace and the George McGovern museum. Yep, we're getting out to that part of the country where every town of any size has some ridiculous tourist trap.

They had a good wine list, but honestly, I was in a beer state of mind when I got there, so that's what I was getting.

And they only had six beers on tap: the light troika, Sam Adams and then two kinds of Boulevard. I decided to do their amber, which was OK, but it's no Moose Drool.

Which is a crying shame, since I was flying East the next day, and this was my only night in Moose Drool country.

And honestly, only six beers on tap is just kinda weak for a place like this. They must get at least a few customers who aren't in the mood for wine but have at least a little taste.

I didn't really have anything particular in mind when I ordered, so I asked the waitress what was good, and she recommended the prime rib, which I got.

As I waited for the prime rib, they brought out some dinner rolls to me, which were quite tasty, and still hot but other tables had these interesting multigrain-looking ones, and I didn't get one of those.

Instead of getting a salad, I also ordered a sausage and tomato soup, which was really good -- honestly, twice as much of it would make a great light lunch.

Then the prime rib came, and it lived up to its billing: crisp and slightly peppery on the outside, soft and tender on the inside.

It was some good eating.

And I wasn't completely full at the end of the meal, so I got dessert, again asking for a recommendation: my waitress recommended the chocolate cake.

And it was also very, very tasty. For whatever reason, I've been getting much pickier about my chocolate cakes, since a lot of 'em are dry, but this one wasn't, and the whipped cream and chocolate on top set off the cake perfectly.

I still wasn't thrilled with that beer selection, especially since half of the place is a bar (I sat in the dining room because I had work to do).

But as the waitress said, that prime rib was really, really good.

So they get the main thing right, even in a town whose main attractions are the Corn Palace and the George McGovern Museum.

Which is not bad. Not bad at all.

So I hopped back in my car with a full stomach and kept driving towards Pierre, surprised to see that there was still light in the big sky at 9:30.

Rating: Seriously Considered Buying the Shirt

Egg-cellent

Beth's Café
7311 Aurora Avenue North
Seattle, WA

Hours: 24 hours
Alcohol: None
Cuisine: Diner Food, Especially Omelets

Suit603 is a charter member of the Clean Plate Club.

Leftovers just aren't as good, and it's another thing to carry through security.

And it’s just a waste of money to leave it on the plate.

But I thought I might need a doggy bag when I found out that omelets at Beth’s Café were as big as they are.

You see, the *small* ones are made with six eggs and come with a huge heap of hash browns that are all you can eat (meaning, you can get more) -- the large ones are made with a full twelve eggs and are served on a metal plate that would usually hold a medium pizza.

Some groups split them three ways, though some brave souls were trying to eat ‘em alone even though, as the menu says, there's no prize for finishing the twelve egg omelet aside from pride at a job well done.

Apparently Man v. Food couldn’t finish one, though that’s not really surprising, since that guy’s kind of the Derek Jeter of the big-eating world: all fame, no performance.

I felt pretty lucky to run into the place when all I’d searched for was a 24-hour diner that wasn’t Denny’s to grab a late dinner at after a long day of meetings.

The menu’s really simple, and it seems like the main things people order are the omelets and then milkshakes.

I thought about getting eggs over easy for a moment, but at the end of the day, a Suit orders the specialty of the house, unless that involves green vegetables.

So I ordered the six egg “full house” omelet with ham, American cheese and mushrooms.

As I waited for my meal, I looked at the walls, which were absolutely covered with crayon drawings left by patrons. Evidently at year’s end, the staff votes on its ten favorite, which get put in a place of honor for the next year.

And it was a wait for food, and I found out why on the way out: this place suffers from a serious lack of grill space, given what they do.

A 12-egg omelet takes up literally half of their grill, while the hash browns take up the other half, meaning that if you get behind a few of those, you’re automatically going to have to wait 15-20 minutes for breakfast food, which is just way too long.

If I were the owner, I’d at least double the size of the grill -- their hung-over clientele probably isn’t moving all that fast anyway (the place was voted the best place in Seattle to cure a hangover), but a diner still needs to turn out food reasonably fast for the occasional late-night road warrior looking for a quick bite.

But when my food came, it was worth the wait. The chunks of ham in there are clearly from a real ham that they make themselves, and the egg’s fluffy enough that you know that they beat the eggs themselves (well, if you don’t see ‘em doing it on your way in).

But a problem with the sheer size of these omelets is that large parts of them don’t have any filling in them at all. I don’t know if there’s something they could do with sprinkling the fillings out more instead of dumping them in the middle on the grill (this would probably mess up putting the omelet together), but the reason you order an omelet is to get fillings + eggs in every bite, and this omelet didn’t deliver.

But that wasn’t such a problem that I didn’t finish the omelet -- no, this was far too tasty to let it slip, and I even finished my hash browns too: kind of hard not to have at least most of them, since they’re right under the omelet.

Somehow, I managed to get through the whole omelet and didn’t even feel that full at the end, so I decided to order a piece of their friendship bread that I saw a couple other patrons eating.

It was definitely worth it: still warm, with the cinnamon sugar on top tasting just about perfect.

By this time, the bar crowd was starting to file in, and service was much, much slower. I had to flag down a waiter to get a refill on a drink (it took a solid five minutes), and I was disappointed that they didn’t even offer me seconds on hash browns.

Not that I would have taken ‘em, but given that they're allegedly “all you can eat,” I was a little disappointed.

So I sat for a little bit and then went to pay -- again a belabored process because the people in front of me were trying to figure out split tickets, but I left happy, even if my 9 AM the next morning was half an hour closer than I really wanted it to be.

Summing it up, this is definitely a place I’m happy to have gone to, and one I’d go back to again if I’m famished and have time on my hands in Seattle.

But only under those two conditions.

Rating: Would Wear a Free Shirt

Rolling in Lobster

Linda Bean's Perfect Maine Lobster Roll
57 Main Street
Freeport, ME (several other locations)

Hours: 11 AM-6 PM
Alcohol: None
Food: Lobster, shrimp and other rolls

Lately I've noticed that as bad as travel can be, there's one big way where I have it pretty good.

As a road warrior, I've dealt with the bad in travel. I've had to deal with endless check-in lines, canceled flights and the ever-expanding list of invasions of privacy that go with trying to fly from Point A to Point B in this country (I give them three years before they begin requiring visas for state-to-state travel).

But I've never traveled with children.

This past Sunday, some friends were passing through town on their way back from a college reunion, and I was going to meet them at the airport for lunch.

I wanted to go to a better place for food, but the wife became a mother last year, and she insisted that even in Manchester, NH, where 45 minutes is more than enough, she had to be at the airport two hours in advance.

Walking up to her on the curb, I saw why.

They were checking four (FOUR!) bags, three of which were for their little tike. A fold-up crib. A stroller. And a giant bag full of every imaginable toy to appease the little tyrant's every whim.

Fortunately, they were flying Southwest, or they would also have had to pay more than the GDP of many small African nations to actually get all their daughter's stuff on the plane.

Her husband had dropped her and the baby off along with all their stuff, and had gone back to return the rental car and then loop back around to the curb, where they'd head to check in.

It looked like a nightmare, but it's their new normal, and I can't even imagine what it would have been like if something had gone wrong.

I still don't think they needed to show up two hours in advance, but I understand the caution, and they justified part of it saying that the baby needed to crawl around for a little while to wear herself down so she would sleep on the plane.

Given how much I hate screaming babies on planes, that sounds like a really good idea.

Fortunately, there was a short delay on their flight, so we went to the Airport Diner, which sure beats MHT's food court. I didn't get to take pictures, so I'm not reviewing it, but I can tell you that their mac and cheese makes an excellent projectile.

And this isn't my only experience with kids and travel lately. A friend was sick a couple weeks ago, so I was asked to pick up another friend of ours at Logan with his wife and three daughters, all six and under.

Just looking at his face when I picked them up, and listening to the "I'm trying really hard not to get mad at you" tone in his voice he took with his daughters, I could tell he was having a really hard time, no matter how good a job his wife was doing playing the buffer.

When I'm on the road alone and I have a bad travel experience, I can just blast some classic rock in the rental car, and I'm OK. My friend didn't have that choice here.

And then the daughters needed bathroom breaks.

So his wife took down their orders for the drive thru, and they went into use the restroom while my friend drove through and then met him on the other side.

At McDonalds. Ugh.

But my friend Just. Wanted. To. Get. Home. And McDonald's makes that easy, even if they forgot his chicken sandwich.

I'm not reviewing them either.

What I am reviewing is a little place I hit while driving back to the 603 from a meeting up in Maine.

One obligatory stop in Maine is Freeport, home of LL Bean and a bunch of other tourist traps.

The LL Bean Factory Store there doesn't even have locks on its doors, since they're open 24/7, and they have just about every sporting good under the sun.

I was in a little bit of a hurry, but I decided that I wanted to have a lobster roll, since I'd never had one before.

Most of the best lobster roll places are on piers on various docks Down East where the lobsters were caught earlier in the day, but I figure that since LL Bean doesn't sell bad stuff, I'd try Linda Bean's Perfect Maine Lobster Roll, which is attached to their Bike, Boat and Ski store.

Now a couple things about lobster rolls first.

They're served cold, not hot.

I'd been expecting a hot meal, and honestly, I don't like lobster meat cold.

But despite that, it was still halfway decent. Unlike a lot of other places, there was absolutely no filler in this lobster roll, and it didn't have as much dressing. It was basically just chunks of fresh lobster with some seasoning on top.

It came with potato chips, cole slaw and bread-and-butter pickles, which I don't like either (I love dill pickles).

And since I was in Maine, and one of the major legislative battles this year was over whether blueberry pie or whoopie pies would be the official state dessert (a compromise was reached, making whoopie pies the official state "treat"), I just had to get one of their mini whoopie pies, which was actually pretty good, even as those go.

The cake portion was more "cookie-like" than a classic whoopie pie, and the filling was denser, but it was still very tasty.

I sat there on the bench right next to the stand eating the lobster roll and pondering the drive home. Since I was "just trying it out," I probably should have gotten the mini for about $8 instead of the regular for $15.50.

But it was still a decent price for real food in a tourist trap.

After eating on the bench by the service window, I got in the car and started my drive back. Alone.

I mentioned those bad experiences with children by way of thanking my dad on Father's Day, and it launched a long rant from him on all the varied grievances he had with me and my sisters when we traveled as children, ending with a statement that travel with children should be avoided.

Which I agreed with heartily.

Next time I'm at O'Hare and my flight gets canceled because of thunderstorms, and I don't know if I'll make it home, I'll give thanks that I'm not having to do it with its kids.

Rating: Might Have Thought About The Shirt If It Was A Food I Liked

Lefties Can Kill Dolphins, Too

The Sandwich Depot
49 Hall Street
Concord, NH

Hours: 6 AM-2PM, closed Sunday
Alcohol: No
Food: Home-cooked breakfast and lunch food

I tend to like family-run neighborhood restaurants.

The kind of place where they know the names of at least two thirds of the customers.

The kind of place where the place closes for two weeks every summer when the owners go on vacation because that means half the staff's gone.

These places don't have the soda taps and other amenities that you get at bigger places, the kind of people who run successful local restaurants tend to care an awful lot about service with a smile.

Even if they're raging lefties.

The first time I came here, a buddy of mine had told the proprietor's wife that he was bringing his big conservative friend to the place, which meant she peppered me with questions before I even ordered food.

It wasn't unfriendly, but still, it means I only go there once every few months at best in the hopes that they mostly forget who I am, aside from a foggy recollection that I've been there before.

And that's hard, because both the proprietor and his wife have excellent memories for names and faces, a valuable asset in neighborhood restaurateurs, but they stopped greeting me by name a couple of years ago, so maybe it's safe to become a regular now and just go and talk about how the Sox did last night, or whatever else.

Aside from the conversation, the only other direct evidence that these folks are lefties is in the newspaper selection: you can get the left-wing local Concord Monitor and then the New York Times, and that's it. No conservative Union Leader in this establishment.

No sustainably grown whole grain free range organic food or any similar nonsense -- just good, solid well made unpretentious fare.

And virtually all the plates and cups are paper, which is a big no-no for the environmentalists. They do have recycling bins for the plastic bottles all the drinks come in, but that really doesn't make up for all the dolphins this place kills.

The restaurant, as the name may suggest, is in an old rail depot building from back before Interstate 93 in the back yard was built over some railroad tracks.

Needless to say, there's tons of railroad decor and other old New Englandy stuff, and in winter, they run the wood stove in the corner. The proprietor was filling it up as we walked in.

I went to this place on the morning after I'd pigged out at a Super Bowl party, and my stomach was still aching.

I'd agreed to do a 7:30 breakfast with an older couple I'm friendly with before I realized it was the morning after Super Bowl Sunday, and not surprisingly, we were the only customers in the restaurant the entire time I was there -- everyone else was squeezing in those last few minutes of sleep.

Except on Saturdays, when there's waiter service, customers order on the counter and then the kitchen staff brings the food out, and customers typically throw away their plates in a trash can by the door.

So instead of my usual sausage, mushroom and cheese omelet with cheese, salsa and sour cream-covered beans, I did a bowl of oatmeal with bananas and brown sugar.

It was tasty -- clearly real, steel-cut stuff, not the basic Quaker Oats, and it was an overflowing portion in the bowl (I couldn't even really get the milk into the bowl before I ate some of it), and there were plenty of bananas.

But on to more interesting food.

The comment one friend I brought here a few years ago made was that this place makes real food. It's all clearly homemade recently, and it's all quite tasty, even if it's not the oversized portions you're used to in a lot of other places.

The omelets at least feel like they're of the two-egg variety -- usually an omelet comes on an oblong platter, but theirs come on a round plate, but the rest of the plate is filled with beans, home fries and/or toast.

They're at the lighter, fluffier and less greasy end of the omelet spectrum, but they're still quite tasty.

Ordinarily, I'm not a huge fan of having the beans on the plate right next to the omelet or eggs, since I like food segregation, but here it's not a huge deal, since they're refried beans instead of the Boston baked variety, meaning that they're better about staying on one end of the plate.

Overall, everything's pretty solid, if a bit basic with slightly smaller portion sizes.

Unlike a lot of 6 AM-2 PM places in New Hampshire, this place promptly stops serving breakfast at eleven, and while I've heard their sandwiches are pretty good (after all, that's what the place is named for), I've never actually had one.

All in all, it's definitely a place that I'd mean to put higher in my rotation of breakfast and lunch haunts, provided I can avoid the politics.

Rating: Seriously Considered Buying the Shirt

Puritans Can Be Tender, Too

The Puritan Backroom
245 Hooksett Road
Manchester, NH

Hours: 11 AM-11:15 PM (12:15 AM Fridays and Saturdays)
Food: Basic American
Alcohol: Full Bar

Since 1917, the Puritan Backroom is a place where people in the working class city of Manchester have gone after church, on birthdays and during other special occasions.

You get a nice, big helping of tasty food for not too much more than you pay elsewhere. It's not pretentious, but it is typically well done.

And they make their own ice cream, which is really good, and which is served in really generous quantities too. During the summer, the ice cream stand out front has lines long enough that it almost makes sense to go in the dining room.

Needless to say, this is the kind of place where you go when you owe someone dinner, so I end up taking a fair number of people here.

Aside from the ice cream, they claim to be the first place anywhere to sell chicken tenders, which are the highest-selling item on their rather large menu.

But there may be trouble.

The only fourth-generation heir, Chris Pappas, is a raging left-wing activist and Chair of the local Democrats.

So at the very least, once he fully takes over, all the money socially conservative French Catholic grandmothers spend on chicken tenders for their visiting grandchildren could start going to left-wing politics.

So in time, there may be a price for eating there beyond just the chicken tenders.

Personally, I'm a big fan of the coconut tenders, which I ordered this time out.

When you eat in, they come as a "dinner," which includes a Greek salad or soup, bread, coffee or tea (so iced tea is free, but not soda) and a side.

For soups, they usually have a chowder and then something else like chicken noodle.

I went with the corn chowder.

The great thing about their corn chowder is that it has lots bacon in it.

Bacon makes everything better.

And then the tenders were great, as always. They were the same golden color they always are, and they go perfectly with their duck sauce.

They're not over-breaded like you'll get in a lot of places, and the coconut adds a nice flavor.

For a side, I'd ordered broccoli with cheese sauce. Most things at this place are pretty good, but since it's a vegetable and I was full after about 2/3 of the chicken tenders, I only ate a small nibble, with the cheese at least partially redeeming the vegetables.

With all this coming for $13.95 (the coconut tenders are an extra two dollars), it's certainly not a bad deal compared to most other places, especially considering serving sizes, but it's more expensive than you'll do most nights

The waitress asked about dessert, but as tempting as one of their killer brownie sundaes was, I decided against.

One piece of advice, to the extent that you have any control over it, is that if you want to read or have a conversation, you should try and get seated far from the bar in the dining room, with the loud flatscreen TVs.

But you usually don't have any control over it, because they're usually slammed except on snowy nights like the one on this particular visit when most people are tucked into bed early.

Well, that means less money for crazy lefties, at least.

Rating: Would Buy the Shirt If I Were Convinced It Wouldn't Cause Communism

It's Chili When It Snows

Cheers Bar and Grille
17 Depot Street
Concord, NH

Food: American
Hours: 11:30 AM-1 AM
Alcohol: full bar

One nice thing about local restaurants is that they don’t have stupid corporate offices to shut them down for insurance reasons when the weather gets bad.

They’re not as bad as the government, who had given my roommate the whole day off to watch movies, but they’re almost there.

My roommate’s movie-watching got distracting, so I ran off to the local Panera to get a little work done before day’s end.

When I got there, just after four, there was a sign on the door saying they were closing at five.

At around 4:20, I was told they were closing immediately on orders from corporate, and that I had to leave.

So after running a few quick errands, I had to figure out a place to go and get a little work done.

After a moment’s deliberation, I settled on Cheers, which isn’t nearly enough of a dive to be like the place on the TV show.

They’re local, so no corporate weasel is going to shut them down, the food’s pretty good, and they’ve got free wifi.

There’s a dining room upstairs and a tavern downstairs.

Unless you’re on a date, the tavern’s much better -- more laid-back and you don’t have to wait to be seated.

With the light business from the weather, they were only opening the downstairs for the evening, but even then, it wasn't very busy.

You can either go hang out in the bar with the happy hour crowd, or sit in one of the booths, and it’s not a bad place to either conspire with friends, or read or do work.

There’s a bunch of stuff on the menu, ranging from sandwiches to steaks to burritos to salads.

Since I was trying to keep the New Year’s resolution, I decided to order the teriyaki beef strip appetizer and a bowl of chili.

Since the last time I’d gone there, they’d shrunk the size of the order from six to four while increasing the amount of yellow rice and raising the price slightly.

Now, the yellow rice isn’t bad stuff, but it’s not the reason you order beef skewers.

As for the chili, it was basically meat with a little sauce and a few beans thrown in almost as an afterthought.

They serve it with a ton of tortilla chips, and it's almost like they view the chili as a dip.

Really, it was an opposite extreme from some Progresso "chili" I had with dinner the next day, which was basically a thin soup with a bunch of beans and a couple small chunks of meat in it.

But at the end of the day, I'd rather err on the side of too thick than too thin.

And on a cold day, the chili hit the spot.

All in all, it was a fairly satisfying meal, if a little expensive, and by the time I was done, the snow finally stopped, which was nice 'cause it meant no ice to scrape off my windshield.

Rating: Would Wear a Free Shirt

A Bite of Brooklyn

Junior's
386 Flatbush Avenue Extension
Brooklyn, NY
(also satellite locations at Foxwoods Casino, Times Square and Grand Central Station, but this is the real one)

Food: Black and Jewish food, and cheesecake
Hours: 6:30 AM-midnight Sunday-Thursday, 'til 2 AM Friday and Saturday
Alcohol: Says "Bar" and "Cocktails" outside, but no marketing of booze at tables; a friend says they specialize in "huge old-school cocktails"

When my mom was pregnant with me, my parents went to Italy, and one night in Florence, dad ate and drank too much.

They just kept bringing the food and wine.

The whole way home, my father moaned, "oh, the profits of moderation!"

Dad likes things in limited amounts.

He has a sweet tooth, but he just enjoys a little bite, or a "daddy tax," as he called it when I was a kid and he would take bits of various pies and cakes that my sisters and I would eat.

He didn't want a whole piece, so he would just take a bite out of our dessert.

Dad also never really liked New York Jewish delis -- the sandwiches are enormous and they'd try to charge you extra if you wanted to split your meal with someone.

And dad was never really into touristy stuff when I was growing up in Brooklyn.

So despite living in New York City for 18 years, I never went to the Statue of Liberty or a game at old Yankee Stadium.

Museums, yes, but not the tourist traps.

So needless to say, despite its being "as Brooklyn as it gets," I never went to Junior's for cheesecake as a kid.

Dad went once for breakfast after my mom gave birth to my youngest sister, since it was down the street from the hospital where my sisters and I were born, and he was tired and hungry and it was open.

That sister, being a bit more sentimental and touristy, dragged my more moderate sister to Junior's once "because you have to go" once, but I was out of town, and missed out.

So I was hanging out with friends, and one of them asked if I was going to do anything touristy during my time back in New York for the holidays.

I told him it wasn't likely, since I'd grown up in New York, but then my friend Dan from college called to schedule dinner.

We couldn't decide on a place, but we figured out that Junior's is about halfway between his place and my parents' place, so we decided to do dinner there.

I didn't really know what to expect, since you just see cheesecakes and pies with enormous meringues in the window.

But they've actually got a full restaurant back there with a real menu.

The best way of expressing the cuisine is to talk about the breads they run out: a clearly-Jewish poppyseed roll, and then Southern sweet cornbread.

It's half black Southern food and half New York Jewish food (place isn't kosher, though) with a little Caribbean thrown in.

So you can get catfish with corn and collard greens. . .

. . . or you can get pastrami on rye.

Or you can do Jamaican jerk chicken.

And on the wall, there's a picture of Eddie Murphy right near a picture of Barbra Streisand.

And they've got a whole wall dedicated to Ebbets Field.

The menu's extremely varied, even for a big restaurant, but it's all Brooklyn.

Dan did the matzoh ball soup followed by baked ziti.

I decided to go with that New York classic, pastrami on rye.

We both decided to wash down our meals with egg creams, that classic Brooklyn mixture of chocolate syrup (Fox's U-Bet, of course), milk and seltzer.

Before the main meal was served, our server brought out some pickles, beets, cole slaw and the above-mentioned cornbread and poppyseed rolls.

The pickles were good New York deli pickles, and the bread was great. I didn't try the beets or cole slaw because that's just too much veggie for one meal.

The matzoh balls in the soup were absolutely enormous -- at least an inch across, and they looked pretty tasty.

As for the pastrami on rye, unlike some other places I've been to, there was definitely enough meat -- it was a real Jewish deli serving.

Trying to figure out how you're going to have enough bread for all the meat on the sandwich is a good problem to have.

And they serve it with good brown mustard, though again, with that much meat, it's hard to put enough mustard on to get the proportions right.

The service was a little slow, and it showed with the pastrami not being quite as hot as I like it.

And the pastrami wasn't the most flavorful I've ever had, but it was solid.

In any event, meals aren't why anyone goes to Junior's -- it's the cheesecake.

I'm not really a cheesecake guy, and I was absolutely stuffed from my sandwich (not to mention the previous week's gluttony), so Dan and I decided to split a piece of cheesecake.

Since there's numerous different types, I asked Errol, our server, what he likes, and he said he likes the carrot cake, devil's food and strawberry ones.

Since I was in the mood for a "classic" one, we went with the strawberry one.

Like everything else here, it was huge -- four full strawberries on top of my half piece.

I'm not usually a cheesecake guy, but it was pretty darned good. The crust was tasty, and the filling was much better than what you usually get. It was creamy without tasting like I was eating a block of cream cheese.

I ate a whole three bites instead of the one or two I had room in my stomach for.

I'd definitely go back for another piece, and I'd even try their other cakes, which is saying a lot for someone who doesn't like cheesecake.

It's a little pricey, but you get a ton of food, and what do you expect at a landmark restaurant in New York?

And they didn't charge us for splitting the piece, which is better than a lot of places I know.

Rating: Seriously Considered Buying the Shirt