A Midsummer Night's Dream - Part I

Oops. It's been a while since I last updated, but good news -- I'm back in the City at a most opportune moment, RESTAURANT WEEK Summer 2007 *rubs stomach in content*. First stop this time round is ...

MEGU (62 Thomas St.)

Located in trendy Tribeca (and another location in midtown) this is one of the nicest Japanese restaurants I have ever been to. Lavish but not too ostentatious, modern but not too minimalistic. Megu really takes care to serve exquisite food. According to NYmag, the servers took three-months learning the menu before the opening. So, let me carefully breakdown my pleasurable Megu-experience:

Decor: The furnishings were both impressive and comfortable. Japanese motifs of the flag, totems of zen and spirituality speckled throughout. The spacious ceiling in the dining room downstairs is offset by a gi-normous bell in the middle of the room under which a Buddha sculpture sits, made of ice. (I did not notice this at first but as the night went on the face became more and more misshapen, and that whole dripping thing became hard to miss - haha). Sources have revealed (in other words, my entertaining dinner friends who gathered this from a waiter on their previous trip) that the sculpture is replaced everyday (cuz who knew, but ice melts) for oh, you know, a mere 3 grand a night? Well, that is the word on the street anyway.

Service: On the whole our waiter was helpful and saved us from ordering something we thought was a variety of shrimp but turned out to be a spicy pepper of some sort. Althoooough, when we first arrived at the restaurant and realized that we needed to accommodate one extra person our hostess rolled her eyes exasperatedly. Sure, it was our fault, but the eye-rolling? Really?

Food:
Appetizer - I chose the 'red snapper salad'. Delicious! The fish was so fresh and the numerous ingredients in the dressing meshed so perfectly; there was some savory, some tang, sesame warmness, and other goodness - a perfect balance of everything. Too bad it only lasted about 3 bites.

Entrée - I ordered the 'kobe steak' and this was done perfectly and so sooo tender. (although, I wonder if they were supposed to ask to what degree I would have liked to have it done?). Another thing, funny how they call it steak when it was more like 6 carefully sliced pieces that would add up to a meagre quarter portion of your normal steakhouse meal - but hey, it's kobe, I get it. Sadly, the little fried seafood dumpling (that was located a mile away from the beef on that expansive, almost empty plate) was not good, nor did it complement the beef.

Jes (daring to be different from the rest of us) ordered the lamb chops. This was yummy too. They sure know how to do their meats here.

Dessert - This was the best part for me, hands down. This 'cake' was made from a thousand layers of crepes (ok, I lie, but if you were to piece them together they would probably make a whole crepe) and the lightest green tea cream/mousse inbetween each layer. Immaculate dish, so simple, so satisfying and not heavy at all - a little piece of heaven, sigh.

So far, a great start to a promising fortnight. And what does the forecast look like?

- Indochine

- Butter (yes, again)

- Ono

- Bolo

Cheers mates!