Cafe D'Alsace

Restaurant Week is perhaps the only time of year when college students can have a gourmet meal for a reasonable - or semi reasonable - price. (Okay, so I've persuaded myself it's reasonable, although to be honest $35.00 for dinner... actually, I'm not gonna go there. It's reasonable.)

Last night ten of my friends and I went to Cafe D'Alsace on the Upper East Side for a meal that not only broke up the monotony of cafeteria food but took my taste buds to places they had never before ventured.

For an appetizer I had a poached egg with artichoke fricassee and melted Morbier cheese. I was a little hesitant at first, having never had "artichoke fricassee" (I'm not gonna lie...I didn't quite know what fricassee meant) or morbier cheese. However, it was truly a lovely concoction. The cheese melted onto the poached egg and the fresh, flavorful artichoke perfectly complemented the dish.

Okay, time for a confession... I'm not normally a meat eater. That is, I eat chicken and fish, but rarely wander into the red meat territory. I know, I know, how can one be a food writer and not eat red meat?! I decided it was high time to change this, and venture out of my culinary comfort zone. "If I'm going to be a food writer I need to eat everything," I told myself, and bravely ordered the steak frites.

It was a bit intimidating to have a huge piece of red meat plunked in front of me as if was something tame as chicken noodle soup, but I had to admit it was very, very good. I have had steaks before and this was one of the best I've ever tried. The frites were reminiscent of those I had in Paris. I'm a bit of a french fry snob but these met my high criteria - not too greasy, not too thin. Thick enough to really taste the potato and thin enough to be light, crunchy, and delicate in a melt-in-your-mouth kind of way. These were the kind of fries that people around you just can't help but steal from your plate. (Heck, I don't blame them, I would have done the same if I'd seen these on someone else's plate.)

Dessert truly made the meal. I had the warm, flourless chocolate gateau with raspberry coulis and pistachio ice cream. It was very similar to a chocolate souffle; when poked with a fork, the chocolate oozed out. Halfway through eating the gateau, the chocolate inevitably mixed with the raspberry coulis, and the pistachio ice cream melted slightly into the gateau - a happy occurrence indeed! Usually the first bite of dessert is the best, but in this case the dish just got better and better as the flavors combined forces.

The waitstaff were extremely friendly towards us. I have too often been treated disrespectfully when out to eat with friends - perhaps the waiters assume that because we are college kids we won't tip well. But at Cafe D'Alsace we were all treated with the utmost respect and kindness.

We all left smiling at the end of the meal, tummies full and content, faces glowing with the triumph of having managed to eat a delicious meal outside the brutal cafeteria world we live in. Perhaps $35.00 isn't reasonable for a college kid, but it was still worth every penny!

A Freshly-Baked Start to the Semester

Every weekend, my friends and I gallivant through New York City on a food adventure. Sometimes we go to places recommended to us by friends or family. Other times we go to venues written about online or in the New York Times. Most of the time, we take our advice from the pro's and go to places featured on the Food Network. (If a restaurant, cafe, or bakery has been on a Bobby Flay Throwdown, and is in N.Y.C., you can pretty much guarantee it's on my list of places to go.)

After a long stressful first week back at Barnard, I was craving something sweet to balance out the sourness of the endless amount of pages I had to read that weekend. (Why oh why did I sign up for both art history AND European history?)

It didn't take much to persuade my friends to go to Levain Bakery, on West 74th Street, not far from where we live. It's interesting how the word "cookie" can light up a college student's face.

The moment we walked into the small brightly lit bakery we were inundated - BLASTED - ENGULFED by the heavenly smell of gourmet cookies being baked. It was as if a chocolate and sugar tidal wave had taken over our noses, and for that matter, all our senses. "Why, oh why can't our school cafeteria smell like this!?" one of my friends asked.

Well, it's a good thing our cafeteria does not bake cookies like Levain's does, because if they did, students would gain much more than just the freshman fifteen. (The freshman fifty would be more like it.)

Decisions, decisions....what would it be? (There didn't seem to be a wrong choice, but still...) I finally decided to buy the Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip cookie. My friend Elana bought the Chocolate Chip Walnut, and we split them.

The Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip cookie was still warm when I bit into it. Cue, eyes widening. Sighs of chocolate peanut butter contentment. The peanut butter chips had melted into the dark chocolate cookie dough. The cookie was baked perfectly. It was crispy yet gooey, sweet, yet not overpoweringly sugary, perhaps because it was dark rather than milk chocolate. To make a big cookie into a short story, I had found paradise in this wonderful mixture of flour, sugar, and eggs. The Chocolate Chip Walnut cookie was equally good. The chocolate chip to walnut ratio was utopian. It was a rich and shamelessly decadent dessert - the kind of chocolate chip cookie that puts other chocolate chip cookies to shame. I do hope my chocolate chip cookie experience has not peaked at age 19.

You don't need to take college calculus to know that friends + out-of-this-world-delicious-cookies = the perfect start of the semester.