Morimoto (NYC)

88 10th Ave New York, NY 10024

Here for NYC restaurant week!

The bento boxes look good, but for about the same price (ok, a little more, maybe a lot more), I’ve decided to go off menu here at Iron Chef Morimoto’s fine restaurant in Chelsea… Let’s see, I started off with a half dozen oysters on the half shell ($18), large and tasty, fresh and creamy. What can I say, I love oysters and Morimoto prepares them 3 ways. My only complaint was the oysters were tremendous in size, but I’m a big eater, so I kept that complaint to myself, they were delicious otherwise. The three sauces were also very interesting, nice to see a variation to tease the palette before the main course.

For the entrée, I had the seared foie gras with avocado, unagi (grilled freshwater eel)and rice. How can anyone go wrong with foie gras (I haven’t seen it happen yet), since the recent ban in California on foie gras, it was a like taboo but oh so good, like butter melting in your mouth from the first to the last bite. I was impressed with the dish although again, being an average guy of perhaps slightly above average palette, I ate the foie gras first all on its own followed by the avocado and unagi with the rice. What a nice trio, the avocado I take it was for color and to separate the components of the dish, but overall the best dish I’ve had at restaurant week thus far. Usually with the unagi sauce I find dishes with unagi quite thick in texture and sweet, but this dish presented not only beautifully, but tasted wonderful as well (even if I did split the dish up). I guess you cannot expect less from an Iron Chef.

For dessert, my wife spooted the red bean doughnuts and vanilla ice cream with poached peaches, the ice cream looked freshly churned. Thinking about presentation, it looked just like something you’d see on the judges table on Iron Chef! After looking at the desert menu, the red bean doughnuts seemed to be the obvious choice since we've never tried it before. The texture and flavors we exceptional once again throughout the dish not too sweet but just right.

FINAL NOTE: Thus far the favorite of restaurant week. In the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger… “I’ll be back.”