Babbo

Babbo
110 Waverly Place
New York, NY 10011

Had dinner at Babbo with a small group of friends yesterday evening. The hype for this restaurant may have died down a bit, but making reservations certainly didn't seem to be the case. To get reservations, you have to call one month in advance to the day at exactly 10am. Call any later and the phone line will be busy and you will get stuck with a very early or late time slot.

We arrived at 5:45pm for our Sunday evening reservation and the place was already filling up quickly. Babbo is a fairly fancy restaurant and their dress code is smart dressy. For the ladies, nice jeans are ok. Definitely better to dress up than look and feel underdressed. For gentlemen, a jacket and tie are not required though it's not unusual. Coats can not be hung on the backs of chairs so coat check may sometimes be required. Lucky for me, I sat on a bench against the wall so I just sat with my coat tucked behind me.

My friends and I had great expectations for the food. After all this is Mario Batali's place.

We were given a free starter - chickpeas with olives on toasted bread.

Then we had the grilled octopus and appetizer size goose liver ravioli.

The grilled octopus was just ok. The goose liver ravioli was excellent and more than made up for the mediocre octo.

For our main course, we had the following:

Lobster spaghettini - one pound lobster does not mean one pound of lobster meat. The tomato sauce on the pasta was done perfectly! Though nothing spectacular either.

Duck - super dry! Don't recommend this dish.

Rabbit - this was an interesting dish, but nothing to write home about either.

Beef cheek ravioli - this was delicious! The pasta was very well made and filled with flavor. Highly recommend! This dish is popular for a reason.

We were too full for dessert and nothing really stood out on the menu. Luckily we didn't order dessert because we were served cookies. A bit of sugar was just perfect to end the meal.

Overall, it was a delicious meal but it still fell a bit short of my expectations from a top-chef owned restaurant. Service was excellent and staff was very courteous and professional. I still recommend coming to Babbo, but stick with the pasta and go elsewhere for dessert.

Five Points Restaurant

Address:
31 Great Jones Street
New York, NY 10012

Website: www.fivepointsrestaurant.com

I would have posted pictures, except it was kind of dark in the restaurant so the macro pics on my phonecam came out blurry. I would say the dishes tasted better than they look.

Pros: Food, Service, Decor, Ambiance
Cons: Limited menu, 20% auto-added tip
Make Reservations?: Yes

Ordered:
Drinks: Blood orange fresca, passion fruit fresca
Starter - Pork and Fennel Sausage
Entree - Swordfish, Flap Steak
Dessert - Chocolate Pecan Brownie Sundae (espresso ice cream)

Food was good, but I wouldn't say great. Definitely worth a try, especially with the 30% off from Blackboard Eats. I don't think I would have ever stepped foot into this place if it weren't for Blackboard.

The bill came out to roughly $73 for 2 people. Make reservations because the restaurant was filled up by 6pm. We had reservations for 6pm on a Saturday night, but showed up at 5:30pm exactly when they start dinner. Service is really good. The waitress actually asked us if we were members of Blackboard before we could even tell her. Our cups were always filled, and dirty plates always taken away promptly.

The drinks were very nice and refreshing. They use fresh juice supposedly and the drinks were $5 each. I really wish the cups were bigger.

The appetizer was good. It was cooked with lima beans, very tender and flavorful. Never had beans like that before. Swordfish was surprisingly not dry, but that's probably because of all the butter they used. The fish sat on a bed of collard greens, red onions, tomatoes and potatoes (with skin), some kind of garlic sauce. I ordered the steak medium, and it actually arrived medium. It wasn't a chunk of steak, rather they filleted it so I didn't have to do much cutting. Some may not like that, but I was fine. On top of the steak was a green sauce, which I wasn't a big fan of. It had a fragrance to it. On the side was watercress salad and beer-battered onion rings. I don't know how people can eat watercress raw. It's so bitter. The dressing was nice, but not enough to mask the nasty watercress. I finished all the onion rings. It was delicious! I didn't even need ketchup for it.

Dessert was 3 nice scoops of espresso ice cream, and chunks of chocolate pecan brownie with chocolate fudge and a dollop of whip cream. I could have used more brownie chunks. They were mmm-mmm good.

The evening was wonderful until we got the bill and saw that they automatically calculated a 20% tip. That was kind of a turn-off. I know I'm supposed to add the tip to the pre-discount amount. A suggested tip would have been better than automatically tacking it on. Anyhow, it's not the end of the world, and the 30% discount covers the tip. So I won't dwell on this.