Baohaus (East Village)

New Baohaus location in the East Village. These baos are amazing. Also love that Chef Eddie Huang is a fellow Taiwanese-American and that he is daring to be interesting (see FAQ page. Eddie is featured in the NYMag article about Asian Americans).

KalBQ

KalBQ opening! Korean "fast casual" in the FlatIron neighborhood. Bring on the every ethnicity fast casual restaurants! Chipotle (Mexican), the upcoming Shophouse (Southeast Asian, brought to you by Chipotle), didn't-quite-make-it Spice Coast (Indian), and now KalBQ (Korean)! A Chipotle for all cuisines!

PizzArte

Always in search of the best pizza in NY, I hit up PizzArte, this new pizza place in Midtown (on 55th b/t 5th and 6th). This is not your typical New York pizza joint with large pies on display behind a clear splash screen and grimy floors along with grimy-looking people. Here, one of the hostesses was wearing a stylish black bead-and-feather-adorned fascinator. (A fascinator is a headpiece that is sometimes worn by women, commonly in Britain, in place of wearing actual hats. Note: a "headpiece" is different from a "hairpiece" - little tidbit I learned while Googling things like "small british women's hairpiece" when trying to figure out what these little "hats" were called. I kept getting pictures of creepy wigs.)

This is a decidedly upscale pizza restaurant. We entered the restaurant through a modern, clear-as-air door that I nearly walked into because it was so clean. Then we were escorted upstairs to a brightly lit room complete with crisp table linens, wine glasses, lustrous placemats and oil-on-canvas artwork available for sale. Definitely the fanciest pizza place I have ever been to.

And then there was the pizza. Oh how I love pizza. I think my husband may have clapped his hands in delight when our pizzas were placed in front of us. At every pizza place, one must order a plain or a magherita slice to effectively make comparisons of quality. So, out of principle, we ordered a lovely, albeit skimpy on the basil, Margherita pizza.

And then, as is my husband's custom, we ordered the namesake item. The PizzArte. It is beautifully (perhaps "Arte"fully) topped with zucchini blossoms, speck and burrata. Zucchini blossoms? Speck? Burrata? My husband had no idea what any of these items were but I nearly fainted at this trifecta of artisinal toppings.

As is the case with all brick oven pizzas of this style, parts of the crusts had to be sadly discarded from being overcharred. But ignoring this given sad fact of pizza life, both pizzas were absolutely delicious. I heard one of the waiters say he was from Naples and that he had therefore obviously tried a lot of different pizzas, but the pizza here was really phenomenal. My husband cast his vote for the PizzArte pizza, while I, a sucker for red sauce on my pizza, may have loved the taste of the Margherita a bit more. But in the end I called it a tie, as having the option of eating two different kinds of pizza is the reason I got married. (Okay not really. The reason I got married is so that at all meals I can eat two different things, not just pizza.) Thank you PizzArte for bringing upscale pizza in the likes of Keste and Co. to my upper Midtown food desert.