Benjamin’s Steak House invited me to dine at their restaurant last night to sample their upcoming Mother’s day menu. I was super excited – not just because I love steak, but because I haven’t eaten it in 21 days. I finished my final weigh in from the fight diet with a good weigh in (still not my ideal weight, but we’re getting there!) Ken and I accepted the invitation and I was super excited the entire day because we were not only getting a free meal, but it was my first splurge meal after 21 days of monitoring everything I ate.
Benjamin’s Steak House is located in midtown inside the Dylan Hotel on 41st between Madison and Park (down the street from my old office on 42nd and Madison):
I’ve never walked by that area (I usually went west for lunch) but it must be a very popular spot for business lunches and dinners because the restaurant was packed when we arrived for our dinner reservation. The restaurant was opened by Peter Luger alumni and has a much more intimate and warm interior than Luger’s (and many other steakhouses I’ve visited). The atmosphere felt similar to Del Frisco’s and Del Posto; lively but very spacious. We sat by the fireplace but the space is pretty open (and there’s a second floor with more seating) so you can get a good view of the restaurant at almost any seat. We started off with a bread basket:
Good variety (especially compared to some steak houses that only do one type of bread) – Ken was a big fan of the sesame breadstick. My one pet peeve is when butter is served too cold; I mean, how is it supposed to be spread on the bread?
I started off with half a dozen oysters on the half shell and two large slices of Canadian bacon:
And Ken had the lobster bisque:
While I was on the fight diet, I did eat oysters sparingly and ate ham every morning in my daily omelet, but both the oysters and the Canadian bacon were probably the best things I’ve eaten in the past 21 days. The bacon was smoky, really thick, and had a wonderfully juicy flavor. It was slightly salty and Ken thought it was a little too fatty, but I happily ate my thick slice of fatty bacon. Ken’s lobster bisque was so creamy; I haven’t had cream in quite a while so it tasted extra decadent to me. It also had lots of large lobster chunks that made the bisque a really wonderful appetizer for our meal.
For our main course, we ordered the steak for two:
The asparagus:
And the mushrooms:
The steak for two was gigantic, cooked perfectly, and served with steak sauce (butter and steak juice). Each bite of steak had a beautiful crust that is very difficult to replicate at home and both cuts of the porterhouse were absolutely delicious. My plate:
The vegetables were also delicious – the mushrooms and asparagus were both flavored with lots of butter and sauteed al dente. We finished the asparagus spears easily but had problems finishing the mushrooms because the servings were so large. Ken and I both ate a ton of steak but barely made a dent in the steak for two (it could feed three large men, easily).
We had to order dessert because I haven’t really eaten dessert in such a long time, so we ordered the cheesecake and the pecan pie:
Ken wanted the Bourbon pecan pie – he loves pecan pie and the server recommended it as our second dessert:
I’ve actually never had pecan pie before (it surprisingly doesn’t really appeal to me) – even though Ken was stuffed from the steak, lobster bisque, and bacon, he ate the majority of the pecan pie before I barely made a dent in my cheesecake. When it was time to switch (because we always switch after we’ve eaten half of our entrees), Ken built this super cute barricade with all of our drink glasses because he didn’t want to share:
I carefully maneuvered the glasses, picked up the pecan pie and took both desserts to my side and realized why Ken didn’t want to share; the pecan pie was absolutely AMAZING. Since I haven’t eaten pecan pie before I’m not exactly sure if it’s the best pie in the city, but Ken ate it with a huge smile on his face and he’s had his fair share of pecan pie, so I’m guessing it’s pretty damn good. The crust was super flaky, the pecans had a great crisp and nutty flavor, and the corn syrup was actually not that sweet. I’ve always been a little turned off by pecan pie because the corn syrup looks a little too sweet and unappetizing, but it was actually absolutely amazing (no wonder Ken didn’t want to share!)
Benjamin’s Steak House is having a great Mother’s day brunch on Sunday featuring a special three-course menu (appetizer options: Caesar salad, lobster bisque, or mozzarella and tomatoes, main course: Chilean sea bass, 20 ounce ribeye, or filet mignon, vegetables, and dessert) for $60! You should definitely make reservations – it’s a wonderful place to bring your mom to celebrate Mother’s day and you will definitely leave feeling very satisfied.
I had to review a personal trainer for work on Saturday morning and asked Ken to help (I really didn’t want to suffer by myself!) The trainer really pushed us during our workout and we were super satisfied after working out for over an hour (cardio and weights) but we were also starving. I wanted to eat something healthy but also could barely move so we settled on Korean barbeque – walking distance from the gym and protein right after working out muscles that we’d never worked with before.
I never truly experienced Korean food until my senior year of college, when my roommate’s dad sent down some kimchi jigae, a simple and satisfying pork and kimchi soup that we paired with rice. Angie also introduced me to spam (who knew it was so delicious?!) but that’s for another day. I still love kimchi jigae and almost always order it when I eat Korean food:
We ordered the seafood version with shrimp, mussels, clams, and lots of pillowy tofu. The soup is very easy to make – kimchi, broth, and whatever else you’d like to add (common additions are tofu, pork, seafood, or vegetables). Another reason I love Korean food – ban chan, or the small dishes of appetizers they bring before the entrees are ready:
We ended up going with two orders of galbi (some restaurants require you to order at least two if you want to cook at the table…I’m not exactly sure why we wanted to cook at the table because our clothes always end up smelling bad!):
And the toppings and bean paste:
The meat was really good – very high quality flavored with their marinade (which includes Korean pears!) It hit the spot but the bill ended up being super high – over $80 for lunch! Quite the unexpected treat (but well deserved considering we put up with the torture of a personal trainer!) New Wonjo is one of my favorites along 32nd for Korean food – and they’re open 24/7 so you can go whenever you’re craving galbi!
These photos are actually from our visit to Chicago back in January, but we actually had Walker Bros. again on my last visit so I thought I’d share these photos! Ken, his sister, Flo, and I went to Walker Bros. before we headed back to the city to catch our flight at Midway. Ken grew up eating weekend breakfasts at Walker Bros. and really raved about their chocolate chippies (I thought he referred to them as chocolate chippies because that’s how he ordered it when he was a kid, but when I looked at the menu, their chocolate chip pancakes are called ‘chocolate chippies’). We went to one of their newer locations (closer to Flo’s house):
The restaurant was semi-full when we arrived around 10am on a Monday morning (mostly older people drinking coffee and reading papers and young kids that weren’t in school). Ken and his family still go to Walker Bros. and knew exactly what to order – we started with bacon, hash browns, and pancakes:
The Santa Fe omelette with salsa:
And of course, the chocolate chippies:
And the three of us before eating almost everything:
The Santa Fe omelet was really good – not only was it the largest omelet I’ve ever seen in a restaurant, it was also filled with fresh ingredients like tomatoes, onions and cilantro. It’s Ken’s favorite omelet but it was so good I couldn’t help but have seconds (and then thirds). The pancakes are also really fluffy and not overly sweet (they use semi-sweet chocolate chips to make it extra delicious).
When Ken and I visited Chicago a few weeks ago, his dad picked up Walker Bros for us and ordered the Greek omelet – feta, olives, spinach, tomatoes, and onions – equally (if not more) delicious. Ken isn’t a huge fan of olives or feta so he didn’t have any, but he missed out because it was a seriously delicious omelet. Their breakfasts supposedly have long waits if you get there during prime times and it definitely makes sense – Walker Bros. has really amazing breakfasts!
After spending Saturday night in Chicago, Ken and I met up with my friend Josh for brunch. Josh knows a lot of great places in the city (he introduced me to The Bongo Room a couple of years ago, which was one of the better brunches I’ve had in Chicago) and suggested we go to Longman & Eagle. We met up around noon and put our names down – the wait was pretty long for outdoor seating so we decided to eat inside, which reminded me of a rundown dive bar.
We started off with a little piece of bread from the kitchen – the server told us it was date nut bread:
It was really moist and more like pound cake than bread with lots of nutmeg. I wasn’t sure what kind of food the restaurant had, but the vibe was very similar to The Spotted Pig’s.
The brunch menu looked really good, especially the three dishes that we ordered. After lunch, I read that the restaurant is really good for dinner but their brunch is kind of overrated (completely agree about their brunch being overrated, especially for a Michelin-starred restaurant).
Josh ordered the chicken and waffles:
I didn’t try the waffle but the fried chicken was possibly the most bland fried chicken I’ve ever tasted. Josh said he preferred Popeyes chicken to Longman & Eagle’s and while we thought it was funny, I agreed. There wasn’t even SALT or PEPPER on the chicken! Completely not worth ordering.
Ken ordered the sausage and biscuits with gravy:
I’ve never really been a fan of white gravy; the consistency and look just doesn’t look appealing to me (although I have had a couple of Aunt Sonya’s plates that came with eggs, hash browns, bacon, sausage and biscuits doused with white gravy without a single complaint back in Champaign). The food was just way too heavy for me and the saltiness of the gravy and biscuits made me feel a little dizzy (or maybe that was me having a mini heart attack from the food).
I ordered the wild boar sloppy Joe with a side of beef fat fries:
The wild boar sloppy Joe actually tasted exactly like the pasta sauce my mom makes with pork, tomatoes and bean paste. The fries were a bit too much for me, especially since I had just eaten some of Ken’s sausage and gravy biscuits that were already stopping my heart.
The prices at Longman & Eagle were extremely reasonable and the service was okay – I’d like to see what kind of food they have for dinner because their brunch menu was too heavy but their dinner would probably hit the spot on a cold winter night.
Ken and I went to visit his family in Chicago a couple of weeks ago but also spent some time in the city to meet up with our friends. On Saturday night of our visit, we drove into the city and met up with his friends at Sunda, a popular pan-Asian restaurant in the city:
I made reservations beforehand that were super early (around 6:30 on a Saturday night). Luckily, Ken’s brother-in-law told me to tweet at the owner of Sunda because he could probably help accommodate our party with a later recommendation. Paul was right because the owner put me in touch with the hostess at Sunda and they moved our reservation to a more reasonable time – 7:30pm. We arrived, left the car with valet, and sat down in the back room, away from the hustle-bustle of the main room and bar. We started off with some pickled vegetables:
Flavorless, but free so we didn’t have to eat them.
I ordered for the table because we were a party of six – everyone was an adventurous eater so we weren’t limited in our choices. For an appetizer, I ordered the tempura rock shrimp:
Everyone raves about this dish – it’s shrimp that is lightly battered with panko crumbs, fried, and served with a sweet honey kewpie mayonnaise and toasted walnuts. The dish is okay, but definitely not worth raving about and it was way too sweet at Sunda.
For our second appetizer, I ordered pork buns and duck buns:
Duck:
The buns were overpowering – very little meat (in fact, Ken accidentally ate all of the pork in the pork bun we were sharing so I got left with just the bun and the sauce). The bun had too much green onion flavor and lacked originality, especially since those buns are easily available in Chinatown. The duck meat was slightly on the tough and overcooked side but the duck skin was way too chewy (no separation between the duck meat, fat, and skin).
For a drink, I ordered the blushing geisha:
The waitress promised it wasn’t overly sweet but the drink was too sugary for me to finish – it almost tasted as sweet as a wine cooler!
Everyone’s really raved about the next dish – lobster rolls topped with wagyu beef and truffle oil:
The dish was creative but the flavor of the truffle oil added one too many flavors and masked the naturally sweet lobster. I liked the wagyu beef and the lobster (although I always prefer larger chunks of lobster to the small shreds that were in the roll) but overall, it was a pretty good dish.
One of my favorite dishes of the night was the hand cut tuna with jalapeño on top of pan fried sushi rice:
And the wagyu beef on top of pan fried sushi rice as well:
The sushi rice had a very nice consistency (almost like dol sot bibimbap) and both the tuna and beef tasted very fresh. The rest of the table didn’t seem crazy about it, but I liked the different textures of the rice with the sushi – something I’ve never had with tuna tartare.
I ordered one more roll (my least favorite of the night because there were too many crunchy panko crumbs) – the number nine:
The roll was gigantic but there were too many flavors and each bite was too large to put in your mouth in one bite (part of the fun of eating sushi!)
For entrees, I ordered the Adobo brasied pork belly:
The pork belly was very tender, broke apart with a fork, and was actually very flavorful, although a tad on the sweet side. It tasted like the two main flavors were brown sugar and soy sauce (it might have been a little too much brown sugar)
The miso bronzed black cod:
Miso glazed black cod is very difficult to mess up (which is why so many pan-Asian restaurants have it as their fish go-to) – it was enjoyable and very buttery.
Our last entree was the shaking beef – beef with a lime dipping sauce:
The beef was a tad overcooked, but overall very good. The lime dipping sauce was a bit on the plain side and even when I doused the beef in the sauce, I got very little lime flavor.
For dessert, we decided to order a couple things so everyone could share – mochi with various dipping sauces:
Mini cookies:
I thought these would have been a nice final touch (like mignardises) but they were a little expensive and kind of strange for an Asian restaurant – the cookies were all very sweet (although the chocolate chocolate chip cookie was quite good).
The final dessert, the ridiculous, was a carrot cake bomb-like dessert with lots of vanilla ice cream:
Honestly, there wasn’t much carrot cake but there was more than enough vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce:
Probably the most decadent dessert I’ve ever had at an Asian-style restaurant, I would have preferred something a bit lighter to go with after-dinner tea.
I don’t think I’d return to Sunda; the prices were quite high and there must be better food in Chicago for less with a similar atmosphere. It was a really fun dinner (especially since we talked about the next wedding we’re attending…in less than a month!) but I think we could’ve recreated the atmosphere somewhere else.
After dinner, we headed to Paris Club around the corner, which was equally crowded (we only ordered drinks at Paris Club, not dinner) but I’ve heard that Paris Club’s food is slightly better than Sunda’s. I’ll have to return to Chicago to find out for myself!
