Breakfast and brunch

Saturday after the wedding was another day of a ridiculous amount of eating. It started out innocently enough. We knew we were going to meet a bunch of folks for brunch at Counter around noon. But both of us are early risers and weren’t going to make it all the way ’til noon. So we went by Cafe Pedlar for coffee again and then got bagels.

Then later we headed over to Counter to meet up with a ton of people. We basically took over the back of the restaurant.

Now, I’ll give them a break on the service since we were such a huge group and arrived in waves. But again the food wasn’t worth the hype. I got the tofu scramble. It’s mostly up under the toast. I will say the potatoes were awesome. Nice crisp on them, soft inside. The tofu scramble was bland and uninteresting. How do you mess up tofu scramble? You can make it an infinite number of tasty ways. It’s inexcusable really.

Kevin thought his french toast was pretty good. But there should have been more of it.

Anyway, my overall impression from my two visits to Counter is that it isn’t worth the hype.

After brunch, we grabbed the rented evening clothes and headed downtown to return them. I’m glad I went with Kevin because I was able to see Trinity Church Cemetery.

Oh, we’re not done eating yet. Coming up, pizza and Veggie Conquest!

Breakfast at Atlas Cafe

Wednesday morning, we looked at the internets at Cafe Pedlar. Then we walked over to Atlas Cafe for breakfast. I had the fake BLT on an everything bagel. The micro greens were a nice touch. The fake bacon reminded me of the peppered Tofurky slices. No matter, it was tasty.

Kevin had the strawberry banana crepe. Really good.

Hey, how ’bout a chocolate doughnut covered with sprinkles? Don’t mind if I do! Vegan Treats of course. Atlas has a bakery case stuffed with Vegan Treats.

And here’s the outside. One thing about New York is it’s amazing how much restaurants get done in small spaces.

After this, we stashed the computers back at the apartment and headed towards Chinatown. We passed a pickle shop. Saw some crazy accident or something that seriously fucked up traffic and had roads blocked off.

Then we just headed back on Bowery towards lunch. Lunch, I will cover in another post.

Boston Vegetarian Food Festival

It’s hard to believe that this time last week I was frantically putting out baked goods samples for a packed room full of people shuffling by our table. Aside from a couple of disasters like having a whole box of whoopie pies arrive destroyed and running out of food way too early, I think it went fairly well. Everything seemed to be well received. The cinnamon rolls & Teese bread were the first to go. Leigh has a great post about our adventures, so I’ll be lazy and point you over there. Kevin and I shared a room with Leigh & Ken and Josh Hooten. Normally I’d say I’m too old for those kinds of sleeping arrangements, but it worked out just fine. 

What I will do is give a run down of what I ate in Boston. Which wasn’t all that much with all the travel and stress. But we still managed a couple of restaurant visits.

Friday night we went to T.J. Scallywaggle’s. It’s a vegan pizza place. It has limited seating and probably does most business as take out. I had a chicken parmesan sub.

Kevin ordered the cheeseburger pizza.

We were starving, so any food was good food. I traded half my sub for a couple of pieces of Kevin’s pizza. I think my biggest complaint would be that the sauce wasn’t very flavorful. I like my pizza sauce to be a little bit spicy. More complex. I wish I could remember what the crust was like because that’s also a huge part of what makes a pizza good. But I was totally in scarf mode.

At the festival, after we ran out of stuff to sell and give away, Kevin ran off and got us a falafel wrap and some Teese nachos from the Chicago Soy Dairy guys. The falafel was pretty good, but no Ali Baba’s. The new Teese nacho sauce is pretty amazing. It seems to melt to the perfect texture. I think it wants some spicing up though. Still it gives you a great base to season the way you like.

Saturday night we all dragged our exhausted selves to My Thai for vegan Thai food goodness. We’d been drooling over a menu all day and were really excited at the concept of all those yummy Thai options. We we got there, Eric Prescott was working. We’d met him earlier at the show, and he ended up helping our table. It was kind of surreal. I think he probably doesn’t sleep with all that he has going on. We were also joined by Sarah Kramer and Jae Steele. We’d been hanging out with them a bit here and there throughout the weekend. Both of them are totally sweet.

We started with stuffed fried wontons. Yummy!

And then, my entree arrived, Mee Krob. It was HUGE. To be fair, about a third of the plate was greens. Still, I powered my way through most of it. There were so many wonderful flavors on my plate. The lemongrass beef had many layers of complexity. The rice paper stack I got was stuck together, so I gave up pretty quickly on making little rolls. Still, I enjoyed stacking my fork with various combinations of things from my plate so each bite was a little different.

We were disappointed that we wouldn’t be able to get a proper brunch because our flight left fairly early. We did get bagels with tofu spread. Of course, I can’t remember the name. I had the veggie tofu spread and thought it was pretty tasty.