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Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Madison Square Garden Eats

Last Friday my awesome friend Jingo and I went to this little area of pop up restaurants and eateries called Madison Square Park Eats. This little event takes place for a whole month and unfortunately we were only able to make it for the last day. The experience made me wish I had known about this sooner!

What make this event so great is that many of these little pop up shops have their main restaurants in Brooklyn or the other boroughs of NYC. It's definitely made me more incline to travel to those places despite the usually unpredictable and horribly slow weekend mass transit complications (MTA is fixing various subway platforms and etc so check out the MTA site before you travel around by subway especially on the weekends).

The crowd was really bumping and mingling. The area is the rather tiny triangular piece of side walk next to the park and beloved home of Shake Shack (another favorite place... cheese fries are awesome!) They had several chairs and tables at the center and an atm machine to boot.
We also got there towards the early evening and I was able to snag the last cookie from Momofuku. Cornflakes and marshmallows? Yes I was a tad skeptical and the cookie looked a bit on the greasy side. But it was surprisingly delicious. The cornflakes added this crunch to the soft cookie and when you ripped the cookie apart you can see strands of marshmallows melted inside. I really wanted to try the other desserts there but alas it was completely sold out.

My friend and I basically ravaged the cookie because we were waiting for our orders from Calexico. My friend Jingo had showed me another food blog of last years and I got hooked onto the picture of the piping hot carne asada quesadilla with melty cheese and chunks of meat. The wait for it was about an hour but I don't blame them. There was a line for this place and those guys were working as hard as they can. There was also the usually order of one person ordering like 10 tacos. It was such a tease because the orders with our names hung on top so we could see how many orders were in front of ours.
The next thing that really intrigued me was from Roberta's Pizza. They brought their own pizza firing oven above. The pizzas were small and made and fired fresh. They smelled heavenly. They had this one I think that involved a touch of honey and that was very intriguing. Alas my heart was already set.
It may not look impressive from the picture but I assure you it is gooooooood. The outside was soft and slightly crisp. It was the meat and the cheese that really surprised me. The beef was actually infused with a lot of different herbs and spices. I normally don't eat spicy food I like the kick the meat had. Coupled with the gooey cheese it was heaven. That cost about 6 dollars and they don't go skimpy on the meat!
My friend got the pork burrito and she thought it was pretty good which meant it was awesome because she's such a picky eater hehe.

With the food, people and the beautiful setting sun on Madison Avenue it was definitely a great even to go to. Don't worry you may have missed this one but every week at the Brooklyn Flea and Hester Street Fair are some of the same food vendors along some new favorites.So definitely go out and try something new!

Until next time...
happy eating!