Restaurant Week, Pt. 1, or "Hard Of Herring"

NOTE: See what I did there? I'm the first person to ever make that joke. It's true; prove it's not! See, you can't. God, I'm so fucking awesome.

So it's Restaurant Week here in NYC... if you're unfamiliar with the concept, it's a magical time when all the fancy-pants restaurants in the city put out a special prix fixe menu that highlights what's good about their establishment (in theory, anyway) all for the low, low price of 35$ a pop. In plain English, this means that it's the one time of the year that poor people such as myself are allowed beyond the guarded doors and into the dining rooms of the privileged class. Sure, we usually have to eat in the men's room, or out back by the dumpster, but hey... good food is good food, even if you're having to fight off roving bands of alley cats while you eat it.

Oh but I kid high society... they'll be perfectly nice to you as long as you make it clear that you're inferior. I usually drop to my knees and bow to them like I'm an extra in Gunga Din. They like that.

Anyway, last night, Girlfriend and I headed out for the first of our three Restaurant Week excursions... as you may have gleaned from the picture up there in the corner, the name of the place that we went was called Aquavit. Okay, technically, it was the Aquavit Cafe, which is the less-expensive off-shoot of Aquavit that's located in the front of the restaurant. The "real" dining room is in the back and you have to present your credit score and financial history like in L.A. Story to get in there. I've heard rumors of it's glory, but they're just that... only rumors (I bet they eat diamonds there... diamonds made of people!!!). Regardless, we went and I can honestly say that the food was simply spectacular. Across the board, not an off morsel offended our tongues, and the waitress even complimented Girlfriend on her excellent palate after she was able to discern the presence of a subtle beet puree in the center of her chocolate cake (it was much better than it sounds). It's totally cool to be dating a gourmet; it makes me look all hoity-toity by proxy, when really I'm unable to tell the difference between foie gras and McNuggets.

But what I wanted to talk about specifically... and you might have figured this out already, seeing as how I tipped my hand in the title because I'm a terrible writer who's dumb and a stupid-headed fart-face (ha, ha just kidding; I'm slick like Rick)... is the herring.

Oh yes, herring. Oily, little fish that bring to mind old ladies in babushkas pushing hand-carts up Queens Blvd. But at Aquavit, herring is the crown jewel, provided you're comfortable with a crown jewel having gills. What I had, as was part of the prixe fix menu, was a tasting plate of herring; they have a variety of different preparations on the menu and this dish represented four of them. They were:

Pickled herring - Tangy, briny and with adorable little slivers of pickled red onions to... I don't know... counterbalance the taste nodules or something. I don't know how food works.

Herring in some sort of mustard sauce - Kind of sweet, actually. Tasty, but an alarming shade of yellow that would usually announce the presence of an infection.

Herring in an apple chutney with walnuts - Not bad, necessarily, but it did kind of taste like someone had dropped a fish into a glass of cider.

Herring in a sour cream sauce with soy-marinated salmon roe - Oh. My. God. Fish are weird, and their eggs are weird, but when you do to them what Aquavit did to these scaly, slimy bastards... man, it's like Lollapalooza, but with a mass of co-mingling flavors listening to Jane's Addiction instead of a bunch of gross hippies who think showers are the punchlines to jokes told by The Man.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: If you're in New York and you're here during Restaurant Week and you're generally open to trying things that might look kind of scary but actually aren't, then you should totally go to Aquavit and get the herring. And you should take Girlfriend, too; she'll be able to tell you why what you're eating is delicious. Which is always helpful, particularly if you're a total farmer such as myself.