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Originally Posted by Analyst
We are going to Le Bernardin for dinner on Friday night - reports are that it is formal, but not stuffy. Apparently, if you still don't like fish after going here, then you *really* don't like fish! TR should follow, comparing it to my recollection of L20 (excellent Chicago seafood restaurant) in the spring.
Cliff's notes of Le Bernardin: L20 in Chicago is a truly great seafood restaurant, one of the few seafood places in America that gets mentioned in the same breath as Le Bernardin. We truly enjoyed our meal there in February. However, both my daughter and I agreed that Le Bernardin is vastly superior to L20 in *every* respect as far as the food itself goes, and in 2+2 parlance, it's not even close. We had tasting menus at both restaurants, and of the dozen+ dishes at L20, perhaps 2 or 3 at the most would have not been out of place at Le Bernardin, and they would have been at the bottom of the ranking. Looking at it the other way, the worst (a relative term only) dish we had at Le Bernardin would have been one of the stars - maybe *the* star - at L20. Again, L20 is a great restaurant, there is just that wide of a gulf between it and Le Bernardin.
Service was top-notch at both (and no, we did not find Le Bernardin to be stuffy in the least) so is the one area where L20 competed evenly.
I can nit-pick just a bit - for example, the meat from the end of the lobster claw doesn't inherently have great texture, and while it looked beautiful on the plate probably should have been left off. The bread was nothing special at all. Other than that, though . . .
Le Bernardin was also well beyond our recent - and truly wonderful - dinner at Manresa. Manresa deserves its 2 stars, but just simply didn't compare with Le Bernardin, which equally deserves its 3 star ranking.
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Originally Posted by Analyst
I haven't been to any NYC pizza places but have been researching it and the king of NYC pizza seems to be Di Fara in Brooklyn. We probably will be going to Keste; it's more Naples-style than traditional NY, but it looks very good and the location is great for us.
Keste was wonderful and I'll be back again. I had the Marinara pizza, outstanding sauce and delicious crust - nowhere for either of these components to hide, nor did they need to. The very center of the pie got slightly soggy, but that's not a big deal. There was a fair amount of Italian being spoken between the waiters and several customers, so it gets the authenticity vote as well.