📍Sweetbriar🥘 The Best of NYC Restaurant Week Series 2023 🌆

🍃 Vibes and Ambiance

Located near Flatiron, this upscale but laid-back comfort American cuisine experience is perfect for meetings, after work hangouts or just for you to take a break from the hustle and bustle of Midtown. The restaurant has an exciting live-fire cooking seating experience where you get to see how your dish is freshly prepared. I was very fortunate to be able to sit front and center of this experience. The restaurant has a wood-fire oven for pizza and a charcoal grill so that was very interesting to see in action. I was also fascinated to learn that the term “sweet-bri-ar” according to the restaurant’s homepage means “an Old World rose with stout recurved prickles and white to deep rosy-pink single flowers”.

🧫 Dishes

For starter: Rigatoni

Everything throughout my dinner was very well seasoned, and the starter was no exception. I had rigatoni with broccoli rabe, rosemary, sausage and egg. The rigatoni was chewy and was perfectly seasoned with the richer hearty sauce signified by the egg yolks. The broccoli rabe definitely adds a fresh and lighter taste that counters the somewhat richer flavor of the sauce.

Main dish: Salmon

If you haven’t figured out already, one of my favorite proteins is definitely seafood, and more specifically, salmon. So when I see salmon on the menu, I had to order. For the main course: we have the Salmon Mi Cuit. “Mi Cuit” translate to half-cooked in French, but that definitely does not do justice to describe the very delicately rich and tender taste of the fresh salmon cut. Served with beets and crème fraiche, everything about the flavor profile of this dish is rich and fresh. The vegetables is perfectly cooked to complement the soft and buttery salmon. The crème fraiche dressing was flavored just right to create a creamy yet not overwhelming texture to accompany the protein. With all of its components working together harmoniously, this dish is just subtly amazing.

For dessert: Grilled Pear Pizzette

And finally for dessert, we have a rich Grilled Pear Pizzette served with Almond and Thyme Gelato. This dish is a very rich and sweet, which I am definitely a fan of. The crusty texture of the pizzette was balanced out with the minty thyme gelato.

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