Now that we’ve shown you all of our holiday baking for this year, we think it’s time to take a break from the kitchen and instead show you some of the good food we’ve eaten recently around New York.  Today we’re featuring two restaurants on the Upper West Side – these places are less than a mile away from each other but serve up very different cuisines.  They’re a great encapsulation of the diversity of food you can get in this city, and how cultures from all around the world share shoulder-to-shoulder space with each other.  So here’s some of the delicious things we’ve eaten recently, but just be warned that we will show some pictures of meat here.

The first spot we went to was Wau, a new restaurant that features a menu of pan-Southeast Asian food.  You can get dishes from several different countries in this region of the world – for example, here is the poh plah we got as an appetizer, which are Malaysian fried spring rolls stuffed with veggies and served with a chili sauce.

And here’s our other appetizer, the roti canai, which comes from Indian immigrants in Singapore.  It’s a folded-up flatbread served with a curry sauce.

For entrees, Miriam had the mamak mee goreng with tofu, a noodle dish with a tomato-chili sauce that comes from India’s Muslim community.

And Cyril tried the char kway teow with shrimp, a Singaporean dish of noodles and vegetables in a chili soy sauce.

And we ended our meal there with this lychee crème brûlée.

Now if you walk a little farther south, you’ll come across the Upper West Side location of Parm.  This restaurant turned 10 this year, and it’s now become an New York City institution – it’s considered one of the must-try restaurants here, but we’d actually never been before until recently.  Of course we had to try the dish the restaurant is named for, so here’s Miriam’s eggplant parm, served with a side of spicy rigatoni.

And Cyril decided to try the meatball parm.

And just so we could get some veggies in, we also split the arugula salad, tossed with almonds, figs, and Parmesan cheese.

We enjoyed getting to try these two places and what they offered:  Wau was a new spot that served up dishes we’d never had before, from several different countries and cultures on the other side of the world, while Parm is a mainstay that allowed us to indulge in some familiar Italian-American comfort food.  It’s truly amazing that you can find such different – and tasty – places within just a few blocks in this city, and that’s one of the reasons we love being here.  We’ll make sure to provide more restaurant recommendations like this soon!