AWESOME GIVEAWAY: La Societe - You Know You Wanna

Social media is an expanding beast and brands are doing all that they can to use it to their advantage. When brands have to come to the consumer's level, the consumer benefits - hence, La Societe by Stella Artois. 

We've seen communities like Crowdtap reward users for opinions on brands and limited-time engagements like Lexus Dark Ride use celebrity and fashionable offerings to promote their new automotive concepts, but Stella Artois recently launched this invite-only community designed to link the brand with luxury and exclusivity. Users can earn points by filling out their information, inviting users (each person only has 15 invitations to give - takes you back to the first days of Gmail huh?) and promoting La Societe via Facebook and Twitter. Points can be redeemed for entrance into high-profile events like Heidi Klum's Halloween Party, Suite-tickets to an MLB game, or my beloved Star Chef's Rising Stars Gala.

Lucky for you, I'm giving away three invitations to Awesome in New York Readers. Just follow the blog and post a comment by 5 p.m. today saying why you want the invite and I'll select three winners using Random.org. Be sure to include your email in the comment so that I can send the invite to the proper address if you've won. Good luck!


The winners have been chosen and contacted. Thanks and enjoy!

Breakfast With a Twist

If you've learned anything by reading this blog, you'll know I hardly ever turn away free food. Even at 9:30 a.m. on a Saturday I'm game. That's why when Urbanspoon gave me the chance to attend a blogger breakfast at The Breslin, I was all over that (and so was my Mom who tagged along for the yummies).

Having never been to the Breslin before, I was super excited because of all of the hype I've been hearing. The decor is fun and comfortable with an old-world meets modern NYC eatery kind of feel. All of the bloggers congregated in the front of the restaurant so there would be ample space for sampling and picture taking. One of the things I loved about this breakfast was the fact that everyone was taking pictures and waiting for everyone else to take their pictures before digging in. My friends usually make fun of me for doing this, so I definitely felt like I was part of the "cool crowd" here.

Urbanspoon was nice enough to order a whole smattering of items from the menu so that we'd all have a chance to really say we ate there. We started with French-press coffee and some pastries and sausages. Next we moved on to one of my favorite items, the fried peanut butter and banana sandwich with bourbon vanilla sauce - it was ooey gooey - YUM!

Fried peanut butter and banana sandwich with bourbon vanilla sauce

Next we moved on to some heartier items...

Oven-baked 3 cheese sandwich with house smoked ham

Home fries

Poached eggs with curried lentils, yogurt and cilantro

Seafood sausage

Peanut butter pancakes with concord grape syrup

The Breslin definitely has a thing for peanut butter, which I definitely don't mind, and I love the combination of classic breakfast items with innovative brunch dishes with a twist. Who would have ever thought of seafood sausage!? And it was surprisingly light and delicious. I loved the pancakes, but my mom thought the crunchy peanuts on top were a bit too salty and overwhelmed the syrup.The curried lentils with the poached eggs were genius and really took the dish to a whole other dimension.

While we were eating, the Urbanspoon team passed around iPads demonstrating their awesome app. I've used it before and I can honestly say it's worth a download. With the app, you can search by neighborhood, cuisine and/or price or you can just give it a spin and have it choose something random for you. 

So if you've been dying to try the Breslin, but don't care to deal with the crazy reservations for dinner, go for breakfast, you won't be sorry!

AWESOME DEAL: 51% off "East Village Eats" Food Festival this Weekend

Well, well, well. New Yorkers sure do love their food festivals. Fresh off of last weekend's Taste of the Village: West comes East Village Eats, sponsored by community development organization Fourth Arts Block. Tickets are usually $45, but Living Social NYC Downtown is offering an awesome discount for this afternoon of eating, drinking and raffle prizes. For only $22, you can get your slice of the cake, literally.

The self-guided tour starts at 11 a.m. this Saturday 10/23 and goes until 4 p.m. You will find a total of 15 (that's huge!) restaurants participating in this event, which means you get 15 food samples and numerous drink samples. Fourth Arts Block has created a map so that you can set your course for the day.

Here are the restaurants and food samples they have lined up:

Bond Street Chocolate: Decadent spicy dark chocolate bark.

Xi’an Famous Foods: Liang Pi “Cold Skin Noodles:” bouncy and chewy wheat noodles, mixed with seitan and vegetables, and tossed with secret spicy sauces to make a cool, delicious mess.

Cucina Di Pesce:  Cold antipasto feast: tomato mozzarella & white bean spread bruschettas, tomato & mozzarella, and eggplant stuffed with goat cheese caprese and roasted peppers.

Hecho En Dumbo: Tostadas de Dzik: chilled salad of braised venison ossobucco with tomato, red onion, sour orange, chile habanero, radish and avocado served on a bed of crisp hand pressed corn tostadas.

Luke’s Lobster: Half of a sweet Maine shrimp roll, one of the best sandwiches in NYC (New York Magazine) and best market lunches in the country (Bon Appétit).

Mud Truck: 10 oz Mud coffee, 10 oz latte, cappuccino or shot of espresso –  all roasted, blended and made by MUD.

Nomad: Moorish chicken skewer flavored with African spices and served with a crispy pita and humus.

S’MAC: Four cheese mac & cheese delight: cheddar, muenster, gruyère and a touch of pecorino.

Souen East Village: Steamed Seitan dumplings: juicy wheat dumplings filled with seitan (wheat gluten), napa cabbage, shiitake mushroom, garlic, ginger, soy sauce.

Supper: Mushrooms Trifolati: freshly sautéed mushrooms on Tuscan toast

Tuck Shop: Cocktail portion of their famous pork and sage sausage rolls, a true classic. Get a $5 beer to wash down the bite.

Tu-Lu’s Gluten Free Bakery: Mini red velvet cupcake with vanilla cream cheese frosting.

Faustina: Garlic Nodini: “Knots” of baked dough with garlic, crispy herbs and whipped ricotta.

Nicky’s Vietnamese Sandwiches: Variety of five sandwiches: the Classic, Sardine, Chicken, Porkchop or Tofu on a toasted baguette with marinated carrot, fresh cucumber, jalepeno, and cilantro with a wipe of mayo.

MONO+MONO: Famous Korean fried chicken that is double fried, non-greasy served with either spicy sauce or soy-garlic sauce.

DRINK PARTNERS

Jimmy’s No. 43: $2 off any beer.

DBA: $2 off any beer.

Xoom: $3 smoothies (normally $7) or $2 lattes

With so many choices, I'm not sure what I'm most looking forward too, but the shrimp roll and the Mushrooms Trifolati are sure up there. Click here to get your $22 ticket! Maybe we'll bump into each other mid-bite. That would be awesome.

Wining and Dining in the Meatpacking

For the past two years, I have seen the signs come up for the New York City Wine and Food Festival and then I've seen them come back down, without ever partaking in a glorious event. My friends at Citysearch changed all that this year after I won two tickets to the Meatpacking Uncorked event from a Twitter contest. Even though my mom and I already had our fair share of wine and food for an entire weekend, we were bound and determined to make the most out of this night.

We arrived at the Welcome Center under the Highline and picked up our event passport, along with some tasty Toblerone samples. Making our way to W. 14th Street, we stopped in stores like La Perla and Kimberly Taylor for wine and shopping (sort of like an encore of Fashion's Night Out). The weather was absolutely gorgeous and people were out in the thousands.

Our first food bite was at The Diner - a goat cheese quesadilla. It definitely tasted good, but that may have been because I was super hungry after an afternoon full of wine. The wait for this sample was a little ridiculous, though.

Next, we made it over to The Cooking Channel truck, which was sampling innovative ice cream flavors like Strawberry Balsamic and Chocolate Challah. Again, the lines were crazy (I would have been mad had I actually paid money for the event tickets), but the ice cream was delicious.

We stopped at the Delta/Coke display, where we got to take Polaroid-like shots with our free mini-bottles of coke. Last, we only got down to Ganesvoort Street before the event ended at 9, but we tried sliders from The Collective.

Overall, the event was a lot of fun, but the weather had a lot to do with how much I enjoyed the night. The food wasn't anything amazing, but it was fun to walk around and eat in the streets. The lines for everything were pretty long and the vendors did not always look at people's wristbands, so pretty much anyone could wait in line for some free grub. 

Next year, my goal will definitely be to try another NYC Wine and Food Festival event. I think I might pass on Meatpacking Uncorked, but maybe the Grand Tasting...One can dream.

Missed the Giveaway?

After the giveaway I held two weeks ago for Time Stands Still tickets, I felt badly that I couldn't award all of the entrants with tickets, as it's really one of the best plays I have seen in a while. Even if you didn't win (or even if you missed the contest entirely), I have good news.

Time Stands Still is offering discounted seats for as low as $43! Using the code TSAMC813 here, you can get what I call "rich (or lucky) persons" seating for just $79.50, rear mezz. seating for $60 and "poor persons" seating for just $43. This code is valid for all performances through 11/24, excluding Saturday nights. 


To save even more money, I often buy my theater tickets at the box office to avoid pesky ticket website fees. You can go to the Time Stands Still website to find more details on box office hours and the show itself. Believe me, you do not want to miss Laura Linney in this awesome show!

Seamless Winning?

Remember the days when you would actually have to make a phone call to order food for delivery? Well, Seamless Web erased those days when it launched it's online delivery service a while back. Almost every restaurant and food vendor in the city seems to employ Seamless Web to take it's delivery orders and send them out to the lazy eaters of Manhattan. Despite my taste for actually going to and eating at a restaurant, talk to me in a mid-January blizzard and you know I'll be ordering delivery.

The company is launching a new campaign starting today in an effort to get people to get rid of their paper take out menus and learn about ordering online. They've enlisted the creativity of artist Kevin O'Callaghan to create special works of art out of old paper take out menus, which will be on display this weekend at the Brooklyn Flea.

Also, (this is where you want to pay attention), a Seamless Web truck will be making the rounds across the city starting today. You will be able to drop off your unwanted menus (to be used in the sculptures) and learn about the best way to order food online. You can also pick up a fortune cookie containing a ‘lucky number’ that can lead to prizes such as an iPod Touch, free lunch for a month, an iPad, 10% off your next order, free lunch for a week, or even free lunch for a year valued at $5,475! Starting today, you can enter your lucky numbers here to find out what you have won!


Additionally, first time SeamlessWeb users can enter the promo code ‘MOREEAT’ for $10 off your first order.


Here's the schedule of the truck for the week.

10/18 Monday: Truck at Union Square (17th and Broadway)
10/19 Tuesday: Truck at 6th Avenue (between 55th and 56th)
10/20 Wednesday: Truck at Madison Square Park (23rd and 5th)
10/21 Thursday: Truck at Lexington Avenue (between 57th and 58th)
10/22 Friday: Truck at 6th Avenue (between Carmine and West 4th)
10/23 Saturday: Brooklyn Flea at Lafayette Avenue (between Clermont and Vanderbilt)
10/24 Sunday: Brooklyn Flea at One Hanson Place (corner of Flatbush Avenue)

I'll definitely be stopping by today after work. Let us know if you win anything!

I'll Have Some Cheese With that Wine (And Bread and Sauce)

Well folks, I'm officially a NY Vintners groupie. I've been to more classes than I can count (thanks to awesome discounts from Groupon), and I think my personal best experience there was recently topped after my mom, who was in town from Los Angeles, and I attended a Pizza and Wine class there last week.

If you don't already know how much I love this little wine-shop-turned-event-space already, it's about time you figured it out for yourself. And figure it out at the next Pizza and Wine class. 

We walked into NY Vintners at about 3:45 on a Friday afternoon (yay for taking off work early!) and were each instantly handed a bubbly glass of prosecco -- a perfect way to kick off the weekend. After all the other people arrived, we were welcomed by the owner himself, Shane Benson, who you can really tell has a lot of passion for teaching the public about the joys of wine and food. For the next two hours, we were schooled in the proper technique of swirling, sniffing and sipping and well, we really didn't need to know anything about chowing down on pizza. Pie by pie were ushered out of the kitchen to our tables and I was enthralled by the many different varieties the creative kitchen staff came up with -- buffalo chicken, pulled pork, artichoke and one of the most awesome white pizzas I've ever had. We sampled the different cheesy concoctions with five different wines from all over the world and at the end of the night had the opportunity to take home some of those bottles at a discounted price. 

I'm definitely looking forward to my next experience at NY Vintners. Hmmmm, will it be Bubblicious or Bad Ass Reds? Stay tuned!