On Sunday afternoon, I received an unexpected call from Caroline, who said roughly the following: "Cynthia, I have a weird question for you. I'm meeting up with three friends for dinner, and we don't know where to go. Can you recommend somewhere on the Upper West Side or Midtown, ideally near the 1 [train]?" I asked for a few minutes, did a quick Yelp search of Upper West Side restaurants, then cross-checked the top-rated results against what I remembered from the NY-centric food journalism I follow (namely:
NYTimes,
A Passion For Food,
Serious Eats New York, and
The Girl Who Ate Everything). The two restaurants I decided to tell Caroline about were
Pio Pio Salon and
Kefi, since I knew the former had been praised by Robyn of TGWAE, and the latter had recently shown up on SENY.
Two days later, I got an email from Caroline saying that they enjoyed their dinner at Pio Pio (in addition to smiling, I breathed an sigh of relief), and she also sent me pictures and a brief description of their meal! Accordingly, the remainder of this post is adapted from Caroline. She and her friend Roger apparently shared a whole chicken with sides of maduros (ripe plantains) and rice and beans.
Caroline's mom and friend Hannah both had shrimp entrees. I rather like the plating!
For dessert, the group ordered flan, tres leches cake, and ice cream. The ice cream was apparently quite standard, and the cake was just ok. No comment on the service or atmosphere, so I'm assuming they were at least satisfactory.
