Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

These posts are always SO great. Please keep them coming! :)

Yay Brown! (I'm a current student.) If you're looking for solid ethnic food, probably the easiest and best bet is Kabob and Curry on Thayer Street - it's good Indian food, relatively cheap. East Side Pocket is reliable falafel/gyros but pretty middle of the road. It's true that there's great Japanese on Wickenden street - but that's about a mile walk, which obviously is manageable but if you're just visiting it might be a bit off the beaten path.

Go for K&C. I hope you love Brown!

My spontaneous side trip to Levain for a gooey, enormous, nut-filled chocolate chip cookie one afternoon was one of the best decisions of my life.

lol, this is a ridiculous story. Better be damn good cheesecake!

Hahaha, as you can tell from my username I'm in the same boat!

Living in NYC, I've been able to make the rounds at some really great restaurants. Usually with family, sometimes with friends (to the lower-priced places, because we're all a little strapped obviously). It's also great to make the best of your foodie-ness at home - shop farmers markets, cook a lot, read tons of blogs and cookbooks. Yay for teenage foodies!

I don't think anyone necessarily needs another person to enjoy food. Try going to some restaurants yourself, too - that can be really refreshing and relaxing. :)

I love Kang Suh in K-Town - great gopdol! and delicious little appetizers for free :)

Wow, that recommendation for East Side Pockets could not have come at a better time! I'm taking off for school in Providence in about two weeks, and I've been poking around to find serious eats in the area. I absolutely love falafel and was not looking forward to leaving the Middle-Eastern-food mecca of Queens. Thanks so much!

Any other great Providence spots I should check out?

wow, I actually think this is quite a good idea. I mean, if there's going to be a fun coffee shop to hang out in that has community outreach and varied products, as well as good coffee, i'm there! it's very difficult for "real" mom+pop locations to survive nowadays with big chains dominating the market (and it's NOT just starbucks - dunkin donuts is a far greater curse in my opinion). far better for starbucks to try to rebrand to reach a different part of the market than not to do so if the customer wants it. it's sillier to pine for the days before large corporations than to just accept their existence and appreciate that their executives are trying to find a way to become less behemoth-like.

carrot cake with cream cheese frosting! homemade is the BEST :)

I was pretty nervous to go to SS UWS because i'd heard of the scary lines, but i've been there three times and actually never had to wait very long at all.
as cybercita says, around 12 there's not really a line in my experience - the only time i've walked by and seen a ridiculous line is, oddly enough, at around 5. but the good thing is, you'll need a good five minutes to choose from the menu items - so a little line isn't really all that bad!! :)

gotta be a real parisian crepe with nutella! best in france, but a street-made crepe is amazing anywhere, anytime :)

I was hoping you'd post about the market! I took a trip down there this morning. There was some nice stuff, but it was generally VERY overpriced. Much more expensive, and less variety, than Union Square. The mozzarella is indeed very good, but who knows if its the best in the world. The guy running Yummy is really great, though - he knows his stuff and he's dead set on donating all his money to autism non-profits, which is great. The people running the vegetable stand with the tomatoes couldn't answer a man when he asked if the tomatoes were relatively sweet - they had never tasted them. Questionable. I don't think I'll be going back (except maybe for Yummy coffee! =])

I'm going to have to second the "what happened to the leftovers?" question. I'm constantly aware of how much food I'm eating and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, and luckily I've managed to fit the rare treat from Shake Shack into the plan! But I always go with a friend to share my food, and we order only one or two things at a time. Reading about how you left all that food behind, and ordered in such gluttonous portions, is a little disappointing given how far you've come with your dieting. Portion control isn't really JUST about eating one or two bites of hugely fattening things - it's also about finding wholesome, healthy foods of which you can eat a TON and still lose weight. It sometimes feels like a cheat that you still eat (or post about eating) foods that most traditional dieters wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, because you're able to leave most of the food sitting on your plate. Not raggin' on you, though - keep up the good work! I'm sure next week will bring you down another pound ;)