NYC: Mandoo Bar, Korea Way - The Small Slice

My mission was to cover as much of New York City as possible during our seven days there. To eat in places we wouldn’t find in London, try things we hadn’t tried before and walk our legs to new levels of exhaustion.

Prior to travelling, our only certain plan was seeing The Lion King on the Wednesday evening as I’d bought the tickets a few months beforehand. The Minskoff Theatre is three blocks from Times Square Subway station so we didn’t want to stray too far out of Manhattan for our 7pm show. We stayed in an apartment in Harlem booked through Airbnb (we stayed here – highly recommend) which offered us use of their kitchen and breakfast making facilities. Having that option was really handy on the days Julianne and I just wanted to get up and go.

We chose to have a real tourist morning and visit some of the museums in Manhattan and see some of the famous buildings. First stop was The Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were some really handy tips in my Lonely Planet New York City guide about getting into museums, explaining the suggested admissions system that some have and the prices for the others.

We attempted to find some frozen yogurt to eat on the MET steps (Gossip Girl fans will understand) but all the vendors outside the museum were selling some kind of fried rubbish. We found smoothies at the one fresh juice cart on the street and took some selfies instead.

After our selfie shoot, we headed across Central Park to the American Museum of Natural History. The museums are massive as expected and our energy from breakfast was well and truly depleted.

I found our lunch spot, Mandoo Bar, on Instagram after seeing it posted by @clerkenwellboyec1. I’m all into dumplings and dim sum at the moment so I was super excited to find out ‘mandu’ are Korean dumplings.

My main was the Ojing-O Bibimbob; spicy sautéed squid and vegetables over rice in a sizzling hot stone-bowl. If you’re not good with hot food (by temperature and flavour) then I do not recommend you order this. The stone bowl kept the food super hot so it’s easier to decant some onto the side plate to cool and eat from that. Super delicious, although I did need a fair bit of water towards the end.

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Harleigh Reid

I write about food and eat a lot.

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