We ordered the Harata Buns... which is seriously indescribable. You just have to eat it and you will know what I mean. SO GOOD. I am salivating as I recall the memories of it, haha. They are little steams buns (in Taiwanese, we call them "gua bao") filled with fatty pork bellies and a little bit of lettuce, drenched in a spicy & sweet sauce. It's very similar to Peking duck, but even better because it's not as oily as Peking duck. They are quite expensive though - 2 for $8... but I think it is definitely worth a try (or two or three...) We will definitely have these in the future, despite the high price tag.

So K ordered the Classic Ramen, while I ordered the Tori Ramen. The only thing that seemed to be different from the menu description was our broth, which is really what makes or breaks a bowl of ramen. His was just the regular tonkatsu, while mine was chicken soup with tonkatsu. (Classic on the left, Tori on the right)

I made a few changes to the recipe:
• I made the crust exactly as described, but with vanilla wafers instead of cornmeal; I thought of using graham crackers, but I wasn't sure how that would taste with green tea, so stuck to vanilla wafers.
• I halved the recipe for the filling since I felt like there would be TOO much cream cheese.
• Instead of the lemon zest and lemon juice it called for, I used green tea powder dissolved in warm water.

As you can see, I had a little trouble getting the cake out of the springform pan. I'm not sure what it is, but when I tried to slide a knife between the cake and the pan, it would pull up the cream cheese filling? Why does it do that?! It made my cheesecake look really ugly, that's for sure. Even K was like, "Uhhh what did you do to it?"

So after nearly destroying it with a knife, I put it in the fridge overnight. In the morning, I also had a LOT of trouble trying to get the cake OFF the bottom of the pan. What a nightmare. I actually had to cut out each individual piece in order to get them off, so I'm not sure how I would fare if I had to serve this as a whole.

HOWEVER, all this hard work really paid off, because the cake came out really good (taste-wise, of course). It was creamy, yet not too cream cheesey, which I think a lot of cheesecakes tend to do. It wasn't heavy due to the mascarpone used and the green tea flavor was subtle, not overwhelming and just really added to the taste.

Now, if only I could perfect the aesthetics.....

I've always admired Morimoto on the Food Network; he was such an amazing and inventive chef, yet he was just so humble.

I had visited the first Morimoto restaurant in Philly a few years ago but did not get to meet the chef himself. On a special occasion two months ago, we got to visit his NYC location.

We were seated promptly even though we had arrived 15 minutes after our reservation time.

Ambiance: There was a very clean feel to this restaurant. If you are looking for old school Tokyo, then you will be disappointed. All the staff are dressed in black and there is a lot of white in the restaurant, with dim lighting and special pink/purple/blue lighting effects. There is an area that is quiet (which is where we were seated), and then there is a more "happening" area towards the middle of the restaurant and into the lower level, where there is a bar.

Food: We had originally planned to order one omakase and then an appetizer and entree to share (which is what we did for Nobu). It just doesn't make sense to order two of the same things. However, we were told that in order to get the omakase, the whole table had to order it, which we ended up doing. I didn't particularly like this, since when I was in Philly, we had one person order the omakase while the rest ordered their own entrees.