burger shack

My wife signed up for some crazy credit card that rewarded her with a free five day stay at Atlantis in the Bahamas. Then she used some of her frequent flyer points to secure us our flights. It was just a matter of paying for food at that point.

I’m sure you have no interest whatsoever in seeing my amazing vacation photos, so I’ll share with you, instead, some pics of the food we ate at the resort.

This resort is known for having very expensive food. We tried to avoid that a bit by hitting some of the cheaper joints for lunch, and supplementing hunger pangs with the assortment of snacks that we packed into our suitcases. This place is indeed expensive, with some joints even costing more than what we are accustomed to, even as NYC food lunatics.

Murray’s Deli

This is a classic NYC style Jewish deli. We had a massive loaded baked potato and a pastrami/corned beef open faced sandwich. We just couldn’t get enough in New York, so we had to eat some while in the Bahamas.

Oh and the pickles…

This place was pretty good.

Classic American style diner with burgers, dogs, fries and other comfort foods.

We actually ate here twice because the place we intended to visit prior to our second trip (Bimini Road – Bahamian food) was closed.

First Meal:

The burgers were pretty good. I can tell they use more fat in their patties than we do here in the states. That made for a more robust flavor but with a slightly less desirable texture. Either way a satisfying burger.

The banana nutella shake was on point, by the way.

And I’m sure you saw those fries creeping into the frame in the shots above. We actually ordered the combo of onion rings and fries.

Fries were solid. Onions rings, not so much.

Second Meal:

Goombay Punch, essentially fruit soda (pineapple, mainly), is big down here. And sweet. We tried two varieties during the course of our vacation, and this one was superior (the other was called a “fruit champagne” and it sucked balls).

Hot dogs are split and grilled, which I consider to be the best method for grilling dogs. We covered ours with mustard, ketchup, mayo and Tabasco sauce.

Say hello to the Vitamin B: mac and cheese with blue cheese, chopped up hot dog, BBQ pork, and bacon. Insanity.

Nobu

We had some free sake and sushi sampler platter to use at Nobu, so we figured we would eat a meat there.

The sampler platter kinda sucked. I can’t believe they normally charge $40 for that. But we did redeem the meal a bit with this conch sashimi:

And this crispy pork belly dish:

This small bowl of spicy seafood soup cost $19, which was a total rip off, but it was in fact tasty.

Unfortunately I was still hungry, so I ordered a noodle dish in hopes that the starch aspect would fill me up. Green tea soba noodles:

These were actually pretty good. And of course Katherine lifted them for my Instagram feed.

77 West

This was probably the best meal of the trip. We went for lunch, so kept it relatively light, but everything was excellent.

Good cocktails for the ambiance – not too sweet, just right.

Probably one of the best tuna tartare dishes we’ve ever had; served in a spicy coconut curry style broth that really popped.

And why not have another burger? This was much better than the ones at Burger Shack, and it came with fries or a salad for the same price, pretty much.

I kept it light with a salad instead of fries, and that was a good move. The salad was actually really great and fresh.

Seafire Grill

Of course we had to try a steakhouse. We pretty much shared a meal for one, since we didn’t want to break the bank.

We tried two cocktails (since we had credit for two free drinks): one was too strong and lacked finesse (the 1888 Rum Old Fashioned), but the other was perfect – a bourbon lemonade.

We started with this horrible crab cake. I’ve had better out of the freezer section of Shop Rite.

After dining at over 100 steakhouses, some of which are not NYC-based, I’ve learned my lesson: If there is no prime or aged beef on the menu, I should probably stick with a filet. You’re rolling the dice on quality with any other cuts – especially when you’re outside of the USA. Additionally, since a filet had very little fat content to begin with, you don’t have to concern yourself with marbling quality or things like prime and choice. Furthermore, I also took a peek at the butcher shop area of this restaurant (you can buy steaks to grill on your yacht at the marina), and I was not impressed with the strip and rib eye offerings. Filet was the way to go.

It was decent. I’d say 7/10. It was super tender. It lacked some juiciness and outer crust, but it was cooked perfectly medium rare from end to end. If I weren’t such a steak snob, being spoiled by the selections in NYC, this would have been an outstanding cut.

But at $58 for 10oz, however, this was incredibly overpriced. In NYC it’d be maybe $50, and that’s already pricey since its fucking NYC.

On the side we had some asparagus with Bernaise sauce. These were perfectly cooked, and they even shaved down the woody bottom part with a peeler.

As always, I have to talk about the table bread in some way. Here, it was lame. A little mushy, kinda like tan Wonder Bread. Not warm.

The ambiance and the bar were nice though, and it reminded me of something like Capital Grille in midtown. Rich and dark wood tones. If this joint were in NYC I’d probably score it in the high 60s or low 70s. Let’s just go with a 70, for the sake of ease, and because we really only tried three items.

Olives

Olives is a Todd English joint and it is directly connected to the casino at Atlantis, so the place has some standards to live up to. We weren’t planning on dining here, but when the entirety of Paradise Island lost power, we were unable to dine at the only Bahamian restaurant at the resort, Bimini Road, yet again. First time it was closed (peeve about the resort – random closures of restaurants on random days for random reasons), and the second time, which was our last night there, it was shut down because of the power outage.

Anyway, we ended up having a really nice meal at Olives. We had credit for two free cocktails (which we actually used after eating at Nobu earlier in the week).

That same day we tried the tiramisu flan, which was really delicious and unique, since Nobu was insanely overpriced and the dessert menu looked dumb there.

We split the rigatoni bolognese, which was really nicely cooked with sausage and ground meat.

Since we were intending to eat Bahamian food but got denied, we tried the conch ceviche, thinking it would be stellar, made from a local catch. It was just okay. The conch sashimi at Nobu was better.