Problem: You’re planning dinner with your friends and you can’t decide what to do. In a city like New York, there are endless dining opportunities to choose from. On the one hand, you can make the evening low-key by ordering pizza or Chinese take-out. On the other hand, you can go out to the local pub for burgers. But that’s so boring, you think.
Solution: You can go one step further by eating your entire meal blindfolded or in front of a movie screen. There are a handful of innovative and unique dining experiences in New York City that will make your night out with your friends a memorable one.
Here are five to start with:
1. Dinner and a Movie at Nitehawk Cinema
Why make separate plans to do dinner and a movie when you can do it all in one place? This movie theatre with a full-sized restaurant menu shows independent films, like a screening of Madonna’s 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour and the classics like Psycho and Robocop. Kick back and relax with a glass of wine and a cheese plate or munch on popcorn flavored with truffle butter or a mixture of Old Bay, Tobasco and lemon butter.
2. Farm Fresh Food at Brooklyn Grange
These days, a lot of us like to know where our food comes from. At Brooklyn Grange, it’s not hard to guess because the food is grown mere feet away from your table! The rooftop farming business grows over 50,000 pounds of organically-grown vegetables each year. With all of those veggies, Brooklyn Grange likes to plan true farm-to-table dinner experiences with the unexpected punch of a city skyline.
At their Sunday “Butcher Paper Dinners,” food is served directly on butcher paper along a massive, fifty-foot communal table. With no paper napkins or disposable cups, the dinner creates virtually no waste. At the end of each meal, everything is rolled up and put into the compost
3. Dinner and a Show at Ninja New York
The interior of this restaurant is designed like a ninja village from the medieval period. The winding hallways are dotted with contraptions to deceive the eyes of an intruder – meaning you! Knives and ninja stars are common along with plenty of enthusiastic screaming from ninjas ready to strike. Diners eat in private rooms and are met with a show of food, fire and fun. Check out restaurant reviewer Zagat’s tour of the restaurant here.
4. Dinner in the Dark at Camaje
Four or five times a month, diners are served multi-course meals with a catch – they must eat them blindfolded! Without sight, the rest of the senses are heightened, which creates a unique experience for your taste buds. The menu for the evening is kept secret until the very end, so guests will have loads of fun trying to guess the foods they ate. Tickets for “Dinner in the Dark” must be purchased in advance.
5. Unlimited [Dessert] Possibilities at Dominique Ansel Kitchen
With only eight seats at Dominique Ansel Kitchen’s U.P. (Unlimited Possibilities), this exclusive dessert-only tasting menu is sure to please your sweet tooth. The menu includes eight courses each paired a wine or cocktail, so drink up!
U.P. serves as an experiment for chefs to push boundaries for desserts in innovative ways. The avant-garde menu changes every six months, with one month in between seatings to let chefs develop the next menu. American Dreams, which just finished in August, showed a century of different American dreams with each course. U.P. will reopen in October with a new theme and menu, so mark your calendar.
