My mom and I are huge Chloe Coscarelli fans. Her recipes are some of my favorites because they use simple, normal ingredients, and always come out delicious. When I learned Chloe was opening a restaurant, I immediately told my mom and we vowed to go when it opened. Well, they are opened two weeks ago, and we made the trip to NYC to check it out.

Food

We spent a ridiculous amount of time looking at the menu (and pictures on Instagram) trying to decide what to order when we got there. Despite how amazing the burgers looked, I had my heart set on the Casaer Salad. I haven’t had one in years and it just sounded too good not to get. I decided to get a side of fries and an order mac n cheese too. I almost ordered the pesto meatball sub, but I’m glad I didn’t because after the huge salad, I could barely finish the fries and didn’t even touch the mac and cheese until later. The salad was humongous and delicious, and the shiitake bacon was the best not-bacon I’ve ever had. It was crispy, salty, fatty, and sweet. The fries were very much like other fast food fries, and you would never know they were air baked instead of fried. I generally don’t care for ketchup, and my mom doesn’t like beets, but we both loved the beet ketchup and special sauce that came with the fries. I ate the mac n cheese when I got home, my mom also got an order, and we agreed it was the best mac and cheese we’ve ever had. I realized when I got home that I had made her recipe for mac and cheese with sweet potato sauce before, but I don’t remember it being that good.

My mom got the Whiskey BBQ burger, and also loved it. Every single thing on the menu sounded so good, I wish they had a sampler with tiny portions of everything. We also ordered peanut butter banana smoothies (YUM) and desserts to go.

The cupcakes didn’t quite make it home in one piece but they still tasted wonderful. You can see what the Raspberry Tiramisu cupcake looked like when I ordered it below.  I had to order it since it was one of her winning Cupcake Wars cupcakes! The Chlotess cupcake had the perfect chocolate ganache and little vanilla loops. The chocolate chip cookie was the most perfect cookie, it was chewy with a little bit of crunch…I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.

Price

The prices were very reasonable…especially for New York. My salad was $9.95 and was huge. My mom’s burger was $10.95 and also filling. The sides we got, sweet potato and regular fries, and mac and cheese, were $3.95 and $4.95. The 16 oz smoothies were $8.50, the cupcakes were $3.50 and the cookie was $2.50. Our bill was higher than we’d normally spend at lunch, but that’s only because we went a little crazy and got extra food to go.

The Interior

The restaurant was packed when we got there, which was peak lunch time, at a little after 1pm. I took more pictures of the inside but it was mostly the tops of people heads or their backs. The decor was very modern and I would’ve loved to really look around and see the other merchandise she was selling, but I didn’t want to waste time or be in anyone’s way. We had to stand and wait a little bit for a seat, which was okay, and it was slowing down a little bit by the time we were leaving. The lines/people standing around waiting was a little confusing. I ended up standing in line 3 times (more about that in a second) once behind someone who was waiting to get their food, not order it, and the second time I decided to ask the person in front of me just to be safe and he responded like “of course I’m in line, why else would I be standing here.”

The Service

I ended up in line the second time because after we sat down, I was looking at my receipt and realized the woman at the register missed a bunch of our food. I went back and reordered what was missed, so no big deal.

When we were ordered, my mom asked me if Chloe would be working there and I said I wasn’t sure. When we were eating she was walking around asking people how their meal was and was giving smoothie samples out. She was also cleaning tables, and asked my mom if she could take our trash when I was ordering desserts.

I can only image how hard it is to run a restaurant, especially in NYC. And while I have no clue how much of the business responsibility is on her, I saw first hand how hard she was working. Chloe has been one of my favorite “celebrity” vegans for a while and I love her even more now. She is incredibly inspiring and is showing people vegan food can be reasonably priced, filing, and delicious.

Overall

If you’re in the tri-state area, get to By Chloe, and come hungry. If you can’t get to NYC to eat at there in person I highly recommend her cookbooks. They are all filled with easy, recipes that everyone will love.