FiPS Food Throwdowns: Kinara vs Amin Indian Cuisine

FIPS Food Throwdowns is a series where we order the same exact thing from two different Park Slope restaurants, get it delivered, and evaluate which was better.  It's a culinary smackdown...a triumph of the delivery will. 

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! Everybody loves a violent, knuckle-filled brouhaha, right? It's in OUR BLOOD, people. Cavemen & shit. Hell, even I got my start on this here blog by pitting various Park Slope blocks against each other in TOTALLY EPIC BATTLES. FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

With that in mind, I'm reviving an age-old FiPS tradition--The FiPS Food Throwdown. By tossing two neighborhood businesses into our metaphorical squared circle & ordering the exact same goods and/or services from them, we'll prove once & for all which of the two is OBVIOUSLY BETTER.

In the hood, there have always been a handful of Indian restaurants. Some blow snot rockets. Some don't. Today's two competitors are Indian restaurants that have been open in Park Slope for a while now: 5th Ave's Kinara & 7th Ave's Amin Indian Cuisine. On New Year's Day, I grabbed the same takeout order from both--Aloo Gobi & Veggie Samosas--and absconded back to my apartment to see the results.

READ MORE

FiPS Holiday Gift Guide: Foodies-n-Drunks

When it comes to traditions, stuffing your face & drowning your sorrows is not only a holiday tradition, it’s a Park Slope tradition. We here in Park Slope love consumption.

With that in mind, this holiday season we’ve assembled a delectable group of gifts that’ll ensure that the foodies & drunks in your life will shut up about their latest gustatory obsession for a brief moment. Enjoy it while you can, because by the time 2013 rolls around, they won’t be able to shut up about the way you helped feed their obsession this holiday season. Bon Appetit/Salut!

READ MORE

On 12/12/12, Celebrate Repeating Numbers at Kiwiana

Oh 12/12/12. Look at you, you little date you, all repeating with the numbers like that. You must be feeling PRETTY smug right about now. For eleven years now, people have been making WAY too big of a deal out of the one date every year where the month, day & year are all the same. After eleven years, you're it dude. You're the last time this repeating number junk will happen for another 88+ years. By that time, most of us will likely be dead. Unless of course science figures out the secret to longevity or some shit. Fingers crossed!

Tomorrow, to celebrate you, people all across the globe have decided to mark the occasion in varied ways. In Wisconsin, 12/12/12 will be "Aaron Rodgers Day," in honor of the Packers' beloved quarterback. At MSG, they're bringing out all the crusty dinosaurs of rock for a huge concert to benefit those affected by Hurricane Sandy. I'm sure there'll be a bunch of number geeks out there who'll use nothing but a base-12 number system all day long.

Chef Mark Simmons, of Park Slope's New Zealand restaurant Kiwiana, apparently loves numbers too, so for 12/12/12, he's decided to add another 12 into the mix, 'cause I mean...why the fuck not? On 12/12/12, Kiwiana's officially rolling out a new menu, and for one night only, everything on it will be going for $12!

This past weekend, Mark invited me to the restaurant to give the new menu a lil' taste. It was actually my first time stopping by, so going in, I was curious as to what exactly constituted New Zealand décor. Basically, I was expecting a bunch of tiny stuffed birds & perhaps a Lord of the Rings poster or three scattered about.

READ MORE

GET PORKED at Landhaus

DO YOU WANNA GET PORKED???!!! Sweet! So do I!...Like ALL the time. PORKED IN THE MOUTH.

Unfortunately, as of lately I've been getting a little bored with all the places in Park Slope that I usually go to GET PORKED. That's why it's so perfect that two weeks ago Thursday Landhaus, Brooklyn's wandering pork purveyors, moved into the space occupied this past summer by People's Pops.

Landhaus has earned that "wandering" tag over the past few years by foregoing a physical space in favor of a booth at Smorgasburg & The Brooklyn Flea, and a menu served out of The Woods, a Williamsburg bar. Park Slope makes TOTAL sense for their first physical locale, as their slogan is "Farm to Sandwich." You Park Slopers love that locavore shit.

The tiny storefront space, however, is better suited for take-out due to the dearth of seating. Sure, you can sit at one of the few seats along the wall, or you can do like I did & eat off of the Ms. Pac Man machine, but if you show up on an eve where more than a half-dozen people are looking to GET PORKED in-house, you're pretty much taking that shit to go.

READ MORE

FiPS' Ultimate 5th Ave South Bar Crawl

While not all side effects of the ever-expanding boundaries of Park Slope are desirable, one happy consequence is a wide-range of new drinking establishments. We here at FiPS, ever your companions in boozing-it-up, are super enthusiastic about all the drinking happening on 5th Avenue and, in particular, all of the new watering holes that have opened up in South Slope over the last few years. On any random night it's possible to walk into one of the quality bars on that strip and not find yourself surrounded by a million douchebags. Score!

With this in mind, we -- FiPS' own drinking experts Daniel & Shawn -- have put together a TOTALLY EPIC SOUTH SLOPE BAR CRAWL, starting at 14th Street and working all the way down to 23rd. On this short strip, one can hit at least 10 bars, each with something unique to offer. We attempted the entire crawl on a recent Friday night, but our livers and wallets protested enough that we eventually had to give up. However, we bet some of our readers are ready for the challenge:

READ MORE