This Is Rachael Ray's Favorite Comfort Food Restaurant
What's your favorite restaurant? For most of us, it's a hard question to answer. It depends on your mood, right? All of us have our go-to spots for different occasions and tastes — whether it's Mexican, Chinese, Italian, sushi, burgers, pizza, or something else. We'll choose a sentimental restaurant for a special anniversary, or an energetic spot with loud music and great cocktails for a raucous night with best friends.
This is why it's so hard to choose a "favorite" spot.
Turns out, celebrity chefs like Rachael Ray are just like us — and just like us, sometimes they just want some good ol' comfort food: classic mac and cheese, shrimp and grits, a nice pot roast, or whatever it was that your grandma made the best, assuring you felt loved and safe. So when this busy television star and best-selling cookbook author feels like she needs a little TLC on a plate, where does she go?
Rachael's go-to spot for comfort food is Loring Place in Manhattan, as she revealed on her website. The restaurant is nestled in Greenwich Village, home to lots of great restaurants, such as Joe Bastianich's Lupa. Loring Place is the first restaurant by chef Dan Kluger, who was well known in New York for his work in the kitchens owned by superstars Danny Meyer (Union Square Café) and Tom Colicchio (Core Club). And he became truly famous in the NYC dining scene at Jean-Georges Vongerichten's veggie-centric ABC Kitchen (via Time Out New York).
Rachael finds her favorite comfort foods at Loring Place
At Loring Place, Rachael Ray's favorite comfort food restaurant, The Infatuation promises "everything is good" and "you'll go home happy." In its fresh dining room finished with whitewashed bricks and light wood, there's an extensive menu including items that definitely qualify as "comfort food." The term means different things to different people, but we really like The Atlantic's definition: "Food that provides solace as well as fuel." Merriam-Webster defines comfort food as "food prepared in a traditional style having a usually nostalgic or sentimental appeal."
While Loring Place's menu isn't exactly traditional or nostalgic, it does meet one of Spoon University's characteristics of comfort food: plenty of carbs (and there's also some comforting fat and sugar).
Some great-sounding items that caught our attention (and, likely, Rachael's) on the menu include baked ricotta with cherry tomatoes served with sourdough bread; a plate of roasted cauliflower with squash, tomatoes, and maple tahini dressing; and a "Grandma Style" pan pizza with mozzarella and basil (per the restaurant's website). For brunch, there are butternut squash fries with lemon Parmesan dressing; cheddar cheese waffles served with eggs, smoked ham, and cherry pepper hollandaise sauce; and turkey sausage hash with Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, and a fried egg.
But it's the desserts at Loring Place that sound as comforting as a big hug from grandma, like a "cookie box" filled with salted chocolate chip, oatmeal pecan, and other sweet bites; and a vanilla ice cream sundae with pretzels, walnut toffee, chocolate cookie-fudge, and candied Meyer lemon.
Now that's our idea of comfort!