Masa

Did you really think someone took me to Masa in the Time Warner Center so early in the year?! I wish 🙂 While I was in Boston, I found the Boston Masa with a great brunch deal – 2 courses and a coffee/tea for $7.95. Since Masa was super cheap and pretty close to our hotel, we walked there on Saturday morning:

By the way, I think Boston is a fun city but it is 1. not close to NYC AT ALL and 2. not a good city for walking; I was crossing highways or something super dangerous! Masa has a long wait if you don’t make reservations, but luckily, people in Boston don’t take advantage of opentable.com; I quickly made a reservation before heading out for our brisk walk from the hotel and we bypassed the huge line waiting outside and were seated right away.

We sat down and the waitress brought along some cornbread and spreads:

The spreads were apricot (very good), cinnamon butter (not that great), and a prune jame or something (incredibly bad…so bad I had to spit it out):

There are two menus at Masa – the $7.95 special with two courses or the regular menu (a lot of the regular menu items are also on the $7.95 menu, so there really isn’t a reason for people to order from the more expensive regular menu). I started with the empanada stuffed with plaintains:

There’s also a sour cream-like spread underneath:

The empanada was dusted with cinnamon and powdered sugar and was very crisp. Sweet but not too sweet and it seemed like it would be better fitted at the end of the meal rather than the beginning. It was also a tad small, but since the main course was coming, I wasn’t worried about the size of my starter.

For my main course, I ordered the eggs benedict with potatoes:

The dish was actually really good…EXCEPT for the fact that they used a biscuit instead of an English muffin. The biscuit was too buttery and distracted from the avocado cream and hollandaise. The hollandaise was slightly spicy and was quite tasty with the diced tomatoes on the side.

Lou ordered the huevos rancheros with black beans:

The eggs tasted like they had been sitting out for a while (and the picture also makes it look like the eggs are stale). The torillas were fresh and were more like quesadillas because they were stuffed with cheese (and because I moved the eggs aside).

The brunch was very popular and was definitely really cheap (two people for less than $25 for brunch? that’s pretty impossible in the city) They have some other good dishes on their brunch menu, including a stuffed French toast that sounded (and looked) pretty delicious.