I went to Landmarc twice this week for dinner - the first time (Wednesday) at the downtown location and the second (Friday) at the Time Warner Center.

I was very much looking forward to going since Liz was there a bit ago and said it was really great and I also cheated by peeking at the menu online so I pretty much knew the menu and was intrigued by a number of dishes.

Landmarc - West Broadway
We got there, and as usual, I was late. However, this time it TOTALLY wasn't my fault...really, it wasn't. Regardless, I still bet Sarah a cocktail that I wouldn't be late, and I lost. Earlier that evening, I was SO sure I was going to win this time.

Once we got there, Sarah was waiting at the bar, I paid for her drink, and we were promptly seated.

I took a quick peek at my menu to reconfirm my choice for my main and to decide from a few planned choices for my starter. I decided on the French Onion Soup to start and the Smoked Duck for my main. Liz had some salad thing - no interest on my part, so I don't really know what salad she had - it was colorful though, so that was nice. Sarah, after some prodding from me got the Sirloin - She wanted the burger, but since I knew we were going again on Friday, I convinced her to get the Sirloin so that I would know whether to get it on Friday.

My French Onion Soup came quickly and the melted cheese looked so yummy, and it was - I love cheese by the way. After poking through the cheese, the soup was equally good. Since it has been so cold in NYC these past couple of weeks, the nice warm soup totally hit the spot. The richness of the cheese and the savoriness of the broth just added to the overall yummy-high.

Then came our mains. My Smoked Duck was presented nicely on a bed of wilted spinach and a wild rice cake. Overall the dish was on the disappointing side. I am typically a huge fan of duck, but this time, it tasted overly smokey and was on the saltier side. The plus was that despite being salty, the duck flavor was really nice once you got over the initial salt shock. Texture wise, it was very soft and tender. Unfortunately I really couldn't get over the saltiness of the meat. The spinach and the rice cake were a nice compliment to the dish and helped to balance the intense flavor of the duck.

Perhaps I over hyped the duck in my mind prior to eating it. I really expected it to have a much more subtle and delicate taste to it rather than the overpowering salt taste...I guess I was expecting it to taste like the Eastern Gaspe Lox from Fairway, when in fact, the duck tasted like a thick cut of Belly Lox. Not terribly bad, but not terribly good either when I was expecting something much more balanced in flavor.

I finished by meal with a Coffee ice cream cone and a nice cup of coffee. The ice cream was, again, merely OK. I don't really like coffee ice cream with ground up coffee beans in it like this one had. Additionally, the sugar cone that they used had a paper wrapper on it that left paper residue on the cone so I wasn't able to eat the whole cone.

The coffee was quite good and was served in a very comfortable and large ceramic mug - kinda like you were enjoying a coffee at a friends house. Nice.

WHAT WE ATE
Starter:
French Onion Soup

Main:
Me: Smoked Duck Breast
Liz: Some salad thing - not too interesting
Sarah: Grilled Sirloin with fries - The fries were really tasty - I snuck a couple from her plate

Landmarc - Time Warner Center
It had been a long while since I had been to the Time Warner Center. This mega mall at Columbus Circle is actually kinda neat and has lots of great restaurants inside.

After a minor table issue, we were seated in a booth by a window. While we didn't get a table with the best views, it sure beat the high traffic table they tried to seat us at.

Having had a mediocre dinner this past Wednesday at their Tribeca restaurant, I was feeling hesitant about coming back on Friday. I revisited the menu and figured that I give the place another shot. This time I was pleasantly satisfied - everything was great.

I started with the Escargot Bordelaise. While it was good, I think they gave a few pieces too many for a single person. Sometimes food is most enjoyable when the portion size is just too small - this was one of those cases. The escargot was in a beautifully rich tasting sauce that was equally delicate. The sauce was also perfect for bread dipping.

For my main I ordered the Grilled Pork Chop. Heaven. So good. The chop had the perfect amount of fat and was perfectly cooked. I was so hesitant to order this as I was afraid that like so many other places, the chop would come out over cooked and dry. It wasn't.

This chop was prepared pretty naked - meaning without over doing it and trying too hard. Too often I find that food is prepared in a way that it becomes too complex because the chef tries too hard to make the flavors richer and deeper and in the end, the dish fails miserably because the flavors end up being so complex that things clash. Even the accompaniments to the dish were equally simplistic yet right.

Bite after bite, each piece had the perfect amount of fat attached and was extremely juicy. The best part was when I cut to the meat directly touching the bone. In my opinion, this is the best and most flavorful part of any meat.

After I polished off my chop, I saw that Liz had some scraps of her burger. I ate that up too and have now decided that if we come back to Landmarc, I'll be getting the burger.

For dessert, Liz and Hai Dan ordered some cones. Caleb and myself originally ordered two tiramisus, but in the end, we changed our minds and got the sampler. What a great deal. The desserts were all really good, but some got overshadowed. Out of the desserts within the sampler, the Lemon Tart, Blueberry Crumble, and Creme Brulee were head and shoulders above the rest. The Lemon Tart I had had once before when Liz brought home a slice from when she went with another friend. The Blueberry Crumble was just so comfortable feeling and the Creme Brulee was perfectly delicate.

WHAT WE ATE
Starters:
Me: Escargot Bordelaise
Caleb: Smoked Mozzarella & Ricotta Fritters
Hai Dan: French Onion Soup

Main:
Me: Grilled Pork Chop
Liz: Burger with American Cheese
Caleb: Burger with Cheddar Cheese
Hai Dan: Linguini con Vongole

Just wanted to post a full res image shot with my new 24-105mm L.

EDIT - Blogger doesn't do full res, but you can enlarge this one quite a bit, so you'll get a pretty good sense of this lens.

Click to enlarge.

Football season is coming to an end and I am finally getting around to writing about my new Canon EF 24-105mm L IS lens. I read tons of reviews on this lens and weighed the pros and cons just like any other photographer would when faced with buying their first serious piece of glass - (I won't rehash all the pluses and minus of this lens and the other lens that are comparable, as it has already been done many times over). Since this lens was easily twice as expensive as any other lens I have purchased in the past, the decision weighed heavily on me. Ultimately though, I think I made a great decision. This lens is very sharp, has fast auto focus, and is simply a joy to use since I can spend more time taking pictures rather than post processing them (more on this below).

As I am sure that any photographer who shoots digital already knows, just because you CAN edit and tweak your pictures doesn't mean that you necessarily should...BUT, because you can, you always end up doing so...And also, just because you can pixel-peep doesn't mean you should, but again, you inevitably do. The Canon 24-105 L makes all these inevitabilities all in all, less painful.

My previous main lens was the Canon EF-S 17-85mm IS. While I thoroughly enjoyed this lens (great range on my Canon Rebel XTI) for about two years, I ultimately wasn't super satisfied by it. As I used it more and more, the more I realized that I hated certain aspects about this lens - namely, the barrel distortion at the wide end and the awful chromatic abberations. While the barrel distortion is actually quite easy to fix using Adobe Photoshop's Lens Correct tool or PTLens, it proved to be time consuming and rather annoying in terms of my overall workflow. Additionally, and unfortunately, the chromatic abberations were not nearly so easy to fix and required a lot of tweaking to "get it right".

I don't really like spending tons of time editing my photos, and I like being able to do a quick flip through and choose my "picks" and "rejects" using Lightroom. With the 17-85, I often found that after culling my "picks" I had to pop over into Photoshop to correct the barrel distortion on all my wide angle keepers and painstakingly correct the chromatic abberations, which were killing the sharpness of my pictures.

Now, after having shot for a while with my new 24-105, I can easily say that my post processing time has been reduced by an order of magnitude and I find that the majority of tweaks that I am doing are simple white balance, color saturation, and sharpening fixes all in Lightroom.

With this lens, the contrast simply pops - this is a really difficult thing to explain, but once you see L glass and the contrast and sharpness that it provides, you'll know it. I used to emulate this kind of pop by cranking the clarity slider in Lightroom and then increasing sharpness, but again, this took time and really only had maximum effect in the sharpest part of the image (namely the center of the frame where the 17-85 was sharpest). The corner to corner sharpness of the 24-105 is VERY GOOD.

In terms of ergonomics, the 24-105 took a bit to get used to - the zoom and focus ring positions are reversed and the lens is MUCH heavier than the 17-85 (if you are coming from the 18-55 kit lens, you'll think someone attached a boulder to your camera body). After about 30 minutes of shooting though, both these became non issues. What you'll also notice is that the zoom ring is quite a bit stiffer than the 17-85 and the 18-55 kit lens - this is a good thing as it prevents lens creep and inspires a sense of solidness with this lens. Given the added weight, in low light shooting you'll notice that you'll have to modify your hand holding technique - or at least get used to the increase in weight.

As you can probably tell, I really like this lens. I won't say that it is right for everyone though - although, I will say that it was very right for me. Whether this lens proves to be equally right for you, really depends on your shooting style. On a crop body like the Rebel XTI I shoot with, many people say that the lens isn't wide enough and is really equivalent to a 38mm lens and that with the 17-85mm and the 17-55mm, you get true wide angle. While I don't dispute that you lose out on a creative range by giving up the 17-24mm range, the question that you need to ask is how important that range is to YOUR style of shooting. After analyzing my EXIF data for over a year's worth of pictures I found that I really didn't shoot much in that range and when I did, it was typically landscape type shots that I would have easily switched over to my 10-22mm to shoot.

Is this lens a compromise - yes, of course it it, but so is every other lens. With this lens, you get great sharpness, a very useful shooting range (if you like street photography and candids like me, then the longer reach of this lens is perfect), image stabilization, and a constant f4 aperture. What you lose is a true wide angle range and about a thousand bucks.

Ultimately if you are considering this lens, you already know about its positives. In the end, it is really up to you whether this lens suits your shooting style. If I were a big time landscape and nature photographer, I'd probably have the same complaints as some of the other people out there. What I would encourage you to do is to browse around at people's galleries that were shot with this lens and see if your shooting style matches their photographs that they took with this lens.

To take a look at some photos taken with the 24-105mm and the 17-85mm, check out my Flickr photostream - http://www.flickr.com/photos/alancmak/.