The Tao of Tao

I know I'm biased but I am the mom of the most awesome kid on the planet. I mean, no offense, but he's pretty terrific.
He goes off to summer camp for nearly 8 weeks and I always try to do some special kind of last hurrah before e goes but this year I outdid myself. Thanks to the Shannon family, I hooked him up with a private tour and sitting in on a live studio recording at WPLJ radio in NY above Madison Square Garden the day before he left for camp. So awesome! Everyone was super friendly and he got a great insider's view of how it all works, which he loved. As an added bonus, the studio is also a movie set right now - Dax Sheppard is filming scenes from the upcoming film This Is Where I Leave You, co-starring Tina Fey, Jason Bateman and Jane Fonda. Very cool...
Anyway, we had to be at the station early so I booked us a hotel room for the night before and we had dinner at Tao.  It's part of the same restaurant group as Lavo (about which I blogged) and the Arlington Club and it's pretty great. I mean, there is a 2 story Buddha in the main dining room!
The food is as cool as the name. My son loved some of their totally non-vegan land and sea items, and got a kick out of the faux-jito - a mojito without the rum. Sugar cane, mint, and ginger ale or sprite.  It was a fun way to make a toast to a great summer.
For my entree I had the buddha's vegetables - they come with soba noodles but I have been trying to avoid bread, pasta, rice and potato this month so I got them without.  They were really delicious and much more satisfying than you might expect a bowl of stir-fried vegetables to be.
Maybe what helped to make them so filling (or to make me so full) was my need to try to tempura veggies.  I know - funny for me to be avoiding starchy carbs but indulging in fried food but a) it was a tempura with no egg (very exciting) and b) not only did they have tempura eggplant but they had tempura AVOCADO!  Tell me - how could I NOT try that?  It was melt-in-your-mouth indulgence.  I couldn't eat the whole order of 3 pieces but it was so worth the try.
For dessert, we ordered the giant fortune cookie.  For me, there was delicious fresh fruit.  For my son, this jumbo cookie was filled with two kinds of chocolate mousse.  I think the look on his face in the photo below speaks for itself - he was pleasantly overwhelmed!