"Rice" is nice!

I'm helping my brother out for a few days down in Soho. He's editing a commercial and I'm acting as his assistant. It's awesome of him to bring me on, because it means I can earn some extra cash while looking for a job, and he's also in this really fancy building with lots of other production companies, so I'm in the middle of where things are happening.

Whenever my brother and I try to eat anything together (usually food), we have the toughest time figuring out what to eat. This is because both he and I are extremely lazy, meaning that it's too much of a hassle to really care too much about what we end up eating, as long as it's yummy. Or maybe we just care a little too much that it's yummy, and making the wrong choice about what we eat for a meal could be devastating.

Today, we spent about 20 minutes discussing where we were going to get food from for lunch before we actually got it. But man, I was pleased with the decision. We ended up ordering from this place called Rice, which has a ton of different choices, all involving, you guessed it, rice.

We got an order of tofu satay-($6.50 for small, $11.00 for large, comes with rice, described on their menu as "tofu served with a warm satay sauce of roasted almonds and peanuts") with thai black rice ("sticky black skinned grain with white flesh, rich distinctive flavor, steamed in coconut milk") and an order of vegetarian meatballs ($6.00 for small, $10.50 for large - "tofu balls with miso, soy, scallions and red pepers with sweet or spicy chili sauce") with green rice ("infused with cilantro, parsley & spinach"). Sounds super healthy, right? I'm guessing it was, and healthy usually tastes boring, but everything tasted awesome.

Healthy is good, as long as it tastes like something. Rice isn't a vegetarian place; we just got tofu cause my brother's a vegetarian and cause it can taste good when the right thing is done to it. Both main dishes had tons of flavor, the satay creamy and nutty, the veggie balls sweet and spicy. I had never had black rice before; it's looks really cool, and it tastes good too, has a good texture to it. There are still a ton of things on the menu I'd like to try, like lebanese rice, thai beef salad, tea-smoked salmon salad, butternut squash chowder, carrot or spinach rice balls, to name a few.

Another great thing is that the place is all about being healthy and environmentally friendly. Their website tells us that they get all their food from "conscientious" vendors, they donate 1000 lbs of organic waste a week to this farm nearby, and their delivery van even runs on "filtered Waste Vegetable Oil", meaning after they use oil in cooking, they then use it for fuel for their van (which is way better than the other way around...haha?).

From what I can tell, they have 4 different locations; we got food from the place in Nolita, which is at 292 Elizabeth street (212-226-5775) downtown, right off of Houston. I almost walked right past it, because it's also a coffee shop, and that name is what's big on the door (I think it's called Johnny's coffee, but don't quote me on that), but they're at the same location. I would love to eat in there sometime, cause the atmosphere seems great.

Rice is nice, like sugar and spice!

*I didn't take the photo: I grabbed it from Rice's homepage*