$35 Dinner At Norman In NYC

If you live in New York, $35 will buy you a drink or two at the bar—or at most, the first few line items on your Whole Foods grocery list. But for Michelin-starred chefs Claus Meyer and Fredrik Berselius, that amount gets you way more than a box of kale and kombucha.

Starting this month, the fine dining duo are offering an entire three-course meal at their Greenpoint restaurant, Norman, for less than the cost of a Saturday-night Uber ride. The prix fixe menu rotates weekly, offering diners two to three choices per course, making it feel as though you're dropping three figures on a dinner at Aska or Agern, the pair's restaurants that made it onto last year's NYC Michelin Guide.

Starter options could include executive chef Andrew Whitcomb's carrots roasted with coriander and sea buckthorn, and a hill of baby lettuce dressed with fresh dill, crispy rye crackers and a garlicky buttermilk dressing.

Entrées are taken from the restaurant's best hits, including a smoky bowl of red corn porridge flavored with blue oyster mushrooms, licorice root and pickled green tomatoes. Option two: a blanket of zingy, crispy fried kale covering tender hake, meaty Marfax beans and fermented leeks. 

Desserts aren't throwaways either: There's a hulking cross-sectioned slice of cucumber sorbet, decorated with sorrel leaves and edible flowers to the point it wouldn't look out of place at Noma, in addition to a panna cotta-like buttermilk curd, topped with crunchy rye bread and tart rhubarb honey.

And though it's technically an à la carte option, it's hard to go to a Meyer restaurant without splurging—in this case, shelling out an extra five bucks—on some form of sourdough. At Norman, it's an airy, miniature boule of Øland wheat ready to be slathered with cultured butter.

This three-course menu is available only on Mondays, but with how much cash you're saving, it might be well worth it to move your Friday dinner date up a few days.