Over the last few weeks, we took the opportunity to hit up a couple of Chowhound favorites, from the tasting menu at Craigie on Main to goat cheese raviolis and pan-seared barramundi at the Jamaica Plains Ten Tables. The meals were a bit pricey, but within the norm for fine dining of this caliber. This weekend, we returned to NYC to celebrate my mom’s 60th birthday. Now I’ve been to a fair share of Chinese seafood banquets, but this was my first time shelling out nearly $100 per person for Chinese food. At Brooklyn’s East Harbor Seafood Palace, our lavish meal included a lobster salad, dual-style fried jumbo shrimps, crab-stuffed bamboo piths, conch & geoduck with fried tofu, sharkfin soup, stewed whole abalone (the bulk of the cost), deep-fried soft shell crabs, steamed jumbo grouper, longevity noodles, egg and dried scallop fried frice, and a stewed hasma dessert (yes, that’s frog fallopian tubes). If there were an “extreme edition” for Chinese banquet meals, this would have been it. It wasn’t haute cuisine, but definitely worth it to have my extended family together and see my parents enjoy themselves after a very tough year. On Sunday, we scarfed down some old-school pastrami and beef tongue sandwiches from famous Katz’s Deli with one of my oldest friends in NY before returning to Boston.