Entries tagged with eating in new york

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Momofuku Milk Bar and Bakery

Location: 207 2nd Ave, a little west of the corner of 13th and 2nd. New York City.

I've been known to plan entire trips around single restaurants. This trip was quite the opposite: a whirlwind of travel with only a few weeks advance notice of exactly where we'd be going and when we'd be going there. It was too late and too populate a time to made reservation at anywhere competitive for our 24 hours in NYC, and too many places were closed on Sunday night, my prime dinner opportunity. So I set my sights simultaneously low and high: I arranged to meet C. and

vschanoes for breakfast at the most casual extension of one of the city's hottest restaurants: Momofuku Milk Bar and Bakery.

( Breakfast with pie, cake, and ice cream... )

Mostly, the food was way too rich, heavy, and dense for us, with too narrow a flavor band for real excitement, but when the execution of ideas came through, they were appealingly intriguing. I'm still finding that gingerbread soft serve thought-provoking. I still wish I'd bought a kimchi-blue cheese croissant for later. I'm looking forward to seeing what the seasonal specials are the next time that I'm in town.

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New York City

I've always found Manhattan claustrophobic - it has too little sky. This time, however, it didn't intimidate as much as it does usually. I've begun to be innured by London's throng of buildings, living near skyscrapers and six-story blocks of flats. Sunlight softened the Manhattan. The crowds were no worse than London, although the police treatment of traffic seemed more cavalier, clearing blocks of city around Times Square for ambulances - not a lane of traffic, but streets' worth. White-uniformed sailors crowded the subway for Fleet Week. Dramatically geometric architecture was interspersed with uneventful blocks of apartments. The doughnuts cost more and the subway is still dingy.

I met Z. for dinner,

cliosfolly for the Met, and

chamaeleoncat for a day of leisurely wandering in Westchester county. Dinner at Thalia was good but too large; the Met was fabulous but too large; and the day of leisurely wandering was just right. We wandered the trails of the sometime Rockefeller estate, spied a deer picking its way along a meandering little river, watched revolutionary soldiers rehearsing, and ate ice cream in Sleepy Hollow at Main Street Sweets. (How can you not like an ice cream store that makes its own, and includes a flavor called "Holy Soot", chocolate ice cream with fudge and crunchies swirled in?)

In the Met, we strayed from vase to krater, mask to print, fabric scrap to turban finial. One monolith was labeled as either shrine or goal post, a sure sign that the curators don't actually know what it is. Tlaloc-the-rain-god and vultures recurred. From the roof terrace, we surveyed skyscrapers and obelisks; on the second floor, we wandered through Venice and Islam, the walls painted gem-like colors. A full, proper afternoon tea civilized the expedition, with finger sandwiches, petit-fours, and delightful scones flecked with candied currants. We still don't know what Yellow and Blue tea is, but we drank it nonetheless; after lemonade, it tasted of honey to me.

Sunlight and good company tamed Manhattan for a day, but New York City is still mostly a stranger to me.

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eating in new york

Reunions

Friday night, New York
( For the first time, I recognized NYC, en route to see a Londoner... )

At a Chilean restaurant, Pomaire, we chatted the evening away over tasty little beef empanadas, and ceviche not quite fresh enough for my liking (but close). The appetizers killed my appetite for dinner and dessert, although I poked at a Poor Man's Steak (fried eggs on sirloin with sautéed onions). The real highlight, however, was the vino con duranzos, sauvignon blanc full of chopped peach, softly sweet fruit mellowing the wine.

Next time I'm passing through, she said, she'd love to try some of the tempting restaurants in NYC which I read about in food blogs and magazines and newspaper reviews.

Monday night, Greenwich
How is it that I've made it through over a year of living so close to Greenwich and not been? It's so close, and so alive. The streets are healthily varied in shops and clientele, the turn of streets highlighting views of markets and passageways, historic ships and museums. For the navigational exhibits, zeroth meridian, and the food, I owe it to myself to go back.

Yet thanks to one-time York student, sometime Durham student, and current Australian resident K.P., at least I've now been back. He's here on a whirlwind of family Events, and Monday was when ten of us met up in the mostly-emptied but still echoing covered market to catch up for the first time since the wedding three years ago. We knew some of the Durhamites from the wedding, if not Durham visits, so that was reunion too.

They're doing well down south, still unsure if they're there long-term or short. So much depends on the job, and he's an academic.