Day #16- Thursday

Thursday we had a visitor- Amy D! She is staying here with us for a few days, so we were excited to see a familiar face from home. Scott especially loves getting to be Mr Tour Guide and show off his knowledge of the city.

Amy was hungry, we took her to Terrior, our favorite wine bar here in the city. Besides having a staggering variety of wine, they also have the BEST meatballs I've ever had. We already came here once with Holly and Jon, but knew that Amy would love it here as well. The 3 of us shared meatballs, oxtail and red wine risotto balls, and pea and mint bruschetta. We also all got a free glass of sherry, because they give out a free glass if you come between 5:00-6:00. While Scott was the only one of us who liked it, it was fun to get something for free! That is a rarity in this town!

After Terrior, we walked back home to get changed for the night. We decided to go to a new hot spot, called Employees Only. We each got one fancy cocktail. Amy got a drink called Amelia, which had homemade blackberry syrup, fresh mint, and vodka. I got the Waterloo, which was 2 or 3 whole pieces of fresh watermelon, muddled down with a splash of vodka- very light and refreshing! Scott got a Bella Rosa, which had strawberry puree and Camparie (a type of liquor). They were very good!

Amy's drink

My drink

Afterwards, we went to dinner at a restaurant called The Breslin. This restaurant is co-owned by Ken Friedman and chef April Bloomfield, who is amazing! We loved our dinners. Scott and Amy both got the lamb burgers:

I had the veal stew, which was surprisingly light, yet rich and delicious:

We also shared an order of homemade vinegar chips- YUM!

We had an awesome dinner, and an awesome time with our Amy D! We are so excited to have her with us for a few days!

Day #15- Wednesday

It's official- We've been here 2 WHOLE WEEKS! Oh my gosh, where does the time go? Wow.

We are still loving every minute of it!

Except the work part of it. We worked 6 hours that afternoon. Boo. But, it's worth it to be able to be here and work from our apartment.

So, nothing too exciting to blog about for Wednesday.

After work, we decided that we wanted to go somewhere and have a fancy cocktail. We went to this place called Orient Express. It is designed to look like an old 1920's train car inside, and was really cool looking! All the waitstaff wore vintage clothing that looked circa 1920's. It was a really neat place! Here are the drinks we got:

Fancy and delicious!

Afterwards, we went to a fabulous dinner at Maialiano, which is a Danny Meyer restaurant. The cuisine is Roman, which we have never had before. Scott got his favorite, Tripe (which is cow's stomach, cut up into little pieces that looks like pasta). I will say, I did try some of it, and it was actually pretty good. How gross is that? It really tasted like pasta with red sauce. I could never eat a whole plate of it, I would be too grossed half way through, thinking about what I was eating. But he thoroughly enjoyed it!

I had spaghetti. Not a lot to say about that, except that it was really good!

We are having a great time eating our way through NYC!

Day #14- Tuesday

Tuesday was Ticket Day. By this I mean that Scott and I went down to Times Square to buy our show tickets for the rest of the trip. We bought tickets for Mary Poppins (for me, Megan, and Lindsay when they come to visit), and South Pacific.

While walking back through Times Square, we stumbled upon this little production called Hair Battle. Basically, it was a hair modeling show with 5 models, and 3 judges who scored them. One of the judges was Constantine, who was a finalist in American Idol (he was also in Rock of Ages when we saw that, I forgot to mention that in the post).

Judge Constantine!

Just another random performance in Times Square!

After watching the show for a while, we decided it was lunchtime. We wanted to try out Patsy's, which is supposedly a rival of Lombardi's. On our way there, we witnessed a commercial being shot!

I'm pretty sure it was a commercial for Allstate Insurance, as that is the guy that is always in those commercials.

Random, but cool!

When we got to Patsy's, we ordered the Margarita Pizza. Oh. My. Goodness.

Scott and I both agreed, this was better than Lombardi's! We couldn't believe it- something better than Lombardi's???? We were shocked and excited! When Megan and Lindsay come to visit us, we are DEFINITELY taking them here.... This pizza was absolutely the BEST PIZZA EVER!!!! I'm sure I will have dreams of this for the rest of my life!

After that deliciousness, we went back to the apartment and worked for the rest of the afternoon.

That night, we had tickets to see La Cage aux Folles. This was like that movie "The Birdcage"... but this production starred Kelsey Grammer! It was absolutely hilarious- we loved every minute of it! As photography was prohibited, I was only able to sneak in a few shots :-)

There is Kelsey! In the black pants and white jacket on the left.

Here's Kelsey, sitting down on the left.

He did an amazing performance, but it was weird to see him in this role. All I could think was, "That's Frazier!" It was a great show, we really loved it!

After dinner, we went to a late diner at Blue Ribbon Brasserie. The food was good, but I think Blue Ribbon Sushi is better. I got fried chicken with mashed potatoes and collard greens, and Scott got sweetbreads with arugula, mushrooms, and carrots. He liked his food better than I did. But after that amazing show, it was a wonderful night, no matter what we ate afterwards!

Day #13-Monday

Monday. Day 13. Where does the time go? I can't believe we've been here almost 2 whole weeks! We'll be home before we know it. But, we'll ignore that for now and focus on the present!

On Monday, we worked until 4:00. Then we went to a place called Mamouns and bought falafel's for lunch.

It was a warm pita stuffed with lamb(called Schwarma), tomatoes, salad, cucumber yogurt sauce, and flattened falafels (fried croquettes of smashed chic peas and sesame seeds).

They were really good, but also really messy to eat!

After lunch, we decided to walk back to the Village and wander around the neighborhood. We stumbled upon a sample sale and got some good buys. I got a couple dresses and Scott got some shirts and a sports jacket. We spent the afternoon shopping, and got back to the apartment for some down time and to decide on where to go for dinner. We had been wanting to go to Casa Mono, one of Mario Batali's restaurants. It's a tapas place, meaning small plates. So we went there and sat at the kitchen bar, which allowed us to watch all the food being cooked and plated right in front of us. It was so much fun! Check it out:

Oh my gosh, this was so much fun! It felt like we were in an episode of Iron Chef! We loved every minute of it. And then, the food came.....

Our first two small plates were pumpkin and goat cheese croquettes, and oxtail stuffed piquillo peppers. YUM! This was fabulous!

This was cod cheeks with sea bass and black garlic. It was pretty good, didn't totally love it though.

Confit goat with summer squash. It kind of tasted like braised beef- very juicy, succulent, and fall apart tender. Mmmmmmm........ this was AH. MA. ZING!

This is leg of lamb with pickled peppers. It was good, but a teeny bit undercooked. We like it medium rare, but some parts were straight up raw, not rare.

This is bone marrow with radishes. I k now this sounds gross, but it isn't! It soft and delicious.

Check out the spoon we were given to scoop out the marrow:

Even though the fish and the lamb weren't my favorites, overall the dishes were phenomenal. And getting to watch them be prepared was the absolute best part of all!

Day #12-Sunday

Ok, I'm officially behind on blog posts now. So much to write about, so little time to write it! I'll add a quick post about Sunday, as we really didn't do much. After our action filled Friday and Saturday, we were tired and needed a break from constantly doing something. So, we slept in, then went to eat brunch at this little dinner that is about 100 steps from our front door. It's just your basic, greasy spoon diner, called La Bondbonniere. Scott got an omelette, and I got corned beef hash and eggs. Nothing fancy, but sometimes you just get tired of fancy, ya know?

After some good ol' diner food, we decided to pack up our towels and my laptop and spend the day in the Sheep's Meadow at Central Park. Scott wanted to lay in the sun, and I wanted to catch up on my blog posts. The product of that afternoon in the park were the lengthy (perhaps overly) posts from Thurs-Sat. So, nothing too exciting to blog about for Sunday. I'll just post pictures of the park, and our 50+ block walk home from the park (we had to get some exercise in after laying around all day!)

Scott getting some sun

Everyone must have had our same idea- it was very crowded in the Meadow!

Walked along the Hudson River Greenway to get back home. Beautiful views of the river!

Retired Aircraft Carrier, the USS Intrepid. It's now a sea-air-space museum

Built during WWII

Scott wants to go back and tour the museum one day. I'm really excited to do that, let me tell you.

Ha.

For dinner, we went to a burger place. Hard to believe, I know! After blogging about Scott's burger obsession all day, I was actually in the mood for one! We went to this place called Bill's Bar and Burger. It was a really cute place, made to look like a retro style diner. But fancier. And the burgers- oh my! I'll have to say, these actually rivaled the coveted Shake Shack burgers! They were extremely delicious, and we will definitely be coming back! Yum!

Day #11- Saturday

We slept in on Saturday, and enjoyed a leisurely morning where we didn’t have to work. For brunch, we went to the neighborhood Corner Bistro. Scott had heard that they have a really good burger here (surprise, surprise) J This place was like stepping back in time. It was an old bar and grill, and looked to be unchanged since they opened in the early 1900’s. They even had one of those old school cash registers, like the kind you see in old Western movies. It was an original manual register, it looked like it should belong in a museum! So obviously, only cash was accepted here. We walked in, and the owner motioned for us to sit at a table, and told us that the menu was on the board of the wall. Here is what was on the menu: Cheeseburger. Hamburger. Grilled Cheese. Grilled Chicken Sandwich. Chili. Chili Burger. BLT sandwich. French Fries.

That’s it. Literally. So, I got the Grilled Cheese sandwich (which ironically, is actually what I was in the mood for before we even went inside... good thing since that was one of the only choices!) And Scott got the burger, of course. I’ll have to say, the burger is the thing to get there. It was really good (not Shake Shack good, but what is). I even really liked it, despite my slight distaste for burgers. My grilled cheese was really pathetic. I like the occasional cheap, crappy Velveeta grilled cheese from time to time, but this one just wasn’t good. The key is to have it extra buttery, and grilled till it’s just on the verge of being burnt- this bread was neither of those. Oh well, every meal can’t be great!

After our brunch, we decided that we needed to get some good exercise in, so we planned on walking to Central Park. As the park is 50 blocks from our apartment, we thought that would be good exercise, and then we could walk more once we got into the park.

As we walked, we stumbled upon a street fair, so did some walking/shopping through the streets. A lot of the vendors from Chinatown come to set up at these street fairs, so we had lots of things to look at. "Designer" purses, jewelry, clothes, belts, leather goods, sunglasses, knick knacks, and NYC souvenirs were abundant. I decided on buying these:

You can never have enough pairs of gold earrings!

We took our time, wandering around, exploring different areas as we walked closer to the park. I stopped to get my picture taken with Bobby Flay:

Haha... I wish :-)

We then stopped at the TKTS booth in Times Square because we want to see some Broadway shows, and TKTS has discounted tickets for them. After waiting in line for 30 minutes, we discovered at the ticket window that the only seats left for that night for almost every show was in the front orchestra section, and tickets were $70-$90. While this is a discount from what those seats normally cost, we don't like sitting in that section. We like to be in the balcony, where we can see everything. So, we walked away empty handed.

At this point, we had been walking (and standing in line) for close to 3 hours, and we still had another 15 blocks to even get to the beginning of the park. We decided that we had had enough (my feet were already shot from the night before- I had several blisters on my feet from those shoes), so hopped on the subway back to the apartment. Oh well, we'll get to the park another day.

As it was almost 6:00, we went ahead and got showered and changed for dinner.

We walked up to an area of town called Chelsea to a pizza place called "Co." (pronounced Company) We each got a pie. Scott got the meatball pizza, which had veal meatballs, tomato, mozzarella, caramelized onions, olives, and oregano. It was fab! (And yes, I even had some, but of course picked the onions off mine!) I had the special of the day, which had a garlic and parmasean base, shitake and oyster mushrooms, a bechamel sauce, and shaved jalapeños. Talk about delicious! Wow. So, so good!

As if that wasn't enough food, we split a dessert. It was called "Affogato and Abalone", which means espresso poured over vanilla gelato and a chocolate pudding filled donut on the side (loosely translated). The chocolate pudding filled donut was ridiculously good! Soft and chewy, with a burst of creamy chocolately goodness inside. Wow.

After that carb filled meal, we knew we had better walk to our next destination or fall asleep sitting in a cab or subway. As it was Saturday night, we went to visit our favorite once again, Don't Tell Mama piano bar. Man, this place is so much fun! We had a great time singing along with the piano player and the other patrons. After many songs of Billy Joel, Neil Diamond, and countless Broadway show tunes, we went home with "Sing us a song, you're the piano man" playing over and over again in our heads. Another successful night in New York City!