We haven’t been to NYC enough that I would consider us pros in any sense, but had definitely hit all of the tourist traps on our last visit and decided to take this trip at a decidedly slower pace. We didn’t have an agenda, just a handful of restaurant recommendations and a few must-sees that we knew we wanted to fit in. Otherwise, this trip was a walking tour of quirky neighborhoods and an inventory of hole-in-the-wall restaurants we found along the way.
We slept in on Friday morning (and watched John Mayer perform on the Today Show while we got ready). At the recommendation of one of my favorite girls (hey, Leila!!), we made brunch reservations at Sarabeth’s in TriBeCa for Friday morning. It was about a ten minute walk from our hotel and the restaurant itself was adorable.
The french toast was extraordinary. I had fresh squeezed orange juice and a pile of strawberries on my plate and I ate half of Josh’s applewood smoked bacon. He had a stack of pancakes and we didn’t say two words to each other because we were shoveling food in our mouth. This is definitely on the short list now and we won’t visit the city without stopping by for heart-attack inducing breakfast pastries.
My sweet husband was indulgent on Friday (even though he refused to wait in line for John Mayer) and spent the day following me around The Modern Museum of Art | MOMA for the better part of the day. Remember that I was an art major/art history minor in college, so this excursion was right up my alley. Thankfully, he really enjoyed it and we spent several hours seeing pieces that I had only previously studied in books. There was a small curated collection of circuit maps printed on large format plotters that I thought my dad would love. They were from IBM and AT&T and other computer/electrical companies. Despite the subject matter, the detail was beautiful!
Me & Mark Rothko
Jackson Pollock
Robert Rauschenberg (HUGE fan here)
Jasper Johns
Andy Warhol
Vincent Van Gogh (this was Josh’s fav of the day)
Gustav Klimt (another of my favorites!)
Henri Matisse
Piet Mondrian
Claude Monet
I really, really wanted to see the Rain Room while it was on display and it was free with your MOMA ticket, but the line was so long and it was approaching 100 degrees when we stepped outside. While we’re used to that kind of weather here at home, I’m not normally standing around in a silk shirt, sweating in a crowd of a hundred people, so we passed. The last time we were in the city, we spent a lot of time on the western side of Central Park, so we decided to spend a few hours on the eastern side on Friday afternoon. We grabbed a few bottles of water as we left the museum and headed out on foot.
At some point in the afternoon, we stumbled on an acrobatic act and Josh was asked to participate. It was a muscle flexing, dancing, flying, jumping kind of adventure. It was pretty funny and Josh had a good time.
We came out of the park at the Met, but didn’t really have time to go inside, not to mention it’s massive. Instead, we did a little walking on the Upper East Side and then came back down to Grand Central Station. It was late afternoon and we were ready for some lunch, so we went downstairs to the dining concourse. Maybe I’m weird, but I always love eating at Grand Central. There are a few really great restaurants (they’re building a Shake Shack there, too!), I love the hustle & bustle and the air conditioning is amazing given the temperatures outside. We had grilled chicken sandwiches and onion rings at Tri-Tip Grill and I had yummy coconut gelato at Ciao Bella.
After we cooled off in our room and took a little nap, it was time to hop the subway and head into the Bronx towards Yankee Stadium. I couldn’t stop singing this song in my head the entire way there. We aren’t really Yankees fans, but we do love baseball and we’ve been to several major league stadiums so it was fun to add this one to the list.
As much a we laughed at these pictures, since Josh’s head is chopped off and you can’t even see the stadium that well, I love them both. We asked the lady behind us to take our picture and I felt so bad about not zooming my lens out before handing her my camera, that I was too embarrassed to ask for a do-over! She did tell us that she was trying to be “artsy” and that we were just adorable.
We ended up leaving before the game was over, but mostly because we were starving to death and didn’t want a hot dog for dinner. By the time we got back to our hotel and freshened up and headed out to dinner, it was after 11 o’clock. We had a habit of eating dinner after midnight while we were there. We ended up walking to Lucky Strike in SoHo and it was, hands down, the best meal of the week. Josh had spinach ravioli and I had a grilled chicken BLT and fries. We stayed forever and seriously contemplated going back the next day. If nothing else, we did a stellar job of selecting places to eat while we traveled. We stumbled into bed sometime after 1 o’clock in the morning and didn’t even bother to set our alarm clock.
