NYC!

Gaaaah!  I love New York!  And not like the t-shirts, but really.  I love it.  And I went again - hooray!

One of my oldest friends moved there recently from Boston (by way of Italy and India - she probably should've taken that left turn at Albuquerque).  I went to visit her and her boyfriend.  I arrived fairly early Friday morning, so we had two full days, plus another half day.  We would have had more time if we hadn't slept until 11:00 on both of our mornings.  Regardless, we managed to pack lots of fun and good food into our waking hours.

Friday started out with a badly needed cup of coffee at their apartment, then L and I headed into Manhattan and made a stop at Eataly, across the street from Madison Square Park, where I had - you guessed it - another cup of coffee.  And boy was it delicious.  Best latte I've had in a while.  We took a few minutes (although we could have spent hours) exploring the place, which is an interesting combination of restaurant, market, coffee shop, and grocery store.  And it's HUGE!  It just went on and on - must have been at least half a city block, although you'd never know that by looking at it from the outside.  Anywho, we took our coffee on the road and headed to Harlem.

Yep, you heard me: Harlem.  And the heart of it - 125th Street.  We were after Dinosaur Barbeque, which L had been craving for some time.  I can't say for sure whether it was worth her wait, but it was totally worth mine (which amounted to something like three days).  We split a pulled pork sandwich and a brisket sandwich, and had sides of mac and cheese and the carrot and raisin salad.  Everything was delicious, and I'm honestly not sure which of the sandwiches I liked better.  Normally, I'll pick pork over beef, but that was some awfully tasty brisket.  We stopped to get a soda before we got back on the subway, and at a CVS (of all places!) I found a bottle of sasparilla soda.  I wasn't sure if it would be good, but it was!  A bit like root beer, but less sugary.  A good finish for our tasty lunch.

L has a new job and needed to do some shopping, so we ventured back to the general vicinity of midtown to poke around in some seriously noisy and overcrowded shops.  We had success, though - L scored some stylish yet work-appropriate clothes, and I got a couple of staple tanks as well as two fun dresses to add to the list that have yet to be worn.  (What happens if I end up with more than 52?)

We were still so full from our late lunch that we didn't really want dinner, so instead we went back to Eataly, this time to sample the gelato.  It's an Italian store, so the Italian ice cream has to be good, right?  Right.  I had a scoop each of chocolate and raspberry, and though I was disappointed with the diminutive size of my scoop of chocolate (how dare they?), I was not at all disappointed with the flavor, nor with the choc-raspberry flavor combo.  (See, that's the thing about getting more than one scoop.  It compounds the requirements - and the potential, if you succeed - for deliciousness.  Not only does each individual scoop have to be good, but they also have to be good together.  Sometimes it works, as in the case of my chocolate-raspberry combo, which is a classic to which J can attest.  Sometimes it doesn't: lox and banana, anyone?  This place in Puerto Rico even serves horseflesh ice cream! No thank you.)

That was really the end of our night - we just caught the PATH back to Jersey City, hung out for a bit, and headed to bed.

As I said, Saturday was a day for sleeping.  Other than the hour or so of interruption caused by four stomping feet running back and fourth on the hardwood floors in the apartment above us, I slept for a good 11 hours or so.  We were finally able to drag ourselves out of bed because we had designs on the special eight-hour (or 72-hour, accounts differ) Kyoto drip coffee from Blue Bottle Coffee in Williamsburg.  Again, it was worth the wait - all eight hours of dripping, plus the waiting in line.  You're supposed to drink it black and iced; I drank down about a third of it that way, but then added lots of sugar and cream to finish it off.  My first thought, after my first sip, was that the coffee tasted like alcohol.  I decided I was crazy until L said something about it too!  But we came to the joint conclusion that really strong coffee is delicious, if it's also really good, because it doesn't have that bitter aftertaste that not-so-good coffee has.  They also had all sorts of other scrumptious-looking things like homemade granola, s'mores made with Mast Bros. chocolate (see below), snickerdoodles with saffron, etc.  But we had other plans.

The crazy 8-hour drip coffee brewing contraption

(We were in close quarters so I had to do two pictures, and am not going to the effort of combining them into one.  Sorry.)

We had gotten a few Brooklyn recommendations from L's friend - it was my first time there, except one time when I ended up on that side of the Brooklyn Bridge by accident for five minutes or so - so we set off to explore a new area of a new borough.  Our first stop was the farmers' market, which was a bustling metropolis unto itself.  In addition to the usual vegetable, fruit, jam, and soap vendors, there was a kind of Taste of Williamsburg thing happening, which apparently gets paired up with the farmers' market every weekend!  What a wonderful place!  We selected pupusas for lunch from the tent of a Salvadoran restaurant, and they were quite tasty and very filling.  We were lucky enough to snag a spot on a bench looking out over the East River while we ate, and we relaxed there for a bit letting our food digest.

 I guess sticking a sharpie in some wet cement counts as art?

It's my place!  Who knew I had one?

Once we were ready to hit the streets again, we were off to the City Reliquary, a teeny museum of New York City miscellany, including a collection of Statue of Liberty replica tchotchkes and postcards, bottles of water from famous NYC restaurants (including Katz's Deli), a subway door, a fireman's jacket, and on and on.  Oh, and a room-sized ode to the Slice Harvester, who's eating his way around Manhattan's pizza joints.

Our other primary destination for the day was Mast Brothers Chocolate, where I picked up three super dark and super delicious bars: pecan and maple; almond and sea salt; and fleur de sel (why don't they just call it sea salt?).  They had lots of bars out to taste in the store, but so far of my own I'm still working on the first one.

Nice pants.

We left Mast and met up with L's boyfriend, who had been venturing around on his own all day, going to art galleries and museums.  He's a sculptor (and it turns out he's kind of a big deal in the world of contemporary sculpture), which would make him perfect for Brooklyn, except that he looks down on the hipsters who live there.  Hm.  [I've been corrected.  It's not that he looks down on them.  He just doesn't want to live in Brooklyn.]  Regardless, we hung out at the river a bit more, taking in the view, then headed off to find some eats (yet again).

What we found was Traif, and it was a good one.  As a starter, we each got a little cup of watermelon gazpacho, which as best as I could tell consisted of some odd but delicious combination of tomato, watermelon, basil, and white wine vinegar, as well as lots of other subtle stuff, I'm sure.  L and I did the sharing thing again: baked muenster with apples and crostini for her (and me), and short rib sliders with sweet potato fries and smoked paprika aioli for me (and L).  J did butterfish carpaccio with pickled blackberries, which he was kind enough to let us try, as well as seared scallops with sweet pea risotto.  All certifiably wonderful.

We headed back to the big island and - yes - got more gelato.  This time I did a scoop of coffee and a scoop of hazelnut, which were another good combo.  L and J ventured off to the foreign world of the Upper West Side for the birthday party of a friend, and I walked down to meet my own friend S at Terroir, a teeny little wine bar in the East Village that we've been to before - they have a teeny little menu and an uncharacteristically huge wine list.  Also joining us were S's girlfriend and her roommate, though they were a little late arriving because they live, as S says, "on another planet" - by which he means in the Financial District.

I had a loose plan to meet L and J back at the PATH station in Jersey City, and we realized when we got off the train at the station that we had been on the same train - a car apart! (It's hard to coordinate because there are no cell signals down there, so we just said we'd meet when we got there.)

Sunday was another late morning getting started (but mercifully quiet - not sure where the kids were).  For breakfast, L and I split (are we noticing a pattern here?) Mexican french toast at the local Taqueria, though I'm still a little mystified about how it's different than regular french toast.  We also each had a cactus taco, my first!  And the horchata was delightful - very sweet but refreshing.

We did a little more hanging out at the waterfront, this time looking at NYC from the other side.

Over near the left where you see the building with the cranes on top, that's Ground Zero-ish.  They're rebuilding!

And then, ...well, if I told you we got gelato, would you be surprised?  Because we did.  We went to a place called Tommy Two Scoops, and my combo this time was interesting.  I got amaretto and Parmesan olive oil.  It sounds gross, but we were curious about the latter, so had tasted it - it mostly tasted like really rich creamy vanilla with a little bite, so it fit surprisingly well with the amaretto.

That, folks, was the end of my trip.  It was back to the airport and then home.  I did meet a nice guy in the airport with whom I chatted for a while - lawyer, former rugger, sponsor of a boat at the Royal St. John's Regatta.  Lots to talk about, and it helped the time go by more quickly.

Don't worry, I've already warned L that I'll be back!