Little Bites from the Big Apple

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We just got back from a long weekend in New York City celebrating a milestone birthday for one of our dearest friends.   It was a weekend of sights and sounds and smells and food and high energy fun that is hard to duplicate in any other city in the country, or at least in the cities I've been to.  You never know, a weekend jaunt in Cleveland might just be an undiscovered romp, but my money is on the Big Apple as the premier destination for hedonistic pleasures.

We stayed in the trendy Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, which still astonishes me since when I first started traveling to New York it was smelly urban blight at its worst.  Boarded up tenements, syringe littered streets, discount hookers and countless possibilities of finding yourself on the business end of a Saturday night special were about all that could be discovered there.  Over time, the area gentrified as bulldozers scraped the ground, developers built posh apartments and hotels, and gays made everything look pretty.  Nowadays it is probably the hippest and liveliest slice of the Apple for shops and bars and restaurants and sidewalk cafes.  And the hookers now charge a premium.

A cute little Italian place on 9th Avenue at 44th Street has somehow survived since 1971.  Guido and his wife opened her eponymous Mamma Mia's there a year or so after immigrating to America from Naples, Italy.  I am sure it was a pretty scary location for the first 25 years or so, but they prevailed over the escalating drug traffic and street toughs with dirty fingernails, and once the area started migrating upscale, changed the name of the restaurant to 44SW in 1993.  (Not really sure this was an improvement.)  We had a couple of drinks, a salad, some spaghetti and meatballs, and a few other chianti-bottle-candle classics for something south of $65. Score! (We followed that up with a neighborhood bar that featured highballs for $2 until 10 PM and I was like "am I dreaming this?")

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Another heavenly find in the hood was KTCHN on 42nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues.  It had a really cool vibe and the food was simply prepared and quite tasty.  In particular, my tagliatelle pasta with fresh tomatoes, white wine, basil, pine seeds and grilled chicken seemed like something you could easily throw together at home but just don't seem to get around to it.  They also serve delicious "sexy fries" although I for one couldn't find anything particularly come hither about them.



The standout of the trip was Sunday brunch at the recently reopened Tavern on the Green. Thankfully, the new operators removed all the grandma's attic floral everything (it used to look like what I imagine to be from whence  Laura Ashley's nightmares originate) and pared the decor back to evoke a well-appointed gentleman's country estate.  (You'd never guess it was originally designed and built in 1870 to house the 200 sheep that grazed in Central Park's Sheep Meadow.) We had fabulous breakfast pastries from the world famous Balthazar, and I ordered the Lobster Chowder with Lobster Roe Butter but wished I'd chosen something else when it came.  The little tiny piece of lobster swimming in the salty broth sort of hurt my feelings, especially since it cost $24.  (That's about $12 per forkful, and that's only if  you take tiny, civilized bites.)  It was still a great experience and I would definitely return because it feels so celebratory and timeless in there.

The one disappointing meal the entire weekend was one I should have known to avoid in the first place.  It is said you really can't get a decent Mexican meal in any restaurant north of the Mason Dixon line, an adage even truer in New York City.  I mean for Pete's sake they think salsa is Heinz Ketchup with dehydrated minced onions stirred into it.  We went to a place called Anejo after a three-hour tour orbiting Manhattan on the famous Circle Line ship drinking Irish Coffees so perhaps our judgment was a wee bit impaired.  We had chicken nachos (pretty sure it was pigeon meat) slopped with some kind of drab gravy and draped with a slice of American Cheese (still inside its single portion plastic wrapping.) For once the four Texans amongst our group got to to feel all superior to the dazzling NYC cognoscenti but then we went outside and saw the Chrysler Building and Times Square and a couple of Rockettes and we were rubes again.