Spring Break New York, pt 1

While others might make their way to Daytona Beach or St. Pete for Spring Break, in search of sun, sand, and sin, we headed to New York, in search of, well, spring (that would be nice), sun (that would make things even better),

 fig. a:  the gang's all here

and fine dining (always important).  And good wine.  And specialty foods, especially Italian.  And, last, but not least, some quality social time with our friends R & MA.

Turns out, we picked the right weekend.  It was downright warm, with plenty of sunshine, all weekend long.  And, apparently, it was the first time New York had had such nice weather since 2013.  It sure seemed like it.  It felt like the entire city was out on the streets and in the parks, taking it all in.  And the first signs of spring started to appear on the landscape.

 fig. b:  spring comes to Manhattan

Highlights:

Sullivan Street Bakery still bakes some fine flatbreads, and when you're heading to East 57th via the Henry Hudson Parkway, it makes an easy stop.  We picked up three different kinds this time, but our favourite was the potato pie once again.

The Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant remains one of New York's great dining rooms and one of our favourite places for seafood & beer--plus, the service is always classic.  All it took was a few dozen oysters, some clams casino, a smoked fish platter, a couple of pan roasts, and a few cold ones to make us forget we'd ever been on the road that day.

We'd been to the Chelsea Market plenty of times back in the day, but it turns out we'd never been to the elaborate food court version of the Chelsea Market.  The Chelsea Market claims that its shops, restaurants, and stalls attract somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5 to 6 million visitors every year to its repurposed and reconditioned former National Biscuit Company factory location, and, having visited on a busy Saturday afternoon, I don't doubt that figure.  It felt like a teeming hive in there, but at least there was just cause for those throngs:  there were definitely a lot of tempting treats to be had.  But we already had lunch plans in the works, so we put the blinders on and focused our attention on two places:  Buon Italia and The Lobster Place.

Buon Italia had a great selection of Italian specialty items, but what we liked about it the most was its no-frills approach and its reasonable prices.  Actually, that's not true--what we liked about it the very most was its Sardinian pane carasatu.  And its Easter displays, like its marzipan fruits (and mushrooms).

 fig. c:  Easter treats

We had to keep our purchases at The Lobster Place to a minimum, because it was early in the day and it was going to be hours before we returned to our accommodations.  So all we got, really, were a few cans of Spanish canned anchovies, but the place was driving us nuts because this was the very best, freshest, most beautiful selection of seafood we'd seen since Cape Cod.  If the circumstances would have been different, we would have gone to town.

Michelle has had to listen to me wax poetic about Umami Burger for a few years now, and L.A. has proven elusive since then, so when I read that they'd opened up shop in New York City, we decided to make a visit a priority.  Man, am I ever glad that we did.  I didn't love the location as much as the Hollywood one, but the burgers--three Originals and one green chile-laced Hatch burger--sure tasted good.  And the fried pickles and onion rings were pretty choice, too.  Our entire party was hugely impressed.  In fact, I had to physically restrain Michelle to keep her from ordering a second Original burger (parmesan crisp, shiitake mushrooms, roasted tomato, caramelized onions, house ketchup) "for dessert."  That, my friends, is the power of umami.

 fig. d:  Flatiron District

Later that same afternoon we found ourselves inside that multi-ring circus that is Eataly, just off Madison Square Park and right across the street from the Flatiron Building (you can see there in the photograph above, off to the right).  I thought I'd never been there before, but, as it turns out, I had:  I was in that very same location over a decade earlier for a wedding, back when it was an event space.  With the drinks flowing, a red-hot band on stage, and some dirty dancing on the floor, that wedding had been a pretty crazy occasion, but, I dare say, Eataly on a Saturday afternoon is even crazier.  The gelato line alone was about half a mile long.  Elsewhere, the store had the feel of a department store on Christmas Eve:  pure mayhem.  But, once again, if you hung in there and kept your wits about you, there were amazing finds to be had:  more pane carasatu, anchovy juice, artisanal mostardas, and every style of pasta imaginable, including a number of different kinds of our favourite, corzetti.  We were seriously tempted by the notion of having a late-afternoon snack at Il Pesce, the in-house seafood restaurant that's under the oversight of Dave Pasternack.  And the charcuterie section was pretty tantalizing, too--voracious diners were downing beautiful platters of cheese and cold cuts with their wine.  In the end, we decided to replicate the charcuterie section back in the comfort and splendour of R & MA's apartment--so I picked up some mortadella, some prosciutto, some salumi al finocchio, and a selection of cheeses and we were off!

To be continued...

Sullivan Street Bakery, 533 W. 47th Street, NYC, (212) 265-5580

Grand Central Oyster Bar, Grand Central Station, NYC, (212) 490-6650

The Chelsea Market, 75 9th Avenue, NYC

Umami Burger, 432 6th Avenue (a.k.a., Avenue of the Americas), NYC, (212) 677-8626

Eataly, 200 5th Avenue, NYC, (212) 229-2560

aj

New York Winterlude 1, rev. ed.

fig. a: several large men's footprints, one giant shadow

Maybe it's the fact that Snowpocalypse 2010 has had me thinking of our friends to the south. Then again, maybe it's just that Sam Sifton's review of Motorino this week has left me in a tizzy--a pizza tizzy. Whatever, the case, I finally got around to revising a post that got started about a year ago, not long after a short, sweet mid-February New York Winterlude in early 2009.

It went something like this:

Day 1 began with us having to move our car out of our Midtown, 2nd Ave. parking spot by 8:00 am to avoid getting a nasty ticket. We weren't planning on using the car while we were in New York, but once we got in the car, we figured, "if we have to move it anyway, might as well get some use out of it, right?" So we went about as far crosstown as you could possibly go, to Jim Lahey's Sullivan Street Bakery on W. 47th near 11th Ave. A little crazy, I know, especially when you're on vacation, but Michelle had a hankering for croissants and I had designs on some of their famous flatbreads, so... Plus, we had plans to visit Lahey’s just-opened Co. later in the trip, so this was research.

They'd just opened when we arrived, and they were still very much in the process of setting up shop, but they had plenty of fresh croissants on hand and their counter display already looked pretty appealing.

fig. b: display case, Sullivan St. Bakery

So we grabbed a couple of croissants, and a couple of slices and headed back through the crosstown traffic and the mayhem in search of coffee.

fig. c: Michelle & Juan

We didn't find any of New York's "serious" coffee shops, but we did find Juan Valdez, and he was happy to serve us.

fig. d: sous les pavés, la forêt

Day 1 was all about Midtown and the Upper East Side. We were lucky enough to be staying with friends on E. 57th, and we had museums we wanted to visit, so we put our car in long-term parking and hit the pavement.

fig. e: Sullivan St. Bakery's potato pie

By the time we reached the Met, we were a little peckish again, so Michelle pulled out a slice of Sullivan Street's lovely potato pie that she'd wisely stashed in her backpack, and we refueled in Central Park. We love their basic marinara slice, but those guys definitely have a way with potatoes. Look how golden they are!

fig. f: one in a thousand

Our main reason for going to the Met was to check out their "Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard" exhibition, which displayed hundreds of artifacts from Evans' gargantuan personal collection of early 20th-century postcards (including this beauty depicting plums being dried into prunes in Campbell, CA) and made a very interesting argument about how this collection influenced his work. It was a phenomenal exhibit, but, I have to say, it attracted a strange crowd. It was a compact exhibition too, so it wasn't as though you could get away from all those weird people with their loud voices and their bad attitudes. It felt more like an antiques show than that contemplative museum experience I've heard so much about.

fig. g: To: Walker Evans; From: Diane Arbus

Even with all those difficult people, we still had a great time, and we particularly liked this postcard from Diane Arbus to Walker in particular, with its idiosyncratic script and its curious left field reference to Evans' talents in the kitchen (and his way with potatoes).

fig. h: fancy feet 1

Afterwards, we made the most of our donation and toured a fairly wide cross-section of the Met's collection, but we were particularly taken by the Medieval tapestries.

fig. i: fancy feet 2

By mid-afternoon, we had made our way up the street to the Neue Galerie. In part, so that we could immerse ourselves in its Mitteleuropean splendor.

fig. j: return to Café Sabarsky

But mostly, so that we could pay a repeat visit to our friends at Café Sabarsky. This was our first time having a full meal at Café Sabarsky, and I suspect it won't be our last. Goulash, sausage and rotkohl, beer, kaffee und kuchen--we were in Hapsburg Heaven.

The lowdown:

mains: weisswurst w/ potato salad and mustard; goulash soup w/ potatoes

desserts: sabarsky torte; milchrahmstrudel

fig. k: Schaller und Weber

So much so, in fact, that when we asked about our amazing weisswurst and found out it came from the legendary Schaller & Weber, we made that our very next stop. There we bought some more weisswurst and some frankfurters, and some of their famously spicy house mustard, and we admired their whimsical beer paraphernalia.

fig. l: Shad is here!

Speaking of repeat visits and old favorites, that night we had a hankering for seafood, so we went back to visit our friends at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. We love the atmosphere at the bar--the mix of regulars, tourists, and the seasoned staff, the banter, the repartee--and GCOB’s selection of oysters on the half-shell is always impressive. We ordered a cross-section of house specialties--baked, fried, stewed, and raw (representing Long Island, the Chesapeake, Nova Scotia, and Washington)--and a round of beers, and we settled right in.

The lowdown:

appetizer: clams casino

raw bar: blue points; bras d'or; kumimoto; royal miyagi

hot dishes: oyster stew; clam pan roast

fig. m: inside the Campbell Apartment

Afterwards, we found out our friends R & M had a little surprise in store for us: a nightcap at the Campbell Apartment, the cocktail bar that occupies the former office of William J. Campbell, a financier and railroad tycoon. A former office in a railway station. Sounds glamorous, right? Well, this was no ordinary office. Campbell evidently had a thing for the Northern Italian culture of the late Middle Ages--he spent loads to have the place decked out in medieval Florentine splendor, and just to make sure everyone understood that he had money to burn, he placed a huge, imposing safe in his sizable fireplace. Campbell’s 3,500 sq. ft. office has been fully renovated to its previous splendor (including the safe), but now much of the space is taken up by a big, old bar, and the Campbell Apartment functions as a swanky cocktail bar. Talk about a nightcap!

To be continued...

Sullivan Street Bakery, 533 West 47th Street, New York, NY (212) 265-5580

Colombian Coffee Federation/Juan Valdez Coffee, 140 East 57th Street, New York, NY (917) 289-0981

Café Sabarsky, 1048 5th Avenue, New York, NY (212) 288-0665

Schaller & Weber, 1654 2nd Avenue, New York, NY (212) 879-3047

The Grand Central Oyster Bar, 89 East 42nd Street, New York, NY (212) 490-6653

The Campbell Apartment, 15 Vanderbilt Ave., New York, NY (212) 953-0409