New York, NY - Oct 2011

At Diva Bar

Once we found out that we are moving to Colorado, we just had to have one last weekend in NYC.  As luck would have it, Keith's brother was going to be in the city for ten days, so we timed a trip up to Manhattan to coincide with Graham and Marissa's trip.  We also happened to be in town at the same time as the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, though we opted not to participate! 

Accommodation:
Hyatt Grand Central - since this was last minute, we actually had to pay for the hotel - no points were available - yuck!  The hotel is undergoing renovations, so the place is a bit of a war zone.  The good news is that the lobby will no longer feature 80's style brass fixtures.  Our room was renovated and is quite nice, with the only negative being that the shower was designed to have water run out of the shower, not stay in. 

Activities:
Keith flew in from Denver and Shawna flew in from Raleigh, both of us arriving a bit after lunch time.  We shared a cab from Laguardia.  Our first stop after checking in was lunch at the Grand Central food court.  After that, Keith had to do some work while Shawna relaxed and also worked out in the hotel gym - technically she was still at Blue Cross, but took her last day as a vacation - a tough way to wrap up 6 years of employment!

Priscilla Queen of the Desert Musical

We headed out to meet Graham and Marissa for 7pm, but left it too late as cabs were hard to come by.  We ended up walking over to 2nd Avenue and finally got a south-bound cab to meet them by 7:15pm.  Graham found The Redhead restaurant so we could have pre-dinner drinks, then we went to The Hearth for dinner.  It was great to see Graham and Marissa - they are now 5 months pregnant so Marissa was the designated driver without the driving part.  We wrapped it up by 11pm and all headed to sleep.

We woke up on Saturday and grabbed a quick breakfast in the hotel lobby before doing our usual 6 mile run around Central Park.  The weather was perfect - in the 60's so we made it around the park with no problem.  After cooling down a bit we showered, changed, grabbed another quick lunch at Grand Central, and then went to the Palace Theater to see the musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.  The musical is a remake of the Australian movie, and was terrific - great music and totally campy.  This is now one of Shawna's favorite shows - she says better than Mama Mia.

Outside David Burke Kitchen

Since dinner was at 6:30pm, we headed to SOHO immediately after the show was over - taking the subway to get there a bit faster and cheaper.  Shawna had found the Soho Grande Hotel online as it has an outdoor bar, but looking from the outside it seemed to be vacant so we gave that a miss.  Instead, we walked back up to Barolo for our first drink and then to Diva for another before our dinner at David Burke Kitchen. 

We slept for 10 hours (outstanding!) so got up at about 8am to grab breakfast and go for another run in the park.  Since we did not need to leave until 3:30pm, we grabbed our lunch back at Grand Central and then went to see Moneyball at a theater on Times Square.

It was a great weekend - and now back to the real world, with Shawna heading to Hartford for her first day on the job at Cigna and Keith back to Denver. 



Restaurants:
Hale and Hearty Soups - Our regular place for a quick lunch by the Hyatt.  Directly underneath Grand Central lobby, the food court has oodles of quick lunch spots, with no national chains.  Keith got his usual salad and Shawna ate the chicken curry soup. 

The Redhead - This is a little restaurant near our dinner spot - we stopped in for a couple of glasses of wine before dinner. 

Hearth - The restaurant looks quite romantic from the outside - it is a bit noisier than we had expected, though (not a problem for us).  We started with the escarole salad and smoked bluefish, then the four of us shared the charcuterie plate.  For our main course we shared the pappardele with wild boar: excellent!  we wrapped up the meal with a poached pear tart and a cheese plate. 

Barolo - This restaurant/bar is enormous.  It has an outside garden out the back of the restaurant, but looks much better in pictures than in real life.  The fountain in the very back is helpful in providing white noise, but the service was a bit slow.  We only had one drink. 

Diva - A few streets south of Barolo on S Broadway, the Diva restaurant/bar is pretty cool - the front was totally open to the outside, a DJ played some good music, and we sat at the bar for a drink. In good weather this is a great place. 

David Burke Kitchen - the Kitchen is David Burke's newest creation (though honestly we have not been to any of his other creations).  Upon arriving we saw that there is a rooftop bar on the left, which would have surpassed our two other outdoor bar choices had we known it was there.  The restaurant is slightly subterranean, but does have windows higher up so there is natural light.  We arrived at 6:30pm so were there with the blue plate special crowd to start - but it did fill up after an hour or so.  The bread was OK - bizarrely the bread basket had carrots and radishes which seemed out of place (and definitely not good with butter!) and one of the bread types had olives - not to our taste.  We started with a "snack" of mini tuna tartar tacos with whipped avocado - delicious.  The appetizers we chose were the pretzel crab cake and scallops and short rib ravioli.  The scallops were the winner there.  For our entree we had duck for two (it was the recurring Saturday special) and we added "smoked beef fat and jalapeno french fries" as well as the wild mushrooms.  Excellent!  for dessert we tried the coconut cake with coconut-mango sorbet.  Both were good, but not necessarily together.