Adventures in JulieLand: May 2009

That's right folks. I am fresh off of a trip to the Big Apple, and believe you me, this girl took it to the streets. And by that I mean that I walked that whole damn city at least seven times. My goal for the trip was to eat as much good food as possible, focusing of course on the stuff that is very "New York" and that I can't get at home. I would say that the trip was a big success, based on those criteria, although I was not able to try everything on my list. A girl can only eat so much each day, and I found that I was not able to stretch myself past 5 meals per day. Disappointing, I know.

I did not plan it this way, but the days kind of organized themselves into themes.

Day 1: Sort-of Belgian day
Breakfast at Prune, a lovely little place on the Lower East Side. They have 11 different bloody marys on the menu, which initially got me pretty excited. But alas, despite the varied preparations, we found their mary mix not that great. However, I had a "dutch pancake" that was possibly one of the most amazing breakfast items I've ever eaten. It was almost an inch thick, and must have been made with cornmeal, but it was super fluffy and moist and awesome. It was like a skillet-baked corn cake, with sliced prunes baked into the bottom. I am drooling now just thinking about it.

There was a dance parade/festival going on, so we caught up with it in the East Village and walked along until the end. It was kind of like the love parade, but with all different styles of music and dancing, including breakdancing, drum lines and even burlesque girls wearing flashdance-like spandex.

After watching all that dancing, we were hungry so we got some lunch at Pommes Frites in the East Village. All they serve are Belgian fries with mayonnaise. So we got a giant cone full. Yum. I miss eating fries this way - I learned the joy of fries with mayo during my high school days in Germany.

Then did some snacking on street fair food while walking across town. Apparently there are at least 2 street fairs every weekend day during the warm months. Genius! Why can't SF have street fairs every weekend too? And why do the SF street fairs always have to be full of douchebags? But I digress. New York has totally different food at their street fairs. Gyros? 8 different kinds of pickles? Deep fried Oreos? Yes please. BTW, I know these things are definitely NOT Belgian, but we ate them all anyway. Only in America would someone be bold (genius?) enough to deep fry an Oreo.

Now you know that you need more pickle variety in your life. Your welcome.

Deep-Fried Oreos. Enough Said.

Finally on to dinner with some friends at a place called Extra Virgin (referring to the olive oil, get your mind out of the gutter), followed by Belgian ales at "Vol de Nuit". This place was dark, and hidden in the courtyard of a building and reminded me a bit of Berlin.

Schwanky dinner place deserves a schwanky photo.

Belgian beer bar in a courtyard.

Lastly, drinks at Little Branch, a speakeasy-style place that looks pretty non-descript on the outside. It's really just a door on the corner of a dingy building. But that is part of the allure, my friend. When you go in, you walk down a dimly-lit set of stairs into the basement, where it smells delicious like bourbon and citrus and other herbs that are used for making fancy cocktails. I might have had one too many drinks and then proceeded to send drunken text messages. I need someone to build some Mail Goggles for my phone.

Extracting every last drop.

It rained while we were in Little Branch so we walked home around 2am through soggy streets.

Day 2: Day of Pork
This day was pretty epic in terms of eating. We started out at the Spotted Pig, which is a pretty popular spot, and very hard to get in at dinner time. BUT! We avoided all that by going for brunch and didn't have to wait at all. AND they serve their awesome burger at brunch so we got to try that too. I had the bacon hash with poached eggs, but then I was still hungry so I ordered a "dutch baby" as a second breakfast. It's kind of like a crepe.

I guess I am pretty excited about my meal.

After wandering around the West Village for a while, we made our way across town and found - lo and behold! - another street fair. This time, we tried griddled corn cakes with melted mozzerella, pickles, and zappolis. What's a zappoli, you ask? According to the guy selling them, it's fried dough with powdered sugar on top. Please try to imagine this said with a thick NY accent for the full effect. Sure, I'll have some fried dough. Yes, I want the powdered sugar on top. Actually, this was suprisingly good. Like a really fresh donut hole with a crispier crust.

At this point we were nearing the Lower East Side again, so we decided to get some dumplings in nearby Chinatown. We had gotten two different dumpling recommendations so we tried them both. First we stopped in at Dumpling house, where we tried their pork dumplings. They recently raised their prices from 5 for $1 to 4 for $1. That should have tipped us off that it was no longer a hole-in-the-wall. The dumplings were fine, but the place seems to have turned into a machine-like operation, with no love baked into the dumplings anymore. Sad. Then we went over to Joe's Shanghai, where they serve Shanghai-style soup dumplings. This place was also packed, but the dumplings were huge, and filled with tons of delicious juice.

Marvel at how this dumpling is bursting with juice!

After walking around Chinatown some more, our legs were getting pretty tired, so we headed back to the hotel for a break. After a quick power nap, we headed back out for more eating. It's a tough job, right? We heard about a nearby wine bar that had giant, old-timey meat slicers, so we had to check it out. It's called Bar Jamon, and it has Spanish wine and tapas. We had a glass of wine, some prosciutto and cheese, and ogled the awesome meat slicers. Then we headed out for a late dinner at Momofuku Ssam Bar. Now I have been hearing about about the Momofuku restaurants for a while, even out in SF, so I was really looking forward to trying one of them out. I chose the Ssam Bar over the Ramen Bar because I don't love ramen that much, and the Ssam Bar is newer. And I couldn't get reservations to their fancy restaurant that serves the 3 hour, $175 lunch. So, Ssam Bar it is! We went at 11pm so that we wouldn't have to wait in crazy lines, and yay! we didn't have to wait at all. We then proceeded to order from their all-meat menu. I knew that there weren't any vegetarian dishes, but I kinda thought there would be other stuff served alongside the meat. You know, like when you order a steak and it comes with fries or some veggies or at least something. But that was not the case here. So we basically got a bunch of different meats on plates. All of which were prepared exquisitely, with super fancy ingredients and whatnot, but I have to say that I wasn't really that enamoured of it all. I think you have to both love meat AND love unconventional preparation to really appreciate this place. Personally, I hit a meat wall two-thirds of the way through our meal, and didn't really LOVE any of the dishes. I left feeling both a little bit grody on the inside, and somewhat unsatisfied. Also about $100 poorer. Not cheap for something you don't love.

Meat, I guess I do not love thee enough.

Day 3: Cleanse + Pizza Quest
Still feeling full (and somewhat disgusting) from the Day of Pork, I couldn't really bear the thought of another epic eating day. So we went to a small cafe called SimonSips for granola and coffee, and then headed over to the Google NY office to spend the afternoon doing some work. I also went for a jog along the west side of the city. There is a great waterfront path for biking and jogging that goes along the water, so I managed to get some exercise and hopefully burn off some of the previous day's dumplings.

Finally, we headed out to dinner with some other Google people. We were on a quest for great NY pizza and decided to go to Sam's in Brooklyn because it would be able to seat a group and wasn't too far. Sadly, when we arrived in Cobble Hill, Sam's was unexpectedly closed due to a family emergency. So we headed a few blocks over to a place called Lucali's which was also supposed to be good, but where we had to wait until 9:30pm to get seated. They are a BYOB, so it was fun to buy and bring in our own wine, but I have to say that the pizza was just good, not great. I definitely thought the pizza that I had at DiFara's on my last trip to NY was vastly superior. But I guess it's all a matter of taste, as some people in my group preferred this pizza.

I don't want to sound like a douchebag, but I can't believe I waited 2 hours for this pizza.

View of Manhattan from Brooklyn, while waiting 2 hours for pizza.

Day 4: Park Day
After a day of eating relatively little, we were ready for another hearty breakfast. So we headed to the Clinton Street Baking Company for their famed pancakes. And man were they good. Now, I am not usually a pancake lover. I generally think that they are pretty bland and boring. However, these pancakes were a-mazing. I think they were made with buttermilk, so they actually had a really nice flavor. They were really light and fluffy and soft - not chewy or rubbery like some pancakes, and they also contained lots of blueberries, which is always yummy. Finally, they were served with a crack-like syrup, that I believe was actually made by cooking butter into the syrup that you are basically making caramel. Holy crap that is genius. Why doesn't all syrup have butter cooked in? I will never eat plain syrup again. Get thee to the Clinton Baking Co. for your own pancake revelation.

Best. Pancakes. Ever.

This was our last day in NY, and the only day with nice weather, so we rented some bikes for a ride through Central Park. First though, we had to get to Central Park, which required riding about 30 blocks up 6th Avenue in heavy workday traffic. Yikes! It was a bit rough, but luckily most of the cars are cabs and they actually know what they are doing and look out for bikes. Riding through the park was a nice respite from all the walking we had been doing, so we rode all the way to the top of the park and back down again. Then we crossed the city on the crazy streets again, and headed down the east side to the Brooklyn Bridge. The plan was to bike across the bridge and try another pizza place, called Grimaldi's, in Brooklyn. Alas, when we finally arrived there, we found a giant line of tourists waiting to do the same thing, and we didn't want to wait in line for 2 hours like suckas. So back over the bridge we went, across town again, and returned the bikes.

Riding is better than walking. You get to yell at other tourists to get out of the bike lane.

By this time we were getting pretty hungry so we walked over to the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park for their highly recommended burgers and shakes. We had to wait in a bit of a line, but their shakes were worth it. They make something called "frozen custard", which I guess is basically ice cream made in a soft serve machine and served like soft serve. The result is the taste of ice cream, with an amazingly silky consistency. And they use really premium ingredients like Valrhona chocolate, so the flavors are really good too. Their burgers were good too, but the ice cream-related items were really fantastic. I had a root beer float and half of Dave's chocolate shake and I wanted to go back for a sundae but just couldn't muster up any more room in my stomach.

That cup contains a gold-mine of deliciousness.