We spent our President’s Day weekend in New York City. It was a bit of an impromptu trip; Bridget was able to cash in some reward points to score a cheap rate on a Midtown hotel room, so we drove down as far as Stamford, CT on Saturday morning, hopped the commuter train, and stayed until early Monday afternoon. We squeezed in plenty of things to do and see and eat without feeling like we were on a forced march, only got rained on a little bit, and there were no major meltdowns or arguments. I’ll tell you more about it after the jump.
I first started travelling to New York City on a semi-regular basis about ten years ago for work and found that I really liked the city. On one of my trips, Bridget came along and we spent the weekend sightseeing, and thus was born what has become a more-or-less yearly tradition of going to New York. Charlotte’s first trip with us was two years ago and we all had such a miserable time that last year I did not go with Bridget and Charlotte; they went with Charlotte’s buddy Camille and her mom instead. (to be fair, I went to Ireland last year without either of them, so I think that all evens out)
While I would not pretend to say that we are extremely familiar with Manhattan, it is safe to say that after our various trips together and separately Bridget and I are comfortable being there. We almost always stay in Midtown because that’s where she can use her business travel rewards points, but also because it positions us well to go anywhere in the city and get back afterward. Midtown is crawling with tourists because many of the big attractions are there — Times Square, Broadway, shopping on Fifth Avenue, and so on — and we, too, did our time as gawking touristas looking at the billboards and videowalls and such, but now it’s mostly just our base of operations.
After our arrival around midday on Saturday, we hopped a cab downtown to the Lower East Side/Chinatown area. We made our way to the Essex Street Market to have a look around. On our last family trip, we’d gone to see the Chelsea Market over on the southwest side of Manhattan, but the two are very different. Chelsea Market is more of a shopping experience with a bunch of restaurants and food businesses; in fact, the Food Network has their studios in that building. Essex Street Market is an actual food market featuring produce, meat, general groceries, and only a couple of eating establishments. One of those eating establishments is the new home of a New York culinary legend: Shopsin’s. Kenny Shopsin became famous much to his eternal chagrin after Calvin Trillin published this article about him in the New Yorker back in 2002. He’s almost the stereotypical irascible aging New York Jew, and his original restaurant in Greenwich Village was one of those places that people loved to discover. Shopsin was notorious for his huge and eclectic menu, for kicking people out of his place if he didn’t like them, and for telling people what he would or would not cook for them. He closed his place a couple of years ago, mostly because he was tired of the attention I think, but he reopened with a small space in the Essex Street Market last year.
All the tables were full, the line for a table was long, and they close for the day at 3:00, but I insisted we stick it out. After about half an hour, which we spent wandering through the rest of the market, we got seated right at the soapstone counter in front of the tiny kitchen’s ordering window. When Kenny is not cooking, he sits in a chair next to the counter and engages in incessant yelling with his adult children who also work there. One of his twin daughters is the other cook, and the other twin daughter runs the “front” of the restaurant. His son also handles orders, cooks, and spends a lot of time yelling at his father. It was a total blast to sit right in the middle of the whole thing, with Kenny right next to me and the other Shopsins in front of us. Best free floorshow in town. And beneath the bluster they were all really nice — they brought Charlotte extra watermelon slices when we told them she loved watermelon, chatted with us the whole time we were there, and made it an extra-special experience.
After that, we wandered around a little bit. We’d hoped to go to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, but they limit the number of people on the two tours they do on weekends. So, we’d found a website for the Museum of Chinese In America that was also in the same general area and thought we’d check it out. It was cold but sunny on Saturday, so we walked; our stroll took us through parts of Chinatown and also Little Italy, which is sort of surrounded on all sides by Chinatown. The Museum itself is in an old warehouse building on Mulberry Street that also houses other Chinese cultural groups. It’s only a couple of large rooms and a corridor, but the entry fee is only $2.00. There was a Chinese woman running a children’s craft workshop and a bunch of kids (of seemingly every imaginable ethnicity) decorating paper masks. Bridget and I took turns sitting with Charlotte as she made herself a mask, alternating with looking at the few articles on display. The fun and the cozy space made up for whatever disappointment we might have had about the museum. Sometimes finding little unknown treasures like that is far more satisfying than the big and glitzy stuff.
By the time we finally got back to our hotel, it was late afternoon, so we crashed for a bit before going out to dinner. The restaurant was a little French place on West 55th called La Bonne Soupe. From the website, we expected something a bit grand, but it was a tiny, cramped place with a menu that probably hasn’t been changed since 1975. Very old fashioned basic French dishes. The place was packed, and we were lucky to get there when we did, because the lobby filled up as soon as we sat down. Most of the diners were older couples — no coolness factor whatsoever here — and I would wager every single one was a tourist eating early to go to a show. Bridget and I both had a crock of French onion soup, but something was off about it because I was queasy for the rest of the evening. I had gigeau d’agneau in a tomato-thyme-garlic sauce with dauphinoise potatoes and Bridget had a brandade (a puree of potatoes and salt cod); Charlotte had a burger and fries.
Luckily the stomach queasiness was temporary and I felt better by morning. Our day’s plan was to have brunch, go to the American Museum of Natural History and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, then off to the Union Square Theatre to see a show. It was a busy agenda that would have been unbearable if I’d been sick all day. We took a bus uptown to the Upper West Side, where practically every other shopfront is a restaurant serving Sunday brunch. We’d decided on a place called Good Enough To Eat and once again arrived only moments before the rush began. We got a table in the back and by the time we left the line outside was half a block long. The food was magnificent, so it was easy to understand why the line was so long. Here’s my travel tip for you if you are going to be in New York on a Sunday morning: most of the places seemed to open at 9:00, and if you can be at whichever place you want to try before 9:30, you probably won’t have to wait.
It was only a couple of blocks to the AMNH. Bridget and I have been there before, but Charlotte had not and she had loved “Night At THe Museum”, which took place there. Once we got inside, though, she was scared to death of the display of taxidermied elephants in the main exhibit hall and it took quite a while to get her to calm down enough to step inside the halls. It’s hard to get too excited about 100-year-old dead animals posed in “lifelike” dioramas, but once she got into the swing of it, the kid was a trouper. She wouldn’t go anywhere near the dinosaur exhibit, though. We did, however, really enjoy the Rose Center, which is their new addition with all the cool space stuff, and we LOVED the awesome planetarium show.
We futzed around a bit looking for a place to get a refreshment after the museum, but finally found a coffee shop that wasn’t packed with mid-afternoon brunchers, then walked to the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, which was right across the street from the brunch place. They had a fabulous exhibit about Ancient Greece, including a “Trojan Horse” the kids could climb in. Even though the museum says its intended audience runs right up to kids as old as 10, it’s definitely more for younger kids, even kids younger than Charlotte. But she had fun with the Greece exhibit, and then we went upstairs to a classroom where she got to make her own rain gauge and decorate it.
Still full from a big brunch and the coffee shop, we opted to skip dinner to spend more time uptown, then a quick stop at the hotel to clean up and back downtown to Union Square. It started to rain just as we reached the theater, but we had umbrellas at the ready. The show we saw was a Korean martial arts show called Jump. It’s presented as a comedic play and the performers portray a Korean family trying to marry off their daughter to a bookish young man who is possessed by a fierce martial artist. There’s a plot with a pair of burglars who break into the house, but basically everything is a setup for a ton of corny (and VERY funny) slapstick and displays of tae kwon do and gymnastics. It was utterly perfect for Charlotte, who laughed nonstop for the entire hour and a half.
By the time we left the theater, the rain was coming down pretty hard, and we weren’t having any luck finding a place to eat that wasn’t fast food crap, so we caught the bus back to the hotel and I went out and fetched a pizza, which we feasted on in the hotel room while watching some cheesy Disney movie about ice skaters.
Since we were planning to leave by midday Monday, we stuck close to the hotel Monday morning. Charlotte got to go back to American Girl Place and buy overpriced doll crap. We also went into the Hershey’s store and the M&M store which are right across the street from one another near Times Square. I liked the Hershey’s store better because it was more about the chocolate, but Charlotte and I each bought our own custom-mixed bags on M&Ms, too. Then we walked over to Rockefeller Center, watched the skaters on the ice, and had some lunch on the food concourse at 30 Rock. Then it was time to catch the train back to Connecticut and head for home.
We had a really good time, and I was very pleased that we were able to explore around the city a bit more and get away from the hardcore tourist traps in Midtown. Now that it’s a lot easier for Charlotte to tag along, we can do a lot more stuff and be a lot more open to interesting things that aren’t just shopping or seeing famous places.
It sounds like a grand adventure.
Sounds like a lot of fun – glad you guys had a good time. Chelsea says she liked the M&M store, too.