NYC Noms: Day 3 and 4

Day 3:

Having finally gotten comfortable sleeping despite the ruckus of cars and sirens outside our penthouse suite window, Britton and I headed over to Chinatown (Manhattan) for the most highly anticipated restaurant on my NY vay-cay checklist. The place is called Big Wing Wong. Britton is quick to point out that the staff of Big Wing Wong actually worked at the original Big Wong, and due to a huge falling out, they decided to start their own restaurant a couple blocks away.

For breakfast, we ordered the soy sauce chicken (all white meat), roast pork congee, and a big sweet fried cruller. Everything was delicious, but the soy sauce chicken was my favorite - very tender and moist with an amazingly fresh ginger and onion sauce.

We hit the Modern Museum of Art that day as well. I am not crazy about modern artwork, but they do have many interesting impressionist paintings including Van Gogh's Starry Night and Dance by Matisse. Unfortunately, the museum was very crowded, so it was a fight to see some of the paintings and by the time we got to Piet Mondrian with all those ridiculous lines and boxes, I was ready to throw in the towel. Wikipedia calls this "Neo-Plasticism" a representational art form, but I am telling you that I scribbled that same cluster of boxes and lines on my notebook in my sociology class with glitter gel pens. (On top of that, I just visited the Salvador Dali exhibit on later works at the High Museum in Atlanta, and Dali thought Mondrian was a total goober. I agree.)

There was also a neat exhibit called Rising Currents which demonstrated possible solutions for maintaining or recovering lost waterfront around New York City due to rising sea levels.

My favorite painting in MOMA was Henri Rousseau's The Dream. Very daring and colorful.

For dinner that night Britton hurried his sister and I through this seemingly unmarked door on fifth avenue and up this narrow flight of stairs to a very dark and lounge-y restaurant called Mad for Chicken. Light and crispy chicken wings, some spicy, some garlic-covered, with a scattering of banchan including pickled radishes, cut veggies, and a creamy corn mix.

The wings were HUGE. And the three of us split a carafe of strawberry yogurt soju (which was DELICIOUS but very very pricey.)

Britton may have gotten girl-drink-drunk. He was sipping soju out of this shot glass.

To wrap up the night, we headed down to Bryant Park where Bonnie and Clyde was playing on a big projector.

Which reminds me that I have a confession to make. Sometime before dinner Britton wanted to run into the Apple store on 5th to look at phone covers. He told me to meet him outside in about half an hour, so I wandered into FAO Schwartz to kill some time. I made it through the stuffed animals without any major screw-ups, but when I arrived at the land of bountiful bulk candies, it was all over. It started with the yogurt raisins, and then the chocolate covered pretzels, and then they had those wafer mints you only get a baby shower and wedding receptions, and then ...oh goodness...and then there were the bulk pineapple gummy bears.

Within five minutes of walking into the store, I had accumulated almost $13 in candy. Oi. I was so ashamed, but also very high on sugar.

After the movie, Britton and I wished his sister farewell for the evening and walked over to Times Square which was lovely in a daylight-in-the-nighttime kind of way. Very vibrant and full of people.

Times Square also had a big toy store - Toys R Us. I hope they don't have a candy section!

Oh, and Andrew, that picture is for you. Dora the Explorer! Ay yiyi.

Day 4:

Slightly less rainy than Day 4, we headed over to the American Museum of Natural History. We ate lunch at the Shake Shack on the Upper West Side (no pic.) They made some great burgers and floats using fresh, local ingredients. We had to fight tooth and nail to get a seat, but it was well worth the wait.

We saw dinosaurs.

We dined on the universe itself.

It was a total blast! There are so many exhibits in this museum, it was impossible to see everything. I highly recommend the show Journey to the Stars in the planetarium narrated by Guinan herself, Whoopi Goldberg.

For dinner we met BFC, Britton's sis, and friend at La Luncheonette, a small and decadent french cafe near the High Line. The High Line was once a section of elevated train tracks allowing trains to travel directly into warehouses without running a risk to pedestrians. Due to increased commercial automobile transport, the tracks became obsolete. The tracks are now a quiet public park with foliage that resembles the wild flowers and weeds that took over the tracks long before the park was in place. It's a beautiful place to take a leisurely stroll.