Out and about – NYC

Last weekend we had a little girls reunion (not “Girls”) in New York. Our Uber driver guessed high school reunion and we didn’t work too hard to correct him. Most of the girls arrived mid-day Friday, but I wasn’t able to get there until the early evening. I treated myself to the Acela because I decided it was worth it to avoid rush hour Friday afternoon traffic. It was the first time I’d taken the train and it was lovely and way better than the bus, but also way more expensive.

Since we had no specific plan for Friday evening we started to check out what looked good on Thrillist and Eater and came across Wylie Dufresne’s new restaurant Alder and we were able to get a 9:45 reservation through OpenTable. What did we do before smartphones? We Uber’d over to the East Village and popped into a cute wine bar for a spritz (an aperol spritz) and a snack (trio of bruschetta). Btw, Wylie Dufresne won the James Beard Foundation award for Best Chef New York City in 2013.

Rabbit sausage

Hanger steak

Alder is adorable (yes, I realized on this trip that I need to work on my adjectives) and the evening was so nice that we sat outside. Everything on the menu is meant to be shared, which was great because it meant we could try more things! Unfortunately they were out of the kale summer roll (bummer), but there were two off-menu specials: an homage to a NYC hot dog made with rabbit sausage and a pu pu platter which was two bites of five things on the menu. We started with the pub cheese, rabbit sausage “hot dog”, shrimp on shrimps, and the shephard’s pie tartare. Raw lamb (part of the tartare) and rabbit sausage were firsts for all of us. The pub cheese was a surprise winner for me, especially once we found out why it was a strangely purple shade (from red wine). 

All the food came out super fast so we took a break to enjoy our wine and assess our hunger. Whether we were hungry or not, we decided that we couldn’t not order more because there were too many other delicious sounding things on the (fairly small) menu. We went with the hanger steak (with moo shu vegetable, shio kombu butter) and the striped bass (with curried lentils, mango, lemon verbena raita). Of the two, I definitely preferred the hanger steak over the bass. The meat was cooked perfectly and the moo shu vegetables were scrumptious. 

Carrot cake gelato

Since there is always room for dessert, we tried two: carrot cake gelato and the macerated strawberries with corn bread and fancy whipped cream (fancy is my description because I can’t remember exactly what it was). You could definitely get a glimpse into Wylie’s world of molecular gastronomy with the carrot cake gelato. There was a party in my mouth. Speaking of Wylie, we chatted with our server about him and she us that he’s very nice, but “he’s a chef…of course he gets cranky.” Apparently they are closing WD50 to make way for some fancy new condos. 

Saturday morning we got up and walked the High Line from 23rd Street to Gansevoort and then hopped on the L train to Brooklyn to check out Smorgasburg, which also happened to be Kendrin’s first time in Brooklyn! Smorgasburg is a Brooklyn Flea Food Market that occurs every weekend. On Saturdays it’s in Williamsburg at East River State Park. We got there around 11:30 and decided to scope out the prospects. There were so many options (100 vendors every weekend per their web site) that we wanted to

Chicken satay

be selective about our choices. Unfortunately, there is only so much stomach space.