A little while back, our Melbourne GM, Vanessa Crichton ventured off to the ever fascinating, mind expanding, waist expanding, liver destructing New York City. New York New York. The City that never sleeps. The shops that never close. The restaurants that seem to feed you so well that you just keep on eating long past the final bell.
We are all quite jealous of Van’s trip and don’t feel sorry for her in the slightest, even when her stomach was hurting the most from all that over-indulgence. In all honesty though, she was celebrating a special birthday and deserved every bit of food love they threw at her. Happy birthday Vanessa and thanks for sharing your foodie travel blog…over to you…
Gasolene Alley
Our first port of call every morning in NYC was Gasolene Alley for coffee. They always played great music and made coffee that rivalled ours in Melbourne!
Lunch at Pastis
This is exactly what we needed, steak and Frites with LOADS of béarnaise after a night out hitting many many bars with Linden Pride (sorry no photos from that night!)
Ma Peche
We started with cocktails at the bar and my choice of Carthusian Roulette – bols genever, yellow/green chartreuse, lemon/lime cemented my obsession with green chartreuse, it was dangerously delicious.
The chef Paul Carmichael at Ma Peche was incredibly generous and treated us to a few extra dishes…bless him if he had only known how much we had gorged on already!
The first dish was trout roe with rice, crosnes, jalapeño – we devoured this so quickly that we forgot to take a photo! Such fresh flavours and texture…
Then we moved onto oysters, steamed bun with lobster, maitake, chicharrón and monkfish with sweet potato, salsify, pine…all the dishes were beautifully balanced and really clean and fresh. Our final 2 savoury dishes were duck (jurgielewicz farm, pa) with orange, pistachio, rutabaga… and artichoke with peas, egg, black garlic – this dish was amazing!
We were of course very full by them but Paul sent out dessert of white chocolate, popcorn, caramel and salt it was so light and tasty we felt a bit stupid polishing it off only seconds after it hit the table when we had exclaimed so loudly how full we were! Ma Peche was definitely a favourite spot of mine.
Bagels, Russ & Daughters
New York style smoked salmon and horseradish cream cheese bagel from Russ & Daughters
The best part of this bagel (aside from eating it!) was waiting in line in utter fear of getting the ordering process wrong. We stood in line for about 45 minutes tightly clinging to our ticket watching the countdown for our number. It was a fight between us as to who was going to order from the SCARY but mesmerizing staff carving to order the largest selection of smoked salmon I have ever seen! I took the plunge and ordered after listening to how the natives did it and tried to follow suit to the best of my ability! We squeezed our way out of the deli and found a park bench to enjoy the fruits of our labour after almost an hour. It took us all of 5 minutes to devour the bagels!
Eataly
What is not to love about this place! A massive homage to everything about Italy that is good! I felt so at home here and anywhere that worships everything that is good about pasta instead of bad is always going to be a favourite in my heart. A simple margarita pizza with a glass of chianti for lunch was one of the highlights of our trip!
More from New York soon!