It's been pretty much exactly a month since we went on our NYC trip. Although this post is probably suuuper late, I still wanted to share some of the things we did, since what would a Part 1 be without a Part 2?
I feel like I have to add a disclaimer and say that all of these photos were taken with an iPhone 6S. It's by no means DSLR quality, but for phone pictures, it suits my purpose! Plus, I am definitely the type of person who tries to carry as little as possible when exploring a new city or place. During our trip, I literally carried my wallet, my phone, and a portable phone charger in the pockets of my jacket. It made everything no fuss since I didn't have to keep up with anything, so it was really nice.
Day 0.5 #
Our flight out of DFW was at 7:00AM (CST), with a layover at O'Hare. We landed in New York at around 2:00PM (EST). We then took a cab to our Airbnb (our first NYC taxi!!!). By the time we arrived, unpacked, and settled in, we were starving. One of the main things we wanted to get out of the trip was to eat a lot of great food! During trip planning, we had a list of restaurants we knew we HAD to visit. For our first dinner there, we chose Ippudo Westside for some great ramen.
Next up was Times Square. We headed down to Discovery Times Square where they had a very cool Star Wars costume exhibition, with all the costumes from the movies! Obviously Padme was a central figure in the exhibition, since she had so many costumes in the movies. We then did a little exploration in Times Square. It was honestly a little overwhelming, but there's nothing like it! After that we went atop the Rockafeller Center, otherwise known as Top of the Rock. The price was kind of ridiculous, but the view almost worth it. Once we left the Rockafeller Center, we were due for a little snack at Junior's (the cheesecake is great, and also not pictured :P) before heading back to the Airbnb early to get some rest.
Day 1 #
The first full day! We decided to try breakfast near the place we were staying at this Dominican place called Malecon Restaurant. We then headed down to Midtown around Bryant Park and grabbed some coffee from Blue Bottle Coffee along the way (Stephen loves coffee and orders their beans at home, so we had to go!). Our next stop: Muji Fifth Ave! I've been a fan of Muji ever since I bought some of their pens to use at school last year and their flagship store made me fall in love with the brand even more. It truly made me want to fill our home with all their products. I ended up picking up some extra school supplies (because that's the logical thing to do when you're in your last semester of college?) and we bought a humidifier and essential oil. Their whole store smells SO GOOD, so they definitely hooked us in with that one.
After leaving Muji, we stopped by Kinokuniya Bookstore, a Japanese bookstore that sells tons of books, manga, and knick-knacks. There's even a little cafe inside. If I were maybe 5 years younger, I'd be all over the anime/manga merchandise they had. We then eventually made our way to a store called Pasteur Pharmacy. Although it seems like just any other pharmacy, they have an excellent selection of wet shaving supplies - razors, brushes, soaps - you name it. Stephen uses a double edge razor to shave, and since we can't bring those on the plane, we stopped by to pick up some razors for him (and soap), as well as check out their selection.
To round out our day, we visited the Museum of Modern Art, as well as the MoMA Design Store across the street. I actually really enjoyed looking at all the interestingly designed household objects they had to offer. For dinner, we walked a couple of blocks to find the famous Halal Guys food cart. We luckily got there early enough to beat a line, but when we finished eating and walked past it again, there was a huge line of people! As for dessert, we made our way to Momofuku Milk Bar and picked up a few cookies along with their cereal soft serve (which is btw, amazing). After watching Mind of a Chef on Netflix, we became pretty big fans of David Chang, so we had to check out his line of restaurants!
Day 2 #
You can't make a trip to New York and not have a bagel - at least, that's what everyone told us. We decided to hit up Absolute Bagels after a bit of Yelp research and arrived to a about a half hour wait in line. It was pretty worth it, though. After that little breakfast, we took a bus ride around Central Park (which I had no idea was THAT big) to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art! We didn't even realize how big the museum was, so we just picked a few sections we were interested in and went through it in about 2 and a half hours. I don't think we even saw half of what was available to see. At that point, we were hungry again and we decided to try another NYC staple (or so we're told) - $1 pizza. Stephen found this place called 99 Cent Fresh Pizza and we picked up 2 slices of pizza for $2. It's crazy. We had walked past a Papaya Dog (which we had heard of from Anthony Bourdain's show "The Layover") and since we were still hungry, we decided to also pick up a hot dog. You'll notice a common trend here - we watch a lot of food shows on Netflix.
Our next stop was the Flatiron Building. Stephen had to see it, since as he says, "It was in Spider-man". Just down the street from the Flatiron Building was this store called Flying Tiger. It's basically a store that sells cheap household goods and knick-knacks. Think Daiso, but European. They even have some of the same products. Of course, I wanted to buy everything, but since we only brought carry-ons, we had to keep shopping to a minimum. After a little bit more exploring, which included stops at the famous Strand Bookstore, "home to 18-miles of books", and Club Clio (Korean cosmetics brand), it was almost dinnertime. We had Momofuku Noodle Bar in our sights. Luckily, it was a bit early for dinner for us, which turned out for the best since there was a 45 minute wait for the freaking place. We killed time by walking around St. Mark's Place, window shopping at a bunch of vintage boutiques, and even stumbled upon a store that sold Korean and Japanese makeup products. A bit of research into ramen or noodle restaurants in New York will tell you that Momofuku Noodle Bar's popularity is attributed to hype, but even knowing this, we had to try it. While I don't know if I'd be able to say it was the best noodle place ever, it was good food. To end the night, we picked up dessert at Sweet Revenge, where we devoured some cupcakes.
Day 3 #
At the top of our agenda - dim sum and Chinatown! We went to Jing Fong for brunch. That place is nothing like I've seen before, and I've been to several dim sum places in the DFW. When you get there, you just see a lobby and a guy handing out tickets with numbers. When they call your number, you ride this really long escalator up to this HUGE ballroom full of people. We sat at a large table with these two couples from Kentucky - they didn't seem too thrilled with the food unfortunately. We were pretty satisfied with our food, but I was disappointed they didn't have any egg tarts, so we hunted down this highly rated bakery in Chinatown called Lung Moon. I got my egg tarts! To our dismay (and slight awe), it started snowing. It was kind of miserable walking around since it was so cold, but we found a few different stores, like 0035em, an awesome Korean cosmetics store, as well as a small underground mall to kill the time.
As we were looking at our agenda trying to decide where to go next, we knew we wanted one thing - some place indoors and warm. Lo and behold, we decide to try going to Koneko, a cat cafe (supposedly America's first, according to the site) that sells delicious treats and coffee. We stopped by Joe's Coffee Headquarters, a coffee shop that sells a bunch of cool coffee equipment since Stephen wanted to check it out, and headed to the cat cafe after. It was honestly perfect and at $15/hr, it probably one of the best experiences I've had and well worth the money. The cafe hosted many cute cats that were available for adoption. There were a ton of cat toys, as well as 2 stories to the building connected by stairs and a hidden ramp for the cats to go wherever they pleased. There was even an enclosed outdoor section. It was so CUTE and I swear I would've taken all the cats home with me if I could've.
After leaving the cat cafe, we had some time to kill before dinner, so we went to a couple of the shops we wanted to check out, for me namely Green Fingers Market, the shop of a Japanese garden stylist that sold vintage clothes and plants (very chic, I know).
For dinner, we went to The Spaghetti Incident for some awesome spaghetti and stopped by Peter's Pie Company for some dessert. It was a bit too early to head back, so we did some more exploring of the area and stumbled upon Bluestockings, a cool feminist/counterculture bookstore and coffee shop that sold neat books, zines, and even Diva cups.
Day 4 #
For our final full day in New York, Stephen kind of indulged me so we went down to SoHo to do some shopping (mostly window shopping...lol). We stopped by The Doughnut Plant, a doughnut place originally from Japan for breakfast. Even though we spent a better part of our day going into shops, I bought very little. Some of the stores we went to were & Other Stories, Opening Ceremony, Aritzia, Uniqlo (I LOVE their Heattech leggings), Alexander Wang, Acne Studios, The Kooples, and American Two Shot. & Other Stories had a really good sale going on for their jewelry, so I did get some earrings and rings for a really good price! Obviously most of those stores are out of my price range LOL, but I still enjoyed looking at the stuff they had. We also stopped at Crate & Barrel and CB2, because I love looking at furniture. A really cool store we got to check out was this place called The Evolution Store, which was just a shop that sold fossils, taxidermy, preserved animals, and more.
For lunch, we went to Vanessa's Dumpling House near Chinatown. This was probably the cheapest meal during our trip and so good. We also stopped by a coffee shop called Coffee Project that had cool coffee concoctions such as their Deconstructed Latte and Nitro Cold Brew. After that, we checked out a few more shops, including the McNally Jackson bookstore to pick up a souvenir for a friend, and the McNally Jackson Goods for the Study store, a cool little shop with office supplies, desks, and stationary. When dinnertime came around, in order to hit both the food places we wanted to go during our trip, we decided to split something at Caracas Arepa Bar since we'd heard a lot about it, then headed to Bao Haus, Eddie Huang's (yes, from Fresh of the Boat) place that sells delicious buns, accompanied by some discussion on gentrification. There was another Momofuku Milk Bar around the corner, so we stopped by to pick up some Cereal Milk, literally milk that tastes like what you get when you eat all your cornflakes and only have milk left, for Stephen because he didn't get it the last time. It was surprisingly really good.
Day 5 - Departure (and Stephen's birthday!) #
Our flight out of LaGaurdia was at 3:00PM...or so we thought. We ended up being delayed for almost 2 hours, but that's another story. I really, really wanted eggs benedict, so we went to Sarabeth's. I'll have to say that that was probably the meal I liked the least during our trip, if we're talking cost per taste value. Our final stop in New York was at Levain Bakery, supposedly home of NYC's best chocolate chip cookies. I'm not a huge fan of cookies (yeah, I know), but they were huge and pretty good.
All in all, it was an excellent trip, and we got to visit most of the things we had planned for! A month later, my bank account is still recovering from it, but the truth was that the majority of our expenses were on food, so it was worth it. I suppose we could've eaten in and taken advantage of our Airbnb host's great kitchen, but that wouldn't be fun, now would it?
Thanks for looking,
Christina