Weekend of March 10-12: Manu & Dees...

A slightly different weekend with visitors than usual; given Manu & Desiree's recent (2003) visit to New York, the weekend revolved more around walking around, discovering neighbourhoods, trying out restaurants & having an (occasional) drink in a bar [rather than visiting NY's major attractions].

Friday started with a walk through the West Village, followed by afternoon cocktails & hamburgers (the NY equivalent of tea and scones) at the 230 Fifth Avenue rooftop bar, at BXL & at the little Thai restaurant in the East Village that we visited when Anouck's family was here in New York about a month ago. By the time we left the restaurant Manu & Desiree claimed to be very tired, citing time-difference as the major reason, but I guess the intensive culinary trajectory of the afternoon might have been another reason...

A lazy breakfast at the Amish market (see picture left) kicked of the Saturday (nothing better than some sushi's for breakfast) & the walk from Ground Zero to Union Square really woke us up. After a quick bar-stop in Hell's Kitchen, the (by now) traditional visit to the MoMA was followed by a long walk through Central Park to my favourite Morningside Heights bar (Saurin Parke). Given that the plan was to go to a jazz club later that night, we decided to look for a restaurant in the Harlem surroundings and found a fabulous Argentinian steak restaurant in the Upper West 90s, called Pampa. The 30 minute wait for a table was spent listening to the stories from a friend of the owner, who was re-living his time in the U.S. army by talking to us... Gigantic steaks, tons of garlic sauce and fantastic bread... what more could a meat-lover wish for... Anyway, leaving the restaurant behind us (in the mean-time it had started raining) we ran for the jazz bar and found a great combo playing. In the amical company of a couple of beers, we enjoyed the music which, as the night evolved, became more and more improvisatory and experimental...

Half of Sunday was lost lying in bed and when we finally got up at 2pm the weather was so good that we decided there was no better place to spend the Sunday afternoon than on the terrace of a 20-story high appartment building; incidentally, the rooftop bar that we visited earlier in the weekend, has such a terrace, and buying some drinks was obligatory to be allowed to sit on the terrace... A visit to Ninja (see previous post) on Sunday evening (for which much thanks!) concluded the Sunday.

For Manu, the highlight of the weekend came on Monday morning, when, at about 1pm, he phoned me during a meeting and started telling a story involving the Metropolitan museum, a broken New York tour bus & the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. After calming him down, it turned out Will Smith was shooting a new film at the Metropolitan museum [Quick look on Imdb.com tells me that the movie is probably titled 'I am legend']. In an apparent act of adoration, Manu had managed to come so close to the actor that the film crew actually though he was some sort of paparazzo, a fact that he was telling me proudly over the phone; the result of which you see in the picture [note: I might have exaggerated some of the facts in the paragraph described above]

A BXL diner on Monday night and a Suba diner (see picture left) on Tuesday night, concluded a great weekend. Thanks for comming over!