Weekend of March 17-18: Benjamin

Being my last visitor (I'm leaving New York end of next week), Ben came over to New York for 3 days. He basically had two things on his list that he wanted to do (besides having a good time of course); one being the MoMA (which was closed last time he was here) & the second being the Frick Collection (which I hadn"t visited until now, so that came in handy). A heavy blizzard swept over New York on Friday. Ben arrived at the WTC subway station and I went to pick him up, the short walk became a painful experience as the fierce hail came down by the cubic meter.


We booked in an Indian restaurant in the Village (called Surya) but unfortunately we arrived a little too early so we went searching for a nearby bar. As it turned out, very nice piano bar was just around the corner. Having ordered a couple of beers, I tried to take a picture of the bar and was refused to do so by an over-protective waiter. Not quite understanding why this was not allowed, we asked one of the guys sitting at the bar whether he knew the reason why this was a picture-free environment, only to find out that the bar was apparently a well-known gay bar & that they had had some problems before with tourists thinking this was an attraction similar to the Empire State Building... Anyway, the restaurant experience was once again splendid (for which thanks Ben!).

Saturday was spent walking through the city (stumbling accidentally onto the Saint-Patrick's day parade), visiting MoMA, Central Park & Upper West Side. Some colleagues had recently cited Grimaldi's for serving the best pizza's in New York, so we decided we should give it a try. We took the Brooklyn Bridge (instead of taking the subway), which gave me the opportunity to take pictures with my newly-bought tripod, and found the restaurant actually being in the shadow of the bridge. Nothing has been exaggerated about this restaurant; great quantities, superb quality & low-low prices. The view over Manhattan is fantastic. My orientation ability however failed when trying to find a taxi that could bring us back home, forcing us to walk around the area for around 30 minutes before actually coming accross an empty yellow-cab.

We closed the weekend on Sunday with a visit to the Frick Collection (an art collection amassed by steel-barron Henry Clay Frick in the early 20th century), with a walk from Union Square to the Mexican restaurant on 8th Avenue where we had reservations (and where we happened to be served by an extremely nervous waitress for whom it was her first day on the job [she poured an entire beer over the table instead of in our glasses]), with a couple of drinks in the famous 230 Fifth Avenue rooftop bar & with an endless discussion about which companies add value to society and which companies just profit from market inefficiencies....

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!

Wednesday March 7: Ninja....

Romain, my colleague from the Paris office, felt it was time we had a diner with all the people on transfer in the New York office (actually we're only 6) and took us to a place called Ninja in Tribeca. This place is absolutely awesome on all three restaurant dimensions: food, decor & service. The entire building that houses the restaurant has been built to ressemble a traditional Japanese village; every table has four walls and a roof, which makes dining a very cosy experience. The food is very original (swords that are being daggered through your food, tiramisu that looks like a little bonsai tree, sushi with meat instead of fish,...), the service (our waiter called himself ninja-Robert) funny/entertaining. In short; this place is a must-visit if you like original dining experiences...

Saturday March 3: Guggenheim (finally :-)

Given that this is the last weekend where I will be al by myself (ok, I'll have one weekend before I leave but my guess is that I will be busy packing and Fedexing all my stuff home by then) I thought it might not be a bad idea to go and visit the Guggenheim museum at last. I didn't visit it until now since I figured that some of my visitors would want to do this anyway. It turned out that everybody wanted to visit the MoMA and the Metropolitan instead of the Guggenheim.

Part of the museum's fame originates from the building (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) that accomodates the collection. Unfortunately, it is impossible to see the facade for the moment due to a refurbishment. The interior (see picture) remains splendid however. I visited the Guggenheim back in '98 and I had lively memories of the modern art collection. In winter & spring however, the museum dedicates most of it's space to special exhibitions, the current exhibition being 'El Greco to Picasso', which displays Spanish art since the 16th century. Most of the paintings depicting portraits, the collection on display was somewhat of a disappointment to me. Luckily some of the galleries contain parts of the permanent collection, such as Pissarro's 'L'hermitage à Pontoise' (see picture).

Friday February 23: Symphonyspace (with Phebo)

It must have been at least 5 years ago since I last visited a classical concert, but last Friday Phebo, who is one of my colleagues in the Amsterdam office and who was on transfer in the Boston office until recently, invited me to a performance of Dvorak's 9th symphony & Mozart's Flute concerto No.2. Phebo (picture) plays in an Amsterdam orchestra & one of his colleagues there, Inger, is currently playing in the "New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra", which brought us to the Upper West Side Symphonyspace concert hall. Inger's parents were visiting her from the Netherlands and coincidentally it happened to be her father's birthday, so he took us to a Jazz bar & paid for the drinks afterwards (thanks again for that!).

Weekend of February 17-18: Anouck's family

We kicked off the weekend on Saturday evening in a fabulous Thai restaurant in the East Village, called The Elephant. Although at first sight, the restaurant looked like a bar that had known better times, the food was great (even Anouck's father, who is an authority in the Thai food area, agreed).


The Sunday started with a fabulous breakfast at the hotel where everybody stayed (Wannes apparently was determined to win the first prize in the "Who can eat the most" contest, never knew somebody could eat so much in one meal :-). After that we went off to do the (by now) traditional tour of Fifth Avenue, visiting MoMA & then on to Times Square (in my 5 months in NY, I hadn't been into the M&M store, it's amazing how one product can spin-off so many merchandising) & onto Macy's.

Given that our lunch consisted of a traditional hamburger meal 'à l'Américaine' (meaning there is no way you can have more fat & other unhealthy substances packed into your meal) we definitely wanted a decent restaurant for the evening. Using the Zagat guide we found an amazing Tribeca Argentinian restaurant, called Industria Argentina. I've seldom eaten a better steak than that one. After that we had some drinks at the hotel bar, where Astrid managed to fool the waitress into believing she is 21 already (US bars are extremely sensitive to underage drinking, which is probably one of the root causes why most of my colleagues, being in their mid-twenties, are still very fond of drinking games...)

Monday was spent walking through Soho, Greenwich Village, Union Square, Central Park & Bloomingdale's. Given the extremely cold temperatures, I was almost happy to go into another apparel shop every 5 minutes... The culinary depth point of the day was our evening meal, at a restaurant called 'Doyer's Vietnamese Restaurant'; the fish Anouck's father ordered looked like it had been served to a couple of guests before who had politely refused to eat it and the complimentary water had so much chlore in it that it almost seemed like as if they were trying to sanitize the place by sanitizing it's customers...

The last morning was spent on a tour through the financial district & Tribeca. All in all a terrific weekend. I'm just sorry that I will have to wait about 1.5 months before I see Anouck again(which is when I will be heading home...)