Three Perfect Days: A trip to New York City

One of my goals on this trip was to find out how New York has changed in the few years since I left. I’m happy to say that our first destination has not changed in the last 116 years. The Upper West Side’s Barney Greengrass serves, according to both me and Anthony Bourdain, “the best breakfast in the universe.” I always get the same thing here: A bagel with scallion cream cheese and paprika-dusted Pacific sable. Alex, prefers the sturgeon, which is firmer—the steak of fish. Adrian, has milk.

Next, we’re off to the American Museum of Natural History, another institution that is largely the same as it’s ever been. If they ever get rid of the 21,000-pound blue whale hanging in the Hall of Ocean Life, I’ll be upset. However, there are also some new things. In 2021, the oldest gallery, the Northwest Coast Hall, reopened with more space, a bluer color scheme, and a greater focus on the indigenous communities it represents. The Halls of Gems and Minerals, also reopened in 2021. They are like a treasure trove of sparkling, glowing, expensive rocks.. I could spend all day here trying to come up with names for the unique colors.

Eventually, we head south, to a part of town I remember as a perpetual construction zone. Hudson Yards, the largest private mixed-use real estate project in U.S. history, opened in March of 2019. It’s now a mini-neighborhood of multimillion-dollar condos, fancy restaurants and stores for people who own private jets. Inside this playground for the ultra-rich is José Andrés’s takeout-friendly food hall, Mercado Little Spain. We stop to put together a tapas lunch to go. Is this the first time anyone has ever eaten Manchego and charcuterie, wood-fired paella and churros with imported chocolate over a parking garage barricade while their son naps? Possibly.

The holy grail of the New York City vacation is the mid-day refresh. This too can be found in Hudson Yards, where the gym chain Equinox opened a wellness-themed hotel in 2019. The spa has a thing called a Wave Table. It's a glowing waterbed that subtly vibrates while you nap on it beneath a weighted blanket. Leaving Adrian with my husband, I put on a robe, lie in a pod for 30 minutes while spa music plays on headphones.

I could hang out in the relaxation pods overlooking the West Side rail yard all afternoon, but it’s almost Adrian’s bedtime. We still need dinner, so on our way back to the hotel, we stop by a new sandwich shop that everyone’s bee talking about. All’Antico Vinaio is the first U.S. outpost of a Florence shop. It's famous for fat, juicy square sandwiches filled with thinly sliced meats like porchetta, salami, and mortadella, rich cheeses and unusual spreads like truffle and pistachio creams. The two we order, L’Inferno with spicy nduja sausage and La Favolosa with salami, pecorino, and artichoke spreads, are delicious.

We eat those sandwiches in Bryant Park, also known as the backyard of the Main Branch of the New York Public Library. Ephrat Asherie Dance, a contemporary dance group with roots in African American and Latinx street styles, performs amazing moves. It turns out we’ve stumbled upon the park’s weekly Picnic Performances. There are free dance, opera, music and plays for people who would rather enjoy their theater outside in a park. There are even free blankets you can borrow.

With that, it’s bedtime. We’ve arranged for childcare tonight through the Baby Sitters’ Guild. It's been in operation since 1940 and provides experienced sitters to travelers, hotels, conferences and weddings. Our sitter, Marva, arrives on time, says hello to Adrian and hangs out in our en suite living room at The Chatwal while we get him to sleep.

We make the seven-minute walk to Pebble Bar. It's a rare New York City spot that is both exactly what it used to be and something entirely new. Named for a Jack Kerouac line about its location, “The pebble at the hem of the shoe of the immense tall man which is the RCA Building.” The bar is a revival of a classic’s classic. That classic was such a New York landmark that its reopening attracted Mark Ronson, Jason Sudeikis and Pete Davidson as investors. Which landmark? An Irish bar called Hurley’s. It opened in 1892 and became so popular with the NBC staff, including Johnny Carson, John Belushi, and David Letterman, that the studio even had a phone line installed. They nicknamed the bar Studio 1-H. It was basically a Saturday Night Live clubhouse.

Perfectly recreating a place like that is impossible, so Pebble Bar is its own invention. Today, it feels like a nicely decorated private club. There are drinks like the Kerouac daiquiri, which has two kinds of rum, lime and demerara, served in a delicate Champagne coupe. There’s a vibe in here, too. It feels like the sun is always setting over Sixth Avenue, and a finance guy in French cuffs is making some kind of deal at the next table. When you live in the suburbs, this kind of excitement is both rare and refreshing.

The Chatwal, where we’re staying, is one of New York’s old-guard hotels. It’s a grand old building from 1905 that once housed a theater group called the Lambs Club. The location is a half block off a stretch of 44th Street that was once called, “club row." That's where you could find the Harvard Club of New York City, the New York Yacht Club, the Penn Club and the Algonquin Hotel, essentially the New Yorker Club. When we leave for breakfast, the doormen say good morning to Adrian and help us carry the stroller down the stairs.

I’ve been wanting to visit Little Island since the man-made plot of land popped up, mushroom-like, in Hudson River Park in 2021. From afar, it looks like something out of a Studio Ghibli film—like if you got up close you’d find out it was actually animated. I’ve heard that it can get busy in the afternoons. We walk south, making a stop at Sullivan Street Bakery in Chelsea. There, we get cold brews and bomboloni, which are airy Italian cream puffs filled with smooth chocolate, vanilla pastry cream, or tangy seasonal jam.

Little Island is small, but it delivers with magical glades and winding stairways. We stomp on metal plates called “dance chimes” and take pictures of our bomboloni with the skyline in the back before eating them.

Then it’s lunchtime, which means we’re headed back to Hudson Yards. When I first asked about bringing a baby to Ci Siamo, I was surprised that the staff was okay with it. The place is nice—like, European-business-hotel, earth-tone-leather nice. When we arrive, there’s an adorable mint-colored high chair set out for Adrian. We order a pair of fried goat cheese gnocchi puffed up to the size of pillows, cavatelli with Maine crab and vermouth that tastes like the best night of summer in a bowl, and a lightly salted amaro cocktail. Adrian, even tries a tiny bit of the buttery soft tongue tonnato.

While we’re eating a caramelized onion torta that tastes like French onion soup turned into bread, chef Hillary Sterling stops by our table. We learn why the food is so incredible, and also why Adrian is so welcome. Sterling is obsessed with live-fire Italian cooking and she has a 5-week-old son. I tell Sterling she looks surprisingly chipper for having a brand-new baby. “By the time I get home, I’ve got two hours until the first wake-up,” she says, smiling that very specific parental smile of both love and utter exhaustion. “But my wife and I managed to get away to Long Island recently for oysters and beers.”

Now, it’s time for art. We board an Uber with a car seat for the 15-minute drive to Fotografiska, a photography museum imported from Sweden that opened at the end of 2019. Executive director Sophie Wright is waiting for us in the lobby café when we arrive. She recently moved from London to New York. It's located in the rambling 1890s Church Missions House and is as much a community center as it is a museum. “It’s sort of a 360 experience,” Wright says. “We have the café where people come and meet in the mornings. We’ve got evening events upstairs. You can have wine here before going to the exhibitions.” The idea is that photography is a living art, and you’ve got to enjoy it that way.

Each of Fotografiska’s exhibition floors hosts a single show. Each one is like its own world, with lighting and music selected in collaboration with the artists. Silence is the soundtrack for a devastating selection of war photography by James Nachtwey. Black Venus, which examines the representation of the black female body, has a vibe like Josephine Baker in the 1920s.

Freshly stimulated, we’re off across the East River to the new Ace Hotel Brooklyn. It opened in 2021 in an area near the borough’s downtown that used to be home mostly to chain stores and Barclays Center traffic. The hotel reminds me of the Brooklyn I remember from the mid-2010s, which brings back a lot of nostalgic feelings. If I didn’t have any responsibilities, I would buy a vintage velvet dress and refuse to leave the lobby bar until someone named a drink after me. I put on pants and usher in another babysitter, so Alex and I can visit another refurbished classic’s classic. This time, it’s Gage & Tollner, a clubby steak and chop house that first opened in 1879 and ultimately closed in 2004. The space did time as an Arby’s and a TGI Fridays before restaurateur St. John Frizell and his partners lovingly resuscitated it in 2021.

“The last time I had seen it, it was a clothing store, almost like a flea market,” Frizell says of the dining room. “All of the woodwork and beautiful mirrors were hidden behind these false walls.”

Now, Gage & Tollner is once again a lively, dining spot from the late 1800s, as luxurious as the Grand Central Oyster Bar. As at all great chop houses, the food is indulgent in the best way. We start with crispy hen-of-the-woods mushrooms and luscious chicken liver pâté. Then we order martinis off a list mined entirely from G&T’s 125 years of menus. Alex and I feel as refreshed as the luminous dining room, drinking cocktails and slurping oysters under the original Victorian-era light fixtures.

“Can you believe we used to go out like this whenever we wanted?” I say, over a monster pork shank with grits and fermented cranberry jam that neither of us cooked, and which neither of us will clean up. “No,” Alex says, wistfully. We stare off into space for a minute, appreciating the peace of our earlier lives.

During 2022’s James Beard awards, the judges nominated a New Mexican breakfast burrito joint in Brooklyn as one of the best new restaurants in the country. There is a line when we arrive at Ursula in Crown Heights, but it moves quickly. We soon have our hands on two chewy burritos. Their exteriors toasted to a light crunch, their interiors stuffed with fluffy eggs and hash browns. Mine also has bacon and New Mexico’s famous green chile sauce. Alex's has chorizo and New Mexico’s famous red chile sauce.

The nomination couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. While my husband takes Adrian to explore the peaceful paths of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I walk down Eastern Parkway to meet Ursula’s amazing chef, Eric See, at one of his favorite restaurants. Agi’s Counter is just down the street from the first place I ever lived in the city. It’s obvious why See likes it. The owner, Jeremy Salamon, is a fellow queer chef, and both restaurateurs named their places after their grandmothers. Also, the food is delicious. There’s not much room in my stomach after that breakfast burrito. Still, I order speck, egg and cheddar on a Balkan biscuit called a pogača. I eat almost the whole thing. The same goes for the deviled eggs with salmon roe and dill that the kitchen sends out when See arrives.

The chef has just come from work—which is true pretty much always these days. See is one of those traditional New York success stories. He came from a small town in Albuquerque, worked hard in the kitchen at a place called Locanda Verde, and then became so successful that everyone back home started to hear about it. “Anytime I’m on the local news in Albuquerque, my grandma gets recognized,” he says.

He’s not done yet. He is using his success to benefit the LGBTQIA+ food industry community and did a pop-up series in which other queer chefs did short-term kitchen takeovers at Ursula. He also hopes to take a shot at his childhood dream of being a food and travel journalist.

I say goodbye to See and head over to the Botanic Garden to meet Alex. The BBG has an exhibition of artsy birdhouses on display. We check them out while Adrian naps in the stroller. One of our favorites is a birdhouse in the Children’s Garden designed to look like a corner bodega by Brooklyn artist Olalekan Jeyifous.

Once Adrian is awake, we’re off to a brewery. A 15–minute subway ride from the Botanic Garden, Threes Brewing sits like an oasis in the cracked concrete of Gowanus. It’s packed with: A backyard, bathrooms, cheeseburgers, beer. We consider our next move while we pick out a six-pack of beer for later.

My husband has been very patient for the last several days. It's only fair to let him pick our final restaurant. He goes with Mao Mao, an “old-school Thai” drinking establishment by the JMZ train in Bushwick. The tables have movie theater–style seats, Thai action movies play on a big screen, and I’m told that it gets loud on the weekends. We arrive right when it opens and it’s completely empty.

This is the kind of place Alex and I used to love before we left Brooklyn. Everything your eye lands on piques your curiosity: Thai movie posters, old soap boxes, twinkle lights. The food is equally exciting. Squid in ma nao with mint and lettuce is super spicy. Gai saam yang, a traditional Thai snack, is served on a plate like a Cobb salad. When the khao mun gai arrives, we have to ask how to eat the broth that comes with the slow-poached chicken and chicken-fat rice. The server says separately, like soup. They bring a selection of ya dong, Thai moonshine, in unmarked bottles with tiny plastic shot glasses. We pass around one that tastes like cinnamon while we keep dreaming about the future.

“Would you move back one day?” I ask. Alex nods, his mouth full of dumpling, but I already knew the answer. His eagerness to see and hear and feel everything the world has to offer is one of the reasons I married him. I assume it’s what drew him to this marvelous city in the first place. It’s certainly why I came.

For now, though, it’s bedtime. We take a car back to the Ace and put Adrian down in his crib. Then we do what all parents do on vacation: Put on our pajamas, open a couple of beers and hang out in the bathroom.