New York - Part The Third

Sunday we took extremely leisurely. We left the hotel late and went off to find brunch before exploring the West Village. I had the largest pile of pancakes, bacon, scrambled egg and maple syrup of the whole trip. I didn't think that the bacon/syrup combination would appeal but I ate it a few times a developed a bit of a penchant for it although no-one seems able to cook scrambled egg in New York, it's always too cooked.

After failing to finish my breakfast - there were just too many pancakes, we wandered through the West Village past Le Petit Puppy, a puppy shop. Pet shops like this are now illegal in the UK and have been for nearly 20 years but there were a couple we saw with tired little pups crammed into a window display. It's possible that the dogs were on rotation for window duty but they didn't seem happy and the experience upset both Tinseltroos and myself. Fortunately once we'd got beyond the village down to the river we saw many happy dogs out and about playing. We even stumbled across a specifically doggy playground.

One of the best aspects of New York compared with London is what a dog-friendly city it is. T and I are mad-keen on dogs and one day intend to own a Tibetan Terrier whom we plan to name Sprocket, but that's a digression. The number of dogs on the streets of New York was a constant delight. I think we annoyed a few locals by asking to play with their dogs and quizzing them generally about their furry friend.

After our walk we retreated back our favourite watering hole Fanelli's for a beer or two.

Fanelli's is the second oldest restaurant in New York apparently and it's wonderful. The burgers are superb, the beer very good and the waiting staff friendly. They began to recognise us eventually due to the frequency of our visits. From what I saw, bars in New York are generally full of either preppy types who seem too uptight to have fun or serious poseurs. What I liked about Fanelli's was how laid back it was - an atmosphere like a British pub, whilst still remaining a very New York cafe.

Monday was MoMA day and it didn't disappoint. It was a delight to see Les Demoiselles D'Avignon in its centenary year; it certainly lived up to the hype and one of the most amazing paintings it has ever been my pleasure to stand in front of. We were also able to catch the Jeff Wall show which is on tour. I'd seen it at Tate Modern last year but T hadn't so it was good to be offered a second chance and I wasn't about to turn down an opportunity to see one of the best shows of last year in London. The other delight of the MoMA was that it had floors devoted to design and architecture as well as fine art. The exhibit on 50 years of Helvetica, probably my favourite type-face, was lovely to see.

On Monday night we once again opened ourselves up to the wisdom of the concierge and asked for a table to be booked at a very American restaurant as it was our final night in the city. He got us a table at a superb restaurant on 10th Avenue called Cookshop. It billed itself as "modern American" which seemed to me very akin to the "modern British" school of taking some traditional national dishes and mixing them with influences of other cultures a little but with the focus on good quality ingredients. It was a delicious meal, I had a fish bisque, a New Jersey rabbit and an apricot baked alaska. This was washed down with a bottle of Napa Valley Semillon from Ruston Vines. Well worth tracking down the 2003 vintage.

Tuesday post checking out was spent mooching around Soho until the shops opened so that Tinseltroos could go to Miss Sixty and get some jeans.

This was followed by more mooching, a final beer at Fanelli's to get out of the 87 degree heat and then at 4 o'clock we went back to Lombardi's for a late lunch to fortify us against having to eat any airport food.

The cab back through rush-hour was pretty exciting with our cabbie diving down the back streets of Queens to try and beat the rush and he got us to JFK with plenty of time to spare.

After a bit of a panic at check-in when we found that our flight had been cancelled we were allocated to another flight that took off at almost the time we'd been supposed to leave anyway so all was good. I slept from the coast of Canada to due south of Iceland and we landed back at Heathrow, safe and sound at 9 a.m. BST.

Wonderful.

New York - Part The Second

On the Friday morning we pootled around Soho and its environs taking a peek inside some of the shops. We met up with Lucretia for lunch prior to his jetting home to Maine that night. Ama was a very pleasant Itialian restaurant which Tinseltroos is modelling here:

The proprietor treated us to a lengthy diatribe on the failings of his employees who had apparently telephoned him thirty minutes before to say they were sick and couldn't come to work; he suspected this to be a fib and since the weather was a balmy 80 degrees I tend to agree.

Friday evening saw us visit the New York offices of a former employer so we could a) Take advantage of their lovely roof-terrace with views like this:

and b) go out for the evening with several former colleagues for pizza at the remarkable Lombardi's Pizzeria:

Lombardi's claims to be the oldest pizzeria in New York and I love New York style pizza. The consistency seems like a very light dough which has been thoroughly beaten flat meaning that once cooked it is slightly thicker than an Italian pizza base but not as bready as more deep-pan pizzas. They also had pitchers of Yuengling and Sam Adams beer which was the perfect accompaniment. Following dinner we went out for a few drinks till our jet-lag would finally leave us alone no more. Here is my Perfect Manhattan in Manhattan:

On Saturday we had breakfast in an old style New York restaurant called Prime Burger. The swing out tables and bar-top dining combined with the staff and pleasingly mechanical till made me feel as if I'd just stepped into a Damon Runyon story. They did a good bacon and scrambled egg too. Next we took a ride in the fastest elevator I've ever been in up the Rockefeller Center to take in the New York skyline. Whilst not a high as the Empire State, the Rockefeller grants you wonderful views of the Empire State which I'd rather have that a view of The Rock. The vista laid our before us was predictably astonishing. Until you get above the roof line it is hard to grasp just how big New York City is. London apparently has a greater population but that's spread over a greater area and much of it is suburb, the part you'd actually call city-like is pretty contained. In New York it extends for miles. Amazing.

After The Rock (not Alcatraz) we went up to The Guggenheim. It was disappointing truth be told. Half the gallery is closed to allow for renovation, the entire exterior is shrouded in tarpaulin meaning little of Frank Lloyd Wright's design can be seen and the visiting exhibition of neo-impressionism and divisionism was full of some of the nastiest paintings I've seen. I've never liked Seurat and to have room after room filled with him and his acolytes did not cheer me or Tinseltroos. I liked this photo I took of the entrance to The Guggenheim though:

From there we walked to the Frick Collection. Henry Clay Frick was an industrialist who had a fortune so vast he decided to build a replica of a French palace on Fifth Avenue. The building itself is a skillful pastiche but is not of much interest beyond that. What is of interest is Frick's art collection that he filled the place with. He has Holbein's portrait of Thomas More, there are Rembrandts, Vermeers, Piero della Francescas and a collection of deliciously naughty Bouchers. If the building feels a touch ersatz the art more than makes up for it.

We did one more gallery, the International Center of Photography. Having thumbed through a copy of Time Out New York I'd found that the gallery had an exhibition of the work of Stephen Shore, one of my favourite photographers, and so we decided to stop by. In addition to the Shore, which was the biggest selection of prints I've seen together in one place there was another show on African America portraiture. Whilst this could have been very tokenistic, the theme of the show was how photography had allowed images of prominent African Americans to be widely disseminated and thus how photography formed part of the political struggle for equality. The photographs chosen were incredible as were the stories of those portrayed. A very impressive show.

Here is a napping courier I photographed on our wanders through Midtown. I only include this photo because I like it:

Having had enough of culture we head back to Soho through the East Village stopping off for a spot of lunch. Inspired as I was by Stephen Shore, here is my pastiche of a famous Shore picture of a half eaten McDonald's meal in 1973:

New York - Part The First

We did so much in New York that I'm going to have to break this down into a few posts I think. Chronological order is dull but will serve me well here. Let me back up a little and explain before I go into detail that I am probably the worst travelled person on the planet. I have been abroad five times prior to this trip and I've flown on two of those holidays, both within the EU. The idea of a) going to another continent and b) flying reasonably long-haul to do so was completely alien to me, and I was quite nervous if I'm honest.

Once we'd got to Heathrow and handed over our luggage we sought breakfast and found a Chez Gerard which served us a very good scrambled egg on toast. A top tip if you're stuck in Heathrow as most of the other places to eat aren't too enticing. After having our shoes X-rayed about 17 times and putting all my worldly goods into a plastic tray and then taking them out again another 127 times we were deemed not to pose a security threat to anyone and were allowed to board. We flew Virgin as their seats are a teeny bit bigger than BA (which helps if you're over 6 foot) and they have edible food and excellent entertainment. You have hundreds of movies, TV shows, music and radio to choose from. I managed to fit in several episodes of "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue", "Blackadder" as well as documentary on Led Zeppelin and as we finally made landfall into North America I was listening to "Voodoo Chile" by Jimi Hendrix which seemed pretty apt to me. This is what I was looking at whilst Jimi was chopping down the sides of mountains wth the edge of his hand:

Once we'd landed and immigrated we got a taxi to our hotel. The thing which I don't think I'd fully appreciated is what the sensory overload (combined with jet-lag) would feel like. I've only ever travelled in Europe before where cars, houses and so on look roughly similar; there are differences of course but they don't leap out at you. The US looks totally different, from the vehices on the street, to the concrete of the roads and the buildings which line them and on and on and on. For the first two days it was a complete head-rush as the filters in my brain which say things like, "Oh yes, that's a Ford Focus" or "There's a 19th Century terrace" at a subconscious level obviously no longer worked so my eyes, ears and nose were feeding my brain completely new and unprecedented data all the time. I actually felt quite dazed and confused for a while until my brain began to "learn" what The US looked like.

We met up with my chum Lucretia Racquel Arabella and his girlfriend Zifogel on the Wednesday night for cocktails until we had to bail in order to get some jet-lag, bad-craziness sleep at about eleven.

The following morning I had my first experience of pancakes, bacon and maple syrup which I found surprisingly moreish. We don't, in general, mix sweet and savoury much in the UK so I was a little trepidatious about the whole thing but since I had the same thing on 3 further mornings I think we can count it a success. After breakfast we took a wander into Tribeca to find the fire station from "Ghostbusters", probably my favourite comedy film. It's now a working fire station again but I think you can tell by the inane grin on my face how much this bit of fanboydom meant to me:

We then went on to walk from our hotel in Soho up to The Metropolitan Museum of Art which is halfway up Central Park - a pretty lengthy hike. It was worth it as the exhibits there were incredibly beautiful and it was lovely to see an art gallery and museum combined, something else we don't really do here much. Here's a selection of my favourite photos I took there:

Our second Ghostbusters homage took us past the New York Public Library where the film opens. I had my iPod loaded up with The Bus Boys' "Cleaning Up The Town" and, as I ran down the steps, Tinseltroos captured the moment for posterity. I'm sure posterity is very grateful.

Wednesday was also our anniversary and so we spoke to the concierge about finding us a good restaurant for dinner. I casually mentioned it would have to be veggie friendly for Tinseltroos and she rather took me at my word. We were booked into Pure Food and Wine, a vegan, raw restaurant where they have no oven or hob and only use pickling and dehydrators to treat the food. Despite our slight misgivings we had an excellent dinner, my main course consisting of portobello mushrooms steeped in lapsang souchong, pickled beetroot, capers and a raw potato salad. I think the potatoes had been soaked in something for a long while as though they were crunchy there was no hint of the starchiness you'd normally expect from a raw spud. We washed our dinner down with a lovely Kiwi Pinot Noir (they're so hot right now) and from there took a cab home to bed. What a lovely day.

To be continued...