NEW YORK — I spend a fair amount of time here, but no matter how many days I’m able to string together for one of my visits, I always seem to run out of time before I get to do all the things I want to do.
Or, more to the point — to eat all the things I want to eat.
There are too many restaurants I want to spend time in — too many best-beloveds to visit, too many new joints to try out, too many as-yet-unknown spots to uncover.
On this trip, I managed to squeeze in a couple of favorites, including boeuf Bourguignon with my mom at Le Veau D’Or, my favorite time-warp French restaurant anywhere. Wedged into the un-neighborhood of East 60th Street, it’s the kind of restaurant where, after a glass of champagne or two, it could be 1972 and that could be Bianca Jagger in the booth next to you, or it could be 1988 and that could be Ivana Trump. Or it could be 2008 and that could be, but isn’t, Judith Nathan and Barbara Walters.
I nursed a hangover with eggs over easy and home fries at Florent, the long-standing Meatpacking District diner. Sad news: The place is set to shutter in the next few weeks, thanks, according to the celebrated owner Florent Morellet, to increased rent and a general distaste for the overabundance of glitz the neighborhood has acquired in the past year or two.
I gobbled down two slices (ordered one after the other, not simultaneously, to guarantee too-hot- to-eat temperature) at Joe’s Pizza on Carmine Street, which continues to get my unwavering support in the decades-old West Village pizza war that pits awesome, excellent Joe’s against boring, dreary, overrated (who’s biased?) John’s of Bleecker Street.
At neighborhood favorite Trestle on Tenth in West Chelsea, I got medieval with a half-dozen deep-fried duck necks accompanied by anchovy-soaked aioli and a plate of pizokel, devouring the appetizer-cum-dissection project while watching the famously vegan (and appallingly stunning) Natalie Portman a couple of tables over shift uncomfortably in her chair, probably (and understandably) grossed out by the short ribs, tripe and calf’s liver being passed to and fro.
At the smack-new Merkato Fifty-Five (recently opened by Swedish chef Marcus Samuelsson), I dined on African-inspired chicken pots and octopus with citrus and cured beef, which were interesting and, well, lovingly conceived but left us wishing we’d dined somewhere else. Come dessert time, we did, transferring our meal a dozen blocks down to Wallse, Kurt Gutenbrunner’s tight little Austrian eatery, where we stuffed ourselves with a dish of warm, soothing souffle-like nockerl over huckleberries.
A doughnut from Donut Pub on 14th and a croissant from Patisserie Claude on West Fourth, and I was all but out of town, wishing I’d found time for dim sum and walnut cookies on East Broadway, for noodles on First Avenue, for matzo ball soup up at the new Second Avenue Deli (located on 33rd Street, go figure), for a Manhattan at Employees Only, for a pork chop at Little Owl, for a gin and tonic at Per Se, for a guzzle of armagnac at the Brandy Library.
Well, there’s always next time.
