Jet Lag? Pish-Posh to Jet Lag.... Let's go to NYC!

Two weeks after returning from our trip to Russia and barely over jet lag, mom and I were off again to New York City for the Labor Day weekend.
A few months before going to Russia, mom suggested going to NYC for Labor Day weekend, I wasn’t going to turn down a visit to the city that never sleeps, until I actually looked at the calendar and said that’s only 2 weeks after returning from Russia. Mom said she was “up for it” so I jumped on board too.

We got a reasonable airfare for that weekend, with one catch. Instead of being the direct flight on Delta from Savannah to LaGuardia, the outbound flight had a connection in Atlanta. Typically we like the direct flight, it’s barely 2 hours and with only a few direct flight options out of Savannah it’s always a nice alternative. But, if we connected in Atlanta, then we would also get a few more miles to add to our Sky Miles account, so we took the plunge and booked the outbound trip with the connection in Atlanta and for the return trip we did manage to get the Delta LaGuardia – Savannah direct flight.

Once the airfare was purchased I searched my “go-to” websites for hotel discounts. I came up with a good deal on TravelZoo for the Millennium Broadway hotel, a hotel we had stayed at before, in a good location and for $189 a night in the heart of the Theater District, it was a no-brainer for us to book it. The hotel does seem to need a little love, but it was clean and comfortable and perfect for 2 nights.

With only two nights in the city I didn’t want to cram every second with a Broadway show, and honestly, there wasn’t much that was playing that we had a big interest in, but when I got a discount offer for tickets to see The Best Man, with a note-worthy cast, we bought the tickets.

Now we were set, except for restaurants. Here is where I turned to past research and experience. I had been hearing a lot of good things about Trestle on Tenth, so we booked a table there for Saturday night and followed that with a booking at Toloache (mid-town location) for Sunday night after the show. I knew we’d want a pre-dinner drink before dinner at Trestle on Tenth and I did a little Google research. This research brought me to a wine bar called the Drunken Horse in the Chelsea neighborhood on 10th Avenue between 23rd & 24th Streets, which was just a half block from Trestle. We planned to go there before dinner on Saturday.

We arrived at LaGuardia on Saturday afternoon at about 1pm. I had booked a Carmel Car pickup and after I called them to say we had landed the car arrived in about 10 minutes and whisked us into the city. I’ve got to say, we have used Carmel on all of our visits in the last 5 years and this particular driver had the cleanest car we ever had.

We entered the Millennium Broadway Hotel at about 1:30, which was earlier than the 4pm check-in time. This wasn’t a problem; we left our luggage with the bellman and headed out in search of a Starbucks, which aren’t hard to find in this city!

We enjoyed a refreshingly cool coffee beverage in Bryant Park and then planned to go to the New York Public Library to check out an exhibit I had heard of. The exhibit is the History of Lunch in New York and I was excited to see this, but mom was ecstatic because there was reportedly a replica of an automat in the exhibit. As we approached the side door of the library, where the sign for the exhibit was located, I had an uneasy feeling; the big doors were closed tight. I walked up and tried to open the door, no luck. Were we in the wrong place? So, we walked all the way around the building, with no luck, no open doors. Then it started to dawn on me, I had checked the hours of the exhibit online, but I never checked to see what the hours of the library where for the weekend. Yes, I miscalculated, because of the holiday weekend, the library was closed, which meant no exhibit. Oh, well, go to Plan B…a little retail therapy at Sephora.

It was close to 4pm so we now were able to check into the hotel and freshen up a little. After about an hour, we made our way to the nearest subway station, bought a Metro Card and made our way down to Chelsea and walked to the Drunken Horse Wine Bar ( www.drunkenhorse.net ) at 225 Tenth Avenue.

We LOVED the Drunken Horse; the proprietor was really nice. He greeted us as soon as we walked in. There were several others at the bar and scattered at tables throughout the place. It’s not a big, but it has a very welcoming vibe. Mom and I decided to sit at the bar.

When it came to ordering wine the owner asked what we liked and then said he had just the wine for us. It was a white wine from Spain and boy was he spot-on, it was perfect. We then asked what the specialty of the house was on the tapas menu and he happily recommended the hummus and zucchini pancake, we ordered one of each.

I am not a huge hummus fan, but this hummus was unbelievably delicious. I’ve never had hummus so creamy, and the pita bread that came with it was warm and soft and perfect. The zucchini pancake was good too, mom really enjoyed it, but I pronounced the hummus a winner for me.

Just before 8pm we left The Drunken Horse and walked the 3 minutes to Trestle on Tenth. Being a holiday weekend Saturday it was clear by the number of empty tables that I probably didn’t really need a reservation, but what really raised my radar was the hostess. For an establishment that was not full, we had to wait a good 5 minutes to even be greeted at the entryway. This did not sit well with us and the meal didn’t get much better from there.

The service was mediocre, and the food was not much better. The pasta and pancetta starter we shared was extremely salty, my scallop main dish was ok, but mom’s fish main dish was really lackluster and had no flavor at all. The wine, a French Sancerre was very good. In an effort to try and salvage the meal I did opt for dessert and all I can remember about it was that it was a cakey item which came with a lemon ice cream that was ok.

Lesson learned, sometimes all that you hear about a place isn’t always the most accurate, and it was a holiday weekend, so maybe the “second string” was in the kitchen cooking. At least our time pre-dinner at The Drunken Horse was great!

On Sunday morning we made our way to the Starbucks next to the hotel for a jolt of caffeine and then walked to The Morgan Library at 225 Madison Avenue (at 36th Street). Mom and I had never heard of The Morgan Library until we read a Fodors trip report a few years ago about someone who had gone there. At that time we put this library on our radar for a future visit and this trip seemed like the perfect time. Plus there was a temporary exhibit at The Morgan Library of Winston Churchill’s correspondence.

We arrived at The Morgan Library just before the 11am opening time. Prior to this trip I found out the actual dining room, which was part of the Morgan family home, was now open as a restaurant and served lunch during the week and brunch on weekends. Being a Sunday we opted to have an 11am brunch reservation. The omelets we had were delicious and the dining room is just lovely.

After we had brunch we meandered through the library. All I can say is WOW! What an incredible collection of drawings, printed books and bindings, medieval and renaissance manuscripts, literary and historical manuscripts, music manuscripts and ancient seals and tablets. Pierpont Morgan was quite the collector. As incredible as the collection itself is, the library is also a work of art, it is truly an exquisite building. When we picked up the audio guide that is included in the admission price we hit the jackpot with the docent handing out the devices. This woman was a wealth of information about the history of Mr. Morgan and the library. I’m glad she asked us if we knew anything about the library and I’m glad we said, “No”, because after just 10 minutes standing with her at her desk we knew a whole lot more!

The library is not very large, but we spent close to 2 hours there. We probably could have spent more time, but by 2pm we had to leave because we had a 3pm matinee of The Best Man we had to get to.

It took us about 30 minutes to walk from The Morgan Library to the Theater District and find the theater. The line in front to get in was longer than I thought it would be. The doors were opened about 20 minutes before the performance and we found our seats without a problem.

The Best Man did have a great cast, James Earl Jones, John Larroquette, John Stamos, Kristen Davis to name a few, but for us it started out slow. It did pick up in the second and third acts, but we would say it was average. It wasn’t the worst show we had ever seen, but it wasn’t the best either. This was the last week of performances of this show and I was a little surprised to see a completely full house. Maybe it was because of the discounted tickets they were offering, or maybe it was because it was a Sunday matinee, or maybe it was just that full because of all the big names in the cast.

The show ran just shy of 3 hours and at about 6pm we were streaming out of the theater and heading to the Renaissance Hotel in Times Square. We found the lounge in this hotel has a spectacular view of Times Square and it’s a nice place to get a glass of wine, for a reasonable price and the location was perfect because we had a 7:30pm dinner reservation at Toloache on 50th Street.

Just before 7:30pm we settled our bar tab at the Renaissance Hotel and walked over to Toloache. I found this Mexican Bistro on one of our NYC trips last year and have to say, the food is delicious. It was packed to the gills on this Sunday night and I was happy I had made a reservation. We were seated as soon as we walked in and this time we had a table on the upper balcony level.

The service here was great, attentive, but not hovering. The big draw here is the number of tequilas this restaurant has on offer. So going out of our “wine box” mom and I ordered margaritas to start. Mom had a cucumber and lime version, I had the blueberry and lime version. We were both very happy with our selections.

Another claim to fame of this place is the guacamole. I am not a big guacamole fan, but I really wanted to give it a try here and to strike a balance between my milder palate and mom’s fiery palate we ordered the mild version. Another WOW! dish. This guacamole was like no other I have ever had, it was creamy and chunky at the same time, how is that even possible? I don’t know, but it was delicious.

We took the advice of our server and we got the 2 menu items he recommended. Mine was a shrimp dish, and mom’s was a pork dish. Talk about flavor exploding in our mouths, but not in a hot spicy way, just in a bold full of flavor way. Since by the time our main dishes arrived we had finished our margaritas, we ordered 2 glasses of a Spanish albarino wine that went perfectly with both dishes. We were two happy girls.

But, there was really a specific reason we wanted to come back to this restaurant and it was the orange coffee. Oh My God! This is the best coffee either of us has ever had and it did not disappoint. It was the perfect end to our time in NYC.

The next day we had plenty of time to get ready before the car was to pick us up at 10:30am to take us back to LaGuardia. As great as the driver was who picked us up on Saturday, this driver on Monday was the “Mario Andretti” of the Carmel Car fleet. Seriously, we were not sure if we would get out of the car in one piece. He sure did like to drive fast, cut off other cars and take surface roads instead of the highway. Thankfully we arrived at the airport without getting into an accident.

As luck would have it, our flight was delayed for a couple hours, but this gave us time to have a late breakfast/early lunch. As we waited to board the plane for the flight home I was happy to see both our names clear the flight upgrade list, so mom and I got to fly home in business class, it was like the proverbial cherry on the sundae of a great weekend!