On staycating in NYC

I live in NYC. I grew up in the north of England. Four years ago I started seeing this lovely lady.

Last year to balance the distance I agreed to speak at a lot of conferences, this year she came over to NYC for two weeks. I spent a bunch of time asking people what we should do. So I took a two week vacation from Artsy & CocoaPods.

We started out with a huge list of things to do, and would pick a thing or two from the list each morning. Unless it required pre-booking, wherein I had usually already sorted that.

I’ve taken the liberty of making a Yelp page of all the restraunts incase you want to look at those specifically. I am normally vegetarian, but given that Danger was over, I opted to go full omnivore in order to share more food with her.

• We started the tour by going straight to the Statue of Liberty. We walked down to the southern tip of Manhattan and followed the crowd to a ship. It was nice, if a tad underwhelming like all tourist architecture tends to be. We got out and went straight to bare burger, a renound burger bar in the finance district. They were expensive burgers, and it was cool to get recognised in manhattan in front of my girlfriend :) - we finished the evening with an Artsy happy hour.

• Previous to Danger arriving I had been volunteering with the Coalition for Queens. They were hosting an event, so we went along to that in the morning. This was fun. We hung out a bit at home, and tried to make it to the NYC Porn Film Festival but couldn’t buy tickets on the door. So we headed back and did Kellogg’s diner for some Americana.

• For breakfast we went to Yonah Schimmel’s Knishery - this is a few steps from my house. Lovely place, really old school. I had never heard of a knish, they’re nice, stodgy potato buns. In the evening we went to the Discovery Museum and attended their Bodyworks exhibition and be kinda creeped out by the human body. As it was a sunday, we participated in my sunday dinner club. We ate vegan junk food at Champs, in Brooklyn.

• We got up and did bagels at Russ and daughters. Bagels are a thing in NYC, and this place is famous. A bagel there comes to around $15 ( for contrast, I get them for 6 for $8 at a store. ) It turns out the traditional way to do it is cold. We heat them and add cream cheese and marmite. It’s the real way to eat them IMO. Anyway we went to the Rockerfella Center’s Top of the Rock instead of the Empire States building. It looked like the view of Central Park would be cooler. It was a beautiful view.We went back did dinner with Dave Wiskus at a cool Italian place. |

• We figured now that we had seen Central Park from afar, and that the weather had a snowy forecast it was the day to go to Central Park. We meandered up dropping in to a Five Guys Burger place. I loved their burger, probably the best one I had during my stay in NYC. We walkted through central park as it went from clear to inches of snow, hanging out in a mini-blizzard was fun. Got some great photos. We finished up the evening by going the The Meatball Shop nearby. Great place, would recommed.

• I live by Katz’s Deli, and we kept our eye on the queues outside, and on this morning we could just pop in. I’ve seen the portion sizes, so we opted to share a Pastrami Sandwich.

  I had booked to go see a Broadway show, Fish in the Dark, during the day. The show was a bit meh. However it ticked off a thing to do, and it was interesting seeing the theature culture. We finished the day by going to the restraunt Yunann, we had been recommended their numbing spices, I loved it.

• We did Fried Chicken in the morning, then in the evening we attended a performance of Sleep No More.

  Sleep No More is a live-action theatre show, reenacting Macbeth. It’s performed on two floors of a hotel, and you act as a floating head following individual actors around as you piece together the story from separate threads. I previously had no experience of the story of Macbeth ( would recommend reading the sparknotes ) so I spent a lot of time walking around absently exporing the set. Every detail could be taken apart. It was beautiful. Would highly recommend.

  We grabbed some Clinton street pizza on the way home exhausted.

• The Armory Show opened and I wanted to pop by. Artsy provided a lot of cool tech to this fair, and I wanted to get a sense of what it was like as a punter. We walked in and I played with my phone for a while, then I had to restart my app and all the cache was gone, so I couldn’t use it. No WIFI either. So useful for a bit.

  The show was cool. We had brazilian food after at Rice and Beans, this was awesome. Given that it was a Friday, we attended Artsy happy hour, then went for Benito One Italian with some fellow Artsyers.

• Danger wanted to try a corn dog. We had seen a place that looked like a nice greasy-spoon on our routes to Brooklyn. So we heading to Papaya dog for a corn dog and philly cheese steak.

  The rest of saturday was pretty chill, we finished by going to the most garish indian restraunt in Manhattan, Milon Indian. I think the photos explain enough.

• We had planned on getting Girl Scout Cookies, as a part of doing the American Experience. We tried a few days earlier to pick some up that were closer, but the date was wrong on the website. And we ended up doing something else. So this time we cditwewalked the Manhattan bridge, Girl Scout cookies, walked back on the Brooklyn bridge, pukk

• Went to whole foods, katja ( German ) then escape the room.
• Highline, artichoke, painting lounge
• Prosperity Dumplings, Coney Island, chili cheese dog at Nathan’s, Dino bbq.
• dominiue ansel, emmets, 
• filipino food, cooper hewitt, artsy happy hour, lamb face ( famous chiuan )

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