Another New York note

Just wanted to add to the New York chatter that’s been prevalent on the board of late. We just returned from a lovely weekend in the city, and I thought I’d add a recommendation or two. We stayed at the Lucerne Hotel and for anyone who wants to make food a focus of their New York visit, this would be a great choice. It’s not too expensive, by NY standards anyway (I think you can get rooms beginning at about $200 a night, and perhaps do better with internet deals – they do give a AAA discount) and the location can’t be beat: Upper West Side, 79th just west of Amsterdam, a block from Broadway. The service in the hotel was excellent, and the rooms were very nice, and ours included a mini-fridge, dishes and microwave. This was all good because we had breakfast in the room each day, as H&H bagels and Zabar’s are literally around the corner from the hotel. (All these place are described in the earlier NYC posts.) No restaurant breakfast could have been better – on our first morning from Zabar’s we got a pineapple-cream cheese strudel (over a foot long, and only $5.99 – Zabar’s prices are really amazing!) fresh-squeezed orange juice (on special -- two quarts for the price of one! $3.79!), and cream cheese with lox and chives, along with hot bagels from H&H (I learned from my New York native husband that it’s best not to choose in advance what kind of bagel you want – just ask “what’s hot?” and if it isn’t blueberry or cinnamon-raisin, you go with that.) The strudel, which was superb, lasted our entire trip; the bagels we got fresh each morning, needless to say. Barney Greengrass is also a short walk from the hotel, and there are restaurants on Amsterdam or Broadway every few feet, it seems. Any kind of food you might want you to eat you can find in a short walk. There's great ice cream to be had across the street from the hotel at a place called Emack and Bolio's (the ice cream comes from a Massachusetts dairy.) We ate one dinner at a deli on Broadway – Artie’s – which is fairly new but endeavors to capture the essence of the Stage or Carnegie, and does it pretty well, we had to say. Good pickles and very good cole slaw on the table, and excellent pastrami – about as good as the Stage, where my husband often eats on his business trips to NY. The portions were not as huge but then the price tag wasn’t as big, either.

The weather was perfect in NY last weekend (while it rained here) so the Lucerne’s location was even more ideal: we walked two blocks to Central Park and spent an afternoon there, and the next day walked to the Natural History museum. I swear I’m not in any way affiliated with the hotel, and it’s really the location I’m recommending, especially if you’re visiting NY with kids, as we did, or if eating well is part of your game plan. (Also, it being the upper west side, the shopping is great, which matters when you have fashion-conscious young girls with you.) Thanks to all, by the way, who provided advice when I asked before our trip where we might find good family friendly dining in the area.

I have to disagree. I read the entries above, and I just don't understand all of the rave reviews about New York.

Last month I visited NY and it was raining the whole time. However, my regular, yummy go-to city of Chicago was sunny and 70 degrees.

Never again!

Well, and despite the nice weather that we had, the good food, and the artsy shops, my daughters thought the streets smelled like garbage, which of course they do, so we'll stay in Chicago, too. And by the way we also dined at Joe's Shanghai, and we agreed with your previous post -- we weren't bowled over. My older one adores dumplings of all kinds, and we miss the Phoenix dumpling house, so we were pretty fired up about going there, but found the dumplings good but not exceptional. But I was choosing to accentuate the positive, as Chicagoans do (at least by comparison to New Yorkers.)

Toni, I was kidding about the weather. I was just mocking a type of post you see elsewhere often (and here, increasingly) that purports to topple the accumulated wisdom of others based on the poster's one-off, unpleasant experience. My post really had nothing to do with yours, and for that I apologize.

Thanks for the info on the neighborhood and the hotel, which sounds like a good setup.

Regarding Joe's, I did think it was very good, but I guess I'm just not blown away by soup dumplings the way some others are. I do wish we had the robust dumpling competition here that exists in NYC. On the other hand, I'm pretty happy with the state of our noodles compared to NYC -- at least if you count Westmont as Chicago.

PS, I remember when Chicago smelled like garbage and we had graffiti everywhere. Sometime in the past 15 years, Chicago became a city that, at least in its center, looks more like a Northern European metropolis than an urban American place.

I figured you were kidding, and I was kidding about your kidding, but perhaps I was too subtle. No need for apologies, although we could keep this thread going by apologizing back and forth for some time. I'd disagree, though, about Chicago's garbage smell. We have alleys, which they don't for the most part in NY, so we don't have bags of garbage piled up on the street, which are an affront to a number of our senses. It could be what one is used to, of course, but as a lifelong Chicagoan, I'd argue that Chicago has never smelled as bad as New York does generally -- unless, of course, we count the smell once generated by the stockyards, when parts of Chicago (and when the wind was right, all of the city) smelled worse than anywhere on earth.