A Friday Evening in March

The weeks are passing alarmingly fast now and we are slowly approaching spring. These past few day, or rather weeks have been cold, well, relatively cold. At Christmas we got a gift card to a famous restaurant called Momofuku. We have been cooking recipes from their cookbook for a few years now, so it seemed suiting to actually go there now that we live in New York. We were celebrating something else this day and decided to finally use the gift card. We left the apartment just before 5, even though we planned to leave at 4, I guess that is how it goes nowadays. Riding the subway on a Friday during rush hour is always interesting, and can probably seem like a nightmare. You get packed into the subway carts amongst a thousand other people who are switching places for the evening, but it is also a perfect time for people watching if you are into that. During our slow (even though we were on the express line) ride three interesting groups of people went through the subway cart. On the ride to the first stop we had three people entertaining us, one person was playing a guitar, another one singing and a third rapping a beautiful tune. Quite impressive though to play guitar and ride the subway at the same time. When they left a thin woman wearing a poster hanging on her front and back entered our subway cart. W had seen her riding a bike a few days before, banging on car windows and yelling her message. She was praising veganism and thought that everyone should become vegan. When she left a man came in and wanted to sell postcard photos, he had a funny way of presenting his art. It was unclear if it actually was his art or not, since there was no information about the art or him on the actual cards.

We finally got off at 14th street and East Village. If you are looking for dive bars there seem to be quite a few around east village. We are not made of money and while it’s probably super awesome to grab a cocktail or two while you are in NYC you probably already spend 20 dollars before you even found a place to eat. You’ll probably spend close to that amount in other cities too, but NYC rents are out of this world so we hang on tight to every lite penny we have above that :) Many places do have really great Happy Hour deals, which is a life saver for you wallet. Most of the time you can find their happy hour specials on their websites or by reading peoples comments on google maps. We walked down towards 7th street to get to a dive bar W had looked up earlier, Blue & Gold Tavern. I was surprised by how few people were there, but I liked the vibe. It had a pool table, a jukebox and a friendly vibe, and a pretty decent Happy Hour. Seems like a lot of the locals go to this bar. After that we went to Momofuku which is located between 10th and 11th street on 1st Avenue. We thought the wait would be long but it turned out that they get people in and out pretty quick here. A tip is to make sure that people who are standing in line are actually standing in line. You have to put your name on the list to get a table, but there isn’t that much space to stand, other than the line, after that. We got a tiger beer while waiting and before long we were seated by the bar right by the kitchen. I love seats where you are able to see what all the people in the kitchen are doing. We ordered the pork buns, chicken wings and the pork Ramen. So tasty, just like we expected :) Our plan was to continue the night but we went to one other bar and realized that we were both so full after dinner and decided to call it a night. We were home before 10, I guess we are getting old.