Sick Transit

I just got home last night from my first personal trip to the East Coast since moving away from New York in 2003. Meia and I spent nine days in New York, Connecticut, Massachussets, and Rhode Island, seeing sights and visiting family. Meia will undoubtedly post a journal and some pix, but I can’t resist sharing a few tips and wags.

Akdeniz Turkish Cuisine near the Theater District not only has excellent food (try the Sultan’s Delight: chunks of tender lamb on a puree of eggplant and flour), but also the most amazingly efficient service I have ever seen. If you are looking for a lesiurely dinner this is not the place to go; but if you’re worried about making an 8:00 curtain, you will be very happy when your entree appears less than a minute after you finish the first course.

Norma’s at Le Parker Meridien, on the other hand, is a waste of your hard-earned cash. Our omelette fillings were dry and overcooked, toast was cold, and the service was mediocre. A $70 (for two people) breakfast ought to be beyond good; this didn’t even match my neighborhood bistro.

Meia had not been up the Empire State Building before, so we went. It’s an obligatory part of a visit to New York, at least once, and I can’t recommend skipping it. But the hard sell for extra items (in addition to the basic observatory tickets, which are already $14 per adult) is unceasing from the moment you enter the building. They even have a dedicated hawker preaching the virtues of the audio tour to the captive audience in line for tickets. The experience felt like it had been designed by a marketing department on crack. I recall nothing like it the last time I went, in ‘02.

To my surprise, some of the best potato salad I’ve ever had was not in New York, but at the Wheat Market deli in Chester, CT. Similarily, I did not stop at the Strand in New York, but Wellfleet Oyster on Cape Cod has a used book store that is more interesting than even most in large cities.

The Rhode Island School of Design Museum is small, but eclectic and well-selected. As one of their rotating exhibits, they mounted a capsule history of 20th-century Western art–a task so broad that a more distinguished museum would likely disdain the idea–entirely from their own collection, and did a solid job of it. The tiny but beautiful textile collection is also well worth seeing.

Finally, a tip to New York’s new AirTrain, which conveniently connects JFK to the subway, and a wag to the designers of Terminal 3, who failed to observe the basic niceties of pedestrian passage or clear signage. I am safely and happily home, but no thanks to those unnamed architects.