New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 4 (or, museum messes, strudel, Japanese grill, and Avenue Q)

Once again I started the day off with a bagel and cream cheese. (This time, though, I'd planned ahead so I wouldn't be flustered and decided on a sesame bagel with low fat vegetable cream cheese.)

The day's plan was to go to the city and kill some time before the 8:00pm show of Avenue Q. Avenue Q was on the list of reasons to go to New York; I tried getting half-price tickets a few times while I lived there in 2004, but since the show had just won the Best Musical Tony Award for 2004, tickets weren't available. (And I wasn't willing at that time to pay full price.) This time, however, I wasn't going to risk the unlikelihood of getting half-price tickets and instead purchased some (after much debate about the quality of the seats I wanted and how much I was willing to pay) in advance.

One other activity I missed during my time in NYC was the Museum of Modern Art. Its Manhattan location was under renovation then and so it moved to Queens, and I never made it out to Queens. Well, the renovation had been completed so I planned to spent the day at Moma.

Getting to the city involved the simple purchase of a NJ transit ticket. Well, I almost managed to screw it up -- I was waiting for the train on the same side of the platform as when I went to Princeton. But NYC is the other direction! Happily I realized my mistake before the train came.

After arriving at the endpoint of the rail journey -Penn Station-, I hiked the twenty-something minutes northward to Moma and breathed in the essence of the city. I was back!

And then I found that Moma is closed on Tuesdays. Oops.

My mind was already in the museum mind-set. The only other famous NYC museum I'd missed during my journey was the Pierpont Morgan Library; it was also closed for renovation during my time in the city. While planning my week, I noticed it was still closed for renovation (it's been years!) and due to reopen within the next month of two. But that meant it was out for a destination.

I thought about returning to the Museum of New York, which I'd enjoyed on my previous visit and didn't manage to finish. I'd arrived within an hour of closing; feeling guilty for making me pay, they gave me free tickets to return some other time. However, I'd left my free tickets at home. I believed that fact was a message from fate that today was not the day to return.

Thinking harder, I decided to go to the Design Museum. It was the only museum I could remember not visiting and even feeling remotely bad about. (Most museums I skipped I felt no qualms about.)

After walking north and east in the general direction of the museum for a while, I finally stumbled upon a subway entrance. I felt silly that I'd forgotten where all the stops were in the measly two years since I lived nearby. (This feeling of embarrassment will return again.)

Arriving in the upper east side but before walking to the museum, I decided to head over to someplace on my places to eat in NYC list. The place was Andre's Cafe, an eastern European bakery and restaurant that had been on my list ever since reading the article, The Lost Strudel (New York Times), profiling its production of this hard-to-find item.

The menu portrays itself partially as Hungarian but also offers some ordinary diner-type fare like hamburgers and eggs. But I didn't hover over the menu much other than to choose my flavor of strudel: apple -- fairly traditional, though not quite as traditional as cabbage and not as odd as cherry or potato and ham. My strudel was good, with sizable chunks of apples wrapped in layers of phyllo dough, sweet enough to be a dessert after my bagel but filling enough to complete the meal.

Speaking of bakery items, why is it one can find rugalach at nearly every bakery, deli, and coffee shop in New York but I never see it anywhere in California?

Happily satiated, I went to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. It was thoroughly disappointing. They had a vaguely interesting exhibit on "fashion in color," showing how different colors were used in fashion in different times and the affect they portrayed. And they had a small (sad) exhibit on "designs from Israel" which had a neat chair made of straws melted together. (Yes, the plastic ones you drink from.) That is all that is worth mentioning, in both the special exhibits and the museum itself. Despite listening often to the audio tour, I was still out of the museum in less than 90 minutes and promptly wrote in my notes "small and boring."

Now I had lots of time to kill before the show. I took the train back south to check out the menu of another restaurant I recently heard about. (I thought perhaps I could meet some friends there for dinner later in the week.) Then I checked out another such restaurant. (Ah, text messages to Google local is great for addresses of places you know the names of.) I called my parents. (It's the middle of the workday so the people I could call were limited, and I figured they'd love to hear from me while I was on vacation.) Eventually I took the subway and went shopping at Bloomingdale's, looking for a nice professional looking jacket. (You know, those three-quarter length ones that business-people and other professionals wear outdoors.) I browsed for a while, amazed at the size of Bloomingdale's selection, but, despite the late-season sales making the horrendous prices more reasonable, didn't buy anything. (I can't buy important pieces of clothing like that without a second opinion on how it looks.)

For dinner I grabbed the subway to the east village to head to Yakitori Taisho, a Japanese grill place recommended by a friend of mine. I arrived before 6pm and was told to come back after they open. (New Yorkers as a whole eat late.) So instead I killed some time and scouted out another restaurant I heard about in the area, a restaurant that I'd actually return to later in the week (see the post for Friday - Day 6). When I returned, it was after 6pm and they seated me.

I had really good grilled items and excellent french fries at Yakitori Taisho. (The menu offered a lot of different types of choices (mostly Japanese food with some Korean), so I tried to judge what to order based upon which items had the largest pictures and more prominent placement. That got me to the grilled items. And this seemed right, because as other people arrived, that's what they were ordering too. But they could have been using the same strategy as me... The french fries, however, I ordered because a number of yelpers recommended them.)
* One grilled item I got was a very good skewer of chicken meatballs. The meatballs were light, a mix of ground chicken, peas, and corn, and moist.
* The beef skewer, with a tasty juice marinate, was also quite good (but not as good) because the meat was slightly rubbery / hard to rip meat with one's teeth.
* The green onion skewer was very good. (I'd never had grilled green onions before.)
* The french fries with spicy salmon roe mayonnaise were excellent. The french fries came right out of the frier and started out too hot to eat. This caused me a few burns because they were good, dense from potatoes and fatty but not too much so. But the roe mayonnaise made this dish -- a wonderful creamy cool dipping sauce with a unique flavor.
* Still slightly hungry and wanting to try something besides a skewer to further evaluate the restaurant, I ordered one more item: a grilled rice ball with salmon. This was exactly as described: boring. They coated the ball with a sauce that allowed the outside to blacken without burning on the grill -I saw because I was sitting at the counter- but what I ended up with was a dull ball of rice with small overcooked dry salmon chunks inside. Disappointed with this item, already full, and feeling guilty from all the meat and carbs (especially the whole bowl of french fries), I left some of the rice ball uneaten.

Then, yet another subway ride later, I was in the theater district for Avenue Q.

Avenue Q was great! And my nose-bleed seats -in the balcony along the wall, third row from last- still gave me a perfectly good view of the stage. Perhaps the most mesmerizing feature of Avenue Q was that it seemed as if it was being performed simultaneously by two separate casts: the puppets and the actors holding the puppets. Both were on stage and both "acted" -- I kept going back and forth from watching the expressions on the puppets to watching the expressions on the people.

Avenue Q was clearly targeted at people in my age bracket recently out of college and looking for a PURPOSE. And while it dealt with this issue well with songs like Purpose and I Wish I Could Go Back To College, the concluding song to this theme felt a bit like cheating. Basically the message was wait, and everything will get better.

Avenue Q was filled with catchy songs with funny (and likely true) messages such as The Internet is for Porn, Everybody's a Little bit Racist, and even What Do You Do with a BA in English?. Yet the songs that touched me the most were slower: There's a Fine, Fine Line ("between love and a waste of your time") and There Is Life Outside Your Apartment.

In addition to lessons based on the morale and the theme, I learned something else from Avenue Q; I learned through the song Schadenfreude that I'd always been mispronouncing this word.

The only complaint I have about Avenue Q is that they had Gary Coleman as a character. This felt unnecessary, like a source for humor that wasn't relevant to the theme.

After the show I walked straight to Penn Station and arrived back "home" around midnight. One of the most striking features of the day was the number of familiar sights, especially so during my walk to Penn Station as the route was the one I usually used to walk to work during the time I lived in the city.

P.S. I took this small selection of photographs today. (The previous day's Afghan Kebab House #7, today and yesterday's Bagels-4-U, today's Andre's Cafe, today's Yakitori, plus one more photograph...)