New York City-Round One

I always seem to be jetting off to far-flung locations and it's usually without my husband. I'd love it if he could join me, but his jobs is the worst and he barely gets any vacation time. Luckily, we were able to spend a gorgeous long weekend in NY together where we, naturally, ate and drank every thing in sight. We stayed with my friend Dominick, who had pizza and snacks ready for us when we arrived well past midnight. These are the kind of friends you want to keep around. He is always on the cutting edge of something food-wise and introduced us to Maangichi, a Korean cook living in NY who has tons of delightful and very detailed videos on Youtube on making all kinds of Korean specialties. Hungry for more, we headed to New Wonjo, where we had a Korean style miso soup (Ben's favorite), a seafood pancake (not memorable), a chicken soup with dates and ginseng (delicate and lovely) and the classic bibimbap (my favorite). Briefly sated, we walked to Washington Square Park to enjoy the gorgeous weather, listen to some music and do some excellent people watching. I had a hankering for a cocktail at this point so we went to the rooftop bar at Eataly. Unfortunately, 1 million other people had the same idea so it was very crowded and very hot. We continued our search for drinks in an outdoor venue when we stumbled upon Bobo, which had no outside seating but was so charming we had to stop. Now that we were properly aperitifed, we made out way to Mario Batali's flagship restaurant Babbo. I had made the reservation weeks before and we were all very excited! My thoughts overall were positive. I thought the food was of high quality, some of it very impressive (smoked scallops with fava-mascarpone mash and pasta with tomato, pecorino and mint) and some of it could be improved (the pastas weren't all that, although they were sauced spectacularly). For dessert we had the buttermilk budino, which was not at all what I expected. D and B. didn't like the apricot sauce on it (I did), but we all agreed that the sesame gelato was sublime. Service was a bit chilly but perfunctory. It was really expensive, as I anticipated, and we definitely enjoyed it, but it's crossed off of my bucket list now.