New York Trip: Days 2 & 3
We kicked into the rest of our New York weekend with a trip to Tipsy Parson. We all had coffee and breakfast before heading over to the Javit's Center for NY Now. We walked around the handmade portion of the show for a bit and then decided it was time for a coffee break at Blue Bottle inside of Gotham City Market. We stopped into the photo booth at the Market and took a few photo strips to add to our little collection. We then hopped in a cab and drove over to China Town for mine and Ryan's first taste of dim sum. Britni and Bobby's favorite dim sum restaurant is The Golden Unicorn, amazing name, and the restaurant itself is several stories tall. We were sent to the fourth floor and seated at a table where we were eagerly greeted with ladies making their way throughout the tables with carts full of various flavors of dim sum. We picked up several different types from each cart that went by, some were sweet while others were your traditional savories. The table favorite was easily the little piggy sweet buns featured below. I have zero idea what was in them, maybe some sort of taro paste? but it was delicious none the less.
On our last day in town it was Ryan's birthday, and there's no better way to kick off a birthday than with a bunch of donuts. Britni and Bobby took us to a tiny donut shop located inside of a car wash. I loved the fun combination of the two, being able to watch the cars go through the wash while you wait in line for donuts. They have a small variety of flavors, maybe 5 or 6, and we each picked out a few to try. The best was the car wash special which is glazed and is topped with colored stripes that look like the soap stripes used when you have your car washed.
After breakfast we went back to NY Now to walk the upstairs section. Below I took just a few photos of some of my favorite booths. I loved being exposed to brands that I had never heard of and I loved seeing brands booths that I was already familiar with. My favorite of all the booths was Loopy Mango, which specializes and knitted wool sweaters, hats, scarves and blankets. I've never seen anything like it and the colors and knits were so beautiful! Those knitting needles were almost as large as I was!
One of Ryan's friends was working the Tattly booth and was sweet enough to give us a few sample tattoos for his birthday. The pizza neck tattoo was clearly pretty amazing- so many people asked him if it were real and were sadly disappointed when they discovered it was only fake.
Of course I had to stop by the Rifle Paper Co. booth to see which new products they have arriving in stores soon. It was heart eyes all around for their new calendars and planners.
After NY Now, we took the car over into Brooklyn to have lunch at Court Street Grocer's. Brit and Bobby had taken me previously and I absolutely loved their broccoli reuben. We took Ryan their for lunch and it was just as delicious as it had been the last time. I wish we had more places like it at home.
After lunch we went to the Brooklyn Flea, followed by a few games of shuffle board at the Brooklyn Shuffle Board Club. Ryan and I played against Brit and Bobby and my horrible game play cost us two ice cream cones next door at Ample Hill Creamery. Too much talk of biscuits and keeping out of the kitchen for me! I wasn't the best but it still was a lot of fun and I would love to play again sometime.
To end Ryan's birthday celebrations, we went to his requested Shake Shack for dinner. Only the shops in NY have their new fried chicken sandwich and Ryan had his usual burger with a side of chicken sandwich on the walk back to the car. I didn't try it, but it looked delicious. One of Ryan's favorite movies is The Royal Tenenbaums and it was filmed at a house up in Harlem. We took the drive up that way and jumped out of the car for a few photos.
Finally when we arrived home we wrapped up the day with a chocolate, chocolate birthday cake- Magnolia Bakery sure does make a delicious cake. Funny story, I had forgotten to bring candles so I ran to the corner CVS and they legitimately only had the numbers 5, 0, and 6 and all of the 5's were broken right in half. I turned the corner, and the only other candles they had spelled out the word "congratulations," I took my bets on it and figured we could spell out something using the letters, but the only thing we could come up with was RDT, Ryan's initials- haha. Also, month's ago, I had picked up gold mylar balloons that spelled happy birthday. I brought it with me to the city so we could hang it up for his birthday. While Britni and I blew up all of the letters I realized that something wasn't looking quite right. There was only one H in the entire package...so it either spelled out "Appy Birthday" or "Happy Birtday." Such a theme, I could not stop laughing...between that and the candles. We ended up just using the birthday portion of the letters...as you can see. Good thing Ryan has a great sense of humor and it ended up being the best way to end such a fun weekend.