Secret Lovers
Mrs. Robot and I like to do the mystery date/vacation thing. It’s all sorts of fun.
There have been mystery dinners and mystery hotel stays in NYC and mystery trips to Portland (east coast style (Maine)) and Las Vegas (yuck town USA). This past Friday was Mystery Date night!
All I knew was that I had to meet her at Columbus Circle at 7pm.
Discovering Columbus
This public art installation has been up for a few months (ha - I wrote “up”). “If you’ve ever wanted to see what the city’s pre-eminent statue of Christopher Columbus looks like standing on a large coffee table in an upscale New York living room with killer views, now is your chance. Under the auspices of the Public Art Fund, the Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi has built a convincingly appointed penthouse-worthy space around the 13-foot-high marble sculpture of Columbus that has presided over Columbus Circle from a height of 60 feet since it was completed by Gaetano Russo in 1892.” - NY Times Review - Public Art Fund website
The Christopher (Kriss Kross make you jump) Columbus statue in Columbus Circle is wrapped in scaffolding. You get your free tickets online and hike up the stairs to the living room at the top where you see the Columbus statue displayed on a coffee table in a (swanky) living room. It is a bit surreal to have this large statue in this nice living room setting. The night we were there (a Friday) it was a bit crowdy and everyone had camera phones out snapping photos (me too) - which kind of makes things less surreal.
Two points...
I apparently don’t like heights. The scaffolding to get up to the living room is very nicely put together and very safe, but I stupidly somehow tripped on the first set of stairs and for dumb stupid reasons I was all buggy the rest of the way up.
The views were awesome. Views straight up the avenues and across 59th street. Central Park. Good stuff.
Mystery Dinner
Afterwards, we had to eat dinner and the lovely Mrs. Robot booked us a table at Boulud Sud. One of my favorite places in Manhattan is Bar Boulud, which is Daniel Boulud’s take on the classic French bistro right around the corner (in fact, they actually connect). Boulud Sud is his take on Mediterranean.
It’s very grown up. Apart from the older gentleman with the very young girl (daughter? granddaughter? mistress?) I think we were the youngest people in the restaurant. I know this for a fact because I saw NO ONE TAKING PHOTOS OF THEIR FOOD. It was strange. They were all eating and talking.
But, really. Skews older. The dining room, while very handsome, has a 1980’s/90’s media/socialite power-lunch vibe to it.
The food is lovely. Here’s what I’d recommend:
This dish with uni and crab
The grilled octopus dish
Mrs. Robot loved the chicken liver. I did not.
Kale salad (of course)
My only complaint is the menu that is divided into categories: fish, vegetables, and meat. Within each category are starters and plates to share and entree-sized dishes. You basically have three menus. It may have been the sudafed in my blood stream (yay meth!) but I had a hard time working through the menu.
#firstworldproblem
