We also went shopping with the girls in the Meatpacking district. As the name implies, this is where the meatpacking companies slaughter their livestock, and was also historically the home of some late night S&M bars and lots of transvestite hookers. As the rest of Manhattan real estate skyrocketed, even the grungy Meatpacking district became gentrified. It's now a very eclectic mix of high end quirky retailers, trendy cafes and even the occassional meatpacker.

The last few days of our New York stay was a Bangkok reunion, with Catherine and Saba also in town. Again details are sketchy other than remembering we had a good time together. I also remember something about Morell's restaurant, a wine-oriented place in Murray Hill. I think we tried to have dinner there three different times but something came up each time, including our getting lost, which is virtually impossible in the straight, numbered grids of Manhattan. We also hung our in Laura's apartment, where Somchai and I showed different degrees of comfort with the touch of a woman, as you can see.

Alain Ducasse is probably the most celebrated chef in the world, on the strength of his Paris and Monte Carlo restaurants. He had just ventured into New York with his third restaurant prior to our trip, which was getting alot of negative attention due to its being the most expensive in the city. For us masochists, of course, that's like a red cape to a bull, so we quickly booked dinner here as soon as we planned our trip. Weirdly, his luxe restaurant is in the Essex House, which is a perfectly ok, if frumpy, hotel on Central Park South. Its main problem is that for a decade, every episode of Saturday Night Live ended with a plug for the hotel, along the lines of "guests of SNL stayed at the beautiful Essex House" and it always seemed like one of SNL's jokes rather than a real ad. Anyway, the restaurant itself is very impressive, one of the nicest spaces in the city. We both ordered a special white truffle tasting menu since they were in season, which consisted of eight dishes covered with very expensive white truffle shavings. Due to my cursory journaling during this trip I don't have many details, except the overall memory of excellent food served by fairly stiff, overly formal service. New York restaurants generally suffer from too informal, or too harried service, but the top restaurants overcompensate for this by going overboard on the formality. You would think Ducasse would get this spot on since France has really mastered the perfect mix of formality and friendliness at its top restaurants, but Ducasse's New York outpost hasn't figured this out yet. And I also remember the restaurant had the most impressive wine list I've ever seen, bigger than the phone book and full of rare and obscure offerings. But we made the mistake of opting for matching wines with our tasting menu, which had the usual effect of overintoxicating us. Midmeal, Somchai gave up trying to finish his wines in time with each course, and ended up with about six glasses surrounding his plate. Also, it was an odd choice of wines, mostly from places like Slovenia, which isn't really what I'd expected. (Food: 19, Decor: 19, Service: 15).

The real negative with the Hudson is the rooms. When I travel for work, I get stuck in a single on a cheap corporate rate. These rooms are tiny, but have some design flair. Since this visit was on our own tab, we opted for a suite, which is about three times bigger, a great plus. But the last time I had seen wood paneling was in the house I grew up in as a young kid before we went "uptown", or at least "upstreet". I think they were going for some sort of Adirondack lodge look, and granted it was more expensive material than the cheap wood paneling of my youth, but it still looked darkly depressing and cheap. (Room: 5, Facilities: 9, Service: 5, Overall: 6).

Some more shots of the Hudson, including the scarily lit lounge off the lobby, and some great outdoor terraces. By the way, this should seem familiar to Pomme and Stoli, since you came in to stay here for a day or two with us. We went to see Little Shop of Horrors, then had dinner at a French restaurant that wasn't bad, but a bit quiet. Jog any memories?

Another plus of Madison Avenue is it runs through the heart of the Upper East Side, New York's most exclusive, and prettiest, residential neighborhood. To clarify, Fifth Avenue is very much an Upper East Side avenue as well, but the shopping part of it is further south, in Midtown. The avenues have the grand prewar apartment buildings that house New York's most famous high society families, but the cross streets in the sixties, seventies and eighties contain beautiful townhouses and are much prettier in my opinion.

As per my recent Sydney post, repeat cities like Sydney and New York present blogging problems, and in this case it's compounded by the fact that I seemed to have been on a journalist strike, as my entries are sparse and mostly written while on a subsequent trip. By piecing together my writing fragments and the photos taken I have a vague idea of what I did, so I'll use that framework to largely make up any details needed to flesh this out. Actually we were in New York for a week, but I'll just do a quick blog about it to move onto some newer destinations. I worked during the day, and Somchai (surprise!) went shopping on Madison Avenue. Generally, we tend to stay downtown, mostly because we like it better and because we had an apartment in Soho. But downtown is too cool for Christmas so we spent most of our town in midtown or the East Side to get the full-on Christmas spirit. While for most people Fifth Avenue is New York shopping, we much prefer Madison Avenue. Fifth Avenue is crazy crowded, particularly at Christmas, the shops are very variable in quality and not particularly attractive. Madison Avenue in contrast, has a much quainter feel to it, and has many more unusual boutiques and one-off shops interspersed among the luxury brands.

103. New York

We flew to New York via Hong Kong and Vancouver on Cathay Pacific, which was very good flight except for the stop n Vancouver. From the plane Vancouver looked like a rainy, dreary place, which was depressing since we'd be spending a week there on the return journey. I had to work a couple days in New York, which meant staying at a hotel on our corporate list, which is usually a bad idea. This trip proved no exception, as we stayed at the W Hotel, which should be avoided at all costs. There are three W hotels in New York, but we stayed at the original (and worst) of the bunch. It used to be an undistinguished old hotel on Lexington Avenue, perhaps New York's ugliest avenue. It got tarted up in the usual W way, but as the old saying goes, it's like putting lipstick on a pig. The lobby is dark, and music thumping, hence establishing its street cred, and it had the usual absence of service. One oddity is that what few people they did have standing around and not providing service were old and unattractive, the type you'd find in KMart rather than a hip hotel. Usually staff at these types of hotels are models and actors so they at least contribute to the ambience, but here they clashed. Room was standard and on the fourth floor so you could practically see into the Lexington Avenue buses as they noisily chugged past. (Room: 4, Facilities: 5, Service: 3, Overall: 4).





We had dinner at the Heartbreak restaurant at the hotel, which wasn't bad, had a bit of design to it, though again, very "experienced" servers. And Somchai proclaimed his risotto to be the saltiest thing he has ever eaten, including salt. (Food: 10, Decor: 16, Service: 12).

New York/Vancouver December '03

Decided on another Christmas in New York, so this post will be a bit repetitive. The good news is that the previous trip was hundreds of blog posts ago so it's unlikely anyone will remember. I'm pretty sure that photos such as the Rockefeller Christmas Tree are so blindingly obvious inclusions for a New York Christmas entry that these photos must be very similar to the last time round, but I'm too lazy to check. The photos are new in any event, so very anal blog readers can compare differences in the tree this trip vs the last Christmas visit.

I remember Somchai spent most of the day at Prada while I went to work, and we had dinner at Chanterelle in Tribeca. Chanterelle was one of the first destination restaurants to open in the then wasteland of Tribeca, but it's been joined by dozens of fine dining spots as the neighborhood has become one of the trendiest places to live in New York. It's still very highly regarded, though a notch below Daniel, but I preferred it. The room is much warmer and welcoming than Daniel's, and the service more welcoming and a bit less robotic. I also enjoyed the food more, which I'm not supposed to, as it seemed a bit more innovative than at Daniel, which sticks more to classic French. The only big downside here was there was some sort of corporate function involving about half the restaurant, and as the night progressed, that half degenerated into a loud boring office party with everyon standing around shouting boring work stories. (16-17-13)

We were in New York for three days I think, and I'm pretty sure we moved to the much nicer Mercer Hotel, although the only reason I think this is because I remember some of our friends passed out in the lobby of the Mercer one night, and I think they were there because we were staying there. I know that one night we had dinner at Daniel, one of a handful of restaurants awarded four stars from the New York Times. Daniel is the main restaurant of uber-chef Daniel Boulud, and it does churn out great food. But overall the experience was pretty cold and corporate. The room is tough, no windows, done up like a Venetian palace, so it borders on Vegas-y. But mainly it's the service that got on my nerves. If you only eat in American restaurants, then you'd be comfortable with the service here. And I used to be impressed with places like this when I lived there. But there's such a difference in restaurants in the US and almost everywhere else that I'm no longer used to the American approach, and it really struck me as fake. Everything is designed to upsell and get you moving out of the table so they can seat usually two or three sittings a night. In Europe it's one sitting per night, and the whole feel is so much more relaxed and elegant. There are also lots more waiters around in non-US restaurants, so in New York as you're talking to the waiter, he or she is more likely looking around the room seeing what else his large number of tables needs. And because they're so stretched, they engage in fake pleasantries rather than really engage with their smaller number of customers. (Of course I'm comparing apples to apples here, top New York vs. top non-US restaurants; we all know of tourist traps strewn about Europe with god-awful service). And there's no particular reason why I'm ranting about service here, as it's probably better than 90 percent of all other American restaurants, except that this was probably the highest-rated restaurant I had been to in the US and expected it to conform more to global standards, which it didn't. (15-14-11)

We had our millennium new year's party at our place, which is ideal as a party venue. It's a typical SoHo loft, high ceilings and huge open spaces, so it easily converted into a restaurant. Dinner was catered for by Kin Khao, a SoHo Thai restaurant where Somchai's friend from Bangkok has been head chef for years. We had about forty people at the party, which went on all night, and actually carried through another few days with a hardcore group of people who stayed with us. Our friend Anna was in New York attending film school and brought some of her film school friends with her to the party, and they ended up shooting a movie at the loft about our friend Laura's love life. I also remember ordering a huge decorative cake for the party, and that Somchai tipped the delivery guy $100 because he thought you were supposed to tip big in New York. And because the city pretty much shut down for the weekend after New Year's, the half dozen of us who stayed at the house just stayed inside for those days eating nothing but leftover cake and drinking wine. May not sound like it, but it was great fun, really.

38. New York Dec '99

Went to New York for the holidays to end the year and usher in the new millennium with a party at our place. Flew on British Airways via London, which is generally our airline of choice when getting to either Europe or the US. I think I prefer them out of loyalty for pushing the airlines to improve their service all the time, and I think they generally are the pioneers in this space. They clearly had the revolutionary idea to have the flat bed private cabin type layout in first class, for which I am eternally grateful. The problem with being a pioneer is everyone can then copy and do it better, so I'd say Singapore and Cathay, among others, have a better First Class offering than BA does. BA is saddled with a god-awful entertainment system and has never done much with their food. But I still stick with them more than is probably warranted just to reward them for making the periodic breakthrough.

We stayed at our apartment in SoHo, really the only time we ever stayed there. Did the New York Christmas thing, including the Christmas Show at Radio City Music Hall, which is definitely an extravaganza, and Christmas dinner at Tavern on the Green, which is more ordeal than extravaganza. The restaurant's general gaudiness goes well with the sensory overload of Christmas, but the whole experience feels like you're eating in a cafeteria. But really just walking around the streets, looking at the crazy people lined up around the block to get into FAO Schwarz toy store, the skaters at Rockefeller Center, just being cold on Christmas, all make it a great place to go for those of us living in the tropics.

We stayed mostly downtown in our week in New York, but I did want to show Somchai all the different neighborhoods that make up Manhattan. A lot of cities like to stress they are made up of distinct neighborhoods, and guidebooks are always organized around that theme, but honestly very few really are. They all have neighborhoods of course, but they're usually historical place names and have little distinctiveness. As I type this I'm sitting on my deck in Darling Point, looking at three other "neighborhoods", Bellevue, Double Bay and Point Piper, but they are almost completely interchangeable. Beautiful views, some great houses, but there's no way you could tell one from the other. NY is different,and each neighborhood is precisely drawn, and differs wildly by ethnicity, architecture, culture etc. Just to the east of SoHo are the very sharply defined Little Italy and Chinatown, with the gay center of Greenwich Village just to the north. Somchai trodded around all the 'hoods, and I'm not sure he saw the differences as clearly as I did, so I think you need to spend some time to really get to know the place. So maybe all the tourists that pound the pavement looking for the Hollywood New York aren't disappointed since they're just looking for a live version of their TV shows, but spending some time wandering the streets is really the best way to appreciate it. Oh, and as you can see, Central Park is perfectly safe and lovely. Before we visited, Somchai was sure only muggers were in Central Park, so I dragged him in there on the last day to show him that it's a lively, beautiful place that NY couldn't live without.

That was too happy an ending, so I'd like to amend the Central Park comments. It is beautiful, and safe, but also very, very unpredictable. When we first entered, I remember we saw this guy in tight white shorts with an enormous fake penis shoved down them. He was walking around the park and everyone was laughing. Somchai gave me such an "I told you so" look and I thought he was going to flee the park after that, but he persevered, and something like that happens to you, you should too, and just stash the memory for future use in your own blog.

This was the work in progress. The building is about 175 years old, and used to be a department store, a warehouse and many other things besides. Its most recent reincarnation was as a tobacco warehouse, which tarred the floors dark brown. Like all the Soho buildings, they were converted into residential lofts by artists in the '60's. The place I bought had electricity and one toilet, and that's it, so it needed a pretty big rework. The neighbors hated me (rightfully so) when the construction crew somehow turned on the building sprinkler system and ruined all sorts of artworks, clothing, etc. It was pretty horrible. One really odd thing about the building was it only had an ancient freight elevator, and you had too manually pull on a rope to get it going, then grab the rope when the elevator was passing your apartment,which was pretty freaky. Anyway, during the long construction process I ended up moving to Hong Kong and then Bangkok, so I actually never lived in the place except for having a great New Year's Eve party there for the Millenium.

Here are a couple of photos of SoHo, which is my favorite part of New York. I could walk to my office on Wall Street in about 30 minutes, and the place really feels apart from NY. Its architecture is pretty uniformly iron cast facades from the early 1800's and cobblestone streets, which is unlike anywhere else. It was the center of the art world and had lots of funky shops and bars, but it has definitely lost its edge and is now populated mostly by luxury label stores. It still looks great, and is a great place to walk around, particularly on a weekday or early morning before the tourists arrive. If you do make it there, check out Cupping House or Balthazar for breakfast, (Balthazar's also good for dinner) Mercer Kitchen for dinner, (or Raoul's or Lucky Strike for late night dining with a cool vibe), and great Thai food at Kin Khao and Kittachai. In fact, the chef at Kin Khao is an old friend of Somchai's from Bangkok, and the chef at Kittachai just opened the place a few years ago after working for the Four Seasons in Bangkok for a long time. The photo on the right is of Broome St, where my apartment was, on the top floor of the building with the Perry Art Gallery (whose flag you can't miss in the pic) in it.

8. New York, June '98

I think most of the allure of New York to foreigners is Hollywood-related. It's a really stimulating city to live in, but I always wonder what sights there are to keep the tourist hordes busy. As you can see, Somchai's first picture request was with an NYPD car, which are world famous because of Hollywood. We've been to NY so many times I can't really remember much about this first trip. We stayed at the SoHo Grand Hotel, because the main reason we were in NY was to look at my apartment in SoHo, which was under a year long construction project. The hotel used to be the only downtown hotel, and despite its ugly new brick exterior that jars with the historic neighborhood, the public spaces have a nice vibe and the rooms are too small but not decorated that badly. But there are lots more hotels in the area now, and there's no reason to stay here now.