Our New York week ended with a big group brunch at Zoe, a longstanding SoHo restaurant. It's a prettily designed place, fairly traditional American food, with a special emphasis on brunch. Pomme and Stoli were already in town and staying at the Hudson, and Catherine, Saba and Laura came to hand us over to Mom and Dad over a big communal brunch. We then waddled to our car and drove to Connecticut.

From this photo I know we also had dinner at Kin Khao, one of New York's top Thai restaurants, located in SoHo. We go here pretty frequently because the head chef, Ray Wat, used to be Somchai's boss when Somchai first moved to Bangkok. Somchai was at university and also washing dishes for Ray at his Bangkok restaurant. Somchai did such a great job that he was promoted to waiter, but on his first day he spilled a huge tray of food all over an understandably unimpressed family, and he was sent back to the dishes. Ray moved to New York a while ago and runs this very popular restaurant that manages to be authentically Thai but also trendy, and keeping its popularity notwithstanding that it's been an "in" restaurant for a couple decades. We sat with the chef as he plied us with heaps of free food, oversaw a very busy kitchen serving a full restaurant, and managed to drink himself silly.

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.

We had dinner with our friend Laura, who had moved from Bangkok to New York. She inconveniently chose Blue Hill, a very popular restaurant downtown in Greenwich Village. Unfortunately it was pouring rain, and I can't remember exactly how we made our way down to the restaurant, but I do remember it was painful. Food was simply prepared but very tasty. The chef is something of an Alice Waters disciple, stressing the importance of local ingredients, in this case sourcing almost all his supplies from nearby Hudson Valley. In fact, he's taken the trend to its logical extreme, by opening a farm there to help supply the restaurant. Service was very friendly but scatterbrained, regularly forgetting orders, but she had so much fun doing so that it was a refreshing change from the robots at Ducasse. (Food-17, Decor-14, Service-15). Oh, and Laura gets angry if I don't mention her at every opportunity, and she recently berated me for not including our trip to her wedding in our blog. Of course that points to a poor grasp of the blog's concept since the wedding was in 2006. Anyway, I'm just adding this discussion so I get credit for ample Laura coverage.

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).