Hamptons Weekend

I know I said I didn't particularly like the Hamptons when I went last year. Or at least "the scene" that comes with it, which thankfully is easy to avoid.

But let's face it - with my friend ES having free run of her family's five bedroom house in Amagansett for the summer, it's an incredibly easy way for us to escape the City for a few days to a place that scenically appears to be a thousand miles away, which is why a group of six of us happily made the trip there for Memorial Day weekend.

CS and I took the train there for the first time and it was an experience in itself. While Penn Station was as busy as usual, the real zoo started when we stopped at Jamaica to take the connecting train to the Hamptons.
Before we realized what was happening, hundreds of people were elbowing their way onto the train while CS and I watched in stupor. This resulted in us not getting a seat and instead spending most of the journey uncomfortably sitting on the stairs.
With magazines and books to kill time, we got to Amagansett in just over two hours. But next time, we will be more ruthless in our determination to find seats, as well as bring snacks and wine as everyone else in the carriage seemed to have done. I would still recommend taking the train over driving there, which in traffic takes at least 4 hours.

Amagansett is probably one of the quieter Hamptons and the scenery is in fact reminiscent of a perfectly English countryside hamlet with a quaint feel, lush green lawns, old trees and colonial houses - some of them of manor/castle proportions of course. With the added benefit of sandy white long beaches being minutes walk away.

The "scene" I dislike so much is really only found in a few hot spots, namely Cyril's, the Talkhouse and the Surf Lodge. If you want to see a lot of trust funds kids, investment bankers guys, and the girls that usually seek them out - then these are the places you should go to. Although I must also say that the atmosphere is always fairly laid back - it is the beach after all - and the Surf Lodge is particularly stunning.

We did go to Cyril's one night, of course. It's hard to understand why this small roadside outdoor bar draws the in-crowd of the Hamptons in such numbers but I can only imagine that they come for the same thing we do - the irresistible, "dessert in a plastic glass", that is the BBC cocktail. Banana Baileys Colada. Surely it must be the only reason why, when the place is at its busiest, people (including us) are happy to be in standing room only at the back bar, right next to the portaloos and the dumpsters! But the BBC really is to die for, and particularly good (and lethal) with a Rum floater on top - three of them should be your limit unless you want to forget small insignificant details like what your name is and where you are staying.

The rest of our time was spent having yummy breakfasts at the Farmers Market, lounging by the pool at the house, grilling the most amazing turkey burgers on the BBQ, having oysters and steamed lobster at Botswick's, doing a spot of shopping in East Hampton and just generally completely relaxing away from the hustle and bustle of the City and enjoying spending time together.

I can't think of anything better than that and will be doing much more of it over the summer!

Cupcake Craze

Photo by jammieanne @ Flickr (C)

Today I am delighted to be bringing you a guest post about the best cupcakes in New York from Charlotte, a writer for Simonseeks.com.

This is rather handy as, while I have on occasion enjoyed them, I am not a huge fan myself (too sweet for me!) and therefore wouldn't be able to provide any guidance on this hot topic!

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These beautifully crafted small cakes adorned with icing of every colour and flavour you could imagine, once associated with children, are now big business, a fashion statement in their own right the cupcake is now glamorous, fun and here are some of the best places in New York City to pick up one of these delicious treats.

Magnolia Bakery
No list of the top places to grab a cupcake in New York would be complete without the Magnolia Bakery. Opening its doors for the first time in 1996 on a quiet corner in Greenwich Village, Magnolia Bakery was designed to make visitors feel as though they were stepping back in time whilst enjoying the best in traditional American desserts. The brand has developed and there are now six stores, four of which are in New York, one in California and one as far afield as Dubai! Fans of the hit TV show Sex and the City will recognise the Magnolia Bakery as where Carrie and Miranda devour delicious looking pink frosted cupcakes in one of the episodes. Magnolia bakery is a tourist attraction in its own right, it’s even a stop on the Sex and the City tours that run all year round, be prepared to queue if you visit, sometimes around the block but the experience is worth it once inside – particularly for a Sex and the City fan like me!

Sweet Revenge
Sweet Revenge situated in the West Village offers an artisan twist to cupcakes, the eatery is open every day and becomes an excellent place to be in the evening as it stays open till late. This is largely due to the fact that Sweet Revenges unique feature is that it sells alcohol, the menu teams the perfect cupcake with the perfect drink for you so you don’t have to worry that your chosen combination won’t taste right! They offer the finest in beers, wine and cocktails to accompany your delicious cupcake and for those who don’t have a sweet tooth they even offer a savoury cake option. If I were to go it would have to be a Crimson and Cream cupcake and a Raspberry Bellini for me, I’m booking a table already!

Sugar Sweet Sunshine
Situated on Rivington Street, Sugar Sweet Sunshine aims to offer its visitors a warm and comfortable vibe with a 60s and 70s vibe thrown in. The atmosphere here is relaxed, the decor of mismatched chairs and tables make it feel as though you are in someone’s living room rather than a coffee shop. The owners operate an open door policy, visitors are made to feel more like guests than customers and all can see into the kitchen to watch the sweet treats being made. The delicious offerings at Sugar Sweet Sunshine include the cupcake named after its birthplace Sunshine which is a yellow cake with vanilla butter-cream icing and a Sassy Red Velvet, red velvet cake with chocolate almond butter-cream. The overall aim of this coffee shop is that its customers leave feeling happy, a reason enough to pay them a visit.

Crumbs Bake Shop
Crumbs Bake Shop first opened in New York’s refined Upper East Side in 2003 with the promise of offering elegant comfort food. They offer over 50 varieties of cupcakes, all baked fresh daily with a cupcake of the week being unveiled every Monday, they are renowned for the large size of the cakes and deliver all over the USA. They even offer a college care pack, so if your loved ones are in college in The States you can show them your thinking of them with the cakes being delivered to their door. Crumbs focuses a great deal of its energies into donating to charity, so although the guilt of the amount of calories you’ve just eaten can’t be taken away knowing that $1 from every cupcake purchased goes to the Breast Cancer Coalition makes you feel better about ordering that second cake!

Cupcake Stop
Cupcake stop is the place where New Yorkers go to enjoy their cupcakes and avoid the crowds of tourists at the better known cupcake shops across the city. As Cupcake Stop in no ordinary coffee shop, instead it is a fully mobile truck, rather like an ice cream van, the Cupcake Stops several trucks travel around New York stopping in some of Manhattans prime locations to serve delicious freshly made cupcakes to the passersby. All of the cakes are baked the night before in a commercial kitchen, making over 40 flavours, with any leftovers at the end of the day being donated to the less fortunate at the City Harvest. This relative newcomer, only being established in 2009 offers a unique mobile cupcake service and is perfect for those you want a quick sweet treat to go minus the long queues and waiting times.

If you are looking to visit New York and sample the cupcakes on offer, you might want to also look at the top rated recommended New York hotels on Simonseeks, where you can find inspirational travel guides and expert advice.

Hamptons Weekend

I took my very first trip to the Hamptons last weekend. One of my friend's family has a 5 bedroom house in Amagansett so a group of six of us (including the adorable dog Baxter) headed off on the BQE and along the Long Island strip on Thursday night to beat the weekender traffic.

I knew exactly what I wouldn’t like about the Hamptons which is essentially a gated paradise for rich people to play together. It is the least multi-cultural and diverse place one can imagine and I had never seen so many men wearing pink pants and polo shirts with an upturned collar before. It was ridiculous.

However, if you stay out of “the scene”, the Hamptons are very beautiful and a lot more laid back than I anticipated. Every morning we would take the short drive to the Amagansett Farmers Market to get a big cup of coffee and one of their fabulous brioche buns with egg and cheese to be leisurely savoured at one of the tables in the shaded garden. We would also get fresh salad ingredients, bread and cheese for our lunch back at the house later and the rest of the day would be spent either in the gorgeous swimming pool or at the beach.

We would get itchy feet at around 5pm and get ready to go out. The first stop of the night was always Cyril’s, a tiny roadside outdoor bar packed full of people wanting to see and be seen. For us however, the main attraction of Cyril’s stemmed from the large, strong and frankly yummy cocktails they create. The B.B.C (Banana Baileys Colada) in particular is worth the trip alone and with a rum floater on top, we would all be tipsy enough to engage in some serious car karaoke after just one on our way to dinner! Luckily for us, the one man in our party was happy to be our designated driver for the entire weekend - yes, he’s a keeper!

My favourite evening was on Friday night, when after our usual pit stop at Cyril’s, we headed to The Lobster Deck in Montauk. There we had what was probably was one of the best lobsters I’ve ever had while watching the sun set slowly over a completely calm sea and the pink, orange and yellow tones of the skies only seemed to accentuate the bright red shell of the lobster.

Spending weekends at the Hamptons is most definitely a New York rite of passage. Many people buy into share houses for the entire summer (at often exorbitant costs) and so it is a little like the entire crowd you would normally find on an average Saturday night in the Meat Packing district magically teletransported themselves there to form a weird but wonderful "Manhattan on Sea" ...

Country Girl

I am in France with my family for a few days and following the same reassuringly predictable and relaxing schedule I have described in the past.

I have been spending more time than usual with my brother however as he off work at the moment and most days have included games of squash, cross-country cycling with Dad and cooking with Mum.

We made a day trip to my parents' country house to enjoy the fresh mountain air and to go for a long walk in the woods surrounding their property. No walks in my family is without purpose however and ours was to pick wild mushrooms (specifically a vibrant yellow variety known as "chanterelles") which, as surprising as it may sound, is one of my favourite things to do in the world ... yes, as high up the list as drinking cocktails on rooftop bars!

Mushrooms tend to grow in the same areas over and over again and therefore the first rule of mushroom hunting (and second and third) is to never divulge your best picking spots. My parents for example would never tell their friends or even their siblings where their spots are and in fact, Mum and Dad themselves don't even know all of each other's hunting grounds as they tend to split up when going mushroom picking and only meet up later, each smiling widely and carrying a wicker basket brimming with delicate and aromatic fungi.

There is something very eerie but also incredibly freeing about being in the middle of a forest and not knowing where you are, which way you came from and more importantly, how to get home. Thankfully my parents seem to be equipped with an almost alien sense of spacial awareness and can not only find their way back very easily (thankfully, as neither of them carry a mobile phone!) but can also tell exactly where they are, even down to the actual ownership of the plot we are standing in!

My Dad's family owns several acres of forest in the area as it was customary for my grand-father to buy plots for his children and grand-children. I guess that for his generation it represented the safest and most long lasting form of financial investment. I must admit that I do always get a tinge of pride when, after having apparently crossed some kind of invisible boundary lines, my Mum or Dad casually drop in that we are now on my very own piece of land.

From country-side lover to stereotypical New York City girl, I realise that I am describing two different lifestyles that should in theory not co-exist very happily together. But I have come to terms a long time ago with the fact that they are both "me" and that I would never truly be able to appreciate one if I didn't also have the other.

Meatopia

I went to the inaugural Meatopia festival this weekend with my friend and colleague JR. He invited me after even the most virile of his friends turned down the opportunity to eat meat for an entire Sunday afternoon. I, of course, jumped at the chance.

The event assembled some 30 chefs from across the City and beyond with the premise of enjoying multiple tastings of BBQ food on Governors Island, many of the cooking teams roasting whole pigs and lambs right in front of the public.

It was a glorious day for it - hot and sunny but not as humid as the previous few days - and the short trip to the Island from South Ferry was suitably scenic as we slowly sailed away from the gleaming high rises of the Financial district.

The event attracted a very mixed crowd both in terms of age and style. But a love of sustainable, local products and of meat in particular is what united all the revelers. JR and I had opted to get 6 tastings, which turned out to be a fairly decadent choice and we only made it through by taking a break a couple of hours in! Notable highlights included a fantastic grilled bacon roll with pickled green tomatoes from Bobo, smoked duck tacos from Suenos Restaurant, smoky pastrami from Mile End and an incredibly tasty and moist lamb shawarma from Ilili Restaurant.

 In the end, I believe that around 5,000 people came to Governors Island that day for the festival and many queued for long periods of time at some of the most popular stands. If that doesn’t further prove New Yorkers’ enduring love affair for all things food related, I don’t know what does ...

NYC Food Film Festival

I read about the New York Food Film Festival a couple of months ago and on a bit of a whim bought 4 tickets to what was dubbed "the World's first food truck drive-in movie", one of the events scheduled to take place during the 4-day extravaganza.

I knew that it wouldn't be hard to convince at least 3 of my friends to come and spend a whole afternoon (and most of the evening) eating and drinking alfresco under the Brooklyn Bridge, which is exactly what we did last Saturday.

The festival combines two things I love - trying lots of new things from different chefs while watching food documentaries. As the name indicates, the event centered around the City's most reputable Food Trucks and around a dozen of them congregated under the Bridge, giving us the choice of sampling anything from Rickshaw Dumplings' delicious chicken & basil creation, to Korean kimchidillas from The Krave, goats cheese and hazelnut crostinis from Pizzamoto and pastries from Street Sweets, amongst many others.

 Food Trucks are a particular obsession here and the better ones have gained quite the cult following. People readily queue in line to get to their favourite morsels of food (patience is not a virtue normally granted to New Yorkers!) and many, myself included, follow their movements in the City on Twitter. Rickshaw Dumplings (brain child of Anita Lo, former Top Chef Master contestant and Michelin starred Chef) has over 5,600 followers for example!

Food in general is a huge component of New York culture and way of life and most people consider themselves foodies, which means that there are many food events to attend throughout the year. Next up for me - Meatopia on Governors Island on July 11th where I will be going on a BBQ tasting adventure with my friend JR!

Street Fair

Great thing about having a Japanese Street Fair happening literally outside your window:
- Access to yummy spicy crab noodles is less than a minute away.

Not so great thing about having a Japanese Street Fair happening literally outside your window:
- The live/loud/frankly not so good music streaming right into my living room!

Restaurant, Inc.?

I have just read a very interesting article on nymag.com about New Yorkers average monthly spend on eating out, based on the neighbourhood they live in.


Topping the list at a whopping $2,350 (not far off my monthly rent!) is Chelsea, with my own zipcode coming in not too far behind at a choke inducing $1,895. Step outside of Manhattan however and the spend goes down quite dramatically to $710 in Park Slope and $233 in Astoria to pick just a couple.

While this is clearly a reflection on the differing affluence levels (and restaurant pricing) across each of the boroughs, I also believe it is a unique Manhattan trait for other reasons.

Apartments in Manhattan are small and cooking in some of the kitchens I have seen here would be the equivalent of performing a circus contortionist act. A friend of mine saw the most unbelievably small kitchen once when apartment hunting - so tiny in fact, that the shower cubicle was literally next to the fridge. No joke.

Grocery shopping can be a hit and miss experience. Delis and small supermarkets, while convenient as most of them are open 24 hours a day, usually only carry a small and sometimes quite odd selection of food products while larger places such as Trader Joe's and Wholefoods are expensive. I have often walked out with enough ingredients to cook just one meal that costed me nearly as much as if I had eaten out at my local restaurant.

And lastly restaurants are just amazing here. There are so many of them, spanning all the types of cuisines one would desire and all price ranges. I've had the tastiest eggs & bagels at Barney Greengrass for $10 and the most exquisite and elaborate food at Per Se for $250 per person. Overall the food and service in New York restaurants is overwhelmingly high compared to many other cities.

I must admit that I very much embraced New Yorkers' restaurant habit as soon as I arrived here and I eat out at least 4 times a week. And while I am not storing Manolos in my oven quite yet, my empty fridge always gives my visiting European friends a bit of a chuckle when they come and see me ...

* Screenshot taken on bundle.com

Borough Market

For my final day in London, last Saturday, I wanted to go back to a favourite haunt - Borough Market - and could think of a no better companion and guide than Pete, the lovely friend and fellow foodie who first introduced me to it years ago.

Together we spent a few hours slowly meandering through the market and grazing on delicious morsels of food as we walked past the multitude of stalls.

While I don't really spend much time trawling farmers markets in New York (considering how rarely I cook here), I have a particular affection for Borough.

Even though I couldn't buy anything (due to the strict US customs rules), I still reveled in the atmosphere and found myself imagining which occasions other people there were shopping for - A large family gathering around a roast organic chicken? A romantic steak and wild mushroom dinner for two? Or a decadent and solitary cheese fest?

Over the years, Borough Market has become a rather posh affair and while I think it has lost nothing of its charm, it has gained many, many more visitors and making your way through the small lanes can be quite challenging.

I love the fact that it is located in the arches of the old railway viaduct at London Bridge and despite the gentrification, it still retains a slightly gritty, old London feel to it. A little bit like stepping back into the London of "Oliver" ...

http://www.boroughmarket.org.uk/