Have you heard about it? The massive Oscar Farinetti/Mario Batali/Joe and Lydia Bastianich owned restaurant/marketplace? Supposedly it’s the largest Italian food and wine marketplace in the world. Well, it *is* huge and sort of Vegas-like in the way the space rambles along and the 5 or so restaurant seating areas are situated right within the aisles of food (it feels sort of “theme park-like” in that way), but do yourself a favor and try to go during the week if you can. We went with the kids on a very cold Sunday with visions of eating good food, but it was soon squashed by the long waits and crowds. The girls were happy with their pear nectar juice boxes though and we miraculously found 4 free chairs right across the way from the fish section. And so we sat and people watched. What a scene. Lots of ladies in fur coats.

In the end, we walked away spending $28 for a block of cheese, a bag of mushrooms, a box of pasta picked by Claudine, some shallots and some herbs. The cheese made up for more than half at $16.

Was it good cheese? Yes. $16 good? Maybe not.

It’s become sort of a tradition. To go to Ippudo after the end of our holiday season and celebrate with a bowl of ramen and pork buns. Place gets packed though and there was a line out the door when they opened right at 11. There are lots of other ramen places in the city and now 2 near our house too, but we prefer this place and it’s large and kid-friendly. They gave the girls princess bowls to eat noodles out of. This is one classy joint.

So hey, listen up. It appears that some people thought we had a booth at the Union Square Holiday Market this year because our friend Re Jin from Bailey Doesn’t Bark ordered our shortbread cookies to include in one of her holiday gift sets. Her booth is well branded. There’s a huge sign with the company name over the booth. We do not sell porcelain tableware. And yet 3 very small packages of cookies scattered throughout the booth display was enough to make some people think it was our booth. It didn’t happen just one time. It happened a lot and some people even told Re Jin that they loved “the blog”. Really? I mean, RJ is also Korean…but…really? It became an inside joke. She’d text me nearly every time it happened. She even overheard someone say, “wow, Whimsy & Spice really expanded”. We are both just completely confused by this. 3 little packages of cookies, people, amid a sea of Bailey Doesn’t Bark wares. If it was, indeed our booth, wouldn’t we have more cookies to sell than 3 sample display packages? At some point, Re Jin didn’t even bother correcting people anymore. She just smiled and said “thanks” when people came up to her to let her know how much they loved the blog.

Sorry RJ, that people mistook your booth for ours. And uh, thanks to anybody who thought that RJ, who is younger (and prettier!) than I am, was me.

We rarely ever go out to brunch, but we did over the weekend when my cousin was in town for Thanksgiving. Like a lot of other things, eating out for 4 people isn’t cheap anymore. It’s not like grabbing a bite to eat and throwing $10 down at the table. I keep thinking about how we’re going to get around when the kids are old enough to have to pay for a subway ride, which will probably be soon. Actually, they do it by height here which really sucks for tall kids like mine. But with tokens costing $2.25 a ride (ha! I just called it a token! I remember when subways and buses cost 50 cents), it’ll cost us $18 to go anywhere roundtrip. Holy hell!! And that’s with the prices they are now. This is scary, folks. I am all for mass transit since I hate taking the car, but it makes it actually cheaper to drive places. Grrrrr….

Thanks to all who gave us some love on our FaceBook page. Many of you mentioned that you didn’t even know we had a Facebook page. See? I’m so bad at stuff like that, but it feels nice and cozy over there right now. Free stuff does that I guess, which is TOTALLY OK, but it’s so nice to finally meet so many of you. Don’t be strangers here, ok? We haven’t done much with our FB page because it does bug me to see so many company and blog posts in my feed, so we keep it very light and sporadic, mostly with market and event dates and sales notification. I’m not very good about announcing it on the blog so that’s the place we try to do that sort of stuff. (By the way, if you have ever tried to friend me on my personal page, I am sorry if I have not friended you back. I’m not trying to be unfriendly, but FB is the only space that I am keeping strictly to friends and family).

So…December. What the hell? Doesn’t even seem possible that it’s here already, but it’s here. I still can’t gauge yet what kind of holiday season we’ll have. Every year is a little bit different with our very first holiday season being the absolute worst. Seriously people, I thought we were going to die from lack of sleep and exhaustion AND we were just dealing with corporate orders that year, not even retail. Last year was hellish, but better because we were more experienced and Mark is simply faster at doing everything. This year, I don’t know. We are doing more market dates than ever starting in less than 2 weeks for 10 almost straight days, and I’m not quite sure how we’ll pull that off, but I’m just going to hope for the best. The good news is that most of my design work has been delayed unexpectedly again so I’ll have more time to help Mark out. Dude’s been looking really tired already.

Some weeks are spent hibernating, other weeks are more social. My recent schedule allowed for one of those this week. I met with different people every day and I hung out with a whole lot of people at a party last night. This morning I met with Barbara who is my neighbor and a letterpress card designer. We took our youngest kids to eat pie in the neighborhood (yes, pie for breakfast). And oh, did I say that the weather’s been mild? Well, it was pretty cold this morning. Bringing out the scarves, hats and gloves for this one.

And saying no? I said no. It was the right decision and I have no regrets. Have a great weekend.

Hard to believe that a week ago today, we were enjoying our last dinner in Seattle with family and friends. Isn’t that the way vacation goes? Upon your return you feel like you’ve been away so very long, but just 3 days in (or thereabouts) you feel like you never left.

It’s sort of fitting that our last dinner was at Delancey, the pizza restaurant, perhaps not unlike Franny’s here in Brooklyn, that was opened a year ago by Molly from Orangette and her husband, Brandon. I know that when we begin to think about the store more seriously sometime after the holidays, I’ll be going back and re-reading those entries leading up to the opening day. There are other similarities, like cross county moves but in opposite coasts, and Mark, like Brandon, was a music composition major who decided to focus on food.

Now, we don’t plan on opening a restaurant or even anything with table service, but it was really nice to sit in their wonderfully minimalist dining room, feasting on delicious pizza and feeling the buzz of happy customers. Dreams, a vision, hard work, and maybe a sprinkle of fairy tale magic do pay off.

One last thing I want to say about our trip. It’s really interesting to see a space, a home, and a view that you’re used to seeing in photos, with your own eyes. I’m not sure how many photos throughout the seasons I’ve seen of Lecia’s boys out on their street, taking a walk after dinner or headed down to the beach. Now I have one with my kids now too.

There are all kinds of Fall signs here, in the mountains, in the city. Even further south in Portland we noticed clusters of dead, brown leaves on the sidewalk. In Seattle we’ve seen a few yellow and orange leaves on trees and it’s been cold enough that I’ve been wearing scarves, jackets and hoodies the last few days. I’ve gotten quite used to the cooler weather, but I see you, New York. I peeked at the forecast this week. I know it’s still raging summer out there and it’ll be a shock to go back to hotter temps back home when we’ve gotten used to dressing like it’s Fall.

On Friday, we went up North to the Cascade Mountains to find a hike that all the kids might like to do. We never did find that trail, but instead drove up a few miles to a road that lead to nowhere except a recently abandoned campfire littered with trash. We drove back down and played by a river, resting just enough so that Mark could recover from being carsick. Back in the nearby town of Granite Falls we found a little diner with funny artwork that had the best Yelp rating, which happened to be owned by an older Korean couple. As far as I could tell, the woman took orders and waitressed while the husband was the cook. It was just the 2 of them. It was a rather curious little discovery for your fairly typical rural American diner situated in a predominantly white populated town, nestled between the mountains and other ghost towns.

The fries were hot and crispy. You can always tell the quality of an establishment by the quality of the fries. True facts.

And this was our Saturday:

Another perfect 82 degree, low humidity day (seriously, did Bill Clinton negotiate with the weather gods to have this perfect day for Chelsea’s wedding? I don’t know. He was able to bring those 2 women back from North Korea, so…)

A drive to Dia in Beacon. The first time I went to Dia was when they first opened their doors 7 years ago. We were visiting a client who had just moved there, to learn more about this Smithsonian Photography project which we would later design and we got a tour of the town and a visit to some of the art studios that were being renovated. Beacon was supposed to be the next big thing. I’m not sure it really quite got there.

The 2nd and last time I went to Dia was when I was 37 weeks pregnant with Mia. I was huge and uncomfortable and we met my friends from Amsterdam who were visiting family nearby. It was dead of winter and cold and I remember being at that final stage of pregnancy where you don’t really give a shit about what you look like, you just want that baby out of you. My friends had a toddler at that time and I remember being stressed during our visit to the museum because he was the only kid there and unlike the city museums, Dia is usually very empty so the guards have nothing to do but to watch a running toddler in the gallery spaces like a hawk. I think he may have even touched a painting. I’m telling you, it was stressful. Well you know what? Saturday’s visit with the girls was just about the same. It was hard to contain them from running around the minimalist, huge spaces (no photos allowed at Dia, btw).

The girls were more interested in finding every plush gray couch scattered all over the galleries than Sol LeWitt’s Drawing Series (ok, the couches *were* ridiculously comfy), but they did totally dig walking inside Richard Serra’s massive steel torque sculptures as I thought they would. That alone made the trip worth it.

And you know what else was worth the drive? Discovering Zora Dora’s popsicles after it was recommended by a few people on twitter. I had the Honey Lavender Bee Pollen and Mark had the Banana Curry Peanut Coconut. There were about 25 different flavors. Yeah, this was our kind of place and got us thinking about popsicles. Mark makes them for the girls, but holy crap! Maybe we should have a few flavors each week for the store!

We drove back to Brooklyn with the windows down. Another splendid night watching the sunset from the car. I can’t remember the last time we had a summer with so many days “off”. When we work, we work gangbusters hard and it’s rare that we both get 2 back to back days off on the same days, but this is the summer of doing things.

Sometimes, I can’t believe this is my life.

Father’s Day was Mark’s first full day off in like a month. We let him sleep in and then went for breakfast at a big diner near my parent’s house. Sometimes you just feel like sitting in a booth in a typical American diner where all the menus are identical and you know you will get ridiculous portions of food. Plus we know that picky Claudine will eat pancakes and sausages, and lots of them. Win/win all around.

We then spent a leisurely 3 hour visit to the town pool after breakfast, the first visit of the season, where we always pretend to be residents of my parent’s town, only we’re not because we have to wear brightly colored guest wrist bands and we don’t really fit in and it’s not only because we’re from Brooklyn.

We drove back into the city early Monday morning and dropped Mia off at school. We found this Father’s Day note in her backpack. Later in the afternoon, the neighbors and I sat on stoops and on towels spread out on the sidewalk while the kids ran amok with the sprinklers. Innocent pedestrians tried to dodge hose-wielding children as they walked past our motley gang. Bottles of beer were passed around. Such a different scene from the suburbs the day before. But that’s how we hang in 90 degree weather here in Brooklyn.

NYC has always been about food. It’s what I missed most when I moved away for 5 years. I’m not talking about the fancy foodie stuff either as I was still just a kid really, when I moved away. My friends and I probably never spent more than $15 a meal and most times it was well under 10 bucks. We were on art school budgets and if you knew how, you could eat really cheaply in NY, including knowing which art openings to go to when you knew there would be an open bar.

I don’t remember cooking at all during that era, even though I’m sure we did, but why would we? There was so much good food to be had. Like most people, we had our regular rotation of spots including the deli down the street from school on St. Mark’s Place where we picked up our bagels and egg sandwiches for breakfast before our first class. The deli guys knew all the Cooper Union kids so well that they were familiar with all our major projects and wished us luck on whatever grueling 4 hour critique we faced that day. Strangely enough, I didn’t drink coffee back then. I’m not really sure what I did to get through all those years of undergraduate and grad school but it wasn’t caffeine. Maybe being young was enough to pull all nighters.

During those early art school years when I was living on my own, first on Baxter Street in Chinatown and then on St. Mark’s in the East Village, I started discovering foods that were new to me. Having grown up eating the usual American-type fare as most kids growing up – you know, shake and bake chicken, pork chops, spaghetti and meatballs – I had a fairly typical American diet mixed in with Korean and other Asian food. But then I discovered Ethiopian, Indian, Middle Eastern, Ukrainian, Mexican and Thai. I was a vegetarian back then as were most of my friends, and I was even vegan for a few years as well, but there were so many options and I didn’t miss eating meat at all (years later, after 8 years of being a strict vegetarian, it was missing sushi that did me in).

These are the restaurants that I missed when I moved away, the places that I pined for until I would come back to NY in the summers and holidays: Abyssinia on Grand Street for Ethiopian, Ali Baba and Mamoun’s Falafel on MacDougal Street, Rose of India (really any of the places on Indian row) on 6th street (also the Indian Place on 1st ave up the steps that clearly won the contest for the place with the most over-the-top Christmas lights, an odd trend for Indian restaurants at that time), House of Vegetarian on Mott for vegan Chinese food, Benny’s Burritos for huge over-stuffed quesadillas, the Kiev and Veselka for Ukrainian in the East Village, Dojo for the soy or hijiki tofu dinners – at $2.95 and $3.25 respectively, the cheapest filling dinner you can find (and the prices, so I hear, are still not that different 20 years later), Holy Basil Thai food on 2nd ave, Cafe Mogador for their carrot ginger soup, Cafe Yaffa, Cafe Orlin, Sin-é, all on St. Marks, Angelika Kitchen, Life Cafe on 10th and Avenue B, Venerios Bakery for pastries.

Many of these places are still there, some are gone, but these are the places of my youth and a big part of the memories I have when I think about that era – East Village, NYC, circa ’88-91.

It’s funny, but I haven’t been back to any of those restaurants except for maybe Cafe Orlin and most recently, Venerios, since I moved back to NY in ’96, this time with Mark. Maybe because when I left the city on New Years Day in 1992, I wanted to leave it behind and bury those memories for good, as well as the people, the places, my friends and just start over. But we were walking around that neighborhood with the girls after school on Friday afternoon and we walked by an empty storefront on 2nd Avenue where a health food store used to be. I quickly peered in, I couldn’t see much, but this is when some of the memories flooded back. I had a sudden urge to go have some stuffed cabbage and pierogies at Veselka (the Kiev, as we knew it, is long gone) or sit on the bar stool of that tiny, narrow 2nd Avenue (I think) restaurant where we would get mushroom barley soup or whatever the soup of the day was (people of this era, please help me out – what was this place called!? I cannot remember. *edit: Yes! A reader came through – B&H Dairy ).

We didn’t end up doing that. Instead we made our way to some of the East Village comfort spots like the Takoyaki stand and take out sushi from Sunrise Mart, places we used to go to when we lived on 12th street. These are newer food memories, when the East Village became more Japanese and I was going to grad school at Tisch at NYU in the late 90s. I guess because these memories are fused with more recent trips with the girls, they don’t hold that same level of nostalgia. Maybe it’s just as well. Some memories are meant to be sacred. Maybe these places are better left untouched, suspended back in time when we were young and in art school.

Related: NYC stories Part 1, City of Ghosts, City of Memories.

Once upon a time…before kids, a mortgage, a business, life insurance and college savings, Mark and Jenna lived in NYC and enjoyed dining out at restaurants. Some were quite fancy, while others were so popular that they waited on a line that snaked down the block to get seated even before the doors opened. And then there were the neighborhood haunts. Good standbys for a meal, but nothing to get yourself worked over. You could have argued that it was part of Mark’s job as a Pastry Chef. Something like research and development, or maybe like keeping tabs on the competitive landscape. And so he found that eating out was encouraged by his job. Mandatory, even.

Being in the business, it was preferable to have someone who knew someone make the reservation for you. That way you would ensure that you would get special treatment, whether that was whole meals comped, an extra course or two, or, because you were a Pastry Chef, every dessert off the dessert menu, even though there were only 2 of you.

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Ok, ok, I won’t continue with this 3rd person business, but the point is, our regular dining excursions feel like a different lifetime. Sometimes Mark and I look at each other with real, quizzical looks and wonder what we ever did with our free time before we had kids and a business. We try hard to remember, but it feels like the kids have been around forever, and we just can’t recall. The most noticeable thing that changed when we started a family, however, was that nice dinners out became a rarity.

Can I tell you that in the 6 years that we’ve been parents, we can count on 1 hand the number of times we’ve gone out to dinner together without the kids? When you factor in the cost of babysitting (and that mostly involves paying someone to sit around the apartment while the kids are asleep), it’s an expensive night out. BUT…you only turn 40 once. Mark and I weren’t sure which restaurant to go to for my birthday since it had been such a long time we went anywhere fancy. We asked around. We got all sorts of varied answers. Caught in the busyness of life, we neglected to make our decision with enough time to ensure a reservation to those restaurants notorious for long waits. But in the end we decided on Eleven Madison Park (and yes, we had someone with a connection make the reservation for us with less than a week to the date).

There has been a lot of talk and chatter about Eleven Madison since it received a 4 star rating last summer. This wouldn’t be our first time there. We had eaten there maybe a year after it had opened in the late 90s, but it wasn’t a 4 star, or even a 3 star restaurant back then. As I recall, the dining room was cavernous, loud and bustling, housed in a landmarked Art Deco building with ceilings that were ridiculously tall. I remember seeing huge, spectacular flower arrangements in the dining room. I didn’t remember it being too formal.

Which brings us to that other question – what do we wear to dinner? Mark poked around on the internet to see if there was a dress code because we didn’t want to get caught in another situation like his birthday dinner to Le Bernardin one year. I made the reservation, but never realized that there might be a dress code because really, you don’t think about these things when you are 27 or whatever. So in a last minute panic after reading on the restaurant website that it was jacket required (WHAT!? Mark doesn’t even own a jacket!), we ran to a Banana Republic ON THE WAY to dinner and bought a jacket. Talk about feeling like stupid young kids, especially in that particular restaurant which might be one of the stuffiest, most formal dining rooms in NYC.

I ended up changing dresses about 5 times. Mark didn’t have to wear a jacket, but he did iron his own pants and dress shirt. I know this may sound ridiculous considering how old we are, but in situations like this, we both still feel like we’re playing dress-up when we have to dress up. We still feel like kids. I got to at least wear my vintage Ferragamo t-strap navy heels, pulling them out for their usual, once a year appearance.

So this post is already getting long, so I’ll just skip over the part where the subway is late and we are late to our 8pm reservation and I end up getting really stressed and Mark ends up rolling his eyes at my stressed out state. Let’s just move on from that, ok? When we get to the restaurant, the hostess knows who Mark is and greets him by name and asks how the Boathouse Restaurant (where he previously was Pastry Chef and where he still consults) is doing this time of year. “Do you know her?” I whisper as we are led to our table. “No, I don’t think so”, Mark whispers back.

I can’t recall the last time I was in a 4 star restaurant, but it’s most definitely well before I got puffy and pregnant, which is to say, at this point, a really long time ago. I had forgotten about the level of service that comes with a 4 star restaurant. The way the wait staff is suddenly there, even though they were nowhere in sight mere seconds ago, as soon as you shuffle your chair to pull your seat out for you when you excuse yourself to go to the restroom. The way the restroom has single use crisp white towels to dry your hands off. The way they refold your napkin while you are gone, regardless of whether you absently tossed it on the seat next to you (me), or carefully tried to fold it yourself (Mark) to see if they would bother refolding it anyway (they did). The way it takes 2 people for bread service. 2 rolls, 2 servers.

And then there is the food. I won’t really describe it in detail here because I really can’t, but you can see photos on their site and read the menus here. Just watch the slide show on the homepage and get mesmerized (and no, I didn’t bring a camera and even if I did, I would never dare take a photo). We ordered the 3 course menu, but that is a little deceiving because you get so many little extras and we got a few more extras on top of that (we had someone else make the reservation, remember?) so it ended up being closer to an 8 or 9 course meal. This included 2 waiters carrying a tuft of fake grass in a bowl, upon which was perched 2 frozen pea and mint lollipops (uh huh). And in addition to our dessert, we received another complimentary dessert course before that, as well as the standard macaron course where a waiter brings along a tray of assorted macarons to choose from to finish the meal (after your dessert, mind you. hello, sugar).

And just when we were thinking that our meal was over, the waiter appeared with this gorgeous box of pate de fruits (jellies, if you’re not fancy) to take home and a complimentary glass of cognac. Now, I’ve never had cognac before and I probably wouldn’t choose to have it again (seriously, people choose to drink this stuff? Voluntarily?). He even left the bottle on the table. Needless to say, we drank our one glass and called it a night.

The final bill is not cheap, people. You can book a round trip plane ticket with the cost of that dinner, but as I’ve said before, you only have a milestone birthday every once in a while. Besides, it felt like old times when we used to eat out at fancy restaurants and felt like kids playing dress up. We kept trying not to crack up during dinner because of the whole novelty of it all – so different from our usual evening of thrown together meals and trying to coax Claudine into eating anything off the dinner table.

And lastly? We were one of the youngest people in the room. When was the last time I was able to say that?