Adventures in Chelsea, Part 2
It’s amazing how much trouble two adventurous city girls can get in a mere half hour. After our exciting adventures with five-figure jewelry, we headed straight over to the Chelsea Market’s rear entrance on 10th Avenue.
Coincidentally,Morimoto just happens to be right outside the Chelsea Market’s back door. (I warn you, if you click the link, Morimoto’s website has possibly the most irritating animation design I’ve ever seen.) Well, we’re both trying to eat healthier, but isn’t it one of the great things about New York that you can drop in to a famous restaurant for a drink when you want to?
White Lilies for our Lily
As we all know, Morimoto is New York’s local showcase for Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto. Morimoto greets its guests with a half-circle wall of flapping red curtains, behind which is clean white minimalist decor and an intriguing lit wall showcasing the starry bottoms of hundreds of plastic water bottles. It’s generally crazy for a weekend dinner, but can be worthwhile for its creative takes on Japanese cuisine. At lunchtime, it’s much more manageable, although it was still surprisingly busy given how far removed it is from most of the business-lunch parts of town.
Lily’s fave at Morimoto is a lovely drink called the White Lily, made with shochu, yuzu, and Calpico. The overall effect is a frothy, easy-going cocktail that’s reminiscent of lemonade. Just to ensure we didn’t starve while sipping our cocktails, we procured a little appetizer to go along:
Spicy King Crab appetizer
Look good? Yeah, it’s pretty delicious.
After our high-end snack, we headed over to 202 on the 9th Avenue side of the Chelsea Market, our original lunch destination. 202 is a bizarre but charming little combination of a Nicole Farhi boutique carrying lovely high-end clothes and home goods, and a low-key restaurant with a small but pleasant menu and a full bar. They tend to be crowded on the weekends for brunch, but were very manageable when Lily and I made it there for lunch. While I highly recommend the great buttermilk pancakes with blackberry compote and creme fraiche, this time around I opted for the steak sandwich with caramelized shallots and creme fraiche (is creme fraiche ever bad?) while Lily hewed to her diet with a bowl of granola and yogurt. While I can’t speak to the granola, the steak sandwich (served with some excellent sweet potato chips) was a solid choice, and we managed to escape with a lunch bill lower than our snacks bill. A quick stop into 9th Street Espresso and a Fat Witch brownie sample and we were done. Yep, this is what I love about New York!
now, what the heck are shochu, yuzu, and calpico. The White Lily looks amazing…
It’s so yummy – tastes like a lemony sorbet. Just the right amounts of tart and sweet, without being cloying.
Shochu is an Asian liquor, like a vodka, but it’s made with sweet potatoes and is very low cal. Yuzu juice is just fruit juice, and calpico is a condensed milk drink that’s popular in Japan.
Yuzu’s a citrus fruit that they use a lot in Japan:
