24h – SWEETing our way through NYC

where the blueboots go

10 years ago

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Last Saturday, BlueBoots packed her weekend bag and headed out with BrownBear to NYC for a quick 24-hour getaway. Buckle yourself in, and get ready for a whirlwind trip in photos! Enjoy 🙂

We got in our hybrid

and sped off for a few hours, parked the car somewhere and ventured into Manhattan. When we arrived, we had beautiful 60s weather (despite driving through a rainstorm in CT) and a nice partly-cloudy sky. I had collected a list of food places I wanted to try – this time, all in the sweets category – and once we had mapped them out, we made the happy discovery that if we got to lower Manhattan, we could walk from one to the other with ease.

Our first stop was Stumptown Coffee Roasters, which was embedded in a hotel near the jewelry district. I had tried Stumptown on a recent trip to LA and found the smoothness and coffee flavor to be quite nice. No sugar required. I wanted to take my husband there for his first taste, so off we went. We got a medium latte and it was perfect. Once I finish all the coffee beans at home, I vow to get some from Stumptown Coffee roasters to enjoy.

To go with our coffee, we of course need some pastries. Off to Dominique Ansel’s bakery! Unfortunately, they were all out of the famous cronuts (filled croissant-donuts) for the day. People can preorder two weeks in advance on a website for pick up . They apparently had 180 people lined up outside at 8 am when they opened and sold out by 10 am. It was 6 pm when we arrived, so no cronuts for us! And I wondered why there was hardly a line (25 minute wait only…ahem). We weren’t that disappointed. We enjoyed chocolate-chocolate eclairs and freshly baked, out of the oven madeleines which had a faint lemon flavor and were dusted with powdered sugar. They were divine.

what’s in the box??

a chocolate-chocolate eclair, of course.

We thought we would pop around the corner to have a look at Laduree’s newest space in SoHo, which just opened last month in February. Laduree is a world-famous Parisian maker of macaron pastries and they just opened the largest tea salon in the world – yes, bigger than the one on the Champs Elysees – in SoHo. The tea salon consists of three successive rooms, decorated uniquely, with elaborate tapestries, marble statues, painted ceilings and elegant furnishings. Visitors wait in line outside, within the confines of a velvet-roped corral to prevent the charge of excited guests into the dining rooms, until ushered inside to make their sweets/macarons/tea/candle purchases or to obtain a table.

newest flavor
Marie Antoinette
a light, citron and honey macaron.

We saved our sweets for later, including one Iphshan rose-petal and rasberried gift for B’s tio and tia, with whom we were staying the night. Where next? Dinner! The only savory stop of the evening, we walked to Little Italy (the more touristy one by Chinatown, we learned and not the real deal somewhere hidden) and enjoyed a tranquil dinner at Casa Bella.

After dinner, we had one last stop: il laboratorio di gelato, which boasts 300+ flavors under its belt of nitrogen-made gelatos and sorbets. They rotate in 48 flavors a day. Each customer is allowed two tastes for free, and any additional are charged. We waited in a medium-length line and tried: grapefruit sorbet, passionfruit sorbet, rosemary gelato, earl grey gelato. We selected two to share.