New York City Trip - Day 1

First, I guess I need explain how we ended up in NY. Chris has been meeting with a group of his friends for dinner (or lunch) once a month around the city and they dubbed themselves the Lavish Dinner Group. As time went on people are moved away, started going back to school, etc., and I think it was Derrick (I don't know for sure, since I wasn't there) who suggested that they should do an Ultimate Lavish Dinner in New York City. When Chris frist told me about it, I don't think we were really considering making the trip accross the country for dinner. Somehow, we got used to the idea as time passed. And it's not as extreme of an idea when you make a vacation out of it, it gave us a reason to visit NY. Neither of us have been to the East Coast, and come on, it's New York City!
With Chris' work schedule, he could only take two days off, so we basically had to fit everything we wanted to do into 3 days. We took the red-eye from SFO to JFK and landed at 6:15am. By the time we actually got to the hotel it was already after 9am. I guess that's what we get for trying to travel during morning rush hour. The hotel was nice enough to let us check in early, so we took a little nap before exploring the city.

Luckily (or not so luckily) our room had a nice view of the 30 stories building next to us, so it was dark enough to sleep. (Actually, we never knew what time of day it is without looking at the clock since it looks the same all day long.) And what is our first meal in NY? I had a hot dog and Chris had a Chicken wrap thing off a cart on the street. We had reservation at WD-50 that night, and we didn't get around to eating lunch until 2pm, so we kept lunch pretty light. We were staying in mid-town, so we visited Time Square (well, more like sped through it), the public main library, Grand Central Station, and walked around 5th Avenue. We also explored the Lower East Side and Little Italy area a bit before dinner.
When we were first deciding where the group would go to dinner, most of us had a preference for WD-50. But, due to the amount of people we had (15-16) their dining room was not big enough to sit all of us. Their menu looked so interesting that I decided to make a reservation to check it out ourselves. I'm so glad we decided to go. We had the tasting menu and it's probably the best and most interesting meal I've had. I'm not going to go through all 11 dishes again here since I have the descriptions and comments on Flickr. Click on this picture to read descriptions of all the dishes:

The meal took about 3 hours, I guess the only complaint is that the timing of the dishes is a little off, some came too soon, and others took a little too long. But it's definitely a place we would go again next time we're in NYC.