New York City trip Part 7 of 10:  Food and Fun

I couldn’t make my first trip to New York City without stopping here.  Food was pretty good, coffee wasn’t.

Pizza stop 1 of 4:  Joe’s Pizza!   Our first stop turned out to be our favorite.  Classic New York pizza by the slice.  These guys were turning them out left and right.  As soon as they would put a pie down, the thing would vanish and another would take its place.  And at about 3 bucks per huge slice, it made it very cost effective to overindulge.  I’m a bit sad that I can’t be eating one as I type this.

Another necessary stop, and don’t let the photos fool you, we weren’t the only ones to think that.

Pizza stop 2 of 4:  Lombardi’s, America’s first pizzeria!  This was probably my second favorite pizza stop.  We were told a small would properly serve two people.  We still opted for the large and downed that bad boy like we were born to it!

As a David Letterman fan, I couldn’t help but hunt down this spot to see if I could meet the man.  Low and behold, walked in and he was the only dude there it seemed!  Real nice guy.  I left with a coffee mug, the one souvenir I got myself on this trip.  If you have no idea who the hell this guy is, youtube ‘David Letterman Rupert Jee’ and prepare to enjoy yourself!

Ok, so this photo probably cranks my geek status up to 11, but in my defense, I didn’t seek it out.  We just passed by it on the way to another destination.  But I did recognize it immediately.  Point being… I don’t care what anyone says, Gremlins 2 is fantastic!

Pizza stop 3 of 4:  Kreste Pizza & Vino.  While I will put this in third place, I have to say that it’s super close to being second place.  Really fantastic, but not very filling.  The size of the pizzas seemed to be odd to me… too small to really feed two people, but a little too large and pricey to be a pizza for one.  We were still kinda hungry when leaving here, so we went around the corner and ate at Joe’s again.

A quick google search while walking around Chinatown showed that Prosperity Dumpling had the highest Yelp rating of any listed restaurant, and by a pretty wide margin as I remember.  Didn’t really knock my socks off, but was overall real good.  On top of that, the food was dirt cheap!  I thought I was reading the menu wrong at first, but in the end I think it was about 3 bucks for 8 dumplings and a soup.

On our last night in New York, we decided to hunt down some real New York cheesecake and enjoy some wine.  We were informed that Junior’s Restaurant was the place to go for our local cheesecake needs, and boy did it satisfy!  One slice could have easily served both of us, but we unwittingly got two.  I consider this the best kind of mistake you can make.

While we were in town, they were having a week of test shows for the new Colbert Late Show.  Now I wish we would have made time to catch one.  I would have thought it impossible to come in after Letterman, but Colbert has seemed to really soar pretty quickly in his run.  He’s really made it his own!

Didn’t catch a show at Carolines comedy club, but had always heard of it, so it was cool to swing by.

Pizza stop 4 of 4:  Rizzo’s Fine Pizza.  So this would have to be my least favorite of the 4 we went to.  But just to clarify, it was still terrific.  So in a case like this, I would think ‘least favorite’ only means so much.  I will say this for them, absolutely hands-down the best customer service we had on our whole trip.  This was something the city didn’t seem to specialize in much, to say the least…  But at Rizzo’s, at the first mention of the fact that we were from out of town, they threw a free slice at us that we were told we had to try.  And when we were done having pizza, they came at us with a free dessert, saying that they were so pleased that we came to them when there are so many pizza choices in town to choose from.  How cool is that!