Dear Diary:
I think I prefer Princeton over NYC. At least for this past trip, I did. But let’s be honest here: my expectations of Princeton were pretty low, since I’d never been there before, and my expectations of NYC were rather high, since I had. So what else would you expect? NYC was fun as always, but at least four of the eight chocolate, pastry, and dinner places I’d mapped to visit had vanished, and Chikalicious, which I was particularly keen on, was sold out! Perhaps it was my punishment for spending too much time in bookstores. Also, I was somewhat disappointed by Pho Grand, which the Amateur Gourmet recommended so highly. It wasn’t exactly bad, but certainly not notably better than either of the two tiny Vietnamese places here in Pittsburgh. I did learn later on that New York doesn’t have a large Vietnamese population, which might explain something. But let’s not dwell on the negative. My wandering feet found plenty of things that were good to eat…it just happened to be that this time, they were pretty much all outside of New York.
I did get to sample the macarons at La Maison du Chocolat, which were excellent if just a touch on the sweet side. Someday I hope to get the tops of my macarons to be as smooth.
Also, the chocolates from Michel Cluizel were fantastic, especially the passion fruit filled one.
And, well…that was pretty much it for Manhattan - at least that’s worth noting. After walking around all day and searching for various places that were no longer there, in addition to perusing bookstores and other little shops, we decided not to come back to the city a second day and instead relax a bit more while seeing what Princeton had to offer. There was also a lovely morning spent in Newark, yes Newark, which I’ll write about in a future post. Still, this really ends up being more like a Princeton review post, rather than the originally intended NYC review.
Princeton
Lots of people on message boards seem to complain that there is no good food to be found in Princeton, and to that I say: Pshaw. Maybe there are fewer ultra-fine dining establishments or celebrity chefs, but there is perfectly serviceable, even excellent food to be had there. Here’s a quick selection of my favorites:
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