Museums and Debaugheries

The day started out (for me, at least) with lunch with Lisa L, Jenny and Vince; a small Berkeley CED reunion, at Ponsri Thai Restaurant in Mid-Town. It was a friendly place busy with white collars laborers here for lunch. A lunch spot frequent by Lisa L. The tom yum noodle soup with chicken with the addition of iced Thai coffee was indeed refreshing, good kick for me to start the day...We dropped by Lisa L's office nearby, a firm specialized in courthouse and correctional facility design. After having a little chat with her boss, we left and went to check out the FIT Museum right across the street.

The highlight of today's itinerary was the Tenement Museum at the Lower East Side, which I've been wanting to see for at least 2 years, and we picked a tour on the early immigrants and the New York garment Industry, just to tied together out earlier visit to the FIT Museum...after the tour some refreshments and chillexing felt absolutely necessary having gone through the whole "tenement experience," thus we stepped into White Slab Palace right by the corner, a Scandinavian bar. While the cold meat and cheese tasting was a perfect snack and the service was friendly, I have to say it was extremely slow and unprofessional at best. We were planing on checking out MOCA (Museum of Chinese in America) right after, but the slowness of service kept us here for about 2 hours so we had to start heading towards dinner, another big event of the day.

Restaurant Week has allowed us to try out the super upscale Russian Tea Room. A place of long history and lineage, and was renovated not long ago. The extreme contrast of dark green, bright red and shiny gold was pretty overwhelming; and the music being played was either the completely cheesy elevator fake classical for extremely ethnic Russian, which feels quite out of place from the supposedly classy overall atmosphere. Like all other restaurant week meals, the 3 courses were watered down for the set price, but the desserts were very enjoyable with the accompaniment of an $8 dollar cup of coffee.