As planned, since Saturday, we ate lunch at Bouley, Aquavit, Le Bernardin, a private club, Jean-Georges, and Eleven Madison Park. Leaving aside the private club ( at which we were guests and had a first-rate meal in august surroundings and delightful company), each of these restaurants was as excellent in its own way as we had recalled; as a group, they were, we thought, competitive with the top restaurants in Paris. Moreover, all of these restaurants offer real value for money at lunchtime, as compared with their prices at dinnertime. Nowadays, hearing few American accents in such New York restaurants at midday, it is easy for an American diner to imagine that he or she is a foreign tourist. For an actual foreigner paying in depreciated American dollars, these world-class restaurants are an incomparable bargain, even for dinner.
In the evenings, we went to a revival of The Emperor Jones, to the Metropolitan Opera for Puccini's Turandot, to off-Broadway for flaminco by Soledad Barrio and Noche Flaminca, and to Broadway for the musical, Jersey Boys. Our son, David, joined us for Jersey Boys, as he did tonight for a preview of a revival of Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge, with Scarlett Johansson, who was eclipsed in her Broadway debut by her co-star, Liev Schreiber. Tomorrow, Susan will go to the West Coast for a few days, I will have lunch with friends at Asiate, at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, and David and I will go to Madison Square Garden to see the bull riders in action.
Because we took time off from our tourist jobs to exercise and take care of some business, and I indulged in an occasional afternoon snooze, we didn't leave much time for museums, on which we plan to focus later this month. Nevertheless, for the first time, we visited the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (is that name politically correct?), at the U.S. Custom House: an historic building, at the foot of Broadway, next to which I worked for a few years without ever entering. We also visited the Guggenheim Museum to see a dazzling, sprawling exhibition of Kandinsky's oils and watercolors.
Even though we barely had time in these past few days to glance at a few of Manhattan's cultural attractions, our glimpse through tourists' eyes reminded us of why New York City was the U.S. city most visited by tourists last year. It reminded us of why we raised our family here, and why we made our careers here. It reminded us of why we had planned to continue to live here after I retired.
From experience, I know that once I resume chemotherapy, food and wine may become unappetizing, and it will be difficult for me to stray far from Memorial Sloan-Kettering's facilities. If my next course (which might last six months or so) of chemotherapy goes well, I should recover from it sufficiently for my sense of taste to return and to allow us to have another period of travel. Whatever happens, we are happy to be tourists in residence in New York, where we are blessed with friends; and where the only non-monetary limiting factors on things to do and great places to eat are one's interests, curiosity, time, energy, and appetite.
