Landmarc

OK, this is probably the last restaurant review for this trip – although I can’t promise that.

I think that one reason that restaurants are so important in NYC is because apartments are so small. For most people having dinner with 6 or 8 other folks in their home just isn’t a possibility without a lot of advance planning.

There aren’t kitchens to handle the Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving dinner, there aren’t dining tables and there’s simply not space. So you meet in a restaurant, which is more desirable than a bar because YOU DON’T HAVE TO SHOUT TO BE HEARD.

Although NYC as a rule is much louder than southern cities. Not just the traffic and sirens and stuff. The people The locations. It operates at a higher volume than some of us are used to.

So Thursday night was designated as someone's - who happens to live in the same house that I do -- Birthday Dinner. Being a New Years Baby, he sometimes gets slighted in that regard with all the other festivities of the holidays, so it’s nice that someone takes the effort to make it special.

In this case, it was our friend Richard who picked the restaurant and made the reservations at Landmarc (www.landmarc-restaurant.com), which is up just off of Columbus Circle and overlooks Central Park (sort of – it kind of looks toward the Trump building next door and, if you lean a bit you get a pretty good shot of the park). That didn’t matter, though – we were there for the food and the company more than the view.

Landmarc is located in a building that’s about as close to a mall as NYC tends to offer – several high end stores in a building with a common area that’s covered. The difference is that instead of a food court, there were a couple of coffee shops where you sat down and ate. Also there was an art exhibit going on.

Not coloring pages that go on the trays at restaurants, or anything that you pay a dollar to sponsor a balloon with your name on it for the March of Dimes or anything, but an honest-to-goodness art exhibit.

By Salvador Dali, to be exact. You could get right up next to a variety of sculptures, painting and other things to see them. Some were even for sale. We opted out of a roughly 16 x 24 framed painting that was priced at $120K.

The colors just weren’t right for our house, after all.

There was a Christmas decoration show going on, too, and if I can ever upload the @#($*&#(@& video I’ll put it here.

One of the fun things about NY Restaurants is that lots of them have “signature drinks” in their bars. Their mixologists have come up with creative ways to combine liquids, usually one of which is flammable, to encourage you to eat more food and drink more liquor.

In Landmarc, they had two that were exceptional. One was called a “Light and Stormy”, which had ginger in it and would be especially good on a hot summer day and another was a “Malus Martini”, which tasted EXACTLY like a slice of apple pie, complete with a paper-thin slice of apple floating in it.

The really fun thing about Landmarc was their deserts. They’re all small – meaning that they’re reasonably sized portions that humans could actually eat without going into a diabetic coma. They have little ice cream cones – which most of us opted for – that were reminiscent of those we bought from the Ice Cream Truck growing up. They also offered a “one of everything”, so you could sample all the different deserts – lemon tart, crème’ brulee, chocolate mousse, apple pie, among others, and brought something that none of us had ever experienced before – banana cotton candy.

Dinner was over by 10:30, we said our good-byes and made plans for the rest of the weekend with the group and stopped at Posh (a bar – www.poshbarnyc.com) for a drink.

DID I MENTION LOUD?

I carry earplugs when we come to NYC. They don’t even try to be subtle. They’re the orange safety plugs that stop about 35 dB. It’s still very loud.

We weren’t there long and walked back to our apartment (at 43rd and 11th, if I haven’t said that before), stopping only for coffee filters and bagels so we don’t have to go out in the morning.