Eileen’s Birthday Crawl
I love taking something fun and making it more elaborately fun. Read more about my silly Mario & Luigi crawl here. Although you’ve seen several of my food crawls on instagram over the past decade, all of these food crawls came after the original NYC food crawls I planned for my Mom, exploring neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens, Williamsburg, the East Village, Red Hook and Tribeca. I loved planning these outings, trying to find a balance of fast casual bites, plated delights and some alcohol.
For my Mom’s birthday this year, I decided that another food crawl was in order. Our food crawl day presented me with my favorite type of challenge - timing everything perfectly. This crawl had to come to and end in Union Square at 5 so we could make it to our show, Titanique. If we were running behind, we could skip the last place, and if we finished early, we could hang at a coffee shop, but there is no greater feeling than nailing it time wise.
I started my epic timing day with another challenge - mapping out my Summer Streets biking timing. Sung and I love biking Summer Streets, 10 miles of closed road in Manhattan, every August. We wanted to do Summer Streets before meeting my Mom, but we had to figure out a shower plan. We biked from Brooklyn up to Harlem and back down to Noho, docking our bikes around 11:32, 13 minutes before our boxing class. Perfect! We did the workout, took showers grabbed a coffee, and met my Mom.
We started at a dumpling shop in the West Village, cut over to Pommes Frites and Munchiez (aka Mei Li Wah) in the Village, and then walked to Casa Mono in Gramercy. We paid our check around 4:30, just in time to head to the show! We nailed it! After the show, we went to Loring Place for dessert where my Mom was showered with love. She ordered 1 glass of wine and I ordered 1 dessert to share, and she received a top-off and a plate of cookies too.
Nothing pleases me more than one of those perfect NYC days, where you’ve mapped out the day and timed it just right. Because the opposite has happened, like when you go on vacation and think you’ll spend 3 hours in a museum and 40 minutes later, you are out the door and your whole day is out of whack!
My Mom’s Birthday crawl was also a top moment because it is something uniquely ours. We’ve always had our own relationship, our own activities, and our big annual trip to Aruba. But in the wake of my father’s passing, some of our really fun moments together happen because my Dad is dead. We see more shows together now, go to more Rangers games, and even went to Montreal together. As Phil would say, these are all good things, but all things that may have played out differently if Phil were still alive. Phil’s lack of presence is omnipresent to the point that I sometimes don’t think about him for a few hours and then think about how I haven’t thought about him. I mean - re-read that sentence and try to untangle those emotions. Of course, we wouldn’t have ditched Phil on Eileen’s birthday, but putting the day itself aside, that food crawl would have been an Eileen & Kerry thing anyway. We went back to our roots and had a special day, the kind of day that was always our kind of day.
