When we were in New York with my family over Passover we all decided to go into the city one day to see a Broadway show and go out to dinner in Little Italy. It was a day of fun, food, and shopping with my parents and sister, and my honey of course.
The Broadway show we saw was Avenue Q, which is the show with the grown up puppets. It is about a group of people living on Avenue Q, which is perhaps not the best part of town. Most of them have no money and are unhappy with their lives and are pondering what they should make of themselves. They sing about real life things like racism, porn, relationships, how life sucks, laughing at the misfortune of others, and is complete with a puppet sex scene.
This was really entertaining and the cast did a great job. I think the most important thing that Nick and I learned from the show is that the internet is not for food blogging (like we thought), it is in fact, for porn. 😉
So after that we went down to Little Italy. Luckily by the time the show was over the nasty rainy weather had passed, so we were able to walk around for a little bit before dinner and check out some of the stores and restaurants.
My sister wanted to check out a rice pudding store called Rice to Riches that she had heard about. This is basically like an ice cream parlor, but it is for rice pudding. They have a dozen or so different flavors that you can taste. And bonus – they deliver all over the US (as well as locally in NYC)!
My mom bought 3 containers to bring to my Aunt’s house the next day for Easter. She got Understanding Vanilla, The Milk Chocolate Only Rings Twice, and Perfectly Legal Pecan Pie. The winner of the lot was the pecan pie flavor. Though all the ones we sampled were fairly tasty. My least favorite flavor was Almond Shmalmond, though it wins my award for best named pudding (partly because it reminds me of one of my favorite parts of the movie Knocked Up “it rhymes with shmasmorshan”).
Look at their silly signs:
Mulberry Street is the main street in Little Italy and that is where we ate dinner, at a Restaurant called Pellegrino’s.
We ordered a bunch of appetizers, a bunch of pasta dishes, then a bunch of meat dishes and shared everything between the 5 of us. This is normal to do when we are with my family and I think it is a fun way to eat a meal. Here is what we had (that I can remember): stuffed artichoke, cold antipasti platter, stracciatella, linguini in white clam sauce, mushroom tortelloni with truffle oil, crepes stuffed with scallops and shrimp, shrimp scampi, a chicken dish, and a veal dish. I did not eat any of the meat because I was so full so I don’t remember exactly what they were. Everything was delicious and all the pasta was homemade.
After dinner, we walked around some more to digest and did a little bit of tipsy shopping. Then we went over to Ferrara’s for coffee and dessert. Ferrara’s is a famous Italian bakery and I have a whole bunch of yummy pictures that I will share in another post.