New York City, Day 2

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We started out in super touristy Times Square, stopped at St. Patrick’s to get my mom a souvenir. After a few wrong turns, we found the Cinnamon Snail food truck.  All vegan, sandwiches, chili, amazing baked goods. I got the portobello  sandwich, with capers, olive tapenade and arugula on chibatta. Olives are the only food I generally avoid, but the sandwich, olives and all, was amazing. If you live in New York, this and all my posts this week will probably be very boring to you, but I am a practically professional seeker of delicious vegan food, and I have been crazy excited about all the choices here.

We took our food to Central Park. The park is beautiful, but all those carriage horses suffering made me sad and angry. Here is a list of what is wrong with the carriage horse industry in NYC. I knew I wouldn’t want to stand by and do nothing about it, so before I left for the trip, I printed out copies of the list to give to people that looked like they were thinking about taking a ride, but we did not give out very many. We’ll be back on Saturday to give out the rest. WAR is going to send me a file with a better brochure to hand out. Let me know if you go to NYC and want to do some leafleting.

Next stop was Tom’s Restaurant, the diner that Seinfeld and his friends supposedly went to all the time. Of course, it didn’t look the same inside, since the show was filmed in California, and the menu was so NOT vegan-friendly, so we booked it back over to Midtown to Fashion Ave, which was also a bust. Pj, our friend that’s getting married and we are here visiting, didn’t find the accessories she wanted for her wedding outfit.

Then we took  the subway Chinatown – Vegetarian Dim Sum Restaurant. I had no idea what to order, I’ve only gotten dim sum once in my life, so I just picked out 6 things.  Most of them were kind of weird. I’m a pretty adventurous eater, my motto is generally “if its vegan its for me!” so I liked everything except one thing. I think we ordered: monk rolls, rice with Chinese kale (this was the yucky one), spring rolls, dumplings, and.... other dumplings.

After that we hauled over to Lula's Sweet Apothecary in East Village. I was ridiculously sad that their soft serve machine was broken and they had to order a new one. So, I sampled the butterscotch, peanut butter & maple, and strawberry flavors of their regular ice cream. They make their own cashew-based ice cream. I got a cone of the butterscotch kind, though I wish I also tried the orange blossom kind first.

We managed to do almost everything on our list for the day, except hit up Trader Joe’s. There’s no Trader Joe’s in Orlando, and we’ve heard that the new one in Sarasota (closest one to Orlando, 2.5 hours away) is sold out of stuff all the time.

- Jessi