Day 1 - Eating and (not) Drinking in New York

Any of you who followed Drew and my trip through South East Asia five years ago will remember that almost every post spent half its time (or more) on food and drink. Well no more, at least in the case of the latter.

No more will I be extolling how lemony fresh the pinot grigo is, nor how oaky the chardonnay nor whether the chenin blanc is as crisp as it should be. Gone are the days when I'd be waxing about the richness of the cabernet sauvignon, or the earthiness of the pinot noir, or the zingyness of a zinfandel or its cousin the primitivo. The bottom line is that I am now teetotal.  

This is not, in my case, a voluntary state. Rather it began when one of my colleagues, Dean Whitcombe, was doing research for his PhD. I had volunteered as a subject and Dean undertook a set of glucose tolerance tests; which led him to discover I had Type 2 diabetes. This subsequently led to his supervisor, another colleague Simon Williams, coming to see me and telling me to visit my doctor. Well after a year or two of diet management for the diabetes (when I lost a stone) I was prescribed Metformin. The doctor mentions they don't work well with alcohol, so I go and collect the tablets and read the warnings and there is the lovely "What should I avoid while taking metformin? - Avoid drinking alcohol. It lowers blood sugar and may increase your risk of lactic acidosis while taking metformin." (my emphasis). I went back to the doctor to check if he was serious - and indeed he was!

So, though prescribed the tablets in April 2010, I waited until the end of my summer holidays, August 2010, before biting the bullet and stopping drinking and starting taking the metformin. So far the process has not been as bad as I expected, helped by Drew who decided that rather than enjoy drinking while I wasn't he would volunteer to join me in my teetotal state! That's taking love beyond the call of duty for you. 

Still yesterday saying no to the free champagne and wine on the plane was strange, the first time I've ever flown that type of distance without the aid of alcohol, but apart from that I must say I feel generally healthier - I'm not sure if that is because I'm not drinking, or because I'm taking metformin or both :-)

Anyway, I thought I'd get that out of the way for those who didn't know I was now teetotal and wondered where that element of description was.

As I mentioned in my last post we arrived at the Hotel Bedford and were given an upgraded room on the 15th floor. It is unusually spacious, and for the first time (I've been staying here when I'm in NY since 1999) we had a view of the Empire State Building.

So it was off for food in the Pershing Square restaurant two blocks away on Park and East 42nd street

Drew and his crab cakes

So on with the food: I had an onion soup gratin, it was amazing, it came served in a bowl with the cheese gratin covering the top like a pie crust would a pie dish. The soup was full of onions, stock and large chunks of bread, the hard decision was whether to eat it and then the cheese or to mix them together, so I did a bit of both. Drew had Maryland crab cakes with shaved fennel, crisp parsnips, tartar sauce – as you can see he loved it and eat every bit.

For mains I had  Pershing Square’s “famous chicken pot pie” with poached white meat chicken, baby onions, potatoes, carrots, peas & celery this was served with a shortcrust pastry lid which was sumptuous. I can’t tell you how such simple ingredients could taste so comforting yet luxurious. Drew had classic caesar salad with romaine lettuce, we were to busy eating to take photos of that!

As highlighted above, drink was not important I had diet Coke and Drew had a couple of bottles of Kaliber (non-alcholic lager) amusingly this had been produced in Runcorn, so had journeyed as far as us.