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Turned 45 this past Friday.  Yeah.

Celebrated with Gia and our friends in NYC on Saturday with the following agenda:

• Biscuits and coffee from Donna Bell's Bake Shop in Hell's Kitchen.  Both were outstanding.  I had bacon, blue cheese and parsley biscuit, naturally. Gia went with the pimento cheddar and chive variety. Each was the size of a baby's head.  The service at the joint? Not so outstanding.  We ordered 4 biscuits, a muffin and four coffees and we got 3 biscuits, the wrong muffin, 3 coffees and a 15-minute wait for them to brew the last cuppa. The place is tiny, but c'mon...they need to work on that.
• Breakfast pitcher of beers (and bourbon) at Rudy's Bar & Grill.  The best dive bar in NYC.  We got there around 11:30AM, so the alcohol was indeed of the breakfast variety. I don't know what time they opened, but our bartender's shift ended at noon. And I've closed the joint past 4AM in the past.  I think they pretty much close for a couple of hours, and start all over again. My kinda joint.
• Took a walk downtown and stopped at a crummy Irish chain pub because one of us needed to pee. Wasn't me, by the way.  Didn't stop us from ordering a round of Lutaks. We miss you, big guy!
• We got hungry again, so we headed over to a sandwich shop on Broadway called No. 7 Sub attached to the Ace Hotel.  Gia had done a mess of research about the best sandwiches in NYC, and this place consistently popped up.  And they were awesome.  I had a brisket hero with Chinese mustard, pickled jalepenos (replacing the mushrooms) and parsley.  Gia went with the broccoli hero with Lychee Muchim, Ricotta Salata, and Pine Nuts.  Equally as awesome.  They are strictly a takeout joint, so we took our food to the lobby of the Ace Hotel which was an odd, wonderful experience.  Drinks were ordered at the Breslin Bar located in the hotel, and we sat down for a nice meal.  Did I mention the lobby was an odd experience? Packed to the gills with guests of the hotel and transients like us.  Drinks were being had, job interviews conducted, seemingly lots of work going down...all this on a Saturday afternoon. Weird, but it was a great place to people-watch.
• Our friends had to go home at this point, so Gia and I trudged on without them.  First to some local bar whose name I don't recall.  We were headed to the Flatiron Lounge, but it was still 15 minutes away from opening.  So we ducked into this joint.  Met some really interesting people there as well.  But the Flatiron Lounge was the real gem.  Great cocktails served with absolute precision by knowledgeable mixologists.  A real treat. 

We kinda called it quits after that.  Headed back to Penn Station for the train ride home.  There were a couple of more bars mixed in there, one at Penn while we waited for our choo-choo and one near our home.  By 10PM, 12 hours after we got to the city, I was done.  And feeling it very much the next day.  I can't party like I used to.

The title of the blog post says it all.

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