New York - Day 3

Our third and last full day in New York was filled with TV show tapings and good food.

We started out the day by going to the taping of the Today show. When we arrived, we had missed seeing special guests from the newest Batman movie "The Dark Knight." On the other hand, we got to see co-anchors Natalie Morales and Ann Curry up close. They came out of the studio to chat with a chef making fish tacos. Too bad we didn't get to taste any.

The walking taste tour of Greenwich Village more than made up for it. Our guide had grown up in Greenwich Village. He has a pretty good job. His company secretly goes to tons of restaurants to taste their food, much like a food critic. The most highly ranked restaurants are added to the walking tour of Greenwich Village. The advantage of having a guide that has been to all these restaurants is that he knows the history of each place we visited and the food we ordered were spectacular.

Joe's Pizza. Movie buffs might recognize this as the pizza parlor where Peter Parker worked as a delivery boy in the movie "Spiderman." This place has the best thin-crust pizza I ever had. The owners claim that it is because of the water in New York. Branches of Joe's Pizza that are located outside of New York import water from New York just for their pizzas.

I love these dumplings from Lime, a Thai restaurant. They were plump, juicy, and were soaked in the best sauce. This is definitely one of the restaurants we would revisit if we had another chance to go back to New York.

For more yummy pictures from the walking tour of Greenwich Village, check out my smugmug.

In the afternoon, we raced from Greenwich Village to the Rockefeller Plaza to attend a taping of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Cameras were not allowed inside, so we didn't get any pictures. The studio was much smaller than I imagined it would be. I guess TV really does make things look big. Being the engineer/organizer that I am, it was cool to watch all the things happening in the background in order to run a show. There were at least 4 video cameras being used at the same time. One camera was on a swivel so that it could zoom in and out on the band while it is being raised and lowered from floor to ceiling.

We capped off the day with dinner at Babbo. Babbo is a restaurant opened by Mario Batali, Iron Chef on Food Network. His food tasted fabulous. A and I have never eaten at a really fancy Italian restaurant before, so the combination of fresh ingredients and freshly made pasta made the meal really delicious. We had grilled octopus, pasta, grilled fish, and duck. My favorite was the pasta dish.