How I Spent Five Days In New York

My five day trip to New York feels like a lifetime ago now. But on 30th April I jetted off to the big apple for a solo trip. I felt very lucky to go on this trip despite having Scarlett, but I have a very encouraging husband.

In a few weeks I’ve got a post going out talking about why a solo trip when I have an 11 month old was the best thing I could do. But until then I wanted to do a bit of an overview of what I got up to over the days I was there. I had three full days, plus the end of my travel there day and the start of my travel home day.

This was my sixth trip to New York so I’ve already done a lot of the touristy things. My main mission was to eat loads of good food and do some shopping, and that I did to.

Entertainment in New York

The dates of my trip were actually planned around a gig happening at Madison Square Garden. My favourite band are Bring Me The Horizon and on the Saturday night of my trip they played and I can’t believe I get to say I was there. The venue is absolutely iconic and I can’t think of a better way to have spent my trip.

I love going to see shows on Broadway and during my stay happened to be the final weekend that a particular couple were playing in Chicago, so I booked that for Friday night. Chicago is one of my favourite musicals of all time and Whitney playing Roxie was incredible (if you’ve seen the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives you know). I booked my tickets ahead of time via Today Tix and got a really good seat for a reasonable price. Although I do think just buying a solo ticket helped.

All the food

Food was probably my top priority in New York. I’d been saving Tik Toks and places on my Google Maps for absolute ages. When planning my trip I tried to get to all of them but realistically I had to leave a few until next time.

I would say surprisingly it was the savoury food that I think was better, the sweet treats just seemed a bit too sweet for me this time. But here’s a rundown of everywhere I went/ tried:

• 7th Street burger- a really good and simple smash burger. The perfect quick dinner.
• Magnolia Bakery- I don’t like banana so didn’t try the iconic banana pudding and maybe that’s why I didn’t love it. The slice I had was good but nothing special.
• Liberty bagels- I love the bagels here, and there’s so much choice. I got a garlic bagel with bacon scallion cream cheese and it was so tasty.
• McDonalds- Yes I got Maccies twice, once to try their biscuit for breakfast (it was okay, nothing special) and another because I needed a quick late night dinner. I forget their chips are salted unlike the UK, and their sizes are huge.
• Panda Express- their orange chicken was everything I hoped it would be. And such good value for the portion size you get.
• Levain bakery- the cookies were nice but just way too sweet for me.
• Carlos Bakehouse- the cannoli I got was really good, although overpriced for what it was.
• Golden Diner- I’d seen their butter pancakes all over Tik Tok and yes it was tasty, but I don’t think I’d go back.
• Los Tacos No1- these lived up to their hype. Although I see everyone talking about the tacos and not the quesadillas which are basically giant tacos with melted cheese, what’s not to love?!

• Chip city bakery- this was my favourite sweet treat of the whole trip. The cookies were so tasty and not overly sweet.
• Cool sips- they had some really random combinations of drinks (pepsi, peach and vanilla cream, or root beer, caramel, vanilla cream and brown sugar boba). Safe to say I created my own simple lemonade with peach and passionfruit which was really tasty.
• Prince street pizza- this was soo good. I got the four cheese slice and it was pretty much perfect.
• Moonrise bagels- this place is ingenius. Rather than the filling being between the bagel slices it’s inside the bagel so it’s way less messy and doesn’t feel too bready. I got the bacon, egg and cheese and it was the best breakfast I had.
• Mamas too- their pizza was also incredible. I had both styles of pizza and they were both great.
• Randy’s donut- A really solid donut, there’s not much else I can say.
• Bubby’s- I think Bubby’s pancakes were better than Golden Diner. But it was also helped by the fact that I could get a booking for Bubby’s. Really soft, airy and super tasty.
• Lenwich- I’d seen their chicken caesar wraps everywhere and I had to try them. And it was so bloody tasty, I even managed the whole thing myself.
• Sunday morning- I think I made the wrong choice of cinnamon roll here as I didn’t love mine. Next time I want to try the classic cream cheese cinnamon roll.

That may seem like a lot of food over my trip and yes it probably was. But I did get small things at most places, and walked a lot so got hungry quite quickly. I’ll go into a bit more detail on my favourite places in another post.

Shopping in New York

My other key part of going to New York was to shop. Yes I wanted to buy all the items that you can’t get over here, and that’s just what I did.

My hotel was situated at the corner of West 34th Street and 8th Avenue which was perfect for shopping. Within 5 minutes there’s a decent Target, a good sized Sephora, Macy’s and a 7-Eleven. I went into Target on quite a few occasions to buy a combination of toiletries you can’t get here/ are harder or more expensive to get, and snacks. Although I headed over to the Atlantic Centre in Brooklyn on my first morning as this one is much bigger and I did manage to get a lot of things there I hadn’t seen. I also did a few click and collects from Target as I knew what I wanted and it saved me trying to find it myself.

Sephora wise I feel I was quite restrained and again I bought things you can’t get over here, or things that are way more expensive (like Rhode for example). My big purchase of the trip was a coach bag which over here is £550, but in America was $350 (plus tax). So I got a big saving there.

The areas I explored to shop were Chelsea Market which is one of my favs. You get a few shops including a great bookshop called Posman books,  and you also get the independent market stalls. I love the Union Square area as the biggest Barnes and Noble is there alongside Forbidden Planet and Strand books. And I headed to the Soho area for the ‘cool’ New York souvenirs from Mure and Grand, and Colourful Natalie.

There were so many more places I could have headed to shop, but I only had limited time. Thankfully other than a few snacks I managed to get everything on my wishlist.

Exploring new areas

In between my plans for eating and shopping I tried to walk and explore a bit more.

I did a lot of steps so tried to not push myself too much, but it was so nice to just stumble across places, and sit in little parks with my snacks. This is definitely something I’ll be doing more of in future trips.