The Guggenheim & Le Bernardin

Red Cross Train, Gino Severini

Broken Forms, Franz Marc

Morning in Village After Snowstorm, Kasmir Malevich

Blue Painting, Kandinski

The Unfortunate Land of Tyrol, Franz Marc

Smokers, Fernand Leger

Paris, Chagall

The ceiling, The Gug.


After a rousing bowl of fruit at a Ukranian place near Dex's place, we went to the Guggenheim Museum, the one art destination I didn't get to on my previous trip to NYC 5 years ago. This is only the 2nd Frank Lloyd Wright building I've been in, the first being the Robie House in Chicago on my visit there in 2008.
There were a couple of exhibitions there I was particularly interested in: Broken Forms and Kandinsky at the Bauhaus. We took the elevator as high up as we could get but couldn't take the ramps down for the best view because they were setting up a new show. The art I saw was spectacular. Above are a few of my faves.
The rain was walling down when we emerged from the museum. A man was trying to sell umbrellas by telling the crowd that the rain wasn't going to stop. It did. We had a lunch reservation at the greatest seafood restaurant on the continent, Le Bernardin. On my microcassette recorder, I noted:

Salmon amuse is surprisingly fishy though it does mellow in my mouth. Needs white wine. With water, too fishy.

(Dex says it's savoury.) He makes it with poached and smoked salmon rolled up in zucchini. Sounds much better than this.

Rosemary and olive bread, still warm, looks like cigar, with 2 kinds of butter. Hope my fish is as good as this bread.

First bite of this scallop is beyond belief. The high note is the lime. Eventually you taste the pepper, which complements everything else. Doesn’t taste like scallops so much as it tastes like an ingredient in an amazing recipe. The sauce is dependent on the scallops for its quality. When I finish them and try the sauce by itself, not nearly as good, a bit too astringent. With the scallops, its the emperor in the land of lime. The pepper begins as a confident undernote to the lime and remains as a perky aftertaste

Monkfish dipped in sake is extraordinary. Dipped in pureed turnip and ginger alone, it’s a bit salty. The trick is the combination. A fantastic idea and preparation. What I thought were capers are actually shimeji mushrooms. Delicious. I had a parker house roll, warm and pleasantly soft, to soak up left over sake sauce: extremely good. Dex said it would make a fine soup.

For desert, figs with bacon ice cream. Tea Master tea which has citrus and spice in it. Dex has black sesame and cherry desert.

Figs, nuts (?) candied red wine dribbled around the food, the bacon ice cream doesn’t taste like bacon at all, a fantastic combination has rewarded my adventuresome pick.

The scallops in lime and coconut milk were the best scallops I've ever eaten. The whole meal left me feeling rapturous. Great inspirational images and food too! And it was still the afternoon.