medstar: However, Fieri’s own NY location earned itself one epic bad review from the Times.
For people travelling into and around Midtown, midtownlunch.com provides quite a bit of information as to choices to eat (and sometimes drink) as if you worked around there at reasonable prices.
Mama Zappa, it sounds like it was a grand visit. And the Edison! Ah, that hostelry’s got character (no chain uniformity here for sure) and the location is absurdly prime… and yes the room layouts are kinda wonky, this is what you get after all those decades of redoing, redesigning, refitting, etc. Which as you noticed seems to have been ongoing room-by-room for years now. Too bad they closed the Café. Oy, it was such a swell NY diner.
I forgot to mention one non-food related funny thing: Our last day there, we were on the subway heading up to the hotel - when my daughter spotted a kid wearing a shirt from her high school. We struck up a brief conversation with the kid and his dad and yep, same school. We went 200+ miles, in a city of 7 million or thereabouts, to run into a classmate.
Thirty or so Christmases ago, we were walking Fifth Avenue/Rockefeller Center, and in the tens of thousands crammed into those few blocks, bumped into brother & his wife strolling in the opposite direction.
Three or four of my friends did a post-college trip to Europe (traveling on a Eurail pass, staying in youth hostels and following the advice in the Let’s Go guidebooks). They bumped into a college classmate on the steps of the Louvre. In retrospect, not so surprising as this was a few weeks after we graduated and this sort of trip was common among American college students.