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Cruise Review: Escape From New York, Sept. 2-9, 2018


PaulInPGH
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Well hello everyone. We’ve once again completed another excellent cruise, and I’m again taking pen to paper (fingers to keyboard?) to document our experience. If you’ve read my previous reviews, you know I like the #longread, so expect a long-winded, wordy review, with a few fun photos thrown in for good measure.

 

A quick word about us: we're in our mid-thirties with no children, so it’s just the two of us when we travel. This was our sixth cruise together and our fourth on NCL. We’ve previously sailed the Getaway, the Dawn, and the Epic.

 

This year’s trip was a seven-day cruise to Bermuda on the Escape out of New York. While the trip wasn’t seamless, and the cruise was a little lacking in certain areas compared to our other NCL cruises, we still managed to have a wonderful, relaxing vacation. Specifics to follow, but first…

 

Up next, day 1: Arriving in NYC!

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Day 1: Pre-Cruise Hanging in the City

 

The nice thing about cruising from New York is being close enough to take the train up from our home in Alexandria, Virginia. A short four-hour train ride put us in Manhattan by noon, where we checked in for a two-night pre-cruise stay at the Hilton Garden Inn Time’s Square. The hotel was right in the heart of the Theater District on 8th Avenue and 48th Street, which would be convenient for us the following night when we were scheduled to see the Phantom of the Opera.The hotel itself was great—spacious and clean, and not too big, which helped avoid crowding and long lines (both of which we’d face plenty enough of in the days ahead on the Escape).

 

We stopped at the hotel just long enough to drop our bags in our room, and we then quickly grabbed an Uber to head to my favorite restaurant in the entire world for lunch. We ate at Barbuto on our last trip to NYC and to say I loved it would be selling it short. I’d say that eating is the driving force behind most of our travels (as you’ll see throughout this review), so believe me when I tell you that this restaurant is my number one dining destination I’ve experienced, on land or on the seas, in the U.S. or elsewhere.

 

Truly, words fail me.Just go there! Order the best pasta carbonara in the world (yes, even better than in Rome, trust me). Order the amazing spatchcocked wood-fired roast chicken that will haunt your dreams for years. Seriously, I’ve got to stop writing this now or else this review will become a thousand word restaurant review for Barbuto. Just know, it was the eating highlight of a trip filled with eating highlights.

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After an hour of pure eating bliss, we took a post-lunch walk through the West Village. We realized that we’d forgotten to pack our sunscreen, so we stopped at a Duane Reed to pick up a replacement. We then hopped on the subway back uptown to our hotel for a couple hours of cleaning up and relaxing before hitting the streets again.

 

Freshly showered and clothed, we hopped back on the subway and made our way to the East Village. We walked the streets for a bit, and we tried popping in to a record shop to do some browsing. Unfortunately, the proprietors didn’t think we were young or cool enough to shop in their establishment, so they tried to scare us out by BLASTING some rap music at top volume. The joke was on them, though, since I like rap and wasn’t scared away at all. In fact, we later found the song they played on Spotify (Know Yourself, by Drake), and we made it our song of the trip by singing it constantly for the next week.

 

Following that mini-adventure, we stopped in a small cozy wine bar for a few pre-dinner drinks. I’ve really become an oenophile as I’ve aged, and I tried a number of great wines on this trip. This wine bar, called Bibi, offered some great choices, and they had excellent happy hour prices until 8:00 ($7 per glass), and I’d definitely recommend stopping in if you happen to be in the East Village and looking for a tasty glass.

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Dinner that night was at Risotteria Melotti, which specializes in risotto. Unfortunately, the experience and the food left a lot to be desired. When we arrived for our reservation, the only table they could seat us at was a weird spot where one person at the table basically had to sit on a windowsill. They offered a cushion to sit on, but it was basically still sitting on a hard marble bench, which I naturally took (giving my wife the single chair). There was a lower ledge and a higher ledge, so it offered me two equally-unappealing choices: either sit so high above the table I’d have to hunch over to reach my food, or sit so low that basically only my head was at table level. I chose the latter.

As you might guess, this did not put me in a mood wherein I wanted to linger and enjoy a nice dinner. Where I might have otherwise ordered a nice bottle of wine (or even two!) and multiple courses, I basically wanted to get my food as fast as possible in order to get my injured butt off of that hard freaking torture seat. I might have been more willing to go through this for good food, but unfortunately the food was almost as lackluster as the accommodations. For a place that specializes in dishes made with rice, they surprisingly didn’t know how to cook it. The rice was undercooked in every dish we ordered and it generally lacked flavor. It was overall not at all worth the price, or the injured butt.

After a long day of travel and eating, we decided to Uber back to the hotel rather than take the subway. We got back to the room and dropped off to sleep almost immediately, excited for our next day in NYC.

Up next, Day 2: Pizza, pizza, and more pizza!

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Looking forward to hearing about it. We're doing this same cruise in October.

 

I'm sure you'll have a great time, especially if you enjoy food. The Escape had the best food we've had on a cruise, and the food in Bermuda was also excellent. The entertainment on Escape was also some of the best we've seen.

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Day 2: Our Own Personal Pizza Tour

I think I’ve already mentioned we love to eat, right? Saying it’s our only reason for traveling (or living) might be going a bit far, but not by much. Thus, it shouldn’t surprise you that our main fun for our second day in NYC was a pizza tour of Brooklyn.

We’d initially looked for a company that offers New York pizza tours, but we didn’t see one we liked. So rather than pay $50-$75 per person to get a tour of pizza places we could easily find on our own, my wife came up with her own, hand-crafted, personalized pizza tour of a few of Brooklyn’s most famous pizza purveyors.

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This wasn’t my first trip out to the wilds of Brooklyn, but it was definitely the furthest out from Manhattan I’ve ever traveled. And it takes a LONG time via subway from Time’s Square—like over an hour—but the payoff is worth the effort.

Our first pizza stop was the famous L&B Spumoni Gardens. It was nice enough outside for us to take advantage of their outside tables, which I guess is the “gardens,” though it really was more like a bunch of picnic tables next to a semi-busy street.

“Gardens” or otherwise, this turned out to be our favorite of the pizzas we sampled. We tried a slice of the round, traditional New York style (very good) and a slice of the square, Sicilian style (unbelievable). Next time we visit, when we don’t have multiple pizza places on our agenda, I plan to order two entire pies here and just go to town. It was great.

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Rather than mess with multiple subway lines, we decided to just take a short five‑minute Uber ride to our next delicious destination. Our next stop on our homemade pizza tour was Totonno’s at Coney Island. This is one of, if not the absolute oldest pizza places in NYC. Luckily, we arrived early enough during the day (around noon) to snag one of their few tables without a wait. We placed our order and sat to wait, enjoying the very intoxicating smell of fresh-out-of-the-oven pizza wafting all around.

What makes this a slightly more challenging stop for a pizza tour is the fact that they don’t do pizza by the slice here. My wife and I weren’t daunted, however, so we ordered a large pie—we could have ordered a small, but the large was only $3 more,so…you do the math. The pizza was delicious, but maybe could have been a little more flavorful. The crust was exceptional, but I like my pizza with a little more cheese. Critiques notwithstanding, we very much enjoyed the pizza and came only a few slices shy of finishing the large pie. But while I would venture out to Brooklyn to visit L&B Spumoni again, I’d probably say Totonno’s isn’t worth the lengthy travel effort.

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We needed some time to digest our Totonno’s before venturing to the last of our pizza stops, so we decided to take a short walk over to the main part of Coney Island for a quick look around. Neither of us had ever visited this classic vacation destination, so we were curious to check it out.

Even though we needed a break from pizza, we couldn’t help ourselves from trying another New York dining icon, Nathan’s Famous. I wasn’t ready to pull a Kobayashi, but I did have enough room to split one famous hot dog. It was fantastic—probably the best hot dog I’ve ever encountered.

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Having failed at digestion, we decided to get back on the pizza train and hit our last stop of the tour. Our next and final destination was Di Fara, which was thankfully only a few subway stops away. Again, we lucked out and avoided the typical long lines at this very popular pizza spot. And I have to tell you, I’m glad that was the case, because if I waited over an hour to get this pizza, I would have been very displeased.

The pizza at Di Fara was flavorful, I’ll give it that, but it just wasn’t well prepared. It was overcooked, for a start, and it just lacked overall quality. I may give it a small pass because the famous pizza maker who opened Di Fara back in the 60swasn’t there making the pizzas. I would consider trying it again if I could be sure he was the person making the pies, but otherwise I’d give this place a hard pass, especially if there’s a wait.

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Nice writeup so far. Just one thing that bugs me being a New Yorker...it's "Times Square", not "Time's Square."

 

I hope your pizza tour took you to DiFara, but if not I'm interested to see where else you went. L&B is definitely a ways out in Brooklyn, especially since the D or F trains are all or mostly local in Brooklyn.

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Nice writeup so far. Just one thing that bugs me being a New Yorker...it's "Times Square", not "Time's Square."

 

I hope your pizza tour took you to DiFara, but if not I'm interested to see where else you went. L&B is definitely a ways out in Brooklyn, especially since the D or F trains are all or mostly local in Brooklyn.

 

Thanks for the catch re Times Square. I'm surprised that one got by my eagle-eyed wife, who tends to help fix my sloppy writing.

 

We did get to DiFara, but I wasn't crazy about it. Maybe we went on an off day, but it was my least favorite of the bunch.

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