New Family Tradition: On Fridays, We Brunch

September Edition: Downtown (Flippers & Balthazar)

A friend of mine in New York told me her favourite thing to do is to go out for lunch in the city with her best pal. They get all dressed up and make a day of it and her best pal is her two year old. What a lovely thing to do! I immediately decided to co-opt this tradition. So our new back-to-school routine (the 3 year old and me) includes dropping the 5 year old to school on a Friday then heading on for breakfast somewhere nice!

Financial planning

Getting ready for our first morning out, my husband said “What’s the plan for today?” and I said “We’re going for brunch!”

“Why?” he asked. 

“To give me something to write about”, I replied. 

He immediately jumped in with some financial planning advice, enthusiastically explaining that if I was writing about it, the food could be deductible as a work-related  expense. I was about to point out that I'm not actually making any money but I felt like that fact hung, very obviously, in the air between us so I just let it hang.

Believe it or not, my financial health went further downhill from there. We were 20 minutes into our walk downtown* , when I got an email to say that my Venmo transaction had been declined. How odd I thought, I haven't used my Venmo today. I took a look in the (very open and accessible) basket beneath the stroller to see if my wallet was still where I had casually thrown it and lo, it was not. The email said that someone had tried to spend $2.60 in Duane Reade. I checked my banking app and saw that the $2.60 had successfully been charged to my credit card, as well as an additional $2.90 on the subway. 

I was intrigued (highly intrigued) to see where this big spender’s adventure would next take them and even though they were actively saving me money with their extremely frugal spending habits, unfortunately, I had to go and cancel all my cards. As well as losing my wallet, I appeared to lose all common sense and proceeded to report this $5.50 crime to a police station. 

If you think that writing up a police report on the back of an envelope that looks like it will be filed in the bin is a Garda thing, you are wrong: it is a police thing. Well, maybe it’s a “This is a $6 crime why are you reporting it you lunatic” thing. To be fair to this police officer, he listened to my story with an air of gravitas it did not deserve and once he’d written down all the pertinent details on the back of the envelope, he took a video recording of me, gravely reciting every single thing I had done that morning from the moment I left the apartment until the moment I noticed the wallet was gone. All while my 3 year old, behind me, pilfered toys from a box marked  “Toy Drive for the Homeless”. The good-cop then redirected me to a more appropriate precinct in order to tell my story again. 

I was greeted outside the next precinct by a much more direct (you could say hostile) police officer. I think she was a police officer. I’m not sure what her role was exactly. It appeared to be to stand outside the locked door of the station, screening the legit cases from the hokum. I didn’t make it past.

What she really wanted to know was why on earth I was reporting a missing purse with $5.50 spent on cards I’d since cancelled.  “In case someone does eventually find the wallet and hands it into a police station - I want it back”, I explained. She laughed and laughed at that. Thigh-slapping at the idea of someone in NYC handing a lost purse into a police station.

I got the message, accepted that I was never going to be reunited with my purse and moved on with my day. A day that no longer included a downtown brunch.

Flippers 

By week 2, we were ready to roll and after drop off, headed straight for Flippers in Soho. Arriving at 10:30, we were seated straight away without a reservation. The main dining area is one floor up, in a natural light-filled room. There are windows galore with amazing New York views: landmarks like the Freedom Tower as well as typical New York scenes like 3 and 4 storey red walk-ups with firescapes outside. 

Flippers is a chain restaurant famous for its Japanese souffle pancakes and that is exactly what I had: the fruit souffle pancake.  Light, airy and jiggly - qualities I never knew I needed in a pancake. Topped with fresh fruit and cream and washed down with coffee. The child had sausages with a side of toast followed by chicken nuggets and chips because she said she was still hungry and that’s what she said she wanted - putting the breakfast and the lunch into ‘brunch’. 

We walked home on what was a beautiful September morning and it was like being on a movie set there was so much life! Businesses opening up for the day, deliveries being made, tourists checking their maps, city employees cutting trees, group tours, people lining up outside restaurants. I don't queue as a rule but noted places along the way that did have a line: Raku at 48 MacDougal Street and  Pura Vida Miami at 27th and Broadway.  Walking down MacDougal street was my saved restaurants tab on Instagram brought to life:  Emmetts, 12 Chairs, Caffe Dante, Parcelle. Our route home took us through Washington Square Park, passing men playing chess and dogs frolicking in the fountain. We stopped in Camp on Fifth Avenue for a mooch through the toys and again in Madison Square Park playground, where we shared a tyre swing with two other three year olds until the time for school pick-up  rolled round again, quickly as it does.  

Balthazar

The absolute best bit about Balthazar is that you eat, safe in the knowledge that you won’t be sharing a room with James Corden. It’s not a fear that weighs heavily on my mind generally I must admit, but sitting comfortably in Balthazar, knowing that he is barred from it, just adds a certain…je ne sais quoi. 

Balthazar is an old-school style French brasserie. Red leather couches, brown chairs, tiled floors, servers wearing white shirts with black ties and white aprons. Large age-stained mirrors line the walls and oversized vases of flowers decorate the centre of the large room. The acoustics are perfect to sit back and soak up the ASMR soundtrack: the ceiling fans whirring, cups and plates clattering, people chattering, the coffee machine brewing and pouring and steaming and frothing.

I ordered  a soft boiled egg with soldiers, which actually was for me and not the kid. It had been ages since I’d had a boiled egg. There’s something so decadent about going ‘tap tap tap’ on the top of your egg as it sits, comically majestically, in its cup. I felt like a 1950s middle class man, getting ready to go out to his Very Important Job, a job that definitely fully finished by 5pm and didn’t cost him another thought until he was back in there at 9 the next morning. 

The food was only ok but the people watching was amazing so I ordered another coffee and a croissant and listened as the group of former colleagues beside me, relived the glory days of when their store, in the Staten Island Mall, won the Most Sales of the Year award in 1992. I watched as a table of four women each contorted themselves to photograph their breakfast from every imaginable angle. I’d love for someone to put half as much effort into finding my best angles as those women did for their eggs benedict. 

When we first walked through the door of Balthazar, the 3 year old exclaimed “Fantastique!”. She and her sister are huge Fancy Nancy fans. Fancy Nancy tells the story of Nancy Clancy, a precocious 6 year old that wants to speak French and for everything to be fancy. Their favourite line is “Oh  là là, my family is posh!”. They say it over and over. My mother once asked my 5 year old if her family was posh and she gloomily replied  “No”, before adding “But that's OK, not everyone can be posh”.

As we left Balthazar, my daughter declared “I like the fancy restaurant!”. And there it is, that’s the review. 

*I call anywhere south of our apartment “downtown”. Anywhere north is “Uptown” and if I can see Patagonia vests walking round carrying plastic boxes of salad, that’s “Midtown”