A birthday dinner

Last night, Elana, Sofia, various friends and I all went to The Bar Room at The Modern to celebrate Sofia's 21st birthday (observed). For those of you who don't know, the "Modern" refers to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Yes, museums in New York have three star restaurants (is that weird? I think maybe it is. But delicious).

I've been to the Bar Room before (for Meredith's birthday this past year) and it seemed like the perfect place for a fun, semi-fancy girl's night out. And it almost was. Except for.....

The service! The service was terrible. We had a confirmed 9:30pm reservation (which seemed a little late for dinner, but it was a Saturday, and we only called a week in advance, so we figured we'd take what we could get). We all arrived at 9:28, checked in, and were ushered to the bar where we............waited........and waited.......and noticed it was 9:45 and checked again to make sure they hadn't forgotten us........and waited some more. We didn't get seated until just after 10pm! Unacceptable. They didn't even send us free drinks or appetizers to make our wait better. We did buy some fun girly drinks. Here's Sofia (on the right) and her friend drinking cocktails:


Sofia is having "Coming Up Roses," a champagne and rose drink that was really good (I had one too). See how pretty the rose petals are? It was nice.

They finally gave us our table and left without giving us menus. Five minutes later, we got our menus, but no wine list. But we picked some great plates (some of my favorites being the Slow Poached Farm Egg "in a jar" with Maine lobster, crosnes and sea urchin froth and Roasted Long Island Duck Breast with peppercorn crusted apples) and flagged down a wine list in time for the meal (although the popular vote went for white wine - which is not my favorite. I haven't ordered white wine since I was nervous about mispronouncing the different names - I knew I could always say "chardonnay" correctly. But it wasn't my birthday, so I didn't push it).

One thing I really like about the food here is the portion size. Everything is fairly small, so you can try a lot of different things and share with your friends a lot. It's not a great place to go if you're super starving and are jonesing for a big plate of food - but there's a time and place for everything.

I didn't take pictures of the food because the service was bad enough already, I didn't want to push it by making them think we were 19 year old tourists from New Jersey or something, so you'll just have to take my word that the food was great (and pretty). I would definitely go there again - but maybe not in a group of six girls all under the age of 25. There are places where the servers will fall all over themselves trying to serve a group of young pretty girls - but the Modern is not one of those places.