The Magic Doors of Encanto, Thai and Gelato
Another Saturday full of activities. To be fair, the morning activities consisted of a Target run, but the afternoon was much more exciting. We did a quick meal on the way to the car at the local diner (Neptune Diner) though. Nothing too fancy, I went with Linguine with white clam sauce and my companion had a turkey club.
Afterwards we headed off to the city. The CAMP store on 5th Ave currently has recreated the magic doors in Encanto in their activity area. Each “family” received a candle that helped us open the secret door to bring us back to La Casita. It was well done and pretty cool. We explored all the different rooms and I got a little too bold and tried to go down a twisty slide meant for children and jammed my leg on it. One of my companions bumped her head doing something similar. Note: it is dangerous to go down a child’s slide as an adult.
Since we had a 4:30pm entrance time, we were starved. My companion suggested we try to do Thai since we were foiled many times over when going to the theater. I used the extremely effective method of looking on Google Maps to see what our options were nearby and we settled on Pranakhon. I couldn’t resist a Thai iced tea, but my companion saw a “dang soda” on the menu and had to try it.
The dang soda was very sweet, almost tasted like candy, but kind of hard to pinpoint the exact flavor. Was definitely interesting. Thai iced tea was great as usual, they had a nice ratio of tea to condensed milk, sometimes I find some far too sweet. We started the meal off with the curry pancake as well as the shrimp rolls.
The shrimp rolls were fairly standard, nothing too exciting. The curry pancake was very flavorful - basically the dough was stuffed with a curry chicken mixture. For entree I went with the short rib massaman curry while my companion went with a pad khee mao with chicken.
I was very tempted to just go with a pad thai as I find that is a great way to see the caliber of thai restaurant. However, I do love a good short rib and massaman curry is one of my favorites so I couldn’t resist this. I’m so glad I went with this choice as the short rib was falling off the bone and so so tender. It wasn’t swimming in a large amount of curry and there were some veggies and potatoes accompanying. Although it did come with a bowl of rice, due to the amount of meat and veggies, I probably could have eaten the whole dish without any rice. I was strategic however and left enough to take home for another meal. Instead of exploring the dessert menu, we found a place down the block to have some gelato. I thought I was in the mood for some sort of pastry or cheesecake, but I obviously went for the most instagrammable option.
We visited the Amorino in Union Square despite the fact that they think it’s Greenwich Village. It’s a chain and has locations internationally, but it has a small gelato shop feel with lots of different flavors to choose from. Of course I wanted to try this flower gelato cone topped with a macaron. You get a choice of 3 flavors and you can choose the macaron flavor as well. I went fruity and had blueberry cheesecake (creamy with chunks of blueberry), mango (standard) and the citrus carrot & ginger (tangy citrus with a strong ginger kick to it - if you like ginger, this is your flavor). The macaron is raspberry and instead of your typical creme inside, it was filled with a raspberry gelato. Overall very satisfied - although being a chain, the gelato is good and there are so many flavors to choose from. It was an action packed day and I spent the next day resting from the soreness in my leg from trying to go down a slide meant for kids.
