MoMA or Momo?

My business trips to New York are a mad dash to fit in as much stuff around the business as possible. When I started seeing all the press for the Tim Burton retrospective at the MoMA, I put it on the top of my "to do when not doing business" list for my next trip to the big apple.

Most of my free time fell on a Tuesday. The MoMA, as a general rule, is closed each and every Tuesday of the year. I had a little time on Wedensday, and then a little time turned into half an hour, and I was all the way down on Union Square and Tim Burton was scratched off the list.

Conveniently, I had planned ahead for such an event. I'd noted the location of Momofuku Milk Bar, a place I knew almost nothing about, except that "Momofuku" is some kind of shorthand for good food.

When at a milk bar, order milk. They sell soft serve in a variety of non-traditional flavors including "cereal milk" and the one I settled on, "salted caramel pistachio." For upwards of three dollars, I was handed a tiny dixie cup full of greenish, brownish ice cream and a wooden spoon. How New York.

But oh, how good. It was soft serve, but it was rich and so salty on the tongue. The pistachio and the caramel had a kind of peanut butter taste, except this was a peanut butter I would eat right out of the jar. I walked the long blocks back to my hotel, not bothered by honking taxis or by the vast puddles that a morning of rain left behind. Even in a city as alien and wonderful as New York, good ice cream brings me right back home.