I'm in New York! We made the flight last night with no delays (goodbye LaGuardia, hello Newark, my new bff) and settled into our hotel on the corner of Mercer and Prince. The neighborhood was buzzing, even on a Thursday night, the narrow, cobble-stone streets clogged with the painfully hip and trendy, everyone out looking for a bite to eat and a cocktail to soak up the day's frustrations.

We found ours at Mercer Kitchen, because we're just lame enough to eat in the hotel restaurant...as long as it's run by Jean-Georges Vongerichten. It was loud and fun, our waitress was darling, and we started things off right with a cocktail involving champagne and passion fruit, and a ginger margarita. (Bonus points for guessing who got what!) For dinner, I had sweet pea soup (must be the first pea shoots of the season, God only knows what J-GV had to do to get them) and slow baked salmon with brussels sprouts and truffled mashed potatoes. I know. Yum, right? It was. Nick had glorified steak frites, with some sort of caramel soy glaze that got all over the steak and the asparagus bed it was served on, and made everything sort of Frenchy-Asian, in that fun Jean-Georges way. A wonderful time was had by the both of us, made even better by the fact that we didn't have to fight our way to a cab at the end of the evening, just stagger upstairs to the elevators, and into bed.

Today we plan to hit Cookshop for lunch with the beauteous Meg, whom we've convinced to skive off work for the pleasure of our company, and from there it's up to Chelsea to troll the art galleries for stuff to fill up our bare ass walls. Wish us luck!

Oh. Wait. One more thing about last night. As we were heading down to dinner, I happened to glance over at the front desk, and who should be standing there in serious conversation with the concierge, but Clive Owen. In the rumpled, work-out-clothes-wearing, still-sexy-as-hell flesh. Yes.

SoHo Rocks.

Posted by Louisa Edwards at 8:50 AM