For breakfast, Mom, Dad and I hiked from my apartment uphill through Fort Tryon Park for brunch at the New Leaf Café, an enterprise of Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project, a not-for-profit organization that’s revitalizing grubby public spaces in the city.
I had the challah French toast, served with braised strawberries and, on the side, two plump links of mildly sweet chicken-apple sausage. Delicious. Our server was peculiar in a kindergarten teacher sort of way, not blinking enough as she spoke slowly and obliquely about things like how the gardens at Fort Tryon reminded her of Maurice Sendak illustrations. (The gardens are beautiful, but they’re not Maurice caliber.) Her name was Allison and she signed our receipt with “Allison Wonderland,” which contributed to our suspicions that she was an actor, a stripper, or both.
Afterwards, the garden tour at the Cloisters was informative, although Mom recognized immediately our guide’s mistaken identity of the lavender. “At least she was pointing in the general direction,” Mom said. The tour extended inside to discussion of plant elements in the museum’s famous unicorn tapestries. We learned factual errors, like that pomegranates don’t grow on trees, and that the tapestries teem with allusions to elixirs. Closely grouped but seemingly random varieties of flowers and herbs were depicted to reference the fact that they could be combined to make, for example, an aphrodisiac or a beverage purposed to help women conceive a thoughtful child. Medieval viewers would have instantly caught these references, but to the modern viewer, there’s nothing there but a tangle of plants.
New Leaf Café
- Fort Tryon Park
- (212) 568-5323
- Meal 29 of 52: challah French toast with coffee and orange juice ($15.95).