NY Bagels and Desserts - New York City
Hello Hello my fellow readers, how are we all today? Hope you're ready for another yummy blog post! Today I'm going to take you to an old but famous store, Russ & Daughters, that serves delicious New York Bagels followed by some desserts at Wafels & Dinges and Eileen's Cheesecake.
I firstly heard about Russ & Daughters through Mr. Wang and I wasn't big on the idea as it didn't pop up in my research. Since we had some extra time on our itinerary we decided to visit Russ & Daughters for breakfast.
Russ & Daughters
179 E Houston St New York, NY 10002
http://www.russanddaughters.com
Russ & Daughters has been opened since 1914 and they sell classic appetizers and snacks such as caviar, smoked salmon, schmears, bagels, breads, dried fruits, nuts and sweets. You can refer to the above mentioned website for more details on what they sell. Russ & Daughters have made it into the press many times for all sorts of good reasons so it's definitely a store not to be missed.
As you can tell from my above photos that the store is quite small and has no seats to sit down to enjoy your bagel so be prepared to order your bagel as a take away! When you enter the the store the first thing you need to do is take a ticket from the front, after you've taken your ticket you can look take a look at the menu whilst you wait for your number to be called.
We chose to have the classic Cream Cheese Bagel with a choice of smoked salmon. We chose the Poppy bagel, plain cream cheese and also the Scottish smoked salmon for our bagel.
Other than having New York Bagels at Russ & Daughters some of the local customers will come into the store to purchase the appetizers and snacks separately, we saw a few customers coming in just to buy a box of cream cheese and caviar.
Voila! Got us a New York bagel!
Since there were no seats inside Russ & Daughters we stood outside under a shelter near to have our bagel.
The cream cheese was oozing out from the top and the tomatoes in the bagel made it really juicy. The cream cheese wasn't too creamy and the texture was smooth but the salmon was the highlight of the bagel. The smoked salmon was perfectly cooked, it wasn't salty (sometimes you can get smoked salmon that's quite salty) and it wasn't tough to eat either. All the ingredients, smoked salmon, tomatoes and cream cheese worked really well together creating a juicy and delicious bagel. One thing however was that I thought the Poppy Bagel itself was a little tough and hard to eat so if it was a little easier to bite into then it would have been PERFECT!
Russ & Daughters' bagels are not cheap but they do serve quality ingredients which tastes really good and the servers take their time to cut the ingredients nicely to make a delicious bagel for you.
Now after bagels lets move to our next stop, Wafels and Dinges!
As you can probably tell from the name Wafels and Dinges serves desserts but in particular delicious Waffles! Wafels and Dinges are in several locations around New York, some are stores and some are food carts, we visited the one in Bryant Park.
Wafels and Dinges
Corner of 6th Ave & 42nd Street
New York, NY 10018
During my stay in New York we visited Wafels and Dinges twice (because they were amazing!). The first time we ordered the WMD (picture above) which had bananas, strawberries, Belgian chocolate fudge and whipped cream. The second time we ordered de Bom which had a large scoop of ice cream and strawberries.
The waffles are made to order so they are served really hot. At the store we went to, you can also see waiters assemble your waffles in front of you. The waffles were not too sweet and were very light and fluffy, the fruits also tasted really fresh. Wafels and Dinges at Bryant Park opens till quite late which makes it a popular spot for people to hang out at night, we were there at around 10PM and store was still super busy.
Now lastly lets have a look at Eileen's cheesecake!
When I was researching about New York I came across two famous cheesecake stores, Two Little Red Hens and Eileen's Cheesecake. We decided to go to Eileen's Cheesecake as it fitted nicely in our itinerary. Eileen's Cheesecake has been around since 1975 and for it to still be open today must mean that they serve really really really good cakes!
Eileen's Cheesecake
17 Cleveland Place New York, NY 10012
You can order full size cheesecakes or you can order the cheesecakes that are in tart size. The tarts size cheesecakes are the most popular ones and the benefit of ordering tart size cheesecakes is you can also pick a few other flavours. We were told that the Salted Caramel, Marble and Blueberry flavours were the most popular flavours. We ordered one Marble flavour cheesecake and one Plain flavour (the original). The waiter also told us that they can put whipped cream on top of our cheesecakes if we want.
After we took our first bite of the Plain flavored cheesecake we couldn't stop. We completely demolished the Plain flavored cheesecake within seconds. The texture of the cake was smooth, the cheese was creamy and it wasn't too sweet. I really enjoyed the Plain flavored cheesecake. The Marble flavored cheesecake tasted a little similar to the Plain flavored cheesecake however it also had some swirled chocolate as well as some Oreo cookie crumbs! I loved how both inside of the cheesecakes were very moist which made it easy to eat.
I loved Eileen's Cheesecake so much that I asked if they could ship overseas however at the moment they only ship within the U.S, if you're interested in ordering a cake you can visit their website: http://www.eileenscheesecake.com
That's all for now, I hope you enjoyed my first post about New York. Happy Australia Day fellow Aussie readers! Also, Happy early Chinese New Year :)!
