New York City and Birthdays

One thing that you discover when moving to New York City or the greater city area (Connecticut and New Jersey being suburbs) is that every weekend is someone's birthday, particularly if you observe friends' of friends birthdays. Even within your own circle, you're probably hovering around a dozen birthdays. What this amounts to is that if you wanted, pretty much every weekend you could have an excuse to be in the City drinking and revelling.

My personal experience of this routine of going out to birthdays every weekend lasted about a year after I moved here, and led to a partial overdose on city life. Most of the time, what happens is that you give one of your buddies a call on Thursday night to see if they want to do X, and they say, "Oh sorry, it's blah blah's birthday tonight. Can't make it." Then they either say something like "But if I get done early, I'll give you a call" or "Yeah, I'll be done in Soho if you're there, give me a call" or "If you want to meet us up for drinks after..."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not exactly cynical of the routine of NYC Friend Birthday Revelry. It's actually quite an enjoyable pursuit, as long as you follow a few ground rules:

1) Don't participate in friends of friends birthday dinners (in which you'll be that guy who everyone wonders whose friend you are.)

2) Try to be capable of paying an even split of the bill (with a party of 15, there's nothing worse than everyone trying to figure out their fair share -- which reminds me of a funny story about "bistro math" that my friend Tony told: his friends had come up short paying for the bill, so one guy said "ok, everyone take all your money back and we'll try again." And they came up short on that, too.) A notable exception to this rule is when you have someone in the group who doesn't mind making up the difference between money owed and money collected, in which case it's all good!

3) Don't make plans to meet someone else after dinner. The birthday-ee, I notice, takes pleasure in seeing that a huge horde of drunken people stumbles from the restaurant to a more drinking dedicated establishment. Splitting right after dinner is a clear sign of NYC Friend Birthday-itis.

As it turns out, in fact, this weekend was our good buddy, Glenn's birthday and we celebrated two nights -- last night was the real celebration, though. We hit up Azafran, a cozy tapas place down in Tribeca. I'd made reservations a few days earlier for 15 people and amazingly, exactly 15 people showed up. This never happens for groups larger than 5. In fact, the restaurant was so dubious of a reservation of that size that they phoned me in the afternoon to reconfirm. And when we ordered, it was more efficient just to order two of everything plus some paella and skewers. Family style eating is really quite fun.

The piece de resistence of the evening was The Patrior bar. After efficiently paying the tab at Azafran, we quickly raced the block and a half through the rain to the bar John V had spotted earlier that evening. A masterpiece in the mold of a Pittsburgh watering hole, I would say. It even served Iron City brew. We knew it was perfect when, upon opening the door, we were greeted to the three note baritone of Johnny Cash singing the Folsom Prison Blues. The rest of the night was a mosaic of pitchers of beer, darts, Jimmy Buffet, CCR, kamikazes, and dancing.

Ah, birthdays in the City. You never know where you'll end up.

Also, a few previous birthdays...

Theresa's 25th
Good wholesome fun for Tareq's bday