New York City – There’s an App for That

I’m not one for keeping up with technology.  I still buy CDs and just bought my first Droid in January.  I chose a dog overan iPod when my wife presented with options five years ago.  (I finally have her old hand me down iPod.)  Within the Innovation Adoption Lifecycle I fall somewhere at the beginning of Late Majority.  It’s not that I am afraid of change.  I have normally embraced change.  My gypsy wandering in my early twenties proves that.  I think for the most part it’s because I’m cheap.  I wanted an iPhone since they came out, I was just too cheap to shell out the money.  But once I am in, I am all-in.  I can’t go anywhere without my Droid.  It is loaded with all sorts of helpful and powerful (and free) apps.

I presented my Droid with a challenge – New York City.  On whim, Mrs. Gourmand and I decided on a four day weekend.  We knew little about the city and had no time to plan.  There would be no Internet consulting, no buying a useless guidebook, no consulting AAA.  Instead, we sat at brunch on the patio of The Liberty in Charlotte and looked up things to do with the Trip Advisor app.  Our rough list of sites was sketched out and we booked a free walking tour of Central Park and decided on which musical we were going to see – Memphis.

The night before our trip, we stocked our phones with a litany of apps.  For things to do there was Time Out New York and NYC Way.  For eats I chose Yelp  and Open Table.  And for transportation, NYCMate and NYC Bus and Subway Maps.  I coupled these with apps I already had downloaded like Urban Spoon, Trip Advisor, Beer Where, and Go Time Happy Hours.  Of course, I couldn’t forget about good ole Google Maps which proved to be the most useful.  Apps in phone and we were off!

The first night was Broadway night.  We used Trip Advisor to find and Open Table to book Barbetta, NYC’s oldest family run restaurant.  Located in Hell’s Kitchen walking distance from the theatres, Barbetta’s Northern Italian cuisine was a great find.  All I have to see is rabbit in a white wine sauce.  The finds continued to roll in.  Looking for a place to eat after the Central Park tour?  How about Don Filippos?  Yelp had it listed as the best rated pizza within a few blocks of us (gotta love GPS technology).  Thirsty for a cold beer after a day with my Argentenian cousins and their three kids under the age of two?  Beer Where presented us with Three Stags, our best find of the trip, where we drank from a wide selection of craft beer at great prices. The Happy Hour app landed us at Bar American, a Bobby Flay restaurant, for a drink after Broadway.

How do we get from Times Square to The Met?   Ah yes, a combo of Google Maps and one of the two subway maps we downloaded will do.  Here’s the trick, be sure to download a copy of a subway map to your phone.  You won’t always have a connection in the tunnels.  If there is one app I can suggest, and I am accepting royalties for this suggestion, is an app that combines Google Maps, a subway map, and navigation.  It would have been great to have been given Point A to Point B directions with walking and subway combined.  If such an app exists, I couldn’t find it.

Of course, some things were found with just our human instincts like Le Pain Quotidein in Greenwich Village.  We were hungry, it was there, and it had a crowd larger than anything else on the block.  It was a bit too natural, organic, and hippy for me, but I still enjoyed it.  It was something out of the norm.  Finally there was Upstairs at the Kimberly.  Literally, it was the bar on the top floor of our hotel which we knew nothing about.  We were dragging our tired carcasses home from a night on the town and couldn’t help but to notice a line for the elevators of shiekly dressed people.  That must be a place we need to check out.

At the end of the trip, I found the apps that were the most useful were not the ones that were New York specific.  They were the apps many of us use every day whether it’s in our home town or travelling anywhere else – Yelp, Trip Advisor, Open Table, Beer Where (Download it. Now.), and Google Maps.  The NYC specific apps just had too much info to manage.  Of course NYCWay did have some helpful itineraries based on two to three day trips.  Oh, and buy a powerful battery.  A day of sightseeing can be draining.