Celebrating at Serendipity

Today was little J's first day of school, and in advance of this occasion I had the forethought to make reservations to celebrate his anticipated survival with dinner at Serendipity 3. We first heard about S3 from Miffy Loves New York City, a fine children's book about New York City given to us by a friend to help prepare for the move. I don't know whether it was a paid product placement or not, but it was certainly effective in creating advance buzz about the place for us. We had tried to go there during an earlier visit but found the two-hour-plus wait too much and we weren't willing to return after midnight.

This time I prepared better, though, and had been alloted one of their apparently scarce reservations a couple weeks previously.

The book highlights the signature frozen hot chocolate, and so of course we had to open with that. As expected for an ice cream parlor, the food is more about novelty and quantity than taste or sophistication. That being the case, my Catcher-in-the-Rye BLT was better than I expected, but the best I can say about the other dishes at the table was that there was no questioning their generosity with melted cheese. Still, dinner was just a formality to be endured in preparation for dessert, and we thoroughly enjoyed the Banana Split (although we opted for the merely enormous Coward's Portion).