NY Trip Post Day 1

This Thanksgiving weekend (2009) we visited NYCity.  We stayed at the Mellenium Hilton in downtown.  We booked on hotwire for a dirt cheap rate (well under $100/night).
Review of the Mellenium Hilton: Room was awesome, the view was overlooking the the unfortunate 9/11 WTC pit.  The furniture, bathroom, TV all great! Location - walking distance from multiple subway lines we could get on the A,C,E lines or the 2,3 lines so getting to Midtown and the Museum district was a breeze!

First Day:
We flew into LaGuardia airport and took the M60 over to Manhattan.  We got off at Columbia University and took the subway down to the Hilton. Dropped off the bags and headed out on the town - First stop was midtown Planet Hollywood in Times Square to pickup the NYC Pass.  A 3 day pass that lets you into all the attractions without having to wait in ticket lines!  Given the discount that was offered the pass was well worth it.   One catch about the pass - their advertising states that you can go to an attraction multiple times - you can't - the folks at the attractions told us no sir can't do.
After a jaunt in Times Square we headed for lunch to Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill.   On our Vegas trip we'd loved Mesa Grill and were craving to go back.  Unfortunately NY didn't live upto Vegas Mesa Grill.  Why? Well the service was sloppy, seating was very cramped and it didn't have a price fixe menu.  The atmosphere of the restaurant and the service didn't seem worth the price.  I'll post Mesa Grill food selections and pics in a later post.
After Mesa Grill we headed over to the Empire State Building and stopped at The Sex Museum on the way.  The Sex Museum is a total ripoff.  Since it was covered in the NY City pass we decided why not.
Since it was still Cloudy and raining we headed to the 'SkyRide' show at the Empire State Building (I won't say again but all attractions, museum's ;boat rides were all covered by City pass).  The SkyRide show - not really worth the money.  We got our tickets for the Empire State Observation deck but didn't go up due to the bad weather.  But the great thing was due to the bad weather there was absolutely no line for the tickets.  So we got the tickets and then would get to skip the ticket line the next day!
After the Skyride we wandered around 5th Ave towards Central Park - while walking to Central Park we stopped off and checked out the Apple Store and FAO Schwartz.  Both are worth a visit. 

 

After our feet started complaining that they didn't want to walk anymore we decided to go grab some more food and headed for Mario Batali's Otto Enoteca.  This was one of the food highlights of the trip! Simply Awesome - price, service, food  - all were great I'll post a separate entry with pics. After Otto we roamed around Greenwich village and then called it a night - boy were our feet sore!