thanksgiving lunch in NYC
 

My best friend is going to NYC for Thanksgiving and is looking for a place to have Thanksgiving lunch with her husband and two teenage daughters. Any suggestions?

Anyone have a favorite restaurant or a good new play going on? How about a reasonable hotel as well?

Maybe 202 in Chelsea Market.
M

Not many choices during Thanksgiving in NYC - except ethnic restaurants, i.e. Indian and/or Chinese.

Check out www.opentable.com to see which ones are open.

First things first - if they don;t have a hotel yet they need to get one immediately. This is probably THE busiest and most expensive weekend of the year and a lot of places are long sold out. If you want to give their budget - and if they're looking for one room for 4 or a suite or 2 rooms - people can try to make suggestions. I would look at Quikbook.com right away - as well as some of the other major travel sites to see what is still available.

Second - restaurants. Many don;t open on Thanksgiving. Many of those that are open have limited menu Thanksgiving dinners with set seatings: 2pm, 4pm etc. Really the only places that are casuale and allow you to eat what you want when are some ethnic places - esp Chinese and Indian. I agree with the suggetion on opentable - so you can see which places are open.

For broadway tickets go to playbill.com to get info about what is showing and then broadwaybox.com to see if anyone is offering discounts that weekend. If so, take the discount code to the web site of the show and use that to pick tickets. But again - a very busy weekend and even many older shows don't discount on weekends between Thanksgiving and Christmas. For newer shows or hits you're probably too late for tickets - but you can try their websites - or you can always get tickets from an on-line scalper if you want to see a major hit like Wicked. (We have found that stubhub.com isn't quite as expensive as some of the others.)

I hope they enjoy NYC - but they really need to get moving to avoid being shut out.

Try looking here:
http://gonyc.about.com/od/thanksgivingdinner/

We had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner at Bistro Les Amis, which we found on this list.

This is a very expensive time for NYC, but I've been in NYC on Thanksgiving twice within the last five years and didn't have any trouble finding a place to eat dinner that night where I could just order what I wanted. It wasn't difficult at all, there were many restaurants open around the theater district (because many shows are on that night). I didn't have reservations, and just dropped in places. They weren't ethnic, either. I think I just had regular American food, like steak places or something. I didn't eat lunch there, though, just dinner.

I just remembered, Keen's Steakhouse, one of the top steakhouses in the city, may be open for T'giving.

That'll be a great one to go to. You know, with the old New York ambiance and decor, of course, the very good steaks.