NoKnow SoHo?

So my friend Sean just moved to a swanky new location in the city - SoHo, where he pays an exorbitant rent (by New York standards, no less) for a small studio. But that's not the point - he's in a HOT neighborhood! To "celebrate" his move, we decided to go down and visit him and go to dinner and "maybe" have some drinks. Sean is not known for being a penny pincher, so I knew that his move would definitely escalate my budget for dinners and nights out.

Now, I know SoHo. Not as well as other parts of town, but I've done plenty of brunches down there, eaten at some nice places down there, and have done plenty of shopping down there on Broadway. What I realized, though, is that I DON'T know SoHo! I've been there plenty of times, but I can count on one hand (or maybe three) the number of times I've gone out at night down there. And every time I've gone out to meals down there, it has almost exclusively been East of Broadway, which makes sense because there are plenty of magnets in the area directly to the East. But West of Broadway? No, I'm drawing a blank there.

So we head out for dinner, and Sean heads West from his apartment. Strange, I thought, there's nothing West of Mullberry, is there? He suggests that we do some Korean BBQ and that sounds good to us. I'm thinking that Little Korea isn't in this neighborhood, so where are we going? As we are walking around the Gotham-like streets in the western regions of SoHo, I notice just how many places there are to eat there - and I'm sure all of them are way out of my budget! But hey, we deserve one big night out, so we go to Woo Lae Oak, a super-duper snazzy place with appetizers and Korean BBQ out of this world! Sean just moved from Williamsburg and has a huge, nasty beard and uber-skinny jeans (yuck) with his black-rim glasses, and my style tends to lean to the east as well, and we TOTALLY didn't fit into this place. This, apparently, is a classy district, so it was interesting for people watching.

After dinner, we decided to explore the hood. We had mojitos at a few places and explored the bridge-and-tunnel fueled Bowery clubs and some standard (boring) bars before ending up at L'Orange Bleue, a Frenchy, North African type place playing funky African type music that seemed like a good place to park the bus for some Sangria and chit chat. The drinks were awesome there, it was exactly the type of place that I love, where you can spend hours just talking and sipping wonderfully tasty liquids. And that is exactly what we did!

J. Riley, A fun night despite the disgusting weather!