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I just got back from a weekend in New York, and I ate a lot of great stuff while I was there!

One of my favorite places to eat lunch in New York is Fred's, which is the restaurant at Barney's. Sometimes restaurants that are in stores aren't that great, but Fred's is special. My family eats there lots, and everything is always good, but some of our favorites are the salads, fries and pizza!

We ended up bringing an extra person and the hostess was very nice about finding us a bigger table, even though they were busy. They also have a special area for stroller parking in the back, which is very convenient for families with little kids. We got water and bread right away. It used to be that they only brought focaccia bread, and you had to know to ask for their multigrain seed bread, but now they bring a big bread basket that has everything. The bread always tastes very fresh. The seed bread is my mom's favorite, but my sister likes the french bread and I like the focaccia. Our friend Rachel, who is also my nanny, thought that the focaccia was excellent.

Doesn't this bread basket look pretty?

This is the delicious seed bread!

My dad always gets an order of fries for the table. I think that these fries are perfect. They're crispy on the outside, but soft on the inside, just like french fries should be.

Warm and crispy!

Fred's serves amazing salads. There are lots of choices, and they're all very big, and fresh and delicious. My mom and dad each got Mark's Madison Avenue Salad. The menu describes it as "the ultimate chopped salad" and I agree! It has greens and asparagus and beans and lentils and is usually topped with Italian tuna, but my mom got it with shrimp.

I got Fred's Vegan Salad, which has heirloom beans, chickpeas, black quinoa, and a brunoise of carrot, celery and onion over wild arugula, radicchio and endive, topped with chopped avocado and salsa verde vinaigrette. A brunoise is finely diced vegetables, usually cooked in butter. I got my salad with their mustard balsamic dressing though, because that's really good. I like it because it is much thicker than most vinaigrettes. It wouldn't spill if you knocked a cup of it over. Some of the beans were varieties that I had never seen before, and I thought that was really interesting. I like trying new salads, so I'll probably get something else next time, but I'd definitely recommend this one.

Rachel and our friend Alec got the Palm Beach Shrimp Salad, which is mixed greens with hearts of palm, avocado, tomatoes and hard boiled eggs in a green goddess dressing. Green goddess is a salad dressing with a mayonnaise and sour cream base that is blended with lots of different herbs and lemon juice. The herbs are what make it green! We forgot to take a picture of this one, but the shrimp are poached, rather than grilled, which is a little bit unusual for a salad and I think looks good.

My sister got the Margherita pizza. It has a thin, crispy crust and is delicious. The mozzarella that they use tastes very creamy, but melts better than most fresh mozzarella. I forgot to ask if they use a blend!

Do you see what I mean about the cheese being more melted than fresh mozzarella usually is?

Overall, Fred's is a great restaurant. I think it is a very good place for families to go because the menu has many different things, so there is something for everyone!

In the afternoon, while my little sister was napping, my brother and I went to Soho with my parents, and we ended up accidentally going to two places and getting desserts!

The first place that we went was Kith Treats. Kith Treats is a small ice cream shop that is located inside a sneaker store. You can eat your ice cream in the small ice cream area, or take it outside, but you're not allowed to walk around the store with it. They sell vanilla soft serve, and you can pick different treats that they'll grind into it. There are some candy choices, but a lot of the options are different kinds of sugar cereal.

You can order one of their suggestions or make up your own combination.

We ordered The 80, which had frosted flakes, rice krispies, snickers bar, and waffle cone. It was all ground up so that it was almost completely smooth.

You can see how tiny the pieces of cereal get ground up in the ice cream.

There weren't any chunks of cereal or candy or waffle cone. The vanilla ice cream was sweet and creamy, but the cereal added crunch. I liked the crunch and thought that it tasted good, but it wasn't the best ice cream that I've ever had.

Next we went to someplace very, very, very special called Dominique Ansel Bakery. Dominique Ansel is a very famous pastry chef, who is probably best known for inventing the Cronut! The Cronut is a cross between a croissant and a donut, and when it first came out in 2013, people would line up in the middle of the night for blocks to try to get one. We went in the afternoon, so that there weren't any Cronuts left, but there was still a very long line.

In the afternoon, people line up for something called cookie shots. A cookie shot is a little cup made out of cookie, with milk in the middle. It's so popular that there is a long sign on the sidewalk to answer people's questions.

Finally I got to the front of the line!

I was very excited and was dancing and jumping up and down!

There is a man who guards the door and tells people waiting on line when they can come in. Some people didn't understand how it worked and tried to just walk in the bakery, but he would send them to the back of the line! Unfortunately though, once we got inside, there was another line!!!!!!! I could NOT believe it! But at least while my parents waited on this line, I could watch one of the pastry chefs work and look at some of the pastries.

These were their simplest pastries, but they were still very pretty and smelled amazing!

Finally, we got a whole bunch of treats to taste and found a table to sit at in their flower garden. The first thing that we had was the famous cookie shot! We had to eat it first, because the milk starts leaking through the cookie bottom very quickly. The cookie cup is lined with melted chocolate that mixes into the milk, and the vanilla milk is very sweet. We sipped the milk and then took bites of the cookie. I loved it! The cookie shot was definitely my favorite thing that we had.

You can see flecks of vanilla bean in the milk.

Next we tried the Frozen S'more, which is vanilla ice cream, wrapped in a thin layer of cookie, and then in marshmallow. They put it on an applewood smoked willow branch and then torch it to order. It is a special kind of ice cream, which is based on a Turkish ice cream called dondurma, that is kind of chewy. This one was my mom's favorite. The marshmallow was crispy and gooey and it was fun to eat off the stick.

We also tried the DKA, which is Dominque Ansel's version of Kouign-Amann. Kouign-Amann is a Breton pastry that is made with lots of butter. It's a flaky pastry with lots caramelized sugar and is very sticky! This one was my second favorite.

Th DKA is layered pastry, similar to a Cronut.

A canale is a small French pastry that has a soft custard center, and a thick caramelized crust. We get them at Cafe Madeline in Boston (that should be another blog post!). We got one at Dominique Ansel too, because my dad really likes them. It was very good, but my dad and I think that the ones at Cafe Madeline are better!

Once you cut this canele open, the middle part is a soft, vanilla, custardy cake.

The last thing that we tried was the nutella milk bread. It was a rolled pastry with hazelnut spread. It wasn't very sweet. Like many pastries, the middle part was the softest and the best. We only had a little taste of it, but my little sister loved it the next morning for breakfast!

I thought that this looked like a very pretty spiral.

We had a great time at Dominique Ansel. It was fun to try so many different things. I would definitely love to go back some day to have a Cronut though!

This is me walking out with our big bag of treats!