While everyone was busy traveling back to their hometown for the holidays, my roommate and I decided it would be nice to spend Christmas in New York City.

 

Manhattan is probably the most festive city in the country when it comes to Christmas. From the tree at Rockefeller Center to the ice Skating Rink at Bryant Park to the storefront windows on 5th avenue, this city knows how to decorate. That’s why we thought it would be great to forgo airport security and our small towns (and our families) and stay put.

 

For me growing up, Christmas Eve was always more important than actual Christmas day. That’s when we would go out to a big fancy dinner, go to mass, and open up all of our presents. Christmas day was essentially just a day to relax on the couch, watch Home Alone 2, and decide just what gifts we wanted to keep or what we needed to return the next day.

 

So, keeping the same tradition, I needed to find a great restaurant for Christmas Eve dinner. I went on OpenTable to find a great spot. My roommate and I both knew we wanted to be somewhere in the Village, so that made the searching a little bit easier, but not completely. There are so many amazing little restaurants in the Village that it was incredibly hard to pick one out.

 

But the one that stood out to me and my roommate was this quaint little place called “Home”. Home is New Yorks original farm-to-table restaurant and is located on Cornelia Street in the West Village. It only seats 30 people at a time and it has the look and feel of sitting at a kitchen table at your house. We both looked at the menu and atmosphere and decided that this was the spot we would have our Christmas Eve dinner at. It was official – we were going Home for the Holidays.

 

Like pretty much every other restaurant in NYC, Home was featuring a pre-fix dinner menu for 60$

 

The menu consisted of three courses: A choice of an appetizer (cream of mushroom soup or a grilled pear and blue cheese salad), a family-style main course, and a choice of dessert (freshly baked Christmas cookies with eggnog or a pound cake with vanilla custard).

 

Since there were 2 of us, we thought we would each order one of the appetizers and desserts so we could try everything on the menu. They were also offering a wine pairing for 20$ extra, where they would select a glass of wine to go with your appetizer and entrée. Knowing that 2 glasses of wine for 20$ in New York was a pretty good deal, we took the offer and ordered our appetizers.

 

While waiting for our first course, we were brought freshly-baked bread and a maple butter spread. I don’t think I could describe in words how amazing this butter was. It was so sweet and creamy that I filled up on bread before the appetizer even appeared. 

 

We were both given a glass of wine, a chardonnay to go with the pear salad and a pinot noir to go with the mushroom soup. The salad consisted of spinach leaves tossed in a mustard vinaigrette topped with a grilled pear halve stuffed with warm blue cheese. I’m not really a huge pear-person, but paired (get it?) with the blue cheese was such an excellent combination that Lacy and I were fighting over who got the last bite.