Hungry Girl, On a Budget, In the Big Apple

So as you may have read yesterday, Tim and I made a trip to New Jersey to see our friends Katie and Pat get married. Since we were already pretty much there we decided to head over to New York City for some playtime before heading back to Ohio.

Here is what I am sure of about New York… there are A LOT of people, you do A LOT of walking, and things are VERY expensive.

Including food.

And a girl’s gotta eat.

So Tim and I did our best to eat New York on a budget and I thought I would give you a breakdown of what we spent and some tactics we used to keep costs down as much as we could.

Food

$37 Dinner at La Cerveceria ($25 for $50 Gift Ground NOW deal)
$3.50 Waters
$15 Beers at the Beekman Beer Gardens in South Street Seaport
$12 Breakfast at Ess-a-bagel
$5 Shake Shack for a PB milkshake
$18 Lunch at Dylan Murphy’s ($10 for $20 Groupon NOW deal)
$5 Larabars (on sale at Target)

That gives us a grand total of $95.50 dollars for two people for 2 days in New York City. How did we do it?

Tips

Take some of your own food. We packed some snacks from our pantry before we left and picked up a few grocery store items along the way, For example, Tim left his razor at home so we needed to make an emergency trip to Target and while we were there I picked up the box of Larabars for $5. That was a nice snack to keep in my purse in case the hunger monster came out.
Don’t drink booze. Sure, Tim and I had a glass of wine with dinner and we certainly didn’t deprive ourselves of things we wanted but booze will rack up any bill. Heck, even soda will but in New York (as you can see from the beer bill above) is like $7 a freaking beer Yea us Ohio people choke to spend like $5. Ask me to spend $7 multiple times and you’re lucky that I don’t flip out on your clown ass.
Split/share food. When you are in a new city it’s nice to try new things at restaurants you have never heard of. Share it. Order 2 things and split it. So you get to try multiple things but on a reasonable budget. Oh and just share. We didn’t both need a milkshake from the Shake Shack I wanted to try a New York place and Tim did too- so we shared. Plus, when you are traveling you don’t typically have a good place to store leftovers so don’t order so much that you take things home.
Use ONLINE DEALS! I have been terrible at this but Groupon NOW is an awesome app for our phones that we can check to see where the local deals are around us at any given time. It finds your locations and tells you how far away places are. That dinner deal above- yea-amazing little restaurant. Exactly what you would imagine for New York City. Restaurant.com is another good one and while we didn’t use it this time around I think we will be using it more in the future!

*I should add here that we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to meet some of Tim’s relatives for lunch on Friday afternoon and they were so sweet and bought our lunch for us. That would be an added expensive for most so in that case I would have jumped on Groupon on again!*

So for us we still had some great fun food and a really great time!!

And while that food was very delicious… I am ready to head into the Paleo Cave with my mom until wedding day! Plus, I’m going into a food journal site link-up with some gals so I better start eating better now that they will be holding my butt accountable!