Hanon is located in the North Williamsburg area and is literally across the street on Union St. from the Metropolitan G stop and diner. It has been awarded the Michelin 2021 Bib Gourmand award. It originated in Kamakura, Japan in the summer of 2018. I hadn’t heard about this restaurant much at all and stumbled onto this through Yelp’s Hot & New filters. I wanted to try this restaurant out because the pictures of the udon sets look quite interesting, and the price point was pretty reasonable.

Following our Disney World trip and since I started going back to the office, we are starting to do our Friday date nights again. This restaurant appeared in the local news as a brand new restaurant, so we thought we’d give it a try before the crowds started discovering this and also because we missed NYC food after being in Disney World for a week. The restaurant is a partnership between restauranteur John McDonald of Mercer Street Hospitality with partnership with Chef Justin Bazdarich (Oxomoco).

Space 220 was such a difficult reservation to get. I was able to get reservations for it on the very last day that we were flying out for lunch. When we arrived, there already was a line for walk-ins. Fortunately, we had the 11:30 AM reservation with out flight being at 5:00 PM, so we were looking forward to this new experience. When you arrive at the bottom, you have to stand in line (under the sun) until they check you in.

We were at Universal Orlando today, and we made a reservation via OpenTable super late for Todd English’s Bluezoo in the Disney World Dolphin hotel. We learned that we could valet our car and get it validated for free with the restaurant. If you opted to park yourself, you not only have to drive away from the restaurant and park at another lot, but you would have to pay (I vaguely remember) $15.

We rode the Harry Potter train from Diagon Alley into the other park which was a really cool experience. This side of the park also has the Harry Potter castle (I forget the name), and the decor definitely was more spaced out and open. We went to the Three Broomsticks restaurant to just grab a quick bite (or in my case a quick drink) to help us last to 9 PM for our dinner reservation.

I’ll be honest that I was pretty excited going into the newish Harry Potter section (Diagon Alley) of Universal Orlando. I had heard this area was large and well done. When I walked in, the decor of this area was simply incredible. The walkways, the paths, and the shop exterior decor were all very well done and on theme. We decided to wait in line for 15 minutes for this ice cream shop.

This was my first time ever to Universal Orlando, so I was pretty excited to see how this differed compared to Universal Hollywood. One of my favorite rides over there was the Backlot Tour, and behold, we realized there is no such thing as a backlot in Universal Orlando. This was purely a theme park. After we rode The Minion ride, my cousin wanted to show me the Simpsons area.

The finale for our Epcot night was this very last minute reservation for 5 at La Hacienda De San Angel. At this time, I’ve just barely recovered from being full, so I am ready to give this a try. Unlike the Mexican restaurant next to the Caballeros ride, this one was more like your typical restaurant without the smell of chlorine water or being overly dark. Per a recommendation and not normally eating Mexican food in NYC, this was something on my list to try.

Just like 2021 at Epcot, they had this lovely Flower and Garden Festival. Unfortunately this time around, I was simply too full to eat around. I had enough room to maybe try a snack or two but that’s about it. I noticed that the indoor area between the British and Canadian pavilion was not open, so it felt like there were just a few less options. Unlike 2021, it felt like there were significant more crowds as a whole everywhere.

We entered Epcot around 10 AM on this Friday from the north end of the park, and we had to walk all the way down to the France pavilion to try and ride Remy. The unfortunate part when we got there was that the wait time had already exceeded 90 minutes. I checked my Disney World app, and low and behold, we could do lighting passes for $11 per person. That felt worthwhile to do and not bake under the sun.