--- title: Birthday Party Takes Over Subway and Yes, There Was Lobster description: Photographer Amber Asaly took to the New York City subway system for a decadent dinner to celebrate her birthday. canonical: https://time.com/5450407/subway-birthday-party/ author: Raisa Bruner article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-11-09T16:32:03.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T07:55:56.013Z og:title: Birthday Party Takes Over Subway and Yes, There Was Lobster og:description: For this photographer, the NYC subway was a good enough birthday venue og:url: https://time.com/5450407/subway-birthday-party/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Birthday Party Takes Over Subway and Yes, There Was Lobster twitter:description: For this photographer, the NYC subway was a good enough birthday venue twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # Woman Takes Over a Subway for Her Birthday Party and Yes, There Was Lobster and a Piñata > Sponsored content. 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Photographer [Amber Asaly](https://www.amberasaly.com/#) celebrated a memorable 26th birthday this week when she and her friends set up a full dinner party on board the JMZ line of the New York City subway, complete with shell-on lobsters, bottles of white wine, “Happy Birthday” decorations and even a piñata, as her Instagram and videos can attest. “RESERVATIONS FELL THRU FAMILY CAME THRU. BEST BIRTHDAY EVER \[sic\],” she wrote on social media. According to [local news reports](https://abc7ny.com/society/woman-celebrates-her-birthday-with-a-lobster-feast-on-the-subway/4650598/), Asaly and her squad of birthday partiers, organized by [an event-planning cousin](https://www.instagram.com/ovation.bysamanthaseyfert/), boarded at the J train’s Myrtle-Broadway stop in Brooklyn, assembling their table, food and decorations at the end of one of the subway’s cars. (There were even pillows to add a little coziness to the car’s hard benches.) They proceeded to party all the way into Manhattan — and back out to Brooklyn — before breaking down their dinner setup and cleaning up after themselves before hopping off the train. Most New Yorkers may associate the subway these days with [pizza rats](http://time.com/4094627/doughnut-rat-new-york-city/) and train delays, but pop-ups like this one prove there’s still some allure remaining to the city’s [public transit system](http://time.com/4862959/lorde-trapped-on-nyc-subway/). Still, here’s hoping that subway partiers stick to off-hours for their celebrations; there’s [plenty of congestion](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-system-failure-delays.html) on the trains already as it is. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5450407/subway-birthday-party/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5450407/subway-birthday-party/"},"headline":"Woman Takes Over a Subway for Her Birthday Party and Yes, There Was Lobster and a Piñata","datePublished":"2018-11-09T16:32:03.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T07:55:56.013Z","description":"Show time? 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