September 2007 Archives
In Central Park, I ...
...walked alongside a wedding party riding to Tavern on the Green in a caravan of pedicabs.
...listened to a family playing in the park and speaking a mixture of Korean and English (Hangulish?)
...watched a Japanese couple having their photo taken — he, 40-ish and wearing a tuxedo; she, maybe in her 60s or 70s and wearing a peach-colored kimono and tan and green, flowered obi. A younger woman in a pink kimono and bronze obi watched and waited.
...should have brought my audio recorder.
Play "Nocturna" on KCRW
Hosted by Raul Campos
If you move to New York from L.A. and ask people where to find a good Mexican place, they'll shake their heads and tell you to lower your expectations.
So when a colleague whispered that Lupe's East L.A. Kitchen had received raves, we decided to check it out.
The little SoHo restaurant definitely had the feel of a cantina, with reddish and yellowish lights warming the basic interior — formica at the counter and square wooden tables and benches all around.
Though it was about 8:30 p.m., the place was populated, but not crammed. In the corner sat a Dita Von Teese lookalike and her friend, who was no match for the raven-haired bombshell. There were also a few families and several clusters of guys and girls drinking Coronas and eating taquitos.
Lately, I've been on a tamale kick — there's something about masa flour that's really comforting — so that and a cup of Mexican hot chocolate, balmy evening be damned, was my order. My companion asked for enchiladas.
The servings were reasonably sized and bathed in some mighty hot red sauce. What was on my plate was good enough for me. My friend, however, grabbed the nearest of five hot sauce bottles. She dug in, then covered her mouth as her eyes began to water.
I shoved chips in her direction as she looked to see what had done the damage. The perp: El Yucateco KutBil-Ik, with a rating on the company website of 11,600 Scoville Units and a label announcing "XXXtra Picante."
"Of course, I'd grab the hottest one," she laughed through tears.
"So hot, they dropped the 'E'," I joked.
She dashed to the bathroom to recover. Meanwhile, I worked my way through the chicken tamales and seasoned rice. Instead of black beans, Lupe's serves refried, which was a little disappointing.
Still, dinner was enjoyable and the cheapest one I'd had since my week of gluttony began.
As we talked, my friend asked if Lupe's reminded me of L.A.
No, I said, but it did make me wistful.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a great article about fried clams, which inspired several hungry colleagues to name their favorite places in the city to get them.
I opened with Trout in Brooklyn's Boerum Hill, which is great and relatively cheap. But for this discussion, we confined ourselves to restaurants on the island.
Someone mentioned Pearl Oyster Bar, but apparently they don't fry their clams.
I lamented the demise of Howard Johnson's, which wins my nostalgia prize for best fried clams ever. (There used to be HoJo's all over Manhattan. Alas, no more.)
Someone else mentioned Bondi Road, but no one had been there.
There was a pause.
"Have you tried Mary's Fish Camp?" someone asked. I shook my head.
"It's so good!"
I made a mental note to go.
Today, my dining companion and I went to camp — we caught a train to Greenwich Village, a pretty, peaceful neighborhood with a street layout that makes no sense. Though we consulted a map at the subway station, we were totally disoriented when we got aboveground and had to ask for directions.
Luckily, the woman we asked knew where we were headed. Minutes later, we were there.
Mary's Fish Camp is one of several New York restaurants with notable women chefs heading up the operation. The space is on the corner and pretty small, maybe 35 seats in all. My friend and I arrived toward the end of lunch service, so it was easy to get a table.
The locally revered lobster roll was on the menu, but I went straight for the fried clams (the bellies are still attached, and you can get the clams without oysters — or oysters without clams — if you ask). Being a little vegetable deficient this week, I also ordered a side of sugar snap peas from the "daily specials" chalkboard. My friend had the pan fried cod sandwich, which came with a big pile of greens.
It was joyous, and the servers were very accommodating, letting us stay a little bit past the lunch close.
Check it out:
Having ducked out of an after-dinner party there earlier this week, I decided to go back and try it for myself.
The wine guy behind the bar, Todd, remembered me. We shook hands and went over the menus together. Though the wine and cheese lists have fancy offerings, the place is decidedly relaxed. Everyone's in jeans, even the staff.
Since Casellula opened in early May, patrons and reviewers alike have been raving about the Pig's Ass Sandwich — basically a dressed up cubano featuring pork butt, ham, Fol Epi cheese, pickles and chipotle aioli.
Monday night, the pastry chef had told me the owners chose the name because it reflected the unpretentious attitude they were hoping to convey to the public. It seems to have worked: the Pig's Ass Sandwich is the No. 1 seller by far, and it's really good.
Before the sandwich came a cheese flight and a wine flight, plus extra wine samples from Todd, proving once again that it's good to be friendly with the bartender.
The most unusual cheese was the prize-winning Barely Buzzed espresso and lavender-rubbed cheddar from Utah. The chef served it with dark chocolate shavings. The earthy, crumbly, hard cheese was set off nicely by the chocolate's bittersweetness. A weird combination, but it worked.
The most unusual wine was the Nyakas Olivier from Hungary's Monarchia Cellars. It's a white that has a lemon and mineral taste. Interesting, but not for everybody.
Since moving to New York, I've had to learn a lot of new things: how to get around, how to live in this chaotic and competitive city, how to engage strangers, and how to turn the interesting ones into friends.
I never thought I'd have to learn what to drink too. Living in L.A. for so long, I gained a lot of wine knowledge by osmosis (and by hanging out at The Wine House and Wally's). Wines from California and some regions of Italy, Australia, Argentina and Chile are all pretty familiar.
But that knowledge is pretty useless here, where a tremendous variety of Italian, French, German and Eastern European wines predominate. It's humbling, but it's also an opportunity for discovery. And in my book, that's usually a good thing.
The people sitting next to me were all regulars who come every week or two. One couple raved about the mac & cheese and the smoked goose breast, but warned against the chocolate cake between telling me about the trials of planning a two-week vacation to South Africa.
"You have to come back here," the woman said. And I think I will. Casellula could make a pretty good classroom.
After Monday night's dinner, I should have gone to a salad bar.
Instead, I passed by my favorite Swedish coffeehouse, paused for a moment, and went two doors down to Quality Meats, which was recently written up in a New York Times article about how women are using their carnivorous tendencies to lure online dates.
Without a reservation but wanting to eat, the hostess led me to the charcuterie bar at the front of the house, where I could get a good view of the street outside and diners walking in. Behind me was the gleaming bar (below), above me was an overlook where random guys would pop in to check out the crowd or talk on their cell phones.
AvroKO, the rising-star design consultancy, came up with a butcher theme. There were lots of clever touches throughout — a ceramic steer's head as you walk in, meat-hook chandeliers in the main dining area, butcher's knives turned into wall art. The charcuterie bar itself is surrounded underneath with butcher's block. It had the rugged feel of a lodge, but with more glass and stainless steel.
The service, which started off OK, became nonexistent when the crowds started pouring in. Reviews seem to consistently complain about bad service. Then again, this is a Smith & Wollensky restaurant, which has a reputation for terrible service but great food.
Though Quality Meats is a steakhouse, I thought better of it. Then I got the menu and thanked myself for not having my heart set on an aged rib steak. The prices are astronomical. Instead, I ordered smaller dishes.
First, the bad:
Do not order the gnocchi and cheese. The pasta is grainy and gummy; the cheese, grainy and runny. I ordered it on a whim. Bad idea.
The good:
• A pan of flat, silver dollar-sized cipollini onions, which I first discovered in March at the Chelsea Market. These carmelized gems were slightly sweet and almost creamy.• Roasted bone marrow — but you have to like fat. Two bones were served blistering hot with slices of toasted, crusty bread.
• Polesio Sangiovese from Italy. It didn't quite have the pepper Sangiovese is known for, but it was still pretty good.
• Tropical fruit sorbet served atop cubes of tropical fruit in a light syrup.
The great:
• Traditional steak tartare and slices of crusty, fresh dark bread with four seasonings: sea salt, coarse salt and cracked black pepper, spicy mustard, and green olive tapanade.Most steak tartare is raw, fresh, good cuts of steak seasoned, then mixed with green onion and thrown into a meat grinder or chopped to ground meat consistency.
Here, it was raw steak straight-up, cut into tiny cubes no bigger than a centimeter, served in a little bowl with a raw egg yolk on top. Fleeting thoughts of mad cow disease, E. coli and salmonella raced through my head, but I threw caution to the wind and lived to blog about it. Lovely texture, delicious taste. We'll see how I feel in about four days.
• The vegetable compote that came with the bone marrow: cubed vegetables and smoked, dried Italian ham coated with a thick balsamic vinagrette reduction. Tangy and salty, I would have loved to get the recipe for this.
• The dried pineapple shaving about the size of a gaufrette that decorated the sorbet. It's stunning how great something so simple can taste.
Go if you like meat, want to impress, or have an expense account. But don't go if you want speedy and attentive service.
Location: Greenwich Village.
The scene: Several dozen foodies and friends in biz casual eagerly awaiting a vodka pairing dinner prepared by Beverly Hills chef Larry Nicola and pastry chef Ariel Fox of Nic's Beverly Hills and featuring Modern Spirits vodka.
The luminaries:
• Chef Nicola's mom, Leerese, and her childhood friend Eleanor, a retired antiques dealer.
• Gary Cheong, booker for the James Beard House, former Wall Street trader. Spends most of his time these days eating and finding rising star chefs.
• Jan-Roman Potocki, founder of Potocki Vodka. The first time I heard about this brand, I thought Potocki was a fiction along the lines of Bartles & Jaymes. But no. Turns out the tale of this aristocratic Polish family, like the man himself (on the right in this photo), is for real.
• Jeffrey Lindenmuth, wine specialist and self-proclaimed "most widely published wine and spirits writer residing in Allentown, Pennsylvania." Jeffrey dropped a hint that Rodale publishing is launching a new title, Men's Health Living, toward the end of this year. Watch for a November or December issue and his article on winter cocktails.
The afterparty: About a dozen of us, including the chefs and the vodka makers, went out to the Midtown West wine and cheese restaurant Casellula afterward, where we were plied with more wine and food. The party went on 'til the first light of rush hour the next morning.
The Menu
Starters (served in the brick courtyard behind the house under large trees and winking stars)
• Vodka-cured Scottish salmon with caper-dill aioli on pumpernickel crostini
• Cumin-crusted black pheasant in shiso leaf
• Chickpea fritters with Maytag blue cheese and microgreens
Paired with the Monrovia cocktail: grapefruit honey vodka with lychee and basil. Very easy to get tipsy on this one, which would be bad because the rest of the dinner was served indoors on the third floor....
First
Tuna belly, guahillo chilies, grapefruit and mizuna verrine
Drink: Candied ginger vodka
Then
Organic gazpacho martini with peekytoe crab and lemongrass soda, essentially a deconstructed Bloody Mary
Drink: Celery peppercorn vodka
After
Dandelion greens (very tough, kind of bitter) with burrata (described to me as the soft and creamy heart of an uncured ball of mozzarella — it was fantastic), pistachios, Asian pears, oranges and apricot vinaigrette.
Drink: Pear lavender vodka
More
Organic lamb T-bone au poivre with Leerese's homemade yogurt. A dish that was both Middle Eastern and American at the same time. The lamb looked and tasted a lot like a lean, baseball-cut steak with a gamey flavor at the end. Egad, that sounds like it was written by a wine snob....
Drink: "Au Jus" savory cocktail - black truffle vodka and demi-glace with roast sage leaf
Last
White chocolate semifreddo with blueberries (soaked in vodka) and cassis glaze
Drink: Modern Mar-TEA-ni - Three tea vodka and chocolate orange vodka with chocolate shavings
If ever there was a time to pace oneself, this would be it.
This week there will be much eating with reckless abandon once a day, starting with dinner at Vynl where American comfort foods and Asian-fusion dominate the menu.
So tonight, we have fried food: Butternut squash in green spinach dough wrappers; tofu with a sweet chili sauce on the side; thick, soft chow mein noodles in peanut sauce. I eat at the bar and remember the restaurant term for someone dining alone there is "bar loser."
I order a beer.
Men in couples, groups and with their women friends saunter and sashay in and out. A trio take the stools next to me and we talk about the food. We also get lessons in gay vocabulary.
I notice later that the name "Nelly" hangs outside the door of one of the kitschy themed unisex bathrooms, trussed up to look like movie star dressing rooms. Now I'm in on the joke.
A steady stream of Madonna's hits from the '80s and onward play alongside Kylie Minogue's hits from the '90s and onward. It's an interesting scene, but only if you know who you are.
I went to an inaugural event at TheTimesCenter. Renzo Piano's signature is all over the building: hard edges, flat surfaces, bursts of color and a general feeling of openness and sterility, even in the auditorium, predominate.
I met someone who worked at the Times and asked how she liked working in the Times Tower next door. "It's great — especially the elevators," she said. "But the building is huge! I have no idea where anyone outside my department sits!"
I walked into the Times Tower and asked the huge security guard if there were tours available. Hey, I'm still new in New York, so I can ask touristy questions, right?
Sadly, there are no public tours. But I did get to walk around the lobby. In a long corridor that divides the building into New York Times side and law and accounting offices side was a long folding table and a bald-shaven man of medium build frowning at a laptop. A copy of Edward Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" lay open to a page showing dance notation.
I asked him what happened. "Oh, I think the server just crashed," he said. Onscreen were windows full of names and numbers — the name of every writer who had something published in the Times and the number of articles they had written.
Along the walls were 80 individual readouts about the size of a very large index card suspended between thin wires. Turns out the frowning man was Mark Hansen, associate professor of statistics at UCLA and media artist.
He and collaborative partner Ben Rubin of ear studio have been commissioned to create a work that reflects the essence of the Times.
The project, Hansen explained, mimics the newspaper's clip archive.
Each readout is like an individual card file that shows writers' names (first initial, last name). The person's name stays on the screen in relation to the number of articles they've written. Some names, therefore will stay on the readout longer than others.
It's still a work in progress and won't be officially unveiled until some time in October. But Hansen and Rubin will be at the Times Tower for the next six weeks working out the kinks in the software and refining the idea.
Manhattan's only drive-in opened yesterday and word has been spreading.
If you ask me, the concept is totally stupid, and not in a good way. For $75, you and up to five of your closest friends can pile into a 1965 Ford Falcon convertible to watch a movie projected on a tiny screen. Extra bonus: You get to keep a DVD of the film you watched.
The firm that came up with this feat of marketing wizardry is GrandOpening (solid, midcap "O"), a retail space that periodically reinvents itself when the buzz and polish of the last idea have worn off.
I wonder how long this one's gonna last.
Read more, see more at Racked.
P.S.: Do I suddenly sound like a New Yorker now? Egad.
The Gelato Bar in Studio City, Calif., is giving away free Italian ice cream this afternoon from 3-9 p.m.
Show up and you may even win a trip to Umbria.
They would, of course, do this giveaway the day after I leave L.A. ...sigh...
Today I am no longer a Virgin virgin. And while it didn't exactly feel great, it didn't hurt either. And I'm pretty sure, in time, I'll like it, so I'll probably do it again.
That's right, I was one of the first few thousand people to fly fledgling Virgin America cross-country. There weren't enough gates at JFK, so after being escorted through the fast lane — a rather strange experience in itself, getting handed off from person to person — I was loaded onto a shuttle and driven out to the plane parked in the middle of the tarmac.
My fellow travelers were all young or young looking hipsters. I found myself drawing myself to my full height and sporting an air of detached, bored amusement just to fit in.
But once I got on the plane, all airs were off. What I really wanted to do was play with all the features.
The plane's interior is a study in discotheque that's already dated itself to the early '00s. I hoped to have control over the lighting, but no such luck. Then I hoped the mood lighting would change occasionally, but it stayed purple overhead with bands of red above the windows the entire time.
The charcoal gray leather seats in coach didn't have as many adjustable parts as the first-class chairs. They reminded me a bit of the leather seats on Midwest Airlines flights, though they were definitely newer.
A steady Euro-ambient soundtrack keeps you company in the bathroom. Snack service is a little chaotic during initial go-round, but convenient once the cart is reparked in the galley.
As yet, there's no Internet access, something people groused about before discovering they could get drinks from the galley just by touching the screen in front of each seat. Tap a few times, slide a credit card underneath and a black-uniformed flight attendant stomps up and hands you your order.
Cheap earbuds are free at the gate, in case you forgot to bring your Bose QuietComfort headphones. You can listen to a huge catalog of Virgin artists (talk about vertical integration).
Several cable channels are available, and at some point the airline will offer pay-per-view movies. The monitor also has simple video games and several different chat rooms.
Apparently I was the only geek on the plane — no one else was on chat so I spent a good hour or so playing a version of Text Twist before whipping out my iBook.
A Google map showed the journey's progress. It's not quite real-time information, but it's pretty close.
My plane touched down in L.A. about 5.5 hours after takeoff. Even at the late hour, there was a crush of people waiting to register for their rental cars.
The Googie era Encounter theme restaurant, seen at left, was enclosed in crazy scaffolding made necessary after a massive chunk from one of the arch legs had fallen off several months before. I wish I'd taken a photo.
I had to call the friend I was staying with for directions, even though once upon a time, I knew the route like the back of my hand.
I've been gone almost nine months now, but the time has flown. Though it felt a little strange to be back in a place where subtle changes were all around me, it was good to be in and among the familiar too.
Cindy Blackman is petite — not more than maybe 5' 6". She's built a bit like a modern dancer: rail-thin and sculpted.
For someone so little, she makes a surprising amount of noise. Blackman is one of the few women drummers to conquer the rock world and be equally respected as a jazz artist.
When the opportunity to see and hear someone like her comes up, I jump at the chance.
Blackman performed at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola last night. The club has a too-polished atmosphere, and I've heard jazz lovers complain how Dizzy's isn't a real jazz club at all, but a soulless, corporate monstrosity — a flush faker in a town where divey walk-in places like the 55 Bar and the Village Vanguard still cradle America's important contribution to music.
But so what. I'd come to hear Blackman and see the woman whose musicianship and sheer power behind the kit has made her legendary.
Lenny Kravitz once said during auditions Blackman impressed him with her strength, her groove and her fearlessness: She doesn't hit like a girl, he said. Blackman played with him for 10 years before going out on her own. I've never heard her play, but I entered the club ready to listen and to watch.
I half expected a rock concert. But we definitely got jazz — if jazz is defined as a framework of melody and harmony fleshed out with a lot of improvisation that tries to say something.
Jazz is pretty hard to define, though. A party of four walked out in the middle of the first piece, clearly disturbed by what they were hearing.
As for me, I hope someone bootlegged the concert. From the group's first whomp to the imaginative solo flights all around, Blackman's drums were, as a recent New York Sun review put it, "in the front as well as the back, in every solo and in every written ensemble part, and they are at once the propeller in the rear of a ship and the one at the nose of an airplane."
Pretty frickin' awesome.
Her lineup:
• J.D. Allen, tenor sax
• Fionn O'Lochlainn, guitar
• Carlton Holmes, piano
• George Mitchell, bass
Blackman plays again tonight at Dizzy's. You can also catch her around town supporting her guitarist, Fionn (pron: "fin") O'Lochlainn. Go if you want to hear what Blackman herself described as "creative music." Don't go if you're expecting a more traditional set.
New Yorkers are very territorial. Whether it comes to defending their place at the communal folding table in the laundromat, or rarely inviting anyone over to their apartment, the behavior seems to stem from so many people having so little space to themselves.
I therefore consider myself lucky to have found (through a broker, of course) a fairly comfortable apartment big enough to house what stuff I didn't chuck out in the Pre-Cross-Country Purge of 2006, a place that includes a real kitchen as opposed to a mini-stove crammed into a corner and a fridge that acted as a room divider. Really, I did see apartments like those while I was looking.
Because a chaotic living space is known to cause depression, I tried right away to establish beauty and order in each room. It's a constant struggle and lately, I've been losing the battle.
For inspiration, Apartment Therapy sends a "Hot Post of the Week" email every Friday. The email profiles an outstanding small apartment. Some spaces are pretty cool, others not so much. But about a month ago, the site featured a beautiful, 355-square-foot cubby in Paris owned by a 71-year-old American woman who, after being diagnosed with cancer, decided this was the time to live in her dream home.
Small but stunning, I thought. But given my own propensity for too much stuff coming in and not enough going out, could I ever maintain a place like that? Hmm.
Your New York Age is 29 This New York age puts you into a middle category between young and old (but not "middle age" per se). Be proud. You've got a nice balance between going out hard-core and staying in. You care about culture but also like some quiet nights. Keep it up, but think about expanding your horizons in the other directions. Head to Studio B or Anthology Film Archives for the first time, or finally check out the Village Vanguard or Elaine's for a dose of old-school NYC.
And I knew when I woke up, there would be lots and lots of coverage.
Pavarotti's official homepage, once busy with Flash graphics and news of his final world tour, has been replaced by a simple black and white photograph and a quote.
NPR, meanwhile did its usual thing, posting hard analysis, fond rememberances, audio and video snippets.
Rome's La Repubblica, on the other hand, mourned its great star with a mixture of love and a jaundiced eye. The tenor was its top story.
Pavarotti was known as the King of the High Cs. His wife requested that his funeral be simple and dignified, but surely, Italy will bury him as royalty.
New York magazine, in particular, has fallen into Fashion Week fever with live, show-to-show blogging, photos, snide commentary and more. They've tweaked their homepage and built a new section so readers too busy, too unconnected or too unsavvy to get into the big white Bryant Park tents can follow along.
Today, the Go Fug Yourself girls pulled a photo that demonstrated that men in suits are hot. OK, so it is Clive Owen wearing said ensemble, but still:
Read the accompanying mashnote at "We Would Give Anything to Fug Clive Owen."
With the long weekend now just a distant memory, it was time to dive back into the city. So many things to do, so little time to do them.
I went to the Upper East Side to attend the opening of a special exhibition of German cartoons commenting on the U.S. Though a few of the single panes left me quizzical, most were pretty funny, and thoughtful at the least.
I wandered from wall to wall reading and considering, drinking orange juice and eating pretzels. But that was not enough.
I walked to Smörgas Chef nearby, one of the few Swedish restaurants in the city. When in a Swedish restaurant, one ought to eat as the Swedes do. So out came an order of Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes and lingonberry sauce (very nice), a dish of snails in Jarlsberg (too dry and generally flavorless), a red beet salad and a side of aquavit.
As I prepared to head home, a friend I hadn't seen in many months called to ask me out for a drink. I said yes and stepped to the corner to hail a cab.
The taxi workers union called a strike at 5 a.m. today, but looking outside it was hard to tell. "Clinton and Stanton," I told the driver who stopped. He explained that I had to be OK with sharing a cab. I was. I got in.
He then said cabs were operating on zone fares — flat rates — and handed me a map so small I could barely see the fishlike shape of Manhattan. But one thing was clear: this was going to be a $20 ride. Ouch.
On the way to the Lower East Side, the cabbie watched hawk-eyed for people looking for rides. "Where are you going!" he yelled, pulling toward the curb. If they didn't give him an intersection on the way to my destination, he apologized and raced off. But a few people gave him magic axes.
First, there was a businessman whose trip to London had been cancelled because of the tube strike. He was now heading home.
Then came a regular joe, just looking to get to his girlfriend's place near Houston Street.
We were joined by a guitarist on his way to a rehearsal.
One by one, the men got out, and finally, it was me and the cabbie again. He had debated whether to work tonight, he said, but he had already paid $700 for the cab, plus he needed money for rent, food and to send back to his family. He seemed earnest, but a little defeated. Not a lot of fares tonight so far, he said, "but then again, I just got started."
At the corner of Clinton and Stanton is a dark little tapas bar called Tapéo29, a far quieter place this evening than the Lotus Lounge, across the street.
We caught up and moved on to Thor at the deliberately hip Hotel on Rivington.
Jimi Hendrix played on an endless loop as people clustered, parted and regrouped at tables, at the bar, and on lounge sofas. Cocktail girls in little black dresses (of course) sashayed from group to group, making sure no one went thirsty.
Having never been to this hotel, I had a look at my friend's room. It reminded me very much of a W Hotel, except the space was much tinier and there were far more windows. Even the shower wall, which formed part of the outside wall of the hotel, had strategically placed clear and translucent windowpanes — all the better to titillate the neighbors.
But by far, the best room was the corner bedroom, with its impeccable views of the city.