gastropoda

Now I know why buildings in Manhattan have to be thrown up in record time these days — if construction takes more than three days, the promo signs are obsolete. I spotted one on Park Avenue South touting a new apartment house as center-of-the-cool-food-universe by showing matchbooks from nearby restaurants with travel times below each. Candela was a five-minute walk. Except it’s now Irving Mill. I forgot to look for Barca 18, but having actually braved bogus Wildwood only to walk right out, I would say omitting mention of any restaurant in that space might be a very wise idea. It’s not worth another steelworker’s life.

The biggest Epago on the Upper West Side has the funniest “contest” going to commemorate 20 years in a space that previously did in big stars from both California and Cajun country: Submit a favorite memory and get a whack at a gift certificate worth up to $500. (Insert your own W.C. Fields joke on the second prize here.) Most of my recollections involve waiting for the toilets in the grody basement, and I suspect those would be disqualified. I do remember dragging my brother from the Bay Area, his wife and his younger son there one long-ago summer, just because there were tables outside, and I think he has never taken me seriously on food since. If people actually celebrated wedding anniversaries in the joint, this neighborhood was in worse shape than Panchito knew. All that said, though, I heard an interesting story from a friend who just tried to eat at the hottest thing off the avenue (according to everyone but the Mighty Cuozzo) and was actually turned away from his 6:45 confirmed reservation by a maitre d’hostility who said someone had called to change it to 9:45. Where did he wind up? Epago’s upscale sister. I guess that’s why I have so little interest in the really swankola places opening up here. Assholery should require a train ride.

Is it just me, or has hostility become longhand for host? My consort and I stopped at Q Bar on a whim early one evening and the suit at the front mumbled: “We have no availability.” What? That’s more verbosely ridiculous than “fully committed.” And a “sorry” wouldn’t have killed him. Then there was the teeth-clenching woman manning the door at Bouchon who looked to be one Uzi away from a postal incident. Separating the paying customers from the rigidly arranged tables in a mall can’t be any more fun than getting dressed up in a suit to stand at a silly podium and mumble all night. But if you’re that miserable-to-condescending, there are better jobs out there. Flack with spelling deficiencies, say (I got an e-release touting 10 questions for “Rachel”) or with fusion confusion (tortilla chips topped with crab, avocado and salsa are not “taco bites” — they’re nachos, for crap’s sake). And just as I was typing this, an e-mess landed that inspired a whole new verb: dracking, for catapulting the propaganda after a little too much vodka. What else would explain “fresh hunky potato salad.” Do you fork it or fuck it?

I guess I haven’t seen everything in an eating establishment after all. The other day, when I succumbed to a slice at a relatively good but famously grody pizza place, an older guy sitting across from me had a big bottle of bug spray on his table. It could have been more unsettling, though: He could have brought a mousetrap.

Maybe the most miserable experience my consort and I ever had in a ridiculously expensive restaurant that was not Le Cirque was the night at Jean-Louis at the Watergate when a couple at a nearby table brought their human larva and let it fuss if not shriek through every course. Their obliviousness still stuns me. I had a flashback at Joe’s Shanghai in Flushing when five of us sat down and instantly realized we were trapped next to a howler monkey in a high chair. These parents, too, were determinedly focusing on their food and avoiding eye contact no matter how many pained-to-pissed looks were shot their way. But the screaming just kept getting more deafening. Then a little Chinese boy across the crowded room decided to join in, and then a third kid shrieked in. It was a symphony of misery to choruses of laughter. But the Chinese parents swooped up their tear-soaked kids and headed for the street to quiet them down. The yup couple stayed put, only picking up the kid to swat his/her butt a few times, fannying the fury. Only when a young Chinese couple just seated nearby stood up and walked out in disgust did they take their cacophony somewhere else, leaving me with one question: Why has the CIA been blasting bad music rather than using the children of the self-indulgent for “enhanced interrogation”? That kid could have smoked out Bin Laden. And he/she will grow up to be eating at a table with spawn near you. . . .

The sad news is not that the Strand Diner on 96th has closed — I can still smell the morning I stopped in years ago when something had definitely died on the premises and I only hoped it was not a forgotten busboy. What’s depressing is that the place is being torn down. And that undoubtedly means another obscene tower is going to be wedged into a low-rise block, after construction forces us to walk well around it for months for fear of falling cranes (and crane operators). One diner/mortuary has to be worth more than another high-rise in a neighborhood where it seems half the buildings are festooned with “for rent” signs. And I have to admit I’ll miss walking past and wondering yet again where the “top rated” rating it boasted in a big sign in the window came from. The place knew its audience, idiots not worthy of even Maroon deception.

One of the saddest phrases on the state we’re in is “hope is not a plan.” To which I would add “charm is not edible.” Three times in the last two months I have been lambasted by friends who took my raving recommendation on a restaurant run by a sweetheart in the West Village. The first report was politely lukewarm, the second vitriolic (one dish was described as “shit-on-a-shingle,” a waiter as “dumbshit”) and the third rather scarifying (amid  thoroughly underwhelming food and wine, waterbug falls on waitress, who is unflummoxed). I would go back and see if they have all lost their minds, but I know I would be snowed by the inedible factor. Someone chefly should be hollering Yelp.

I rarely leave the island except to go to the airport, so heading to Brooklyn for a little story was like packing for Liberia must have been for the Chimp’s handlers. I armed myself with a friend as an escort and tracked my route on Hopstop and even tried to do research on a destination for lunch, only to find we were bound for where the internets don’t go. So after wrapping up my bit of work, we started out for the subway by a slightly different route and had a series of experiences that really brought home how soulless the island has become, even in my neighborhood, where fresh chorizo and crema were once available just blocks away from my kitchen. We stopped first at a butcher shop where three types of Puerto Rican sausage made in-house were laid out tantalizingly on the counter along with fresh sofrito and containers of seasoning blends and a variety of other sausages the store simply carried. The meat in the length-of-the-store case looked gorgeous, and a little stand in the front was selling cooked food. The butchers also could not have been more charming (when were we two last called “girls”?) And then we stumbled upon a tiny narrow shop selling Mexican ingredients, some of which I have never seen fresh, where I bought two champagne-style mangos and a pack of 32 tortillas, all for exactly $3, from the nicest young kid at the counter. We had lunch next door at a place where I was too stupid to take a menu and which does not seem to exist on the Google. And that’s too bad because the waitresses in their crisp white shirts could not have been more gracious and patient, and even with over-ordering we paid $19.50 for guacamole, two huaraches, two rajas-con-queso tamales, a huge chorizo cemita, a fruit drink and a seltzer. We were surrounded by families pushing strollers the size of SUVs and by young people tucking into things that looked even better than what was on our table. And then we made our way back to the train for the short ride to the borough where every block is now a bank, a nail-sploitation salon and a Duane Reade.

I see those fine reporting skills Panchito honed as he was being charmed by the good ol’ dry drunk have not gone dull while he’s been chewing and typing. In babbling out a thumb sucker he missed the elephant on Central Park West. Even my regard for the Big Homme has risen sharply since realizing why he opened where he opened: There’s an infestation of gazillionaires just minutes away now. Paul Goldberger wrote a gripping piece about it in the New Yorker, rather breathlessly answering “What does 20 million buy you these days?” But why let a huge development, on a lot that had been empty as long as we’ve lived in New York, with apartments snatched up with fortunes more solid than hedge funds, stand in the way of an easy joke about the Upper West Side?

I’m so old I remember when a certain mini-chain was one Tex-Mex joint downtown, and one that was best known for always making the Health Department shit list back in the days when ratings were actually reported in the papers. (The first casualty of corruption is transparency.) When a branch came to upper Broadway, I figured it had to be cleaner and went once when it opened and once in a moment of indefensible weakness. The latter encounter was memorable because the one waiter at lunch had a rather grimy bandage on his business hand and I didn’t instantly flee when I saw it. It seemed rude to run, so I ate whatever I ate and went home. And next day I was sick as a perra. The only worse experience was eons ago in Florence, when our waiter at lunch kept wiping his pimply nose — that had to be what did me in and not the horse salad my consort insisted on ordering and sharing. But all funky places come to an end, especially in New York, and so this one is no longer around to tempt the unwitting and undiscriminating. Now it’s like all the other storefronts I passed on the way home the other night, sitting empty with a huge “for rent” sign in the window (or, in the case of Aix, with the new definition of loser out front: a guy who didn’t realize the place had closed and had actually arranged to meet a date there). I just hope all the greedy landlords routing longtime tenants know we’re a long way from that elephant on CPW. Walk down Columbus with all the “apartments for rent” signs and it’s obvious what’s going up closer to home: Mastodons.

I’m far from the sentimental type, but I have to say the threatened closing of Florent does seem like yet another cobblestone gouged out of the Manhattan foundation. I first went to the meat district when it was really the meat district — the butchering instructor at restaurant school in 1983, Jack Ubaldi, took a bunch of us on an early-morning tour of four or five distributors, and I still have the white paper cap I got at a pork place plus the pungent memories of carcasses swinging in the cold and blood and guts reeking in the streets. (Yeah, there were hookers, not always what they seemed, but it was more about the meat and a corner of the city that still did a gritty business.) Florent was never great, just quirky, but at least it was a real part of a real place. Maybe the greedy landlord can get a Duane Reade or a WaMu in there. As for the other closing reported all over cyber-foodland, the only question about Aix is: What took so long? Overpriced, pretentious, haughty, sloppy — it was an East Side restaurant on the wrong side of the park. And it says it all that it’s apparently bailing just as the new restaurants all around it are overrun with the undead who should have been its faithful eaters. The barbecue place that preceded it was no great shakes, but at least it fit the neighborhood. Now the bar is set so low a Duane Reade would be too good.

I can’t say I’m sorry to see so many seriously bad old-time restaurants dying on Columbus and Amsterdam lately, but it is a little disheartening to see that so many of their glitzy replacements are all following the latest food merger from hell. I call it Glasian — with the first two letters, of course, coming from Gloppy. At a time when Americans are becoming so much more sophisticated about nuances among ethnic cuisines, what’s with this herd instinct to turn out one menu under Thai, tempura, Vietnamese and sushi? It almost makes you long for the good old days when the ubiquitous mixed marriage was China-Criolla. At least that had historical precedent.

My decision to always eat incognito at Pearl Oyster Bar was validated when I stopped in for a late lunch at the bar next to three not-small women whose order was sent to the kitchen with a “VIP this, show ’em some love.” They were whimpering trying to finish their over-heaped plates while I was feeling beaten not even halfway through my usual skate sandwich. Those portions are beyond generous even for the hoi polloi. (I am always absurdly grateful when friends benefit, though.) Besides, who needs extras when you can hear a repeated dis of “Anthony” for advising diners never to order fish on a Monday, or overhear an explanation of the draconian 2:30 cutoff of lunch orders (the tiny kitchen needs every second to prep for dinner)? It’s the best place in town for lunch and a show.

Of the many benefits of living with a consort who is fresh out of college and 22 again, meeting his new friends cannot be overestimated. When I was a similar age, no one at a party ever opened a bottle of wine with a screw-off cap and reusable plastic “cork” and showed the latter around the kitchen to an appreciative: “It’s a butt plug!” Then again, the wines brought by guests that were being unsealed were way more casually sophisticated than the Mateus and Blue Nun of my long-lost youth. And no one ever passed out penis-shaped hard candies for dessert back in the day; definitely no one ever suggested getting a convivial group together to make a couple hundred dumplings to share for dinner. It’s too bad the world is going to hell in a gas tank when the people are getting so much more evolved. But my favorite detail of an excellent evening in Williamsburg (not Virginia) was the business card an engaging guy handed me as I was leaving after giving him mine. I didn’t have my glasses and only the next morning saw what was on the back: the printed words “the guy you talked about _____ with” and the hand-written words “food and radio” filling the blank. If anyone had known this trick 24 years ago, about 6 xillion business cards would not have made their way into my bag only to leave me wondering: Who was that person who seemed so fascinating? Add matchbooks to the long list of what we’ve come a long way from.

For professional reasons I found myself at Grand Central Oyster Bar just before 1 on a Wednesday and was stunned to see how packed the counters were. Luckily I had the good sense to look around and notice a pretty young woman directing traffic, so I got in line behind four anxious pre-theater couples and said I was waiting for two seats. My consort was on Bob time as usual and so when “our” turn came I said I would stand aside and let others go ahead, for which she expressed serious gratitude. Sometime in the next 20 minutes, with people bitching and carping and clumping the line, I said “tough job” and she responded, “I love it! I hate standing at the front talking to people. Here I get to say NO!” Maybe what this town needs is an exchange program for hostesses.