gastropoda

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.

Wanna feel like a rube? Walk into the P.J. Clarke’s across from Lincoln Center around 10 and ask for a table. The host will smugly inform you that “the kitchen will only be open another three hours.” What he clearly didn’t realize when four of us dragged in out of the brutal cold was how often we have been turned away by Manhattan restaurants at the same hour in the last year. Not in Kansas anymore, my ass. But we were so happy to be welcomed at all that we sat down and I tried not to consider how much the place looked like one pane in a hall of mirrors. Eight years into a fresh century, why were we in a newish bar that could be either the Ginger Man or T.G.I.Fridays? But our friend’s recounting having shot the original for New York magazine back in the day did inspire me to pull down the first Britchky collection I ever bought, from 1980-81, to revel in his takedown of the prototype. Steak tartare was “spread across the bottom of dog bowls,” salmon “should have been poached sooner or caught later,” steaks “needed salt and pepper the way a peanut butter and jelly sandwich needs peanut butter and jelly,” and all of it was dispensed from “what looks like a small prison kitchen.” Could there have been a less likely candidate for cloning?

In other lapses down by the Taj Sulzberger, a restaurant critic of all people seems to be unaware that shit can happen in a year (or less) in the notoriously volatile world of food. A roundup of chefs’ favorites included one that I seriously doubt is still even in the guy’s mental GPS, a full 14 months after he mentioned it. A certain blog may still be getting kickbacks one way or another, but, as I’ve said, Elvis has left the wine bar.

Eat at the otherwise admirable Pamplona at your own credit risk. My consort’s studio manager, inputting our dinner tab in Quicken, noticed the receipt showed his bare-naked Amex number. Since her other jobs in this booming Bush economy include waitressing, she of course went bonkers and called the restaurant — only to be told by the cretin who answered the phone some nonsense about how the credit card processor was making them do it. I went on the google and immediately turned up a recent LATimes story addressing this same invitation-to-fraud situation and confirmed what we both suspected: Since exactly a year ago [technically since December 2004, my older brother interjects], it is illegal to print out the digits in full. And that only makes the argument that they need the whole number “in case we need to reauthorize the charge” reek even more. As TC Boyle would say, with plenty of notes on the food: “Talk Talk.”

Walking to Pamplona from the B train I was struck, the way I am almost hourly in this city, by how fast neighborhoods are changing. Even two years ago, who could have imagined heading to dinner at an ambitious newish restaurant on sleepy, dusty East 28th Street? Now there’s a hip-looking Asian joint right nearby with a blackboard out front advertising, right below “lobster roll,” “spice girl roll.” You used to have to go to the corner of Park Avenue to eat that. . . .

A particularly bad, ridiculously overpriced Mexican restaurant in Manhattan appears to have hired the Chimp’s dream pollsters. The comment card that arrives with the check gives exactly three choices to check off: Happy. Very happy. Extremely happy. I guess that’s one way to forestall “worst experience ever.”

I thought I’d seen it all underground: The woman with her loafers off clipping her toenails on the A train, the couple stripping at the top of the stairs to the B, the woman in an open bathrobe with nothing underneath, also on the B. But the other day I got on the downtown C and there was a young guy ostentatiously eating a big bare roasted sweet potato like a hot dog, skin and all. I had to look away, the way you do when the creep across the car seems a little too busy with his hands in his lap. Chicken breasts I could see. But a tuber, in public?

This is insult to injury: The space on Columbus long occupied by @SQC now has a big sign announcing what is going in there and in what once was the Silver Palate next door, too. And it’s a Crocs store. A whole huge store selling those hideous shoes. Of course the day after we spotted it, and after my consort wondered how there could be more profit in footwear than food, the papers were full of the news that sales are down, inventories are up and the stock is heading for the toilet. With luck, the stoves are only in storage; maybe they could be back in action soon on a street that could use a few good restaurants far more than an invasion of the Molto clodhoppers.

Nothing says GU to me like an invitation to a restaurant party that includes an offer of transportation. If I can’t get there by foot or subway (or some combination) it’s not worth the journey. So I feel for the place over in Queens that deemed itself so inaccessible it sent a hired coach into Manhattan for media types. What did that cost a startup? Probably much more than one line of type on the fancy invite listing the closest R stop. Or even a page or two of content on its web site for CrackBerrians to peruse on the long slog in traffic, maybe? At another event last week I got caught up in an animated discussion of how restaurants not quite ready for prime coverage fake their situation by allowing a closeup of a dish rather than a photo of the whole room. I guess if you can’t get the URL location fully locked and loaded, shoot the bus.