gastropoda/trails

The not awful: Zipper Tavern, where we retreated in the sheeting rain after an excellent Camera Club opening upstairs of really evocative work by one of my consort’s students from Piemonte. The food was mostly just okay — a decent if odd salad of beets, peas, mizuna, hard-cooked eggs and corn offset by flavor-light empanadas filled with alleged duck confit — but the wineglasses were well-filled for $7 each (albarino, tempranillo). The waitress was harried but attentive, the noise level was less than abusive and it was the right place at the right time. The decor, however, reminded me of Grandma’s Place in Tallinn, where the owner admitted every theatrical detail was bogus. WIGB? It’s cheap, it’s convenient. 336 West 37th Street, 212 695 4600.

The fading fast: Madaleine Mae, where it was hard to believe a kitchen could descend to slopping out food in so few weeks. I went alone for an early dinner while Bob was chained to his high-tech work station yet again, and it was light enough to read, quiet enough to think. The hostesses were certainly friendly, the busboys were solicitous, the waitress was not a ’tron and the room was as charming as always. I was even wishing I’d ordered real food after finding the biscuit was improved if not perfect — it had the desired flakiness if not the airiness. But both my appetizers were huge letdowns. The thin johnnycake was overlaid with lots of smoked salmon, but the stingy schmear of creme fraiche or sour cream or whatever under it had melted away to grease. And the spinach salad came drenched in oily dressing, with a few flecks of bacon and only a handful of tiny roasted mushrooms to redeem it. I don’t know why I was surprised when a friend told me P.J. Clarke’s is behind the joint despite the Waxman connection. (I guess I gotta start trying to untangle the knotty prose crammed into DI/DO’s restaurant “column.”) WIGB? Maybe. It’s in the neighborhood, and said friend had a great time at the bar. But it says it all that the hand-dryer in the bathroom didn’t even work, and the staff must have known it because there was a pile of paper towels under it. One month and the place is falling apart?

The transporting: “The Grocer’s Son” at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. I went to the God’s-waiting-room showing at 3:15 and got to hear the filmmaker speak before and after (one question from the audience: “Since it’s a French film, why does it take the couple so long to get into bed?”) He did his research by making three documentaries on mobile epiceries, and he really recreated a small world. Of course what I liked best was buying popcorn beforehand and asking the counter clerk what was in the plastic bag lying on top of the kernels under the heat lamp. “Brioche. They taste like nothing unless you heat them.” Leached plastic notwithstanding, the popcorn was as satisfying as the movie. It opens in America in May.