A funny thing happened when a friend asked me to suggest a place to eat near “Dean and Fucking Deluca” (all caps). I dragged out the little notebook I used to diligently keep and turned to the SoHo pages and was amazed to see how many restaurants were at 199 Prince Street: Frontiere, Elysee, SoHo Cantina, Goblin Market, now Shorty’s.32. And I probably missed a few. Moleskine could run an ad campaign: The notebook that outlasts whole restaurants.
Post Category → eating new york
Count the silverware
On a related topic, it was more than amusing to watch the blowback when one restaurant reporter had the nerve to complain another was playing unfair. The commenters seemed to be in a wild contest to out-ignorant each other. What’s funnier is remembering what a crybaby she used to be when new joints would give their “news” first to the weekly magazines because they ran photos, and in color. Considering the Momofuku frenzy set off by the blogs, I kinda think the days when the likes of Mr. Ko could be extorted are running out.
Don’t ask about human poop scoops
Oddities of the week: I saw a guy towing a Weber grill through the subway station at Columbus Circle one night. I saw a Spanish family of four (or at least a Spanish-speaking, light-skinned family of four) sharing an ear of corn at the Union Square Greenmarket — a raw ear of corn, husk husked down to the stalk. I heard a vendor at our neighborhood Greenmarket telling a shopper who was wondering about breaking a twenty that he would rather change a fifty than “wait for you guys to grope around for the correct change.” And I read in my hometown paper that using skim milk makes macaroni and cheese a more healthful dish. (Tell that to fettucine Alfredo.) Sorta like a Hail Mary pass of roasting pork rinds rather than deep-frying.
Water? Only bottled.
My newfound frugal streak is not a pose. I freak out every time I exit the Food Shitty with a jar of Hellmann’s stickered at $5.39 to replace the one I have just thrown out with a $4.69 label. (And I go through mayonnaise like grass through a goose.) But my real sense of battered-diner syndrome kicks in with restaurants. The other night we met five friends for sunset wine at the uptown concession in Riverside Park and left a couple of hours later $35 a person lighter, after (admittedly) too much wine but only three burgers, three Caesar soups, one order of fries and two ears of corn. Seventy dollars a couple used to buy real food in a room with running water and a working toilet. So I can’t even begin to describe how much more satisfying a picnic was two nights later within eyeshot of the Gouge Bar. We settled onto the intensely green grass with another couple who had brought two V&T pizzas (outstanding even cold), gentle-jerk chicken (actually Cornish hens) and corn-tomato and zucchini salads, all of which we supplemented with curry-deviled eggs, cucumber-chive salad, Kahlua brownies, Paffenroth’s radishes (French breakfast and Easter egg), an epi-baguette from Amy’s and two bottles of rose. Given what a bottom feeder I have become with wine, I doubt the whole too-much-to-eat spread cost much more than $60 for the four of us. And I can’t decide which was more pleasurable, watching the sun set over Jersey in a rose haze or seeing a deck full of suckers getting bled dry just a shout away.
A fate worse than Merkato
Almost the best novel I have read since the last Richard Price is “Lush Life,” which I just barreled through in two middle-of-the-nights when dread was lurking right outside the bedroom door. Nobody is as cinematic in drawing characters with dialogue alone. It helped that I was such an aficionada of Schiller’s (and its uneasy neighborhood) way back when, but even a reader who could not conjure the place from memory would be transported by the descriptions of its subterranean side, and of the quotidian realities of running a restaurant in a city where waiter is so rarely a valued profession. Mostly, though, the book made the frenzy over the closing of Florent seem even more ridiculously hysterical. All that weeping and gnashing and rending of garments when the city is changing everywhere in every way by the second, constantly and relentlessly. Not to throw out a spoiler or anything, but I hear the Borgata is looking for a transvestites’ diner. . . .
Carpe taco
Relish is not a magazine where I expect to come across any Elizabeth David-level gracefulness, but I was still stopped cold by this: “As a Mexican food ambassador, he beats Taco Bell’s talking Chihuahua hands down.” Now there’s a contest: trained chef with seriously endowed genes versus crap-food cartoon — what else could result but a knockout without a pawito lifted? I guess it could have been clumsier, though. The Latinizer could have could have trotted out an allusion to Montezuma’s revenge.
Click three times on the ceiling
Thank allah for a long holiday weekend, because the mass hysteria in Blogville over one diner closing was getting pretty scary to watch. Lutece went out with less weeping and wailing, for cripes’ sake. Apparently clogs are just like dead-trees magazines, though: What’s news to one has to be one-upped by the other. It’s like a yardful of Kool-Aid-lapping dogs sniffing each others’ butts. If this keeps up, the two obsessions will have to merge and open Korent to feed the frenzy.
Climbable steeple, but where are the people?
An email with “hell has frozen over” in the subject line could not have been a more appropriate arrival in the same week one of the more insightful reviews was published under a byline old gray ladies probably would not recognize. I guess we will not be eating well anymore. Unless we do it at places like The New French, which really struck me both times as being the closest thing New York has to Le Comptoir in Paris. We are living in interesting times with food, and an analytical mind is as good as 40 years of eating for a living. Of course, the same was true 25 years ago this year, but the coven was much nastier and more insular back then. All that said, though, I have to admit I will never forget my first day back at the NYTimes after 15 years of eating for a living on my own. I later learned that Atexian instant messages were bouncing all around the Style department wondering “Who is that?” but only one person stood up, strode over, introduced herself and welcomed me warmly. Obviously she knows there are limitless second acts in American lives. Big fist bump to her.
Bistro California
For all my carping about fast food chains engulfing and devouring the world, I have to give them credit for design. If the goal is to move the sheep in and out at the speediest clip, they do it with minutes to spare. Contrast your average Taco Bell expedition with my last two experiences with home-grown wannabes, both of which must have been conceived by bastard bureaucrats from a liaison between the IRS and the post office. At ‘Wichcraft, there’s no overhead menu; only late in the game do you realize you need to pick up a menu in the front and puzzle over it before stepping into the order line, which is more an order clot of confused customers puzzling over menus. If you get your pricey sandwich to stay, you’re guaranteed the runner will make at least three laps around the room in search of your hungry face. The comment card on offer should have been the first indicator that this is not a chute but a maze; that device is the last refuge of flawed enterprises (sorta like sex: places that get it right never have to ask).
Pinch Pizza by the Inch, at least the one on Columbus, was even more of a Bermuda Triangle. Mensa should give credit just for finding the entrance. But the menu is like the agate on the back of your MasterCard bill. Not only do you have you decide what combination of the infinite variations you want. Then you have to do the math — two inches plus jalapenos times what? My head almost exploded, and I spent only a little more than a straight olive-and-pepperoni slice would have cost up the block. I have no idea how they can make it work with a runner, flags with order numbers, utensils required etc. But the staff was astonishingly pleasant. I would go postal in the first hour if I had to listen to two rooms full of squalling human larva while facing down a molasses-like stream of guidebook-carrying, Esperanto-speaking patrons studying the menu for longer than it takes to learn Latin. Plus the occasional childless New Yorker. Because special orders do upset us.
Those weren’t pecans
From up-close and personal experience I know rats are the Al Capones of the food world. Why do they infest bakeries? Because that’s where the sugar is. So the news on the NYC Health Department’s shutdowns of some famous cookie outlets was not exactly surprising. I remember we always had to leave one tray of shortbread uncovered at night because the owner figured the resident vermin would choose the easy dinner over gnawing through plastic film. Now it turns out it’s another way of saying: Leave the droppings. Take the cannoli.
All that in two trips?
I hope whoever used my name to reserve at Benoit got more out of it than I would have. I almost always hide behind whomever I’m eating with, but when I called to reserve for my consort’s birthday I figured Alain Ducasse would have no idea who the hell I am (if he did, his minions would have responded to my pissed-off letter many years ago after we had a disastrous dinner and breakfast at his then-new auberge in Provence). Turned out this one-of-a-kind name was in the system with an 873 prefix. Stupidly, I did not let the reservationist rattle off the other digits so that I could play Nancy Drew. Now that I hear our onetime Paris lunch companion Jean-Jacques should be cooking the chicken as well as the quenelles and cassoulet, I’m half-relieved we will be eating somewhere else. Which we will be doing because no one bothered to answer my request to change the reservation to the early bird special. But in reading the initial reports on Barca BBQ, I’ve been reminded why it really is so important to eat anonymously. Freebies do skew your judgment. . . .
Whither Bolo?
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.
Strawberry butter forever
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.
Beyond epago
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?
Or a Havahart
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.