January 31, 2006
In-N-out Burger lawsuit - New Yorkers still a-drool
Anyone who has been to California and enjoyed the truly heavenly burger that is an In-N-Out burger knows that New York has nothing that compares.
Please excuse me for pointing this out, but it IS the truth. While I find Dumont burger spectacular, it's not quite the same thing as an In-N-Out.
What’s so fabulous about In-N-Out? This is a company that has consistently chosen quality ingredients and preparation over pre-fab food. It is the anti-MacDonalds of the fast food world. It is what all quick-serve restaurants should strive to be. Nothing is pre-fab, nothing is pre-frozen, not even the fries - everything is fresh daily.
Now, the glorious burger institution that ushered in the golden age of the Drive-Thru is about to implode because of… wait for it! … a stupid internecine lawsuit! A board member is suing the lone heir ( a 23 year old with her heart set on a MacDonald’s style expansion) because of fears of lowered standards for quality. Nasty jabs are being thrown all around as the faithful sit an horror and ask themselves, “is this the end of the best damn burger in the west?”
So, New Yorkers may ask, why the hell should I care? Well, if perchance an In-N-Out ever makes it here to the East Coast, we would certainly want it in original mint condition, and not in a stupid clown suit.
So, if you find yourself out in LA or some other sun-drenched location, take a huge bite of the In-N-Out before it becomes extinct.
Tags:
burger, drama, extinction, in n out, lawsuit
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Posted on 1/31/2006
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January 26, 2006
Glam Disaster! Prada SoHo Burns – Babettes Everywhere Send
Tears to Put Out Fire!
As our friend Marfa pointed out (see http://www.nyc.com/people/marfa/blog/3777/Prada_SoHo_inferno), Prada SoHo burned under mysterious circumstances. We are all left mourning the loss of such fabulously overpriced apparel.
For the suspicious out there, I can say with great authority that it was NOT Babette. She could no more torch such finery than Frank Bruni could pass up a chance to tell us more about Frank Bruni (see http://www.nyc.com/people/editor/blog/3789/Blast_that_Spotted_Pig).
Babette in Mourning: The little black dresses will all be out this week, from Tribeca to Midtown, with little Prada accessories honoring the memory of garments yet unsold. In light of such a monumental loss to Babettes everywhere, and indeed Western Civilization itself, we must all take a moment to contemplate how easy it is to have, and then to have not.
Solutions: Babette shall sally forth to the nearest Glam Pack meeting place, and order a couple of Dirty Martinis in which to drown her sapphire ice tears. However, owners of neighboring businesses will be tripling their risk and liability insurance packages.
Tags:
babette, blazing, endangered, glam, prada, shopping, soho
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Posted on 1/26/2006
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January 24, 2006
Chinese New Year – the New York Event - Welcoming the Year of the Dog EVENT SCHEDULE :
Annual Lunar New Year Flower Market @ Columbus Park Friday, January 27th, Noon - 10:00 p.m. Saturday, January 28th, 10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.
New Year's Day Firecracker Ceremony & Culture Festival Sunday, January 29th
Firecracker Ceremony: 12:00 PM at intersection of Mott & Bayard Streets Culture Festival:1:00 - 5:00 p.m. at intersection of Mott & Bayard Streets
7th Annual Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade Parade: Sunday, February 5th at 1pm starting at Canal & Mott Streets Culture Festival: 3:00 - 5:00 p.m. at Mott & Bayard Streets
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The Year of the Dog.
No, this is not another Dick Cheney homage (see Marimar’s blogs for that http://www.nyc.com/people/Marimar/home.aspx). This is the Chinese New Year – the Year of the Dog.
The Year of the Dog is supposed to be good for the honest, upright and faithful among us. It’s a reflection of the qualities of Man’s best friend. Of course, man’s best friend can get snarly and rabid, so there are pros and cons.
According to my Dragon friends, the year of the dog is an unlucky for those born in the year of the Dragon. They intend to lie low once the lunar New Year begins. But for now, they are ready to party.
Gearing up for Chinatown’s New Year means getting ready for the crowds. The best idea is to plot your course prior to heading to Canal Street. If you plan on eating at a place like Peking Duck, you better make a reservation – this is ine of the most popular places in Chinatown.
One of the busiest intersections is Canal at Mulberry – this of course where much of the
action will take place. Take the 6 or the N or R to Canal and jump into the mix.
Stop 1: Bubble Tea. You will need a nice refreshment – to steel yourself for the festivities. Pop into one of the many hip joints that serve bubble tea and then force your way into the crowd that will surge towards Columbus Park. Wear elbow and knee pads if you are into extreme sports. They can’t hurt.
Stop 2: The Main Drag. Stop for Peking Duck at Peking Duck – but make a reservation! This place gets crowded fast.Then, follow crowd until you reach Confucius Plaza.
Stop 3: Photo Op. If you are lucky enough to get up close to the dragons, be sure to pose in such a way that you can you picture taken.
How to enjoy the Year of the Dog: Visit China Town.
Since 911, China Town has suffered a severe decline. There are many reasons for this, most of which have to do with the loss of business coming up from downtown, and from the many places that closed after 911 due to contamination and loss of workforce. Now, as gentrification sets in, China Town is disappearing block by block. While it is true that much of China Town has relocated to Queens, Manhattan is slowly loosing part of the bone mass that has created the fantastic cityscape that we all love. The fish markets, restaurants, herbal merchants, fantastic storefronts, traditional theatres and markets that pepper the area around Canal Street – some since the Victorian period – are part of what makes New York the city that it is. If we all we see is more and more overly priced, sliver-sized apartments in boring high-rise buildings, all we will have left is a monotonous and unsalted soup. Who wants a bland and salt-less soup (besides Dick Cheney)?
Tags:
bubble tea, chinatown, chinese new year, dumplings, new york events, year of the dog
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Posted on 1/24/2006
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January 23, 2006
Now that virtually every table for the dinner hour has been booked, what is a procrastinating foodie to do? Aside from calling in the favors of friends, the procrastinator has to think – THINK – about how to remedy a serious lack of tables for dinner.
Important Note:
It is possible to book tables on Open Table, and the site itself has links to all restaurants that use Open Table. However, there are those restaurants that don’t use Open Table. If you can’t find a dinner slot via Open Table, then call the restaurant directly and see if there are any tables. Much of what is left is of the 6PM or 10PM variety, so plan accordingly. If you suffer from acid reflux, take your purple pill as accordingly.
Check these websites for more info: http://www.myriadrestaurantgroup.com/index.html
(easy to use) http://www.brguestrestaurants.com/
(easy to use) http://chinagrillmgt.com/
(not easy to use)
Restaurant Week Favorites:
For lunch, the top ranking restaurants in the city are the best bet. The prix fixe offerings afford the diner a glimpse into the kind of subtle complexities that garner praise from the NY Times and Michelin. Most of these spots are pricey and don’t have a dinner prix fixe for Restaurant Week. But if you have the time, lunch is a great time to visit Vong, Craftbar, Fiamma, Aquavit, Nobu, Tabla and others. If you don’t have the time, take a personal day from work and make that reservation. There are still lunch spots open at many of these hard-to-get-into-anyway spots.
Glam Spots:
If you can’t get a dinner reservation but have time to pop in for a cocktail (and maybe a cancellation), belly up to the bar at one of the exclusive dinner spots and take a look around. Most of the Glam Packs will be cruising the Meatpacking district. If you want to do some elbowing to get a good spot at the bar, head to the Maritime (snacks are also available here), Vento, Ono, or Spice Market.
For the More Sophisticated:
Head to Midtown where the crowds are less frenetic and the glam volume less ear piercing. Rene Pujol and the Modern might have a spot for you; Blue Fin, Blue Smoke and Compass are great places to escape the excessively pointed shoes, nasal inflections and exposed undergarments so often seen crossing the avenues of Meatpacking.
Eek! There’s nothing left!
In this case, it’s best to wait for the next installment of Restaurant Week, which now happens twice per year.
Tags:
big apple, glam, meatpacking, reservations, restaurant week, soho
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Posted on 1/23/2006
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January 16, 2006
Food, Glorious Food
New York Restaurant Week, Part 1, JAN 23-27 and JAN 30 – Feb 3 (that’s MON – FRI Only)
Restaurant Week is swift approaching, that magical time when we can sample some of the city’s best cuisine at special prices. This is an opportunity to gorge without guilt; menus are prix fixe, with lunch coming in at $24.07 and dinner at $35.00. There is no reason to feel like a grinch. The origins of Restaurant Week are not exactly clear, but the idea is generate buzz and business during a time of the yearwhen restaurants are usually slow.
January is usually the holiday-hangover month, and many people have no interest in making a foray into the cold once the gifts have been begotten. But they might just be enticed by a good deal at the likes of Tribeca Grill or Grammercy Tavern. Serious foodies on the other hand wait all year for Restaurant Week and no matter how cold it is outside, they will not miss “Restaurant Week”. There is no better excuse to visit Eleven Madison or Montrachet in January, after all the holiday lights have been taken down, than the promise of a prix fixe. How to Choose A Restaurant During Restaurant Week Many of the numerous participating restaurants have a special prix fixe for lunch only; these are worth exploring if you are lucky enough to have a lunch hour. In fact, these are sometimes the most enjoyable of meals you will ever have in the city. Explore the menu. If there is something you are dying to try, like a nice venison entrée, check out the Restaurant Week menus, or call ahead to see who is offering what. Some restaurants will highlight their signature dishes, while others will offer innovative specials.
The Vocabulary Du JourNo one really likes to put the word “sampler” on the menu these days; it’s way too pedestrian. This simple two-syllable word conjures up memories of those days when road trips across the wide USA were punctuated with stop-overs at a Howard Johnson’s, with a meal in the white-tablelothed dining room. The plate was a “seafood sampler” and everything on it was fried. New words for “sampler” include “trio of, flight of, selection of,the highlights, the headlines, triple header, the high notes, chef’s choice, your choice, our choice….” It’s anything but “sampler” even though that’s precisely what it is. Prix Fixe is another word with a special set of meanings; it now means that for one price we can get a set of limited choices. We have come to expect three offerings for each course of the meal, but wine is not included. That’s where the wine pairings come in, effectively doubling the cost of the meal, which is often not a bad thing, since one can try a variety of wines that would are not always available by the glass. A bottle of wine can be a nice a little investment for the meal, and if it is a bad choice, well, the meal is not as memorable as it could have been. Beware of restaurants that lure you in with a promise of a Restaurant Week deal, but then give you the same old menu with nothing special except some kind of incongruent pasta dish or an overabundance of cod.
Do stop by one of the restaurants (this is a partial list only!) listed below and pick up a copy of the official guide and map. Also, call ahead for reservations and information.
21 Club
Aquavit Cafe
Aquavit Dining Room
Artisanal
Asia de Cuba - New York
Blue Smoke
Blue Water Grill
Brasserie 8 1/2
Butter
Café Boulud
Café des Artistes
China Grill - New York
Craftbar
davidburke & donatella
Dawat
Delmonico's
Devi
Django
Eleven Madison Park
English Is Italian
Fiamma
Dinner
Estiatorio Milos
Fleur de Sel
Gramercy Tavern
Lunch Only
JoJo
Lunch Only
Jovia
Le Colonial
Mesa Grill
Molyvos
Naples 45
Nice Matin
One if by Land, Two if by Sea
Dinner Only
Ono
Patroon
Payard Patisserie & Bistro
Periyali
River Cafe
Roy's - New York
Sea Grill
Tabla
Thalassa
The Modern - Bar Room
Tribeca Grill
Union Square Cafe
Vong - New York
Water's Edge
Tags:
glam, great deals, prix fixe, restaurant week
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Posted on 1/16/2006
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January 03, 2006
The Other Side of Addiction
How Cool Are You?
The recent tabloid photos of Kate Moss snorting cocaine in an urban restroom were very entertaining to many people across the globe, and maybe even inspiring to those who seek the hip and the cutting edge. Certainly as the poster child of “heroin chic”, Miss Moss has been celebrated, photographed, blogged upon, and written about. In some cases, the rhetoric describing her lifestyle verges on the romantic. The mystery of a young, attractive woman who needlessly falls prey to drug addiction is the stuff of hit movies for screen bobbles like Angelina Jolie. There is something of the tragic hero in the famous and beautiful who can claim addiction to a harsh master like cocaine or heroin. Perhaps it is masochistic voyeurism that leads us to find this addiction fascinating. Perhaps we are just bored out of our minds – a sad state of affairs, especially in a city like New York.
But for those of us who have seen dear friends and family members slide ever further down that slippery slope of abysmal suffering, the scene is not so romantic. Addiction eats away at life, at hopes and dreams and indeed at
humanity. It destroys more than the addict; it breaks the hearts of mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers, daughters and sons; it tears families apart and estranges children from parents, friends from friends, human being from life on earth. 11.0pt; font-family: "Century Gothic"; ">
What All Young Drug Users Should Know
Addiction is not a stage prop; it is not the stuff that makes a person interesting or talented; it is not something to be emulated or romanticized in sleek movies or
photographs; it is not something that anyone should aspire to.
This Morning on a Manhattan Bound L Train
This morning at 7AM, a bedraggled group of young adults, no more than 20 years old, pushed their way into the L train, reeking of alcohol, cigarettes and excess. They were completely entertained by their altered states, loudly bragging about how much they had imbibed, smoked, popped and snorted. They laughed, giggled, made faces at the morning commuters, and acted in the way that many young people do as they push into and challenge the world around them. But to me, it was neither funny nor entertaining, not because I am cranky at 7AM (I will not lie, I am surly), but rather because I know the many forked roads down which such excessive reveling can take a person.
The Other Side of Addiction Of the people I love most in the world, two are racked by addition. One is a close friend of over twenty years who has peaks and valleys as dramatic as the Colorado Rockies. She is a brilliant wordsmith, a comedienne of galactic proportion and one of the most creative people I have ever known. But the monster of addiction snaps at her heels and howls in her ears, never leaving her alone for too long. Try as she might, she will never be able to control this demon. Living in the modern age is complicated enough and beset with pitfalls that no amount of careful parenting could have prepared us for, but to have piled on top of that an addiction beyond heroic measure is hard to imagine. My friend has learned to stay one step ahead of this monster, but just one step. Sadly, the same cannot be said for my aunt.
Only four years older than I am, my aunt has been addicted to different degrees to several different substances since we were in our teens. At any given time she might be drinking impressive amounts of alcohol, snorting cocaine, raving on the Ex, free-basing whatever is around, or doing crystal meth. No one of these things is better than the others, more glamorous, more s-s-sexy. But somehow I doubt that if Kate Moss had been seen doing crystal meth rather than cocaine she would not have been as well received in her naked addiction. Snorting expensive cocaine seems to have an additional cache, something more primal. On Christmas Day, my aunt was in jail on possession charges. We made the hard decision to leave her there this time.
To see my aunt sliding down that slippery slope and knowing that no amount of conversation,no amount of love, no amount of best wishes can stop her from destroying herself is sometimes more than I can bear. It is heartbreaking. It is scary. It is inexplicable.
When she was young, curly haired and rosy cheeked, it might have been chic or cool or somehow even sexy to see her buzzed, or to have her take a trip on the LSD railroad and giggle all night long in that perverse state between innocence and addict. I suppose that the memory is worthy of a song or a movie script – yes, her story and hundreds of thousands of similar stories. It is now a tired theme.
Think Beyond the Buzz
When I see these young people on the train or the bus or the subway, laughing and joking about how cool it is to drink too much or to do cocaine or some other home manufactured drug, I feel sad. At least one of these youths will end up like my aunt and will break the hearts of her daughter, mother, sisters and friends. It is not that experimentation is an evil; it won't go away, it is part of human nature. But the danger for those who have a predisposition to addictive behavior is that they are opening a very scary door.
In a world where there is so much to stimulate our minds and our senses, many of choose instead to drug ourselves into oblivion, whether to fit in, to be hip, to escape, to drop out. And there lurks that monster that is Addiction, a horrifying spectre that lives inside some of us, and we have allowed it a way out.
Tags:
addiction, hip, kate moss, l train, monsters
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Posted on 1/3/2006
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January 02, 2006
Fake ID’s, Glitterettes and the Cosmo: The Tribulations of Being Sexually Active and Under Age
Last Friday, December 30th, while on my southward trek home, I was swarmed by a pack of young Westchester glitterettes suffering through that difficult age between 18 and 21, when hormones scream out “touch me!” and the bartender says, “that ID just won’t cut it, little sister”. They were overly made up, reaching for some kind of Sex-In-The-City glam but failing due to the sheer thickness of their Clinque Acne Cover and Extend-A-Lash.
They flopped down around me and I sat invisible as they ooh-ed and awed over their brand spankin’ new fake New York State Drivers Licenses. Good thing I am not involved in a branch of law enforcement.
NOSTALGIA
I reached the legal age of 19 while living in Texas, one of the last states to change the legal drinking age to 21. But then the rug was pulled out from under us and we were forced to stay home and watch family TV on Saturday nights.
But before we were criminalized, we used to head to Scooter’s Ice House for a little dancin’ and drankin’, pool playin’ and honky-tonkin’. We got all of our vices satisfied in one tin building on the Outer Loop. I was not seriously damaged by being allowed to legally drink before the age of 21.
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The glitterettes around me had a leader, as all glam packs and pack-ettes have. She set the tone for the evening, telling her friends how to order a Cosmo so as not to give away their novice state.
“Just look at the bartender like you’ve done it a thousand times and say, ‘I’ll have a Cosmo’,” she advises. “Like you’ve got a cigarette in your hand. You know, like Samantha.”
A timid little glitterette looks nervously at her fake license, sweat forming on her fingertips as she gazes in disbelief at her take ID.
“What if he cards me?” she asks nervously.
“Just keep talking to whoever and then pull it out of your wallet without looking at him. You know, like you’re his boss, because, in reality, you are. You’re paying him for the drink,” the head glitterette says.
She leans back into her seat and gazes contentedly on her crew, clearly assured that of the five sparkling young ones she sparkles the brightest. She has done this a thousand times.
The more I looked at them, the more I reviewed how stupid it is to allow people to fight in a war, vote, get married, become parents, own property and get into debt while prohibiting them from having a glass of wine. But then these girls were looking for more than a glass of wine; they were looking to live out a little of the fantasy that television and the movies wrap around glitter, glam and the bar scene. But these glitterettes should remember that those of us who do know how to lounge at the cocktail bar and fondle our exposed bra straps in just the right way can spot a novice coming down the block, and so can any seasoned bartender.
NOSTALGIA
When I was a glitterette, Cosmos had not been invented. I used to drink Salty Dogs or Whiskey Sours, as if I were some kind of cigar smoking salesman. And then Sex on the Beach and Panty Burners arrived, and we giggled at them, titillated by the fact that both drinks laid out the obvious goal of the evening. Oh, we were soooo bad!
While I am sure that each of these new glitterettes still live comfortably middle class and at home, I am concerned that they are still stuck in Cosmo drive; really, if they are going to go to the expense of a fake ID and a couple of clearly adult outfits, they should explore other drink options; a Cosmo, Long Island Ice Tea, and any drink with Jagermeister are clues that the guest is underage.
While I sympathize with the young ones wishing to belly up to the bar, the risks are great; such behavior puts the bartender in the position of breaking the law, and if an underage drinker stumbles out of the bar and in front of a taxi, the bartender is the one going to jail. So, while it is fun to giggle and guffaw at our fake ID’s and drinks like the Jagerbomb, it really isn’t fair to put the bartender in the position of being a criminal. Before getting blasted at a bar where the light level makes it difficult to verify the ID, think.
And stop wearing so much damn makeup! You don’t say “glam” as much as you shout out “under age!”.
Tags:
cosmo, fake id, glam, glitter, glitterettes, sex
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Posted on 1/2/2006
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