vip in the city

Free ice cream!

On my way back to the office after lunch, I came upon this swirling, happy crowd, at the center of which was the Good Humor Man, handing out free ice cream to financial district workers on this unseasonably warm afternoon. Strawberry Shortcake, Chocolate Eclair, Toasted Almond, REESE’S Peanut Butter Cup and OREO bars… and it’s not even National Ice Cream Day!

I can’t remember the last time I had ice cream on a stick.

Did you know that the company also make ice cream sandwiches for dogs?

XO XO

On Walker Street for lunch at XO Cafe & Grill, presumably named for the Cantonese spicy seafood sauce, and not the extra old cognac or the affectionate sign-off. “You know you love me.”

Two things immediately gave me pause when we stepped inside. One: the giant fake tree smack in the middle of the dining room, strung with red paper cut-out hearts. And two: the Thai, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese and Szechuan items on the hodgepodge menu… despite which, there were still items which didn’t seem to fall under any of those categories. Baked razor clams with cheese? Dishes on rice… or spaghetti?

Lunch turned out all right anyway. Not many restaurants in Chinatown offer gyoza after all:

What is XO sauce, anyway? In 2000, William Grimes of The New York Times did some investigation into the origins of this curiously named sauce. (Brandy isn’t one of the ingredients; the “XO” is used to connote a similar luxury.) It first started cropping up on menus in Hong Kong in the 1980s, though the exact origin is unclear. High end restaurants began adding (and advertising) the strongly-flavored sauce in their stir-frys and braising liquids, or offering it as a premium condiment, and soon a culinary trend was born. The basic recipe calls for some combination of high-priced ingredients like conpoy (dried scallops), dried fish, dried shrimp and ham, blended with garlic, onion, chili peppers and oil. This “caviar of the Orient” is even now available in commercial versions, for time-pressed home cooks.

I Speak of the City

At the Times Square Visitors Information Center for a poetry reading celebrating the publication of I Speak of the City: Poems of New York. The event was sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, Columbia University Press and the Times Square Alliance.

Some of the city’s and the nation’s most prominent poets were in attendance tonight: Andrea Carter Brown, “neglected master” Samuel Menashe, Tom Sleigh and Gerald Stern. I met up with J just as “Hip-Hop poet” Kevin Coval took the stage. He was followed by The Nation‘s former poetry editor, award-winning poet and distinguished professor of English at Baruch, Grace Schulman:

Harvey Shapiro came up to the podium next — still spry for his 80+ years — reading his contributions from the landmark collection of poems about the city. Shapiro, onetime editor of The New York Times Book Review, has been called the “reigning laureate of New York’s vox populi” by The Times; his pieces this evening were inspired by his New York neighborhoods.

Though most of the attendees seemed to fit the prototype of those you’d expect to see at a poetry reading (scholarly, elderly), there were a few among the audience who broke that mold. I like to think that these two young lads wandered in from the street, and stayed on, riveted by the beauty of the prose.

Who says poetry is dead?

We didn’t stay for the entire event, or for the reception afterwards, but there will be another opportunity to mingle with the poets on Monday, October 29 when anthology editor Stephen Wolf and other contributors will be reading their impressions in verse at KGB Bar.

“I speak of the city that dreams us all, that all of us build and unbuild and rebuild as we dream, the city we all dream, that restlessly changes while we dream it, the city that wakes every hundred years and looks at itself in the mirror of a word and doesn’t recognize itself and goes back to sleep…”

— Octavio Paz, “I Speak of the City”