vip in the city

Sheng Wang noodles

For once, I didn’t have to rush back to the office after lunch, so we took the opportunity to venture a little farther in our eating adventures — east and south of Chinatown’s historic core, to the Fujianese-dominated quarter. We’d made a couple of noodle-inspired trips to these streets before, and in this cold, a bowl of some much-lauded spicy beef noodles seemed like just the thing. It was my first midday, mid-week jaunt to Super Taste, and I was surprised to find the noodle shop teeming with slurping diners — not an empty chair in sight.

Plan B brought us across Eldridge and down the stairs to Sheng Wang for the second time. The scene wasn’t much less crowded there, but ultimately we were able to snag the last two seats in the far corner table. From our chairs, we had a clear view into the rather dingy rear kitchen, where the Fuzhou fish balls are churned out en masse, and stacked on trays to dry out under oscillating fans. (Noodles seem to be pulled or cut by chefs in the second, smaller kitchen at the front of the shop.)

We ordered our bowls of the specialty hand-pulled noodles, which arrived in minutes, steaming hot and topped with chunky slices of tender beef, tangy pickled greens and those tasty pork-stuffed yu wan.  (SYB was missing out.)

Are there better places to enjoy a bowl of noodle soup? A recent round-up of the city’s Asian noodle soups in Paper  cited nearby Golden Dragon Restaurant (7 Eldridge Street), in addition to Super Taste and Sheng Wang. And if the Chowhound boards are to be believed, family-run Eastern Noodles, a.k.a. Eastern Authentic Noodle House, is another worthy contender, and located just west on Forsyth – where the shop relocated after departing the noodle epicenter that is Eldridge Street.

There will be other Thursdays.

Jeremy Kost exhibit

At the The Gallery of the SoHo Grand for a reception for the new exhibition by celebrity photographer Jeremy Kost’s “Not a Play Area.” Kost, who was the subject of a recent New York Times profile, is known for his unique use of a clunky Polaroid camera to capture scenes from the vibrant and gritty New York City nightlife and fame culture. Kost’s low-tech and intimate approach to celebrity portrait photography has earned him the reputation of the new “anti-paparazzi.” He is regular contributor to GIANT Magazine and is the sole artist behind his site, RoidRage.Com.

Provocative, blown-up Polaroids and sculpture lined the walls of the paneled gallery, which began to fill over the course of the night. It occured to me that this was just the sort of event Kost himself might mine for subject material; his previous coverage has included the Mission Impossible 3  premiere, the Independent Spirit Awards and the MTV Video Music Awards. How meta. Kost did eventually make an appearance that night to mingle among the crowds – albeit without his trusty camera.

Interspersed among the snapshots of famous faces, there are glittered club kids and elaborately made-up drag queens, offering a colorful representation of New York’s nightclub denizens, reminding us that somewhere, “the scene” still means much more than “models and bottles.”

“Not a Play Area” is on view through April 15, 2007.

Adult reading

Attended a reading of Christina Masciotti’s new work, Adult, as part of The New Group/New Works readings series. Masciotti’s previous works include 2004’s Hello School and The Collection, which had its run at chashama in Fall 2005.

Adult is a spare, two-character drama about the struggles of becoming an adult, and how it’s never too late to undertake the process. Stanley, a working class gun shop owner, is resigned to a solitary, aimless existence in his depressed Pennsylvania town. His life changes almost overnight when his formerly estranged daughter Tara decides to leave college to stay with him for a while. New York singer/songwriter Jimmie James (who wrote the songs for last year’s Everythings Turning into Beautiful ) gave a sensitive rendition of a man navigating the sometimes fraught relationships between fathers and daughters. NYU student Halley Wegryn Gross, who appeared with Ethan Hawke, Parker Posey, Bobby Cannavale, and Wallace Shawn in HurlyBurly in 2005, read the role of daughter Tara. The performances were directed by Ian Morgan, Associate Artistic Director of The New Group.

The event took place at the 4th floor studio theatre of Theatre Row, on 42nd Street between Ninth and Dyer Avenues, the last of which exists primarily to direct traffic and exhaust to and from the Lincoln Tunnel. Theatre Row — actually a five-theatre complex — premiered on the block in the 1970s when this stretch of 42nd street was a strictly low-rent neighborhood, rife with prostitutes, porn shops, massage parlors, and tenements. Playwrights Horizons moved to the area, west of the traditional theater district, in 1975, where it was instrumental in the revitalization of Theatre Row. Several more smaller theatres followed, opened by the state-sponsored 42nd Street Development Corporation to renew this desolate block.

The theatres are protected by a land-use covenant, but they were gutted and entirely rebuilt in a 2000 project that included new revenue-producing residential towers, a new Playwrights Horizons space, the Little Shubert, and a handful of smaller theatres, studios and rehearsal rooms.