vip in the city, page 9

After 46 meatless days, I indulged in a carnivore’s combination of lamb and ham at J and J’s Easter brunch. Quiche, too, a baby spinach salad, a glazed lemon cake (my contribution), and a delightful apple strudel from Andre’s Hungarian Pastry Shop. In 2005, New York director/screenwriter Nora Ephron wrote a mouth-watering valentine to the bakery’s cabbage strudel, which I’ve not forgotten to this day.

Perhaps it was a shock to the vegetarian system, but my stomach felt… well, not-so-great after eating all that meat. Maybe psychosomatic, but maybe not. (Good thing I didn’t enact my original “Easter porterhouse” plan. ) Looking then to ease into my regular diet, by evening, I was back to eating fish.

B and I ended up at Amber Asian Bistro — an offshoot of a well-liked UES Asian fusion restaurant that recently opened in the old Aegean Restaurant space on the corner of Columbus and 70th Street. The place has been swanked up a bit since its neighborhood Greek restaurant days with the addition of a lounge area, back bar, lots of dark wood and a hip lighting scheme. Judging from the crowds, Amber is off to a solidly popular start, giving Tenzan some healthy competition.

Wasabi Shumai — mushy, and a bit of a miss for me:

There were a couple of intriguing-sounding “Amber Style Ceviches” on the menu, one of which touted an “e.v.o.o lemon-lime dressing.” Yes, it actually said “e.v.o.o.”; I could not order it on principle.

I was satisfied with my rolls, but most notable was the nigiri: the pieces of fish were fresh and prettily presented, but disconcertingly big… bigger even than the oversized “American-style” slabs at Yama. I’ll be interested to hear what the sushi purists will have to say about this one.

There are few things SYB enjoys more than assisting tourists: hardly a week goes by without his proactively offering directions to bewildered-looking foreigners. German speakers, in particular, will capture his attention… as will fetching French women, as was the case with RM’s guests, whom we met at his St. Patrick’s Day soirée in Sunnyside. MB and JA were in town for just over a week, and fortunate I think to have such attentive and enthusiastic boosters for New York City at their disposal.

I crossed paths with the touring trio on Sixth Avenue, as they were heading into the MoMA to take advantage of Target Free Friday Nights when museum admission is complimentary from 4–8PM. All other times, it’s a rather steep $20, which explains this insane queue for entry.

So despite the fact that my MoMA membership card would earn me line-jumping privileges, I knew that every single one of these people would make it inside the museum eventually, and I didn’t particularly want to be there when they did. Not when I could check out the acclaimed “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit any other time… through May 12, anyway.

I met up with SYB, MB and JA a couple of hours later at Amazing 66, where we gave our visitors an authentic taste of Chinatown. Tonight’s menu overlapped much of the Mardi Gras meal -– with the short rib-stuffed pumpkin and steamed whole flounder the unqualified hits of the night — but in the excitement of feasting, I neglected to order the “Salad Walnut Prawns” — sorry, HYB! Afterwards, the nine of us made the obligatory post-dinner visit to the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory around the corner.

After the couples took their leave, it was up to the B brothers and me to plan out the rest of our evening. The night was still young, but, as it turned out, so were our guests; JA was a couple weeks shy of her 21st birthday, which strictly limited our options. Three native New Yorkers, and not one of us could immediately think of a place to spend a Friday night that did not involve drinking, or that at least required guests to be of drinking age. Embarrassing, actually – and a testament to how very long it had been since any of us had to take such matters into consideration.

I remembered what fun we’d had at J’s birthday celebration in December, and suggested Fat Cat Billiards on Christopher, both for its live music and its low-key vibe. Under 21 welcome! The $3 cover got us into the basement saloon, stocked with pool and ping pong tables, shufflepuck and foosball (“baby-foot” in France, I learned), chess and board games galore. The women, though, seemed most entranced by the live performances, and the well-over-21 among us were more than happy to settle into the worn couches for the next couple of hours to catch the sets by The Gospel Queens of Brooklyn and one very talented jazz octet.

We crossed the West Side Highway at lunchtime this afternoon to attend the “Winter’s Palate” tasting festival at The World Financial Center — the cooler weather version of last July’s “Summer’s Palate.”

Except that when we arrived at the Winter Garden, the atrium was suspiciously quiet, save for the usual scattered assortment of suits and tourists. Where were the promised lobster ravioli and sushi, silky gelato and mini-burgers, “prepared to please the most discriminating palates”?

After making some inquiries, we finally got our answer from the staff at Godiva Chocolate: the event had been canceled, but apparently not removed from the WFC’s online Calendar of Events. Grrr.

Well, there’s always Ho Yip to fall back on.

View of the construction activity at Ground Zero:

This spring, the frame of the Freedom Tower will rise above street level for the first time, with steel that has made its long journey from Luxembourg (where the columns are forged and cast) to Lynchburg, Virginia (where they’re cut to size), to a final home in Lower Manhattan.

Watch the progress of the project via live webcam.

After work, CF and I headed into Brooklyn Heights for dinner at one of her favorite neighborhood spots. Just one stop from Wall Street, up the unreliable elevators and north along Henry Street, we came upon a signless storefront with a wrought-iron picture window, near pretty Cranberry Street.

The name of the restaurant is Noodle Pudding — and it’s no secret to Brooklyn Heights residents, who pack the place regularly. Contrary to what the name might suggest, it is not a Jewish deli, but a trattoria. The dimly lit dining room was warmly appointed with mahogany accents, glowing chandeliers, artwork-laden ocher and exposed brick walls. Solid, inexpensive Italian fare with pastas in the $9-13 range, meat entrées topping out around $22 for the Osso Buco. In 2006, the New Yorker deemed Noodle Pudding “the epitome of a decent neighborhood restaurant.”

According to CF, who dines here on a near-weekly basis, the restaurant’s specials are consistently good. Her favorite among them is the pasta with wild boar ragù (also a specialty of The Violent Femmes’ Brian Ritchie as I recall) — this endorsement coming from a vegetarian. That particular dish wasn’t on the menu tonight, so I was not tempted to break Lent. (Five more days until Easter…!) I can, however, recommend my Strozza Preti Alla Sicilian (pasta with eggplant, tomato and ricotta), which was fresh and simply prepared, accompanied by a very reasonably priced glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo — my favorite everyday wine of late. (Pair it with pizza!)

About that confounding name: according to The Rough Guide to New York City Restaurants, Noodle Pudding is so called because the proprietor, Antonio Migliaccio, is known to his Jewish friends as “Mr. Kugel,” which is the rough Italian-to-Yiddish translation of his surname. So many of Migliaccio’s friends ribbed him over his choice of restaurant name that he decided to forgo a sign in front. ”Honestly,” he said, ”I got embarrassed.“

The dessert offerings included a bread pudding ($5), but oddly enough, not a single noodle pudding.

Tile mural inside the Clark Street subway station via the entrance of the Hotel St. George, once the largest hotel in New York City:

We arrived at Lincoln Center this evening to find another phase of the Plaza renovation underway. In addition to the plywood fencing erected throughout, both the driveway and the Revson Fountain had been closed to accommodate the construction. Click here to view a short video of what the newly transformed entrance to Lincoln Center will look like when this work is completed.

Below, the banner for Satyagraha, Philip Glass’s landmark 1980 work about Mahatma Gandhi’s formative experiences in South Africa, set to text from the Bhagavad Gita. The Met premiere coincides with The Satyagraha Project, a public forum inspired by Gandhi’s philosophies of actively engaging the world’s ills through nonviolence.

Months ago, we had ordered these tickets to Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in heady anticipation of catching operatic dream team Ben Heppner and Deborah Voigt, singing together for the first time. Unfortunately, bad luck and stars’ illnesses plagued nearly the entire six-performance run of the Met revival.

To begin… Prior to opening night, Heppner, who the Times has called “the reigning Wagnerian tenor of our day,” was sidelined by an initially misdiagnosed blood-borne infection. His understudy, Canadian tenor John Mac Master, replaced him in the March 10 opener to mostly negative reviews and ill-mannered audience boos. (We disapprove!) For the second performance, Mac Master was swapped out for American Gary Lehman, who fared slightly better in his Met debut. Voigt, however, fell ill in the middle of Act II, and was replaced by Upper West Side native Janice Baird, also making her Met debut, resulting in the March 14 performance finishing out with neither of the originally billed singers in the title roles.

For our third performance on Tuesday night, Voigt was back on stage performing opposite Lehman, but the night was interrupted in the third act when an errant set piece raked the tenor into the prompter’s box. The opera was stopped while Lehman was examined by a doctor, who eventually cleared him to continue. Longtime conductor James Levine led the orchestra at our performance, and drew cheers from this New York crowd — one of the few constants in a run as unstable as a Tristan chord.

Performance #4 featured tenor #3: Robert Dean Smith in his Met debut — a Saturday matinee which was telecast in high-definition to theaters worldwide. When Heppner was finally cleared to perform the penultimate night, it was Voigt who was M.I.A. — laid low by the stomach ailment and fever that had plagued her during the second performance. (Baird, once again, stepped in as Isolde.)

And so, in an unprecedented and magnanimous move, and to celebrate the long-delayed Heppner-Voight pairing, the Met decided to stream the sixth and final Tristan und Isolde performance live on its website. Not quite the same as being there inside the opera house, but on a quiet Friday night, I’ll take it. Bravo!

Erin Go Bragh! Despite the Catholic Church’s decision last summer to reschedule the March 17 holiday for March 15 so as not to coincide with the second day of Holy Week, New York City held its annual St. Patrick’s Day parade this morning. The Church has a history of involvement in these celebrations: in 2000 and 2006, when the holiday fell on a Friday in Lent, during which Catholics are to abstain from eating meat, the Archdiocese of New York issued a special dispensation allowing its 2.5 million Catholics residing in Manhattan, Bronx, Staten Island and several upstate counties to eat meat on March 17. Catholics in Brooklyn and Queens received no such pass from their Archdiocese, and were instructed to perform another act of penance if compelled to indulge in corned beef on that day.

Unlike last year, the city’s official St. Patrick’s Day festivities fell during normal work hours, so I missed out on the parade fun along Fifth Avenue. Guinness is behind Proposition 3-17 — a campaign to make St. Patrick’s Day an official holiday in the United States. No matter, I was able to catch the all inclusive parade in Western Queens earlier this month.

At Irish bars throughout Manhattan, the drinking had begun in earnest well before noon, but my plans for the evening involved a trip on the 7 into Sunnyside, which along with neighboring Woodside, is one of the city’s historic Irish enclaves. Since the 1990s, while other ethnic communities have moved into these neighborhoods, the Irish population has dwindled as longtime residents move out of the city or back to Ireland, spurred by the country’s renewed economy and the end of the Troubles of Northern Ireland.

The Empire State Building aglow in green, of course:

At RM’s home in the Gardens, we caught up with friends recently seen and not so over cold beer and treats from El Shater. The night was marked by valiant attempts at Irish dancing and a rousing, lyrically mangled rendition of “Danny Boy,” (which sounded rather like this one)… by all accounts a fine, fun gathering marred only by a brief, but mortifying episode which included the most appalling party exchange since… well, in a long, long time.

How to keep track of these ever-morphing Chinatown restaurant names? New York Noodletown on Bowery begat Great N.Y. Noodletown, Big Wong on Mott begat New Big Wong which begat Big Wong King… all while management and menus seemed to remain staunchly constant. And now…

On Bayard Street, I noticed a new sign being tacked up over this restaurant, which for years has been dishing up delicious dumplings (both soup and fried varieties) under the name “New Green Bo“:

Curious indeed.

We drove up into the Poconos Mountains this semi-stormy Sunday, to the area around Lake Wallenpaupack. Just two hours from the city, there were rafters of wild turkey and herd of deer milling about, most of whom seemed more curious than timid of our wanderings through their woods.

On the Delta website to purchase a flight out to Seattle, I noticed an option to add $5.50 to my ticket price for a compensatory tree-planting program to offset carbon emissions.

To help protect the special places that Delta flies throughout the world, Delta’s Force for Global Good has partnered with The Conservation Fund to plant trees that will help offset carbon emissions… Contributions of $5.50 for a domestic roundtrip flight and $11 for an international roundtrip flight will be used by The Conservation Fund to plant trees throughout the U.S. and abroad.

No real information was available about how the offset would be calculated, other than to note that “The Conservation Fund uses standards and procedures set forth by Greenhouse Gas Protocol to estimate carbon offset amounts.”

In an October 2006 article for The Guardian, British environmentalist and writer George Monbiot compared carbon offsets to the medieval practice of purchasing indulgences from the Catholic Church. Though the analogy is imperfect as it somewhat misrepresents the concept of indulgences, Monbiot suggested that carbon offsets offer an easy excuse for individuals not to modify their bad practices with regard to pollution.

I don’t know how I feel about this concept of expiating one’s “environmental sins” — and yes, they are sins now — through financial contributions to some temporal authority, even one as seemingly worthy as The Conservation Fund. Quite clearly, simply using carbon offsets to justify a more carbon-intensive lifestyle will not result in overall carbon-emission reductions; it’s rather more important to live conscientiously, actively reducing the amount of waste and carbon we produce on a daily basis. As a New Yorker, I’ve already got a head start.

Related: City Council Approves Congestion Pricing, 30-20. Onward to Albany!

Back at the MoMA theaters for “Canadian Front, 2008” — a collection of feature films from our neighbors to the North. Last year’s opening film, Sarah Polley’s Away From Her went on to earn Catherine Deneuve a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a still vibrant woman ravaged by Alzheimer’s.

This year’s festival featured a week-long engagement of Poor Boy’s Game, directed by Clément Virgo and co-written with Nova Scotian writer/director Chaz Thorne. The film premiered at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival and was selected later that year for inclusion at the Toronto Film Festival. It stars Rossif Sutherland, the 6’5″ dark eyed, half-brother of Kiefer and son of Donald.

Sutherland plays Donnie Rose, a brooding young man recently released from prison, where he has served nine years for a brutal beating that left a black teenager handicapped for life. Nine years later, Donnie is a changed man, but his gritty, racial tension-filled surroundings in Halifax remain much the same. Sparked by the desire to settle old scores, a local boxing champ from the black community (Flex Alexander) arranges a grudge-match with Donnie. And although it’s clear that the intent is bloody vengeance, Donnie accepts the challenge and the $20,000 payment to fight. The victim’s father (Danny Glover), moved by a desire to overcome the violence of his and Donnie’s shared past, forms a tortured and unlikely alliance with the ex-con, leading up to a climactic showdown in the ring.

I’ve seen my share of mass destruction on film, but something about boxing movies always makes me cringe behind my fingers.

After dinner, we did some date location scouting in Midtown — no, not for me — passing Elmo along the way.

I’d been intrigued by Kyotofu, the Hell’s Kitchen branch of a Kyoto dessert bar and cafe chain, since it opened in October 2006, touting Japanese-inspired, homemade tofu-rich desserts. New York magazine called Kyotofu “a magnet most nights for dainty, delicate females and chirpy, dessert-nibbling aesthetes of the opposite sex,” which described the clientele inside architect Hiro Tsuruta’s mod, white jewel box of a dining room pretty accurately. We settled into stools around the front bar, in full view of the glass enclosed kitchen, to sample two desserts from chef Ritsuko Yamaguchi’s menu of sweet and stylish tofu, fruit, green tea, chocolate and sesame creations. (The cafe also features an extensive cocktail and beverage list, light savory bites, and on occasion, Sunday tea service.)

The Tofu Cheese Cake, topped with candied ginger, was wonderfully airy with a hint of tanginess, but I loved Kyotofu’s “Signature Sweet Tofu,” served with a shallow boat of kuromitsu black sugar syrup, candied apricot and a crispy black sesame tuile. The silken texture was reminiscent of the Chinese doufu fa, but creamier, with just the right amount of sweetness. Ed Levine called the dessert “strangely beguiling.”

Downtown location coming this summer.

This blog post’s title is inspired by The New York Post‘s infamous 1989 “Easy as Pi” headline, which appeared over a front page image of illegally obtained answers to that day’s New York State Chemistry Regents. The publication resulted in a massive run by high schoolers to purchase The Post, followed by the abrupt cancellation of the statewide exam on my birthday — so awesome! — and raised all sorts of controversy regarding the paper’s journalistic ethics.

On the 20th anniversary of Pi Day, 3.14 (naturally), SYB hosted a Pi(e)-themed potluck. Fellow pi and pie enthusiasts gathered in Sunnyside to enjoy the bounty of foods that were either in pie form, or related to π, i.e., round, spherical, cylindrical or conical. For the occasion, I made a round vegetarian shepherd’s pie — if such a thing can still be called “shepherd’s pie” — substituting a combination of portobello, cremini, oyster and shiitake mushrooms for the ground lamb layer.

This year, The New York Times ran a “Win a Pie on Pi Day” contest, soliciting submissions of poems about pi (“piems”?) or pi-ku (in three-line, 3-1-4 syllable format.) The most useful of these, like the MIT cheer “Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3.14159!,” aid in the recall of the digits of pi. Among the the pi mnemonics I know of — most of which assign digits based on the number of letters in each corresponding word — my favorite remains: “How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!”

The current world record for pi memorization belongs to Japanese mental health counselor (ha, now that’s ironic!) Akira Haraguchi, who managed to recite pi to 100,000 decimal places in 2006. I very humbly top out at about 35 decimal places — sufficient for computing the circumference of the known universe with an error no greater than the radius of a hydrogen atom.

Yeah, I think I can live with that.

In Times Square on Pi Day:

Oh, and despite never having taken those pesky Chem Regents, I can still chuckle appreciatively over the existence of Mole Day, celebrated annually on October 23 from 6:02AM to 6:02PM, i.e., 6:02 10/23. I leave it to SYB to devise an appropriate potluck theme in honor of that occasion. (“Avocado,” perhaps? *Groan*)