“I like coffee and I like tea, I like the boys and the boys like me.”
The Mad Hatter
If this jump-rope rhyme doesn’t bring you back to early spring—the week or two when winter gives in and it’s not painful to be outside for the first time in months—then, well, you probably didn’t spend your childhood jumping rope. To me, this rhyme conjures what is best about springtime— walking without a destination with a delicious iced tea in hand. If New York was a beverage then it would, of course, be coffee. But there is something refreshing about stepping outside of the city’s speed and energy associated with coffee, and instead indulging in a light tea. So when the temperature hit 60 degrees last week, I decided it was time to take my friend to locate the tea cafes that would engage my spring bliss. My two favorite discoveries were The Tea Spot (127 MacDougal at the corner of West 3rd) and Teany (90 Rivington Street between Orchard and Ludlow). Read the complete post »
No Comments | Posted on March 29, 2009 | Categories: From the Blog
“Schvitz” means “sweat” in Yiddish, and nothing combats the grimy cold of a Slavic ghetto or a New York March quite like one. If you’re not feeling a trek to Brighton Beach for the preferred body-cleaning, head-clearing diversion of everyone from Tsarist generals to Orthodox rabbis, the venerable Russian Turkish Baths on East Tenth Street has been faithfully serving Manhattan’s tense and grimy, both foreign and domestic, since 1892.
Dropping $30 for a day-long membership will get you into a locker and a pair of Soviet-issue bathing trunks, a graying shapeless sack with two randomly punched legholes. In fact, it’s quite comfortable, as well as convenient and good for camouflage amongst the regulars. But honestly, no disguise is necessary. Despite a preponderance of spidery blue prison tats, everyone’s quite friendly … not like the bathhouse’s bad old days, when the bath attendants were purportedly all deaf-mutes, the better for old-school Russian mobsters to discuss Mafiya business undisturbed, and indiscreet bathers who didn’t leave the Turkish sauna when trade conversations got sensitive might never come upstairs to retrieve their clothes and watches – this last, at least, according to one expansive walrus-like bather holding court in that selfsame bloody room. Read the complete post »
No Comments | Posted on March 24, 2009 | Categories: Dining, From the Blog
tags: Russians
pretty
Bacon, lettuce, and tomato? No: Bistro Laurent Tourondel. Is it vainglorious egomania or shrewd marketing to give your restaurant brand the same name as one of the most beloved sandwiches of all time, especially if you’re not going to serve bacon at all of them? …Yes? BLT Fish, for example, doesn’t have an ounce of Bacon on the menu. BLT Burger, where I ventured on a recent rainy Tuesday, is not guilty of nearly as much cognitive dissonance: they have a burger with bacon on it, the—no surprises here—“BLT,” 7 ounces of grilled certified angus beef with double smoked bacon, L, T, and BLT Burger Sauce. It’s $11, plus another $1 for cheese (blue, Vermont cheddar, American, Swiss, or jack). There’s also a standard array of burger-joint sides: skinny fries (meh), waffle fries, sweet potato fries, chili cheese waffle fries (meh plus), fried dill pickles (pretty good!), and so on. Plus, you know, other burgers (including a $16 wagyu beef burger), but no one in my party of 8 had eyes for anything but the BLT. And we’re all watching our weight, so no one ordered one of the beautiful milkshakes. Oh well.
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No Comments | Posted on March 6, 2009 | Categories: Dining, From the Blog, Manhattan
tags: Burgers, gambit
Morningside Heights, Manhattan- In a groundbreaking new move, Columbia University has decided to open a Center for Advanced Cheeseburger Studies at the Morningside Heights campus. It is located in Lerner Hall, known for its forward thinking innovations in salty pasta and laxative stir-fries, and replaces the failed Institute for Critical Pizza Research. Read the complete post »
No Comments | Posted on March 6, 2009 | Categories: Dining, From the Blog, Manhattan, Morningside Heights
tags: Burgers, Cheese, Expensive, Mediocrity, Morningside Heights
The Burger
Park Slope, Bk– Global environmental crisis be damned, I still love beef, and I still love it on a bun. Luckily, we are also in the middle of a global burger renaissance. Maybe in the future overpopulation and global warming will force us all to east cold soy cakes and rice three meals a day, but for now beef is still cheap and burgers are still delicious.
I’m going to have to go ahead and give myself a shout out for earlier predicting the rise of the scrappy fast food style burger over the decadent gourmet burger, and this was even before the recession. What foresight! Today the brioche bun burger, with its Kobe beef patty and cave-aged Gruyere, simply seems out of touch with the global recession, a hangover of the thankfully short-lived trend of dolling up hometown classics with fancy ingredients and big price tags. So now it’s back to basics with white bread buns, thin patties, and the classic fixins: shredded iceberg lettuce, a thin slice of tomato, and pickles. Also, a price tag in the single digits. Read the complete post »
No Comments | Posted on March 6, 2009 | Categories: Dining, From the Blog, Manhattan
tags: beer, Burgers, Delicious, Eating, Food, Global Environmental Crisis
