Sunday, July 31, 2005
Fresh fish daily
We went to Philadelphia this weekend to attend a bar mitzvah -- excitement enough for any man you might say but we managed to tack on a meal at the Striped Bass. The restaurant's chef de cuisine, Christopher Lee, was awarded this year's James Beard Rising Star Award and I had met him in NY in June while doing the Citymeals story for Gourmet (see previous post). The Citymeals event itself, held in Rockefeller Center every year, is sort of like a food court in heaven must be, with relative newbies like Lee and Scott Howard whipping up little appetizers alongside such stalwarts as Charle Trotter and Susan Spicer. Lee's offering was a tasty yet not terribly surprising appetizer portion of striped bass, which did nothing to perpare me for Friday's meal.
While Lee may be leaning on the legacy of owner and mentor Alfred Portale (whose Gotham restaurant here made him synonymous with tall food) in presentation, there is a wacky and inventive side to his dishes that seems his alone. The flash-seared tuna I had, for instance (crispy on the outside, purple rare on the inside) was flavored with little bee-bees of basil "caviar" -- I don't know how he does it but trust me, it looks like green caviar but tastes like basil, and sometimes he does the same thing with mandarin oranges -- and served with a small square of braised short ribs. (Oh that, you're saying, yeah I made that for dinner myself last night.) To top it all off the whole plate looked like a page of Japanese caligraphy, complete with exclamation marks. I'm hoping Lee returns to his native New York and sets up shop someplace here.
The salmon I had at the party after the bar mitzvah was not quite in the same league but neither was it like unto a large pencil eraser, which is sometimes the case at such affairs. To be honest this is only the second bar mitzvah I have attended (Jews were is short supply in Auburn, California) so I don't have much to compare it to. The service itself was more comprehensible than the last one had been, thanks in large part to my friend Jess Greenbaum who supplied me with crib notes ahead of time. The singing was not as elaborate as I had hoped and no one threw candy (they had at the previous bar mitzvah I had attended at the Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn; perhaps they were trying to keep the kids in attendance on their toes). Our 12-year-old daughter Franny sat through the three-hour service with a minimum of fidgeting though afterwards she told her mother, "I will never complain about church again."
The party was held in a banquet hall a few miles from the synagogue and the bar mitzvah boy, Elliot, got to enjoy the fruits of his labors: the envelopes filled with cash that caused Franny to consider converting. My questions here were of a more prosaic nature: What becomes of the cake in the shape of a Torah? It wasn't with the other desserts. Or is it not a real cake at all? Elliot's parents, Alan and Diane, live in Italy now and were enduring the culture shock of the familiar with joy and a modicum of irony. "The last time I saw you was in Rome, near Fellini's old apartment," he shouted at me as the band blew through a klezmer version of "Food, Glorious Food." "Now we're in 'Goodbye, Columbus.'"
No goose carved from pate, though.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Spice of life
Yesterday I had lunch with chef Scott Howard, who after five years overseeing the well-regarded restaurant Fork in San Anselmo, California, is on the verge of opening his own restaurant in San Francisco. Scott was in New York doing a tour of restaurants in the name of research (my kind of fact-finding mission), I had been trying to track him down for a piece I'm doing for Gourmet on the "rising star" chefs who took part in this year's annual Citymeals-on-Wheels event and he was one of the few I had yet to make contact with. We agreed to meet at the Spice Market, Jean-Georges Vongerichten's theme-park of a restaurant in the Meat Packing District.
I enjoyed meeting Scott; he was modest (especially for a fellow naming a restaurant after himself) and polite, exhibiting none of the sense of entitlement I have encountered in some up-and-coming chefs. But the real treat was his companion, the semi-legendary Cecilia Chiang, who opened the Mandarin restauant in SF in the sixties and has given lessons in Chinese cooking to Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl and Jeremiah Tower. Cecilia is both an investor and a consultant in Scott Howard (the restaurant, not the man) and as someone who has outlived both Trader Vic and Herb Caen, two of her original champions, she is a trove of SF restaurant lore.
Cecilia is in her eighties now though I would have pegged her for 70 in both looks and energy. We talked about the Yuet Lee, at Broadway and Stockton, where I used to dine after midnight back in my cab driving days. I told her I was there one night when the restaurant's original chef caught someone who tried to dine-and-dash and beat him with a baseball bat. That was nothing, she said. She was there the night a Chinese gang member came in and killed the cook for his outstanding gambling debts. (This was late, too, after the Mandarin had closed for the night. "When you are running a restaurant you never have time to eat," she said.) She also recalled Masa, the Japanese chef who took SF by storm in the eighties. He was killed, too -- stabbed a hundred times with an ice-pick -- also supposedly for owing money to the wrong people. The lesson, kids: Don't cook and gamble!
For the record, neither chef thought much of the Spice Market's fare, though both admired the road-to-Mandalay decor. Only one appetizer, an egg roll stuffed with mushrooms, stood out and the service was downright indifferent -- strange, given that I had told the maitre d' I was meeting some food luminaries for lunch. But Cecelia has seen it all in her time; as a child she endured the Japanese occupation during WWII and then fled, with her family, when Mao and his boys took over in 1949. Some relatives who remained were killed in the Cultural Revolution. What's a watery ice tea compared to the Red Guard?
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Lose fat, eat spam
This morning arrived a new brand of spam in my inbox (if that sentence seems out or order try rearranging it yourself), magazine ads -- one from the Atlantic (to which I subscribe) and one from Men's Health (to which I whole-heartedly do not). The Atlantic email contained links to stories that will appear in the September issue, including a funny piece by Walter Shapiro about the New York Times' new policy re unnamed sources. (Shapiro was unceremoniously canned by USA Today in the spring, after many years of writing one of the paper's most realiably readable columns. Going from there to the Atlantic is like being fired as a cook at a Red Lobster only to reappear as a guest chef at NY's Craft.) It's nice to find actual links to articles that will not appear in paper form for several weeks; thanks Atlantic Monthly.
The Men's Health spam came from I know-not-where and contains links to nothing but an offer to buy the Powerfood Nutrition Plan, "a revolutionary book that will help you shed fat, build mass and enhance your sexual performance in just 28 days." (They must have misread the form I filled out. I said Performance was my favorite Nic Roeg film. And I didn't say I wanted to shed fat, I said I wanted to shed FATE, and that I was going to Mass.)
How did they find me, I wonder? At some point Salon offered Best Life, a Men's Health spin off for men over 40, to their subscribers on a trial basis. And what a trial it has been! Note to BL editor Steve Perrine, who is a nice guy and has given me a few breaks in the past: The nice thing about turning 40, which I dimly recall, is that you have bigger things to worry about than getting six-pack abs. Like career death, ungrateful children, the hot breath of mortality.
Though a six-pack still sounds pretty good.
Friday, July 22, 2005
Check your bags?
Walking the dog this morning I came upon FOUR local news trucks gathered at the Lafayette Station subway entrance in Ft. Greene. A couple of reporters with microphones were standing a discreet distance from each other interviewing passersby. One woman seemed to be waiting for her turn to be interviewed. I asked her what was a happening while trying to make sure Riley didn't pee on the cables running from the news trucks.
"They're searching bags in the subway," she said.
Well, l knew that. They announced over the PA at the 14th Street station last night, and it was in the papers and on the radio this morning. But why were all the news trucks here? It turns out that the police weren't randomly searching bags at every station. Why had they picked Lafayette? Was it the proximity to mosques on Atlantic Avenue? The nearness of the Atlantic Avenue station itself, a target for terrorists back in '93?
And does that mean you could wander onto a subway platform in, say, Chelsea with all the C4 your bag could carry and not worry about being stopped?
This comes after more bombings (rather pathetic ones) in London yesterday, and a man being shot to death by cautious police at a tube station there this morning. The London police announced that they were going to start randomly searching bags and NY seems to have followed suit.
Yesterday I jumped on the B train, headed for my day job, running late as always. I had just heard about the new bombs in London and was wondering, like anybody who listened to the news: what the fuck? I got a seat (one of morning's small victories) and did my usual quick scan of the train. The fellow right across from me stood out; he was also standing up, even though there were seats available. He looked Arabic (in NY, really, who can tell?), he had a very large black backpack as his feet and he seemed...agitated. Sweaty. Eyes glassy. Nervously looking around. And as the train doors closed I found myself pretending to read the Times while looking at him over the paper and thinking: if he reaches for the bag, do I jump him? Try to get the bag away from him? Among the more bizarre ideas running through my mind were: maybe it's better to be this close, since the explosion will kill me instantaneously and, more pathetically, flipping through the international section: hey, look at me! I'm reading about how messed up things are in Iraq and tisk-tisking! Don't blow me up!
He got off at Rockefeller Center, along with me, no doubt headed for some job worse than mine. It was already in the nineties, which would account for the sweating, and the glassy eyes could well have been the by-product of working two jobs, as so many immigrants do. Assuming he was one. My fifteen minutes of paranoia are the by-product of listening to the BBC World News instead of Z-100. I hear that new song by the Pussy Cat Dolls is really smoking.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Open season on celebs
New York magazine's current cover story ("Celebrity and Its Discontents," by Vanessa Grigoriadis) is but the latest, and probably not the last, sign that it is now officially open season on celebs. Fueled by the unhinged antics of Tom Cruise et al and stoked by the demands of the tabloid press (is it just me or are you tired of reading about paparazzi?), the lid seems to be off. If TomBradBritneyRussell bugging makes them Bugs Bunny, it is, as Elmer Fudd opined, wabbit season.
When and why this happened has been subject to much speculation (TC firing Leslee Dart and hiring his sister as his publicist is one popular benchmark) -- indeed, Grigoriadis's piece speculates on the speculation in amusing fashion -- but it does seem to mark an amazing double standard. We hate them, we love them and we can't get enough of them, those gods and goddesses gamboling on Olympus there. Will there be a stop to the speculation sometime soon? If In Touch, Star, Us ad infinitum remain glutted with sometimes less-than-complimentary pictures and profiles of these wascally wabbits and their Jessicas will the supposedly more highbrow publications continue to write about the trend? Probably.
There was always a tipping point, even back in the day of studio cover, of Hedda and Louella. When Robt Mitchum got busted for pot they couldn't keep it out of the papers -- but he was so popular it mattered not a whit. (Russell Crowe could play him in a biopic.) In modern times, Whitney Houston had it coming for a long time. I profiled her for a fashion magazine ten years ago and the strain of -- what? drugs? Bobby? her sexuality? -- was already beginniing to show. More significantly, the people around her, from publicists to personal help, were already starting to grumble. And believe me, I wasn't exactly doing investigative reporting. She was there to "wear clothes," in the fashion mag parlance, and promote her new movie and album. And even though she lost her shit once in my presence and threw me out of the studio for no apparent reason, she came back the next day and made nice, charming me at the Polo Lounge, resplendent in dark glasses.
No more bounce backs for Whitney, unless you call her cameos on Being Bobby Brown a second act. It's the kind Todd Browning, director of Freaks, would have appreciated. Having reduced celebs to the state of abject misery enjoyed by most regular folks -- addiction, bad marriage, problems with the law -- reality TV makes them chant along with us: Gabba-gabba-hey. One of us.
Monday, July 18, 2005
The roving eye
As much as I'm enjoying the Karl Rove saga, I can't help but think it's going to all come to naught. Bush's loyalty combined with the public's apathy (I really can't believe the Dems can whip the avreage voter into a frenzy over a question of sourcing and confidentiality -- even the question of a covert agent's identity is confusing to many) means the ball will not be moved more than an inch on this one. And even if he leaves the White House he will just be running things from a undisclosed secure location, one that shares a cafeteria with Cheney's.
But with Matthew Cooper's version of events being published in Time today we get a rare glimpse of Rove's working style. Having dished the dirt on Wilson's wife, even if he wasn't playing the Plame game, Rove feigned a moment of conscience. "I've already said too much," he told the reporter, having just revealed that Ms. Wilson was a CIA operative. This is pure Mata Hari stuff: think of the woman in Help! who keeps telling Paul "I can say no more" about the plan of the Kali clan to sacrifice Ringo. Or Dianne Wiest in Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway, forever putting one gloved finger over John Cusack's lips and admonishing him: "Don't speak." Who knew Karl had such a flair for melodrama? "The memory of that line has stayed with me a couple of years now," Cooper told CNN's Howard Kurtz yesterday.
In other movie references, Cooper revealed that the "double super secret background" line he used in an email to describe the status under which Rove spoke was inspired by Animal House, in which Delta House was put on "double secret probation." Perhaps the NY Times's Judith Miller, who has gone to prison to protect the identity of the person who may or may not have told her Wilson's wife was a spook, will get to yell "Food fight!" in the cafeteria.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
The sweet pretty things are in bed now, of course
Greetings! It seems apt that my first official post goes up just before midnight since this is about the only time I can find to write. The CD player has just shuffled -- Johnny Cash, "Don't Take Your Guns to Town" to the Nevilles covering "The Rivers of Babylon" -- on some logic of its own and I'm headed for bed my ownself, sure to be asleep long before my daughter and her cousins who are upstairs watching MTV, which doesn't seem to actually show music videos anymore.
The weather in New York is dank and humid, fog like steam is obscuring the top of the Williamsburg Bank clock tower, which will not be the tallest building in Brooklyn anymore if Bruce Ratner has anything to say about it. Ft. Greene has changed since we moved here, almost eight years ago. Some of the townhouses on my side of the street have been selling for over a million dollars, which means the people who bought and renovated them don't actually have to be here when the weather is like this. They have summer homes, I suspect, leaving their stoops to be inhabited by the crackheads and winos who usually congregate in the little park at the end of the block. Things, in other words, have changed to remain the same. At least locally.
I got an email from our old neighbor Ishbel the day of the London bombings. She had relocated there after 9.11, in search of some sense of safety; you can read her story in "Escaped from New York" on the Articles page. She is expecting another child and is no doubt reconsidering the wisdom of her move. Meanwhile the local Brooklyn paper declared our local subway hub, the Atlantic Avenue station, "a prime target for terrorists." The cops and National Guardsmen on duty down there seem to agree.
The stereo has shuffled past Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys ("That Old Steel Guitar Rag") to Richard Thompson doing "You Dream Too Much" ("All my life I've been like this/I start thinking of a perfect kiss") -- "It's gonna end bad," he assures us but I just saw RT, playing for free right across from where the World Trade Center once stood and he was doing all right. Dressed all in black on a sultry summer evening but there wasn't anything mournful about it. Even his signature signoff, "The Dimming of the Day," didn't sound so sad.
Y'all come back now, here?
