Bill's Bar and Burger

In the sepia-toned pre-internet days, restaurants slowly built their reputations through good word-of-mouth, positive reviews, and consistent quality over a long stretch of time. But explosion of online food coverage means that a consensus can form about a restaurant in about as much time as it would take you to peruse the menu. Take the case of Bill's Bar and Burger. This small, studiously casual Meatpacking District spot was acclaimed for serving one of the city's best burgers before it even opened, and the plaudits kept coming on opening weekend as people tripped over one another to get in on the ground floor.


Muttering to ourselves about the wisdom of crowds, we joined the fray. The menu is short and to the point: six burgers, a fish sandwich, a few bar-food afterthoughts, fries, and shakes, including a creamy vanilla. One pleasant touch is the "crispy veggie fries," which are lightly fried vegetables, salty and crisp.


But the burgers are the restaurant's raison d'être, of course. The meat, a "secret blend" courtesy of Pat La Frieda, is smash-grilled in the style of the now-canonical Shake Shack burger empire. This technique gives the burger a crunchy sear that brings out the salt in the meat and keeps the juices inside. For a relatively thin burger, it's quite beefy in flavor, and satisfyingly rich. We overheard a guy at another table say that he'd been there five days in a row.


Given all of the hoopla around Bill's, our biggest surprise was that it was full of families, as though it had been a community stalwart for years. If they keep it up, maybe it will be.

BETA Spaces

In theory, BETA Spaces, a one-day annual festival of the arts in Bushwick, lets viewers interact with creators, curators, and other folk in galleries around the neighborhood. In practice, most of the galleries were closed when we went by early Sunday afternoon. Still, we had a nice chat with the man in charge of Formless in Context: A Study of Chaos and Discourse, put on by New Experimental Cinema, which included this kooky diorama:

Vermeer's Milkmaid at the Met

In commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's arrival in what is now New York, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has loaned Johannes Vermeer's Milkmaid to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Though the accompanying exhibit makes much of Vermeer's context and the place of milkmaids in seventeenth-century Dutch culture, the real subject of the painting is light --- a clear and ravishing light that transforms, even if just for a moment, the utterly mundane into the utterly glorious.

Photo: Thanks

wd~50

Wylie Dufrense had us at hello. Granted, he didn’t say hello to us, and he didn’t actually say “hello.” In his cheerful, downhome lilt, he said, “Howdy, Mrs. P” to the woman selling us garlic at the Union Square Greenmarket a few weeks ago. Then he, his companions, and a camera-heavy crew moved on to the next stand.

We got a second Wylie fix at wd-50, where he showed his underlings the proper way to whisk in a white-and-stainless steel kitchen. (From what we could tell, this involves very vigorous wrist movements.) It’s always nice to see chefs cooking in their eponymous restaurants, in between appearances on Top Chef and interviews.




We moved quickly from the complimentary bread made from lentils (too airy to be considered pappadum, or satisfying) to our appetizers: noodles made from shrimp served with yogurt, mushrooms, and zucchini, and corned duck, which looked like bacon but tasted utterly different. Despite their pedigree, the noodles didn’t taste at all shrimpy—rather, they were springy, spongy, and light. The duck dish resembled a baby pastrami on rye: the meat was curled atop a dollop of mustard, another of horseradish, and a cracker.



Continuing the theme: we had another Asian fish dish and meat dish for our mains. The scallops with pine needle udon and grapefruit dashi were refreshing, the grapefruit lending the dish its needed tang and the slices of Chinese broccoli and radish ensuring a textual contrast between the soft fish and noodles. The wagyu skirt steak came with long beans and pasta made from peanut butter (very clever), but what made the dish were tamarind seeds that had been vacuum-infused with basil.

All cooking is chemistry. Heat renders a large slab of beef edible; mixed together, salt, water, and grain produce bread. And yet this simple fact gets largely lost when people complain about molecular gastronomy. If you have the tools and the knowledge, then mixing shrimp with agar to form a pasta is as easy as heating olive oil in a pan to sear a steak, and you can make nontraditional ingredients like duck evoke entirely different taste sensations (eyes closed, we were sitting in Katz’s, taking a big bite of a sandwich).



For dessert we had a carmelized brioche with apricot and lemon thyme that was nice but not sweet enough for us, as well as slices of soft chocolate topped with peppermint ice cream and black cardamom.


The final course consisted of two little balls, Alex Stupak’s take on “milk and cookies”: frozen condensed milk surrounded by two layers of cocoa, the topmost layer crumbly. The result was an Oreo dipped in milk, an excellent end to a meal full of pleasant disconnect between what we saw and what we tasted.

New York: Line by Line, From Broadway to the Battery

This book collects line drawings by Robinson, a German illustrator who visited in the 1960s. The pages depict an earlier time, of course, when men wore fedoras and Met Life was Pan Am, but they also demonstrate a deep devotion that transcends the page. His so-called X-ray view lets us see the cityscape from multiple perspectives, but mostly we see New York from the point of view of someone who fell so utterly in love with this place that he painstakingly drew edge after edge, corner after corner, of the city he saw.

The Yankees

The donuts worked!

Photo: thanks

Green-Wood Cemetery

Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery is one of the largest and most appealing burial grounds in the city, and a natural choice for a lovely stroll on the Day of the Dead.

Doughnut Plant

The Doughnut Plant, on the Lower East Side, inspires fanatical devotion and bizarre quests, like attempting to eat one of every doughnut they sell. It hardly needs more praise. But, as we say when we're there, one more couldn't hurt.





Above, an assortment of yeast and cake goodies, including our favorite, the Yankee donut. Here's hoping that the --- ahem --- several we ate bring the boys in the Bronx some luck.

Tenement Museum

In the stories we tell about immigration, we often gloss over the difficulties --- including horrendous living conditions and forced prostitution --- immigrants faced once they arrived in the U.S. The Tenement Museum makes sure we don't rush to mythologize by showing life as it was lived at various points in one particular building on the Lower East Side.


During its time as a tenement, from 1863 to 1935, approximately 7,000 people lived at 97 Orchard Street. Our tour featured two apartments next door to one another, one the home of Prussian Jews in the 1870s; the other home to an Italian family in the 1930s. Each is full of key period details, like bedding, cigarette butts, board games, and a coin-fed gas machine. In both cases, the curators traced the descendants, incorporating their photographs and voices into the overview of their families' experiences. These re-creations rivet far more than any story could.

Koronet Pizza

At Koronet Pizza, they don't serve the best slice of pizza in New York, but by God, they serve the biggest.

Procession of the Ghouls at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

The annual Procession of the Ghouls at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine must surely be among the most fun 10 minutes of the year. After a screening of a classic silent horror movie --- this year, Nosferatu (1922) --- accompanied by the cathedral's glorious organ, the gates of hell open and demons stroll down the aisle, reminding everyone of the horror at the heart of Halloween.

Veloce

Crowded (and drizzled) out of the Dumpling Festival, we made our way into the East Village, our heads hanging and stomachs rumbling. And there like a beacon of delectability stood Veloce, home to the square Sicilian pie. How could we resist?


We didn't. Oh boy, did we most certainly not resist. First we started with frito misto. Not really sure what that was, we were overjoyed to discover that it's a fried salad. A fried salad! Each piece of cheese, tomato, onion, and lettuce had been lovingly dipped in batter, then crisped. Could there be a more marvelous way of deluding ourselves that we were actually being healthy even as we mainlined calories?


All delusions stopped, however, when the pie arrived. Four thick squares, sagging beneath a mixture of mozzarella, sausage from Porchetta, herbs, and sauce, atop a buttery, charred-just-so potato-based crust. One bite instantly turned a crummy day lovely; four bites, and Veloce shot to the top of our (admittedly extremely long) list of best pizza in the city.

Queens County Farm Museum

Yep, there's a farm in Queens, complete with livestock, corn, a pumpkin patch, and even a dirt road. And with the leaves changing and the hot cider flowing, it's dang near bucolic.

William Blake's World at the Morgan Library

In his life, William Blake was a lot of things --- engraver, poet, illustrator, extremist, moralist, visionary, draftsman, painter, printmaker, nutjob. The selection of his work currently on view at the Morgan, titled A New Heaven Is Begun, showcases them all.

Blake claimed to reside in the Imagination. Maybe that’s true, or maybe he just lived in that place where all confident artists must dwell, a place that allows (or causes) them to assert that what they’ve created is actually real. What comes through most fiercely from the watercolors, drawings, engravings, and other materials is this very confidence, an assertion that what he’d portrayed not only mattered but was, that America was a woman and a powerful man watched over all, that we are ourselves miracles and therefore capable of miraculous things.

Photo: thanks

Szechuan Gourmet

Does a restaurant with handwritten signs taped to its walls deserve two stars? Frank Bruni thought so, in his 2008 review of Szechuan Gourmet.



Our server waited for confirmation that we'd be OK with both the coldness of the sesame noodles and spiciness of the pork dumplings before placing our orders for appetizers. But the noodles were a revelation, neither ice cold nor slimy, as we'd feared, but instead a melange of chili oil, sesame paste, soy sauce, and garlic that permeated the very fiber of the room-temperature noodles.

As for the dumplings, they were light but firm pockets of pork, the shell strong enough to hold the filing, yet not so tough that we were chewing for days.



As entrees we sampled ho-hum prawns with garlic sauce and a textury stir-fried shredded smoked duck. Here "smoked" wasn't just an adjective, it was the dish's defining characteristic, lending each bite terrific mouthfeel. (Yep, we actually just wrote the word "mouthfeel.")

We see Bruni's two stars, and we raise him four chopsticks.

Les Desirs Patisserie

This is a tough entry to write.

The story of New York is the story of rapid expansion, a ceaseless bulldozing of the old to make way for the new. Unlike, say, Boston, New York isn't full of old buildings that shout secrets about the past. Here, histories of particular corners are kept by those who walk by them day by day, until they too are no more.


Which brings us to Les Desirs Patisserie, an old-fashioned bakery along a rapidly changing strip mall in Chelsea. We ate a pretty good cinnamon bun and passable chocolate croissant, as well as a too-sweet, fluorescently frosted cookie that took us straight back to bake fairs of our youth. We experienced the headache-inducing buzzing of a neon sign and watched as two old men eyed each other warily, clearly staking out a certain special table that happened to be next to an older woman (the restaurant is a hang out for the elderly who live nearby).


Rumor has it that both Txikito and Co. / Sullivan Street Bakery are expanding. Our feelings about Co. have been well-documented, but there's a reason why we've never written about that other place, which serves very expensive, very salty, very tiny portions: our meal there sucked.

We accept the constant change that comes with living here, and we understand that not every bakery or bodega or dry cleaners or store is worth saving. But we still signed the petition to Help Save Les Desirs Bakery.

Meet the Breeds at the Javits Center

What do you get when you mix 160 dog breeds with 41 cat breeds in one place? Heaven, that's what.

Where the Wild Things Are at the Morgan Library

Neither of us were exactly devotees of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are when we were children, but we are always interested in anything that provides a window into the artistic process, and the exhibit of Sendak's drafts and drawings currently at the Morgan Library is a small but compelling display of creativity in action. It's fascinating to see Sendak struggling with his story ("ALL BAD!!!" he scrawls across one outline) and latching on to what becomes his central image: a little boy in a wolf suit, all alone in the great wild world.

Photo: Thanks

Bourdain + Bruni at the New York City Wine and Food Festival

Frank Bruni, who just folded his napkin as the restaurant critic for the Times, had a pretty sweet job. Indeed, it's hard to think of a better one, until you remember Anthony Bourdain and his unbelievable gig: travel around the world with a TV camera in tow, eating good things, meeting interesting people, and making witty and caustic remarks. When the two of them appeared together for a standing room–only discussion at the New York City Wine and Food Festival, there was enough envy in the ether to make the six other deadly sins seem like misdemeanors.

But Bourdain made sure gluttony and wrath weren't neglected. Bruni kicked things off by asking Bourdain what warthog anus tastes like. (He ate it, fans will remember, in Namibia.) With a setup like that, Bourdain couldn't fail to entertain, and his comments on travel, food, New York, celebrity chefdom, and even fatherhood ("To train [his daughter] what not to eat, I'm going to wrap steel wool in McDonald's packaging and leave it around the house") were quick, barbed, hilarious, ironic, sincere, maddening, inspiring, and endlessly entertaining. Even Bruni, every bit the journalist, was swept away: when Bourdain asked him if his description of Alice Waters as "Pol Pot in a muumuu" was too harsh, Bruni replied, "Not at all. I repeat it with awe and reverence."

Photos: thanks and thanks

Tehuitzingo

Countless bodegas line the streets of New York. Most are tiny, vaguely dirty places that sell packaged foods and household supplies at exorbitant markups. But scattered throughout this seemingly indistinguishable mass are a few bodegas whose names are like codewords among the food-obsessed, signs that grant you admittance into a secret society. One of those is Tehuitzingo, in Hell's Kitchen, which serves some of the city's best tacos in a bizarrely green-hued back room.


If you can get over eating in what is basically a glorified supply closet, and if you can handle ordering in Spanish, then you'll soon forget about the precariously stacked boxes above your head as you dig into a plate of authentically soft and carefully seasoned tacos. We had the papas con rajas, bistec, pollo, and al pastor. Unlike the gooey-sweet slop that passes as tacos at many American Tex-Mex places, these are dry and hearty, even if they look diminutive. The bistec was only ok, but the other three were terrific --- the potatoes and jalapenos had a huge kick and a toothsomeness rarely found in a vegetarian taco, while the chicken and pork tacos both put the flavors of the meat forward, with just a small amount of spice and a drizzle of sauce to augment the protein. It may seem silly to call a taco made in the back of a bodega "subtle," but that's what these were. And when washed down with the decidedly un-subtle sugary goodness of cold Jarritos, they make one of the better cheap meals you're likely to find in Midtown. Just don't tell anyone you heard it from us.

Spike Jonze Retrospective at MoMA

As part of Spike Jonze: The First 80 Years, MoMA has been screening several of his movies, shorts, commercials, and videos. The selection we saw included a documentary about young cowboys (self-indulgent), commercials for Miller and Wrangler (somewhat nonsensical when taken out of the context of TV), and videos for Bjork, Yeah Yeah Yeah's, Fatboy Slim, and Weezer (simply awesome). The one-after-another format flaunted his obsessions, which include animals, disconnect (Sofia Coppola doing gymnastics to the Chemical Brothers), irony (Christopher Walken dancing to Weapon of Choice), and joie de vivre (the Jonze-led Torrance Community Dance Group dancing to Praise You).

Photo: thanks

White Material at the NYFF

Our single New York Film Festival movie lived up to A. O. Scott's recent screed: it was depressing, dispiriting, disheartening. Known for her sensuousness, here filmmaker Claire Denis returns to the Africa of her childhood, telling the story of a stubborn, semi-sane white family in the midst of a coup somewhere in Francophone Africa. "I don't like metaphor," Denis said during the Q&A. "It's a story about a rotten family." But the movie is filled with images and allusions, told largely through flashbacks. Gorgeous Isabelle Huppert plays the matriarch, by turns naive and arrogant, who oversees a dying coffee plantation. Her love of the country blinds her to the political realities of post-colonial life.

After the screening, an audience member asked why Denis thought we should care about these "despicable characters," including the violent, hyperactive child soldiers whose actions and fate shocked us all. (Denis dedicated the movie to these "little rascals," because "they are the victims.") Isaach de Bankole, who plays an aging hero of the rebellion, had the best answer. Americans want a hero, he said, but in life "everybody's on a path of failure." Sigh. True enough.

Photo: thanks