Holiday Train Show at the New York Botanical Garden

As we do every year, we made our way to the train show at the New York Botanical Garden. Model trains whizz and whirr past replicas of famous New York buildings, made entirely from plant materials. A new one this year is the former Penn Station, restored to glory in bark and leaves.

Izakaya Ten

The izakaya is to Japan what the tapas bar is to Spain and the gastropub is to Britain: a place built on the belief that good drinks should be accompanied by good food. The drink here, of course, is sake, and Izakaya Ten has a long list of both cold and hot sakes, some potent enough to peel paint at ten paces. (We can't remember the name of the one we ordered, which gives you some sense of it.) Though Izakaya Ten is next to the terrific tapas bar Tia Pol and thus quite accommodating of a drinking-and-grazing night, we decided to have a full meal there by piecing together bites from across the menu.



Though we didn't know this when we ordered, our first two dishes both involved raw vegetables: asparagus with Japanese mayonnaise and little sandwiches made from mountain potatoes with shiso and plum filling. Both were good (we were big fans of the spicy mayonnaise), but together they made for a lot of crunching.

Thankfully, the next delivery to our table brought some textural variety: a simple but tasty bowl of edamame, a mori set of four different kinds of yakitori (we loved the chicken meatball, which was like an all-meat corndog, and the spicy shishito peppers), a perfect little piece of shrimp sushi, and a collection of spicy scallop rolls coated in sesame seeds.




After a long, maybe-they-forgot delay, we got our final dish, a plate of gyoza, the pork, garlic, and cabbage dumplings so popular in Japan. While not the most conventional dessert, it was delicious. And by this point, everything else had gone crooked as well.

Holiday Open House at the New York Public Library

In the seasonal spirit, the New York Public Library threw open its doors for a holiday party that included a Dixieland band, Christmas characters galore (and a few non-Christmas ones --- what Dorothy has to do with the holidays we're at a loss to explain), choral performances, cookies and punch, and a behind-the-scenes tour of the stacks (no photos allowed). But our favorite part was a small case that included some literary ephemera: a Christmas card sent by James Joyce, a statue of Tiny Tim, and a copy of A Christmas Carol marked up by Dickens for his public performances of the tale.

Motorino

Wood-fired oven? Check. Misshapen crust? Check. Charred bubbles? Check. San Marzano tomatoes? Check. Mozzarella di bufala? Check.

Another Neapolitan pizza place added to our personal pantheon? Check, check, and double-check.

Gingerbread Adventures at the New York Botanical Garden

A small but delightful part of the holiday celebrations at the New York Botanical Garden is Gingerbread Adventures, a showcase for master bakers from the area. This year's theme is fairy tales: the Pied Piper, the Three Little Pigs, and other stories rendered in gingerbread and sugar. Maturely, we left them for other people to enjoy and found our daily sweets elsewhere.

Gerhard Richter at Marian Goodman

While walking through the Gerhard Richter show at the Marian Goodman Gallery, we tried very hard to come up with another artist who has created and/or mastered so many styles. In a career spanning fifty-something years (and counting), Richter has produced extraordinary examples of photo realism, photo blur, pop art, minimalism, and abstraction, among others.

With one exception, his newest paintings fall mostly into the abstract category, layered paint with no obvious entrance or exit, forcing the eye to every corner of the canvas. They are beautiful.




The exception is called September, for obvious reasons.


If his blurred but legible representation of September 11th is taken as the show's center, the rest of the paintings become somewhat landscape-esque themselves. Richter has depicted the world not as he or you or we see it, but rather the world as it could be seen (and sometimes is) by eyes made tired, blind, shut, or even excited by smoke.

Joseph Leonard

Like so many New York restaurants these days, Joseph Leonard emphasizes casual, rough-hewn charm over formality or slickness. Unlike its contemporaries, however, Joseph Leonard taps into another, deeper strain of New York culture --- secular Jewishness. There's a mezuzah by the door, pickles on the table, and pastrami on the menu, but you can also get oysters, a crab sandwich or, on Sundays, a share of a whole pig. It's Jewish in the same way that Seinfeld was, the same way that the city itself is. And that may go some way toward explaining its popularity: it feels haimish.


But affect, however appealing, isn't enough to keep a restaurant crowded in this economic climate, so it helps that they serve very good food. One of our dishes was the lump crab sarnie, an open-faced sandwich whose flavor was slightly marred by being somewhat difficult to eat. But the house-cured pastrami sandwich may well have been the best we've ever had --- simple, but spicy, snappy, and smoky, with just enough taste of brine to round it out. It's a great nosh.

Traveling the Silk Road at AMNH

On the day we visited the Traveling the Silk Road exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, the Shanazaki Ensemble, part of the Silk Road Project, was playing at the end. Our 'journey' through Xi'an, Turfan, Samarkand, and Baghdad, from the ancient world (represented by silk, including looms and actually cocoons) into modernity (represented by books and machinery like an astrolab), was punctuated by bursts of cello, ud, shakuhachi, drums, and other instruments that were developed or would have been played along the famed trade route. Smells of musk and jasmine from a re-created night-market in Turfan floated through the air. It was a lovely, informative way to spend an afternoon.

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Thanksgiving from the Greenmarket II

Thanksgiving arrived, and all the excitement wore someone out.

Thanksgiving from the Greenmarket

Thanksgiving is almost here, and someone is very excited.

The Mannahatta Project

In lieu of presents, and a few weeks early, we decided to be super-trendy and give each other H1N1 this year (hence our silence here). But lots of downtime at home means more time to explore The Mannahatta Project, an interactive website that imagines the island as it likely was when Henry Hudson arrived in September 1609. (There's a book too, a decade in the making, which juxtaposes renderings of "then" with photographs from "now.")

The coolest feature lets you enter an address and learn what inhabited that area four centuries ago. Apparently our block was full of rodents like mice and voles, who thrived among the many oaks. Occasionally a wolf, mountain lion, or bobcat wandered through. Today we're happy to report that there are still trees on our street, but now, of course, French bulldogs, pugs, vizslas, and a fat orange tabby, among others, hold sway.

L'asso

Lovely little L'asso is so much better than its neighbors, it's a wonder Little Italy has any pizzerias left. And, yes, we realize that pretty soon we'll be renaming this blog We Heart Pizza and Some Other Things about New York But Mostly Pizza.

There recently on a rainy Wednesday we started with a refreshing pianura salad (fennel, orange slices, and pine nuts) and a warming cup of minnestrone.



But the real draw are the thin-crust pies that come out of the huge coal oven that takes up most of one side of the restaurant.


We went for a white pie (all cheese, garlic, and olive oil) and a red (traditional Margherita).



In general we prefer our crusty, thick Neapolitans (and also our square Sicilians). But if we're south of Houston and jonesing for some slices, we're heading back here.

Terminator 2 at MoMA

This weekend MoMA screened Terminator 2 (1991) to highlight its collection of works related to futurism. We tried not to wiggle too much with the knowledge that the robotic main character is now a governor. And once we got over the shock of realizing that the pop culture ephemera of our youth is now fit for preservation, we realized that much of the movie's effects have aged really well, including the various transmutations of liquid metal. We left the theater contemplating what so-called popcorn flick out right now will be screening circa 2028.

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Bodies

Yes, it's touristy, and yes, the bodies in question may well have been Chinese people who googled the wrong thing, but the Bodies exhibit at the South Street Seaport does provide perspectives on the human body that you're unlikely to get without a hockey mask and a machete. Our favorite room is an entirely red and black affair showing the circulatory system. It's an elegantly soulful touch in the midst of flesh.

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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.

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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!

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