Sowing and reaping in Brooklyn

I first read about Manny Howard, the Brooklyn man who grew a farm in his backyard as his sole source of sustenance, in last week's New York Magazine cover story. But with the likes of Reuters covering his harrowing and only somewhat rewarding endeavor, it looks like the appeal of the story is universal. Make sure you have plenty of time, then read the story here: My Empire of Dirt [NYMag.com]

Italian ice and everything nice

For the next two weeks, Little Italy plays host to the annual Feast of San Gennaro street fair. The San Gennaro festival was once a religious commemoration, but is now closer to a cultural celebration marked by commercialism, entertainment and excess. Not unlike Christmas, come to think of it.

Since the festival occurs around the middle of September every year -- along the length of Mulberry Street just a block away from our apartment -- it's impossible for Sarah and me to avoid, or avoid thinking about. You see, our wedding anniversary falls smack in the middle of the festival. And so we get wistful when we see the tre colori flags being strung up by those ugly wheeled cranes, when dirty blue sawhorses are erected as traffic barriers, when loudmouthed construction workers assemble wooden stalls for rigged carnival games.

Okay, so it's hardly a romantic event. It's a noisy, crowded, sticky tourist trap, but it's enjoyable in small doses. Tonight, we walked through the street fair with our good friend Melissa, in search of the artery-clogging, tooth-melting deep-fried Twinkie, among other culinary delights. I don't know what the international reach of the Twinkie is, but if you (like many readers of this blog) live outside the United States and have never had a Twinkie, let me put it as delicately as I can: Eating a Twinkie is like swimming in the East River -- you should only do it once a year at most, because once is enough to make you sort of sick. And if possible, try to avoid doing it altogether, because the risk of death needlessly increases every time you do it.

Of course, like swimming in testy waters, eating a Twinkie can be sort of fun. Especially when it's coated in batter, deep-fried, and dusted dangerously with powdered sugar. We found one vendor who indeed sold such a monstrosity, for $3 each. On Melissa's insistence, I talked the seller into selling us two for $5. He not only agreed, but also gave us three free zeppoles, which are basically deep-fried nuggets of dough almost the size of tennis balls. They were also dusted with powdered sugar. We ate everything.

This happened after we'd eaten a whole dinner's worth of barbecued pork, sausage-and-peppers sandwiches, and curly french fries, but before the cherry and coconut Italian ices.

Two observations while walking through Little Italy among hundreds and hundreds of Italian Americans: First, Italian women are quite breathtaking.

I don't remember my second observation.

Read more about the Feast of San Gennaro here. Read more than you need to know about Twinkies here. [Wikipedia]

Savvy at Savoy

Tonight, on a whim, we had dinner at Savoy. I'm not going to review the restaurant per se, for that would be redundant. Savoy has been a SoHo mainstay since the mid-90s, and although it was our first time there, it looked like each of our fellow diners was well familiar with the place. I will say that we had a very enjoyable meal of grilled lamb and slow-roasted sockeye salmon, and by skipping appetizers and wine and by sharing one dessert, we avoided breaking the bank as well. That one dessert, by the way, was killer: white chocolate bread pudding with berry sorbet. Phenomenal.

I requested a table in the upstairs dining room, which I knew of by reputation. It turned out to be an intimate space, furnished in a comfortable, rustic way.

We found out that on October 9, Savoy will be hosting something called Nose to Tail Dining, with an English chef named Fergus Henderson. More than likely, the dinner service will make use of every part of an animal, according to Henderson's philosophy and practice of using oft-discarded cuts of meat in cooking. This made me think of The Far Side, a comic strip by Gary Larson that once illustrated the point. In the strip, a group of cavemen are systematically tearing apart the carcass of a woolly mammoth and carrying the pieces off, except for the tail, which lies severed on the ground. A crotchety old grandfather caveman standing nearby points indignantly at the tail and yells, "In my day, we used every goldang part of the mammoth!"

No forwarding address

For a New York resident, here's a not-so-surprising statistic: Only a third of New York City homes are owner-occupied, compared to two-thirds in the rest of the nation, says the Census Bureau. That means that, like Sarah and me, most New Yorkers rent the homes they're currently living in.

We've lived in our apartment for three years, but many people I know have lived in theirs much less longer. I find one particular side effect of this urban nomadism in our mailbox every day: We frequently receive mail addressed not to us, but to the previous resident of the apartment. Today, for example, a postcard came for Amy D. from Joseph S. Tanen, Violinmaker. The postcard invites Amy to visit the soon-to-be-opened Tanen shop at 3111 Broadway, next to the Manhattan School of Music.

So at some point in the past, our apartment was occupied by a violinist named Amy. Did she practice on her instrument here in this very room where I'm typing this? Was she an amateur who simply annoyed the neighbors? Is she responsible for our broken doorbell, the one that has never worked since we moved in? Or maybe she made the hole in our screen window -- the one that lets in flies and bees in the summer -- with an overly enthusiastic stroke of her bow. Only Amy knows.

When we move out of the apartment next July, someone else is going to move in and start receiving our mail. Not the bills and the letters of correspondence and the magazines, of course; we'll make sure we leave a forwarding address for those. But perhaps the catalogs from Musician's Friend. And Guitar Center. And Music123, Zzounds, Sam Ash Music, and Disc Makers.

What will these people assume about me? Only they'll know.

The 11th day of September

There's nothing different about today, on the surface. Once again, I had to stay late at work, making tonight's dinner the second one I've eaten at the office in a row. I left at 9:30 PM and walked past bars filled with people for whom Tuesday night is as good a night as any for a Brooklyn Lager and a hook-up. Outside the neighborhood supermarket, a man hauled black garbage bags to the sidewalk in a cart, the same type of cart they let customers use inside. At the corner of Lafayette and Prince Streets, a New York Fire Department truck sped by; an ugly Dalmatian hung its head out one of the windows, spotted ears flapping in the wind.

The wind is not pleasant tonight -- it is a sickly breeze that chills in a damp sort of way. It rained all day today, and the air smells of wet leaves. In fact, today's weather is the complete opposite of what it was like on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. On that day, exactly six years ago, the weather had been brilliant. It was the kind of day that made you wish you were outside doing things that made you sweaty and thirsty and eager for a lemon sorbet, instead of stuck in a college classroom somewhere in New Jersey, trying to make sense of synaesthetic approaches in art-making, as had been the case for me.

On that day, a little before 9:00 AM, a student burst into the classroom and announced to the class (before our professor's permission was granted) that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

The professor (with whom I had a loathe-hate relationship, and whose classes I failed, twice) said in a drone, "I'm going to wait for confirmation on this news before jumping to any conclusions."

I ignored him and left the classroom, out of curiosity, but also out of concern for my stock trader roommate, who had taken the train into New York City that morning, just like he did every morning, and would have arrived at the World Trade Center at around the time the plane hit. I tried calling his cellphone and couldn't get connected. And then I tried calling Sarah, my friend who worked in midtown Manhattan, the girl I had a crush on, the girl who in less than a month would become my girlfriend, the girlfriend I would marry in 2004. "We're sorry, all circuits are busy. Please try again."

So I went to the coffee shop around the corner, sat in front of the TV with a dozen strangers, and watched the world end on CNN.

Afterward, I went home and waited. New York was over 40 miles away, but that was close enough for the university to cancel classes for the remainder of the day, and the following day as well. I tried looking out the window to see if the smoke from lower Manhattan was visible from where I was (it wasn't). I finally got in touch with Sarah, who told me that she was safe, that there were no vehicles of any kind leaving the city, and that she would be staying at her boss's apartment uptown. I got a phone call from a college buddy, who was living just below the Empire State Building in midtown. He was afraid. He worried that a plane would crash into his building too, but he couldn't leave because the train and bus stations were flooded with people, some still covered in dust.

My roommate finally came home later that night, stone-faced and quiet. He had been riding the escalator up from the PATH train station to the base of the World Trade Center that morning when an explosion shook the foundations of the building. He, like everyone else, had thought that it was a bomb. Then he went outside, into the square between the two towers. The second plane hit a few minutes later, a concussive blast so loud that my roommate, who was also the drummer in our band, fell to his knees. When it started raining people, he wept with the five hundred strangers around him. And when it started raining computers and file cabinets and concrete, he ran.

By some miracle, he'd worn his tennis shoes that day.

That day was six years ago. Today, the city of New York remembered the people who died on September 11, 2001. There were ceremonies held, and speeches given, and flags flown, and prayers said, and beams of light turned on, and though I didn't participate in any of these things (for to me, there was nothing different about today, on the surface), I remember as well.

Late night

No real blog post tonight -- I'm still at work, and it's 11:18 PM. Besides, the only thing worth blogging about today is the fact that there's nothing worth blogging about.

Shiso fine: a dinner at Perilla

If you read this post I wrote a few weeks back, you'll know that I have a great fondness for shiso leaves, which, until just a few minutes ago, I'd forgotten is also called perilla. By coincidence, Sarah and I had dinner at the new restaurant Perilla last night, and I'm happy to say that it quite made up for my "oyster letdown" I wrote about in my previous post.

Perilla, at this point in time, is still only famous for one thing: its executive chef is Harold Dieterle III, winner of the first season of Top Chef. We don't often go to restaurants run by celebrity chefs, which can be pricey, pretentious establishments with good if not great food to match. But Perilla, situated in the West Village, turned out to be neither pretentious nor exorbitantly pricey (entrées, but for one exception, top out under $30).

We didn't have a reservation, so when we arrived at 8:00 PM on a Saturday evening, we were told that there would be a one-hour wait for a table for two. We left our name and spent the next half-hour wandering around the Village, which tends to resemble any given Main Street in any given College Town, USA on a Saturday night during the school year (except in the Village there are way more stores with names like Birthday Suit and Pink Pussycat Boutique). At one point, we browsed through CDs at a dingy record store called Disc-o-Rama, but the smell of reefer was giving Sarah a headache (I think it had more to do with the fact that she was hungry). We left, but not before I noticed that even here, amidst the ganja haze, there was a section with Christian music. I mean, they had the album Shout to the Lord, which came out when Hillsong was still part of Integrity Music, back in 1996! You can't even find that in a Christian bookstore in Tennessee nowadays.

We went back to Perilla at 8:30 and decided to have a drink at the bar while waiting for our table. The bartender, a friendly and accommodating young lass, let us try three different wines before making our selections (Sarah ordered the crisp and well-chilled Grüner Veltliner, I the earthy Montepulciano in anticipation of eating red meat). I don't remember when restaurants began to chill their red wines -- perhaps they've always done it -- but I love that they do.

Finally, at 8:50, we were ushered into the dining room and seated. Here's the thing about the menu at Perilla: at first glance, the list of entrées doesn't knock you out. Nothing seems particularly original or extravagant; it's all pretty basic, and all quite American. There's the requisite strip steak, roasted sea bass, roasted chicken, grilled lamb loin, sautéed skate wing, etc. There is a roasted duckling, uncommon, to be sure, but who hasn't had duck before? At that point, I said to myself that everything had better taste really good. I mean, knockout good. If you're going to serve basics, serve them right.

Here's what we ordered:
Appetizers

• Spicy Duck Meatballs, with Okinawa yam gnocchi, water spinach, and a raw quail egg
• Crispy Rock Shrimp Salad, with baby mizuna, piquillo peppers, and a mushroom soy vinaigrette

Entrées

• Summer Truffle Ravioli, with sheep's milk ricotta, and forest mushrooms and peas
• Grilled Angus Strip Steak, with escarole, bacon and a sweet onion-horseradish sauce
• Faro Risotto (side dish), with an artichoke confit, parmesan and chili-grape salad

Dessert

• Black Mission Fig and Plum Crisp, with Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream and spiced streusel

[This is turning into a full-blown restaurant review, but whatever.]
The spicy duck meatballs were standout. The result is that Sarah now likes eating duck, a surprising and welcome development. The ravioli was also good, coming with white and green asparagus (not listed on the menu) and a wonderfully refreshing citrus flavor, even if the peas were slightly undercooked. The risotto was uncanny -- it was richly flavored with butter and parmesan cheese, yet didn't taste or feel heavy. The steak was much the same -- cooked to a perfect medium-rare temperature, with even the last bite as good as the first, and topped with a whole red onion. The only off-note was the bacon bits served under the steak; too indulgent and overpowering. When I order steak, I want to taste the flesh of a cow, not the skin of a smoked porker.For the first time in perhaps years, Sarah and I wanted the exact same dessert item, so we shared the excellent fig and plum crisp, a fantastic concoction with too little ice cream and more plums than figs.
As for the decor, Sarah didn't particularly care for the mod chandelier that hung over my head, but the restaurant is tastefully and sparely decorated, and expertly straddles the line between cozy and contemporary, especially the bar area. The tables for two in the back, where we were seated, are quite close together, which made it easy to see what your neighbors had ordered. The dating couple next to us, enamored by the ravioli on our table, asked more than once what we were eating. They later admitted that they were skipping dessert entirely and living vicariously through us, too full of steak and duckling and wine.

I understood completely.

More about Perilla:
Perilla Restaurant - Official website
Frank Bruni's New York Times review
The New Yorker review
Time Out NY review