Month: July 2010

Another Bye Bye NY Top Ten List. Eat your heart out Time Zagat. Or allow me to eat it, and then I will rate it very poorly.

Since I will not be able to take you, fantasy reader, to these restaurants once I’m gone, I hope these links will help you track them down so that they may blow your mind straight down into your satisfied stomach.

1. Pommes Frites: My favorite restaurant during college. Anyone who visited me in New York during my first few years here, this was the first stop on the tour. And they only serve one thing.
2. Burritoville: With their timeless moto, “We’re Mexcellent,” this chain gets the number two spot, despite the fact that they apparently went out of business several years ago. I wept big, spicy tears when their 2nd avenue location closed its doors. The food was great, the sodas were bottomless, and the atmosphere was unintentionally kitschy, just like I like it. Above all, they had the BEST salsa, and they let you have as much as you wanted every time, for free! Come to think of it, maybe that’s why they went under…
3. Sidecar: My dad said that this place served him “The most interesting club sandwich he had ever eaten.” That may be, but I keep coming back because I need the burger like a junkie needs his fix. I literally fiend for it. I sweat. It’s disgusting. They have a killer bloody mary too, with a pepper so hot that every time my girlfriend eats it she has to lie down in a dark room for two hours. And yet the very next week she’s munching on another one while I inject burger meat directly into my veins.
4. Al Di La: This is my favorite fancy Italian restaurant in New York. The atmosphere is undeniably pretentious (they don’t take reservations, so you routinely see patrons outside the restaurant acting like teenage girls around Robert Pattinson in hopes of getting a table) but the food is truly transcendent. It’s not cheap, so I’ve been tricking people into taking me here for special occasions for the last 5 years. Get the saltimbocca, and realize what it is to love.
5. Aunt Suzie’s: This is my favorite UN-fancy Italian restaurant in New York. It’s atmosphere is everything Al Di La’s isn’t, which is ironic because it’s right across the street. Our custom is to pound cheap wine at Aunt Suzie’s during the six hour wait for our table at Al Di La. However, for those occasions when you don’t have a rich relative in town, the food at Aunt Suzie’s is really top notch, for about 1/100th the price of its high-class neighbor. What’s more, there’s a TON of it. One meal at the Suz and you’re eating leftover gnocchi for a week.
6. Holy Basil: Best Thai Food in New York. Also best “Date Spot.” You just ask for a table by the window, and their sound-proof glass enclosure on the second floor makes you feel like you have box seats for the nightly morality play that is second avenue. I recommend the duck, but then I always get the duck. My dream is to live in Duckburg (see left), where life is like a hurricane, and it’s apparently a “duck-blur.” But I digress…
7. Crif Dogs: Best Hot Dogs in New York. Doubtful? Three words: WRAPPED. IN. BACON. Sound gross? You are wrong. The taste of these dogs goes beyond the sum of their parts. It’s like there’s a party in you mouth and, while maybe not everyone is invited (for example, not kosher people) those who are invited keep handing you twenty dollars bills and then making out with you. And it’s not weird or invasive either. It feels natural, and bacony, and you’re completely into it.
8. Two Boots: Best Pizza in New York. I realize that incendiary claim has led to more fist-fights than actual meals, but I stand by it. It’s definitely not the cheapest, but the delicious thin crust and inventive topping combos set it apart from the rest. They have several locations, but the best one is in the East Village, a restaurant that includes videos for rent and a small movie theatre in the back, incidentally the site of my one and only movie premier in New York, a charming slasher film called “Pink Eye.” I played a dude who got slashed. Anyway, best pizza ever.
9. Mamouns: Best Falafel in New York. I vividly remember first tasting it on April 20th, 2001, a day like any other, except that for some reason my taste buds were feeling especially receptive. That day would forever change the way I felt about fried chickpeas. “But it tastes like meat!” I screamed at my friends. “How can there be no meat in this? How?” As they wisely ignored my cries, I realized that I had found my favorite vegetation food of all time. And Mamouns serves up vegetarian impostor-meat just like it should be: out of a tiny, filthy, wooden stand, wrapped in tin foil and shame.
10. Fonda: All right, this is a little bit cheating, because this place is around the corner from my soon-to-be-former apartment, plus we go there once a week, plus they give us free stuff. But even if we weren’t regulars, this place would set the bar for Mexican food in New York. You know a dish is good when it ruins all other dishes of its kind forever. Since eating the Enchiladas Suizas at Fonda, all competitors have turned to ashes in my mouth. Thanks a lot, assholes (I love you).

Since I’m leaving NY for LA at the end of this month, I feel it appropriate to dedicate a few of my blogging hours to crafting an electronic homage for the city that has been my home for nine of my most formative years. The best way to do this, of course, is a Top Ten List.

As a bonus, this list employs the cinematic terminology that will become my native tongue in the City of Angels.

TOP TEN MOVIE TITLES AND TAG-LINES BASED ON MY EXPERIENCES HERE

1. “Those Stories and Andy Rooney”On the Upper-West Side, a young man hangs out with the entire cast of 60 minutes and learns that every one of them has leathery skin. Even Steve Kroft.
2. “Puke Boy” She invited him in. He threw up on her rug. They still made out. Gross.
3. “B & E & Me” Locked out of his cheap, dirty apartment over Winter Break, a desperate junior shatters his own bathroom window and climbs through into the shower, which now contains many glass shards, in addition to his toilet.
4. “Foam Home” As an extra on the set of a low-budget Italian sex farce, a confused 20-something learns that staged foam-parties are fun for 10 minutes…and then the soap burns your eyes for the next 5 hours.
5. “So This is a Leather Bar” When his band plays a gig at NYC’s most dangerous gay club, he thinks that holding a keytar will say “no thank you sir.” He’s wrong.
6. “You Say Tomato, I Say Intestines” A young graduate brings his mother to tears for many reason when he “dies” in an off-off Broadway play, in which his exposed guts are represented by a ball-basting bucket of tomato puree. Thank God for Gold Bond.
7. “Please Don’t Keep Those in the Living Room” Love is a glass of wine. Heartbreak is a six-foot tower of Colt 45 bottles.
8. “Murder on the Papa Johns Roof” A young producer films his first sketch amid aromas of melted butter. No actual murder involved, but what a title, right?
9. “If This Disgusting Couch Could Talk” Though his work is rejected for it’s unorthodox style, a young theatrical rebel is nevertheless ushered into “The Chill Room” at a legendary comedy theatre, hovering nervously over the pee-stains of movie legends.
10. “I Have Not Written a Bridge for This Song” In ten years the former front-man of Soul Coughing will be struggling and jaded. But now it’s 2001, Valentine’s Day, a tentative solo show. A boy stands in the back, listening to all the old hits. It feels like they’re both starting something new.