huevos con vino

Mothers are good for a lot of things. Many of those things are obvious, but both my wife and I were reminded of yet another terrific use for our mothers as we spent our last day in Manhattan: They remember what we did when we were too young to form lasting memories ourselves.

Case in point: My wife has been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on two occasions. Apparently, she was there when she was about nine months old, but she clearly didn’t remember this visit when we went back earlier this week. Her mom took significant delight in telling me about this previous trip, which I think is understandable because it sounded like such a great memory for her, carrying her very young daughter past all of the incredible art on display at the Met.

I thought about my own mother as we took the cramped elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. Signs everywhere within this building refer to it as the ESB, which I have long associated with Extra Special Bitter, a type of beer I enjoy. I guess for me, the bitter beer face that Keystone Beer advertising used to lament isn’t entirely bad.

Anyway, one of the buildings I looked for once I got to the top of the ESB was the Flatiron Building in Manhattan. My mother worked there during the 1970s, one of many things about my own family that seemed normal to me when I was 5 years old, but that now seems totally incredible. The fact that my parents saw Alice Cooper perform in Europe in the early 1970s fits into this category as well, along with most of my mother’s hairstyles from the 1980s and my early taste in music.

So as my summer vacation drew to a close atop the ESB, I thought of something my friend Tom told me: “I like to do three things in New York City - wander, eat, and gawk.” I have to agree, and I think my wife is a believer as well now that she has had a proper bagel, a black and white cookie, and a bit of a slice of pizza. The pizza and bagels in Seattle are about as good as the Mexican food in Finland. Black and white cookies, in particular, are impossible to find on the West Coast. When you do stumble across a few, they are always frosted with icing rather than glazed with sugar as they should be. And the cookie itself is more like birthday cake than any other typical cookie. You’d be surprised how few people know these things in Seattle.

As our trip to the East Coast wound down, we wanted to spend a fun evening with one of my wife’s good friends.  He lives in New York and works in the restaurant industry, so he shall remain nameless.  But his suggestion for dinner deserves special mention because the place was really damn good.

Pó is a terrific Italian restaurant located in Greenwich Village, only a couple of blocks from at least one subway stop.  The three of us showed up and sat at the bar since all of the tables were booked.  This arrangement turned out nicely since we spoke with the man of the house, so to speak, at random intervals throughout the meal.  He held court from behind a small bar that sat, at most, four people (as we found out) and that was the hub of activity for the restaurant.  All drink orders went through him, but we never felt cramped, rushed, or hovered over.  It was a fun experience more reminiscent of Europe than the US.

The menu at Pó includes some spicy flair, with chilies or chile pepper flakes appearing in many dishes.  Portions are gracious and deceptively large, plus the food itself is a little rich.  Somehow, the food tastes light and rich at the same time, which is a dangerous combination by the time you have eaten a few courses.  Pó has a great, convival atmosphere that, once again, feels more like friends dining together in Europe rather than an assembly line of courses.  Finally, the prices are decent, especially by my apparently inflated Seattle standards.  I noticed that food in NYC, in general, cost about the same as comparable food in Seattle, leading me to wonder why the hell I don’t live in Greenwich Village.

Anyway, at Pó the wine list is brief but thoughtful; I had two different Italian reds that were both very good:

• 2002 Cantele Salice Salentino Riserva - 80% Negro Amaro, 20% Malvasia Nera; bold and spicy, very flavorful, lots of clove and black fruit.  Good stuff with pickled vegetables and goat cheese!
• 2004 Baroncini Chianti Colli Sensei “Panezio” - 100% Sangiovese; very smooth and tasty with mostly red fruit and a bit of spice.  Very good with food, particularly slightly spicy sauce with garlic.

As for the food, I thought it was fantastic:

• Some delicious white bean bruschetta arrived first (on the house, I believe)
• Goat cheese and black olive tartufo with pickled julienned vegetables
• Black fettuccine with fresh mussels, sun-dried tomatoes, scallions, and green chiles (noodles made with squid ink)
• Sauteed green beans with toasted garlic, almonds, and bread crumbs
• Ricotta cheesecake with Vermont maple syrup sauce

The cheesecake was a little rich and creamy for my taste, more like New York cheesecake than slightly fluffier ricotta cheesecakes I have had elsewhere.  The maple syrup sauce was a good addition, though.

I would definitely go back to Pó.  If I lived in New York, I would probably return a few times per week, to be honest.  It is probably for the best that I live so far away.  I would need to exercise a lot more to burn off all of that black fettuccine every night!

The Southern leg of our trip at an end, my wife and I braved the wilds of Southwest Airlines and got back into New York a couple of days ago.  Our anniversary is essentially this week, so we decided to spend it in one of my favorite cities on the planet: New York City.  With about 8 million people, 200 million rats, 600 billion cockroaches, and at least 300 bazillion cigarette butts on the ground, it’s hard to feel any sense of solitude in NYC.  But that’s partly why I love it here.  You’re right on top of everyone else and everything nearly all of the time.  And you’re probably eating a bagel or a slice of pizza while you’re at it…at least, I am.

I had almost forgotten how different NYC is from Seattle, at least culturally and psychologically.  For example, what is it with people who don’t know how to use the word “actually?”  I had this problem a long time ago; I think I said “actually” in nearly every sentence for a while until I realized I was doing it and I also realized how pompous it made me sound.  I wonder if the woman at the next table tonight at Petrossian understood that you should really only use “actually” to contradict someone else’s request or suggestion.  She kept saying “actually” as she ordered, as if she were contradicting herself…very strange.

Yes, we dined at Petrossian, home of expensive caviar, delicious seafood, and Russian clientele who enjoy bringing escorts with them to dinner.  And why not?  If you want to spend $600 on caviar for a callgirl, you’re welcome to do that in NYC.  Anything goes in the city that never sleeps, or never got any sleep until they made honking a $350 offense.  Seriously.

Anyway, Petrossian is a freaking awesome restaurant in NYC.  We got in from Islip via Southwest and a crazy car ride, checked into our hotel, got cleaned up and dressed up, and then enacted one of my favorite big city rituals: We got a taxi.  I really enjoy hailing and taking taxis to points within a city.  I only enjoy this process in proper cities, such as NYC or London, because in smaller towns it always feels a little too personal, amost as if the driver has had about three fares in his life before you showed up.  That’s not quite as professional and enjoyable.  I suppose much the same argument can be made for callgirls, but I’m beginning to stray from the purpose of this blog entry.

So, Petrossian is an interesting place.  They have amazing fine china, fine silverware, a terrific bar with Erte engravings in the mirrors, and a wonderful waitstaff who know what you need before you do.  Now that’s classy.  The waitstaff wear suits and ties, or tuxedos, and they are exceedingly gracious and open to your needs as a diner.  They also make suggestions, should you need one or two as I did.  I asked which meal the waiter would recommend, the sea bass or the tuna.  I got the sea bass at his suggestion.

Our meals were stunning.  Here’s what we had to eat; I had two Kir Royale long drinks with my food:

• We split the Selection of Salmons to start; we live in Seattle, so we had unnaturally high expectations with regard to this salmon.  The Selection of Salmons exceeded my expectations.  We received 4 cuts of salmon, all prepared in different ways, with salmon roe and tiny triangles of toast.  Exquisite.
• I had the Savoy cabbage-wrapped Chilean sea bass, with leek fondue, roasted fingerling potatoes, and a truffle/lobster sauce.  Wow.  Now that’s some good sea bass!  It was almost like delicate lobster meat because of the manner of preparation.
• My wife had the seared halibut, which blew her mind.  As she put it, she wanted to lick the plate clean, in part because of the wild chanterelle mushrooms that garnished the plate under the halibut.  I tasted a bit and loved it.
• For dessert, I tried one of the house specialties: chocolate terrine with armangac.  Not bad; I thought the flavors were a bit confused overall, but how can you argue with such good, thick chocolate?
• My wife had the assorted homemade cookies; the lemon shortbread cookies won her over for sure, although the rest of the cookies were also delicious.

Overall, Petrossian gave us a terrific anniversary experience.  I also enjoyed myself because, as I looked at the other couples dining that night, I was particularly proud of my own relationship decision.  Not that having a Russian callgirl is a bad long-term choice.  It’s just a little too expensive on my salary….

Doumar’s is awesome.  The menu is awesome.  The prices are awesome.  The food is awesome.  Even the service is fairly awesome.  I had a minced pork sandwich, double meat, hold the coleslaw.  Sandwiches come wrapped in plastic, mostly to keep all of the meat and sauce inside the sandwich. 

Doumar’s is famous for inventing the ice cream cone, a dubious claim that several others also make.  Nevertheless, they do have a really old ice cream cone machine that looks more like a medieval munchkin torture device, of which I assume there were many during the Middle Ages (munchkins and torture devices, I mean). 

The tradition at Doumar’s is to order from and eat in your car.  It’s amusing to see a fat woman pull up in a new Jaguar, flash her high beams, and order a handful of pork laced with mayonnaise.  Makes me patriotic just thinking about it.  We decided to eat inside the restaurant since there were five of us, and five people eating messy food in one car seemed like a bad idea.  But we passed many, many cars parked in front of the joint stuffed with people trying to eat as much BBQ as possible.

The menu is simple, and the prices are low.  The most expensive single item of food is a banana split, and I saw a military man at the next table get one.  It looked quite good.  Because of the ice cream cone connection, Doumar’s also has rightfully famous ice cream: I tried some with fudge and it was outstanding.  The BBQ sandwich was decent, very simple, with hot sauce that was fairly hot but not offensively so.  I think my sandwich cost $3.80 or thereabouts.  The quart of limeade that I ordered, and that arrived in a huge styrofoam cup, cost about $1.85.  The limeade is mostly soda water, sugar, crushed ice, and lime syrup, with some fresh lime squeezed in and a chunk of lime dropped on top of the ice.  It’s pretty good; it sort of sneaks up on you.  It reminded me of the fresh lime sodas they served me in India last November.

The service at Doumar’s is good in an efficient sort of way.  The portions aren’t all that large, so the beefy waitresses are able to tote several things at once.  They take orders quickly and ruthlessly, but with some patience that must be a Southern thing.  Waitresses in New York do not act this patient.  It also takes less than 3 minutes to receive whatever you ordered (usually), so the waitresses bust their respective butts at Doumar’s.  Many of them must run outside, back and forth between cars, to deliver food.  That has to be thirsty work in the summertime.

I ended up regretting the fact that I ordered just enough food.  I should have ordered about 4 other things to see what they’d taste like and look like.  I didn’t even get dessert, which was a huge mistake once I tasted someone else’s hot fudge sundae.  So I suppose I need to return to Doumar’s one day.  Perhaps I’ll get the souvenir jar of ice cream cones.  Only $8.  I think I’ll have it delivered to my car.

A few days ago, my wife, her brother, one of her best friends (and our host in VA), and I all piled into an SUV and drove down the Virginia coast into North Carolina.  I spend most of my time in Seattle, so I don’t know too much about East Coast geography.  Apparently, Virginia Beach is about 15 miles from the North Carolina border, which really blew my mind since I think of NC as being really, really far away from me.

We drove down in search of two things: a nice beach, and Pigman’s Bar-Be-Que.  We also wanted to check out a Brew Thru location because, hey, how often do you get to drive through the middle of a liquor store?  Not often in Seattle, unless you’re into armed robbery.  We found all of the above (not the armed robbery) and I have the cop tan on my left arm to prove it.

First, the food.  Pigman’s Bar-Be-Que is an interesting place.  The food is good and reasonably priced by my standards; good BBQ seems to be getting more and more expensive around the US.  I ordered a half-rack of baby back pork ribs, a double side of baked beans, hush puppies, and a quart of sweet tea.  I think it cost about $12-$14, but it was really damn good.  The scary thing was, I wasn’t full.  I should have ordered the full rack of ribs.  I’m not sure how this happened since I am of German and Irish descent, primarily, but I can eat a mess of ribs, where a “mess” is equal to 20-30 ribs.  I remember doing this once in Oklahoma, in front of my soon-to-be in-laws, and all my mom would say later was, “Oh my God, I raised you better than that.”

Anyway, Pigman’s is an excellent place to go if you feel like eating a mess of ribs, or something similar.  Unlike Doumar’s, where the quantity isn’t quite the focus, Pigman’s will load you up real good.  The only problem yesterday was that I wanted to swim in the ocean after lunch.  So I stopped at the half rack of ribs.  It is worth noting that the Pigman’s logo seems to suggest a sexual relationship between a pig and a man as indicated by the somewhat amorous advances of the pig in the logo.  People in New York City did not believe me when I told them about this strange logo.

Speaking of inappropriate sexual innuendo, the drive down from Virginia Beach into Kill Devil Hills is an exercise in billboards.  The billboards laud everything even closely resembling Americana or Jesus, with a particular focus on cartoonish animals and people.  It is quite popular, for example, for a BBQ place to show a smiling, wide-eyed pig suggesting that you stop in and eat some of his brothers and sisters with a gallon of sweet tea and a heap of napkins.  It is also popular to suggest that, through some circuitous logic, Jesus died for our freedom as Americans.  There’s something so simple and pure in that type of logic that it makes you crave an entire case of beer.

And then there are the place names that make a Yankee like myself laugh out loud.  For example, Downtown Duck sounds like a slightly downtrodden superhero with lame powers.  It’s also the name of the center of town in Duck, North Carolina.  Downtown Duck is a real place, just like Kill Devil Hills.  Lots of signs enjoy making light of the “Devil” part of Kill Devil Hills, suggesting that they are indeed keeping the devil at bay with their homemade fudge, or their handicrafts, or their BBQ pork sandwiches.  A name as evocative as Kill Devil Hills is a natural inspiration for this sort of schmaltz, a word I never heard once in North Carolina, although I did see 4 bagel shops on the way down the coast.  Go figure.

Some of my favorite billboards advertise slightly bawdy references to peanuts, or walnuts, or whatever kinds of nuts people eat in the South.  “Eat My Nuts,” shrieks one squirrel from a billboard.  Another billboard talks about going nuts for someone’s crabs, or getting crabs after going nuts.  It’s hard to recall exactly at this point just which sexual or oddly scatological references were real, and which ones only seem real to me now, a few days after the drive.

One thing that was real was the Brew Thru, and I have the pink beer huggie to prove it.  In Seattle, any sort of neoprene device that keeps your bottle or can of beer cold is called a “cozy,” or a “coozie,” the latter of which seems a little too strange to be true.  But in Virginia and North Carolina, or at least on the coast there, you use a “huggie.”  Strange.  So yes, I did indeed buy a pink beer huggie from the Brew Thru.  The Brew Thru is designed like the beer aisle in your local supermarket.  The only difference is that you drive your car right down the aisle, selecting beer while young people grab your order and load it into your trunk.  Seriously.  There is even a little poem as you drive into the Brew Thru; the poem says something about how some cars smell bad, some don’t, but all are welcome at the Brew Thru!

The reason people go to Kill Devil Hills, or Kitty Hawk, or Nag’s Head, must be the coastline.  It is gorgeous.  I spent about 20 minutes (without sunscreen) flailing around in the ocean before I decided to leave without getting a wicked sunburn.  It was about 86 degrees and very sunny the day we went to the beach, so I think I was smart to leave when I did.  That said, I did get a “cop tan,” which is when one of your arms gets sunburned because you’ve got it resting outside of your car as you cruise around for hours.  The sharp line dividing the burn from the pale part of my arm is receding today, about 4 days after the drive.  To me, a good cop tan is proof that you have had a real vacation, one where you could care less about getting a line on your arm.

So as my cop tan fades, I realize that I should publish this post before my vacation ends.  I’ll be writing about Doumar’s in my next post, and about the perils of a double meat pork sandwich in an SUV.