How to Get Fat in New York in One Easy Lesson
How to Get Fat in New York in One Easy Lesson: 1. Come to New York.
This weekend, while mud was in town, the NYC Barbeque Festival was being held in Madison Square Park, just down the street from mud's hotel. It was started by Danny Meyer's Blue Smoke restaurant, which preceded NYC's BBQ boom -- NYC now has surprising good BBQ for a city so far north. The Festival was great its first couple of years, and then like so many other things in NYC became Too Fucking Popular For Its Own Good. It now takes up six entire city blocks plus seven city streets with the smoked and grilled meats from over two dozen BBQ restaurants and traveling competitors. We got there in the first half hour and already the lines had grown to a 45-minute wait, like each purveyor was a ride at Disneyland. Instead, we got...
...chicken/pumpkin seed mole tacos and Mexican corn on the cob, which were being sold by Tabla, a fancy Indian restaurant which usually sells Indian street food since it faces the park, go figure. This was extraordinarily delicious (as expected, Tabla also being a Danny Meyer restaurant), and was essentially my breakfast, as we were still planning on meeting...
...eric_mathgeek and mark_shutterbug, visiting from Boston, later that day for lunch. We met at Vynl, a fun place in Chelsea. Unfortunately we couldn't get their best-in-the-city Chinese chicken salad or their lobster roll off their regular menu, and I had to settle for a heavy and poorly constructed Monte Cristo sandwich from their brunch menu. Vynl's a fun place, with brightly mosaic'ed tabletops and a bathroom that's a shrine to Justin Timberlake, and...
...their menu folders are made from recycled album covers. Later, while walking around Chelsea, we saw this bakery where...
...it looks like he's pooping out cookies! mud and I also had a nice dinner at Chez Josephine's, a romantic restaurant in the theater district run by Josephine Baker's son, filled with lots of paintings of his famous mom. And, as long as we're on the subject of food, later in the week I stopped in at DeFonte's for...
...this sandwich. DeFonte's a famous Italian sandwich joint in Brooklyn, and they opened up a Manhattan outpost in my neighborhood. It's popular with cops since it's near the Police Academy, there was a booted highway patrolman and his plainclothes buddy in the store when I stopped by and ordered this. Now that's a sandwich: Italian coldcuts (capicola, mortadella, salami, provolone), a layer of hot pickled vegetables, more cold cuts, lettuce, a layer of fried eggplant, more cold cuts, and dressed with oil and vinegar. I even had them leave off the tomatoes and marinated mushrooms!
See how easy it is?