To Russia and back for five bucks

This time last Sunday TLOML and I were in deepest darkest Russia. Or so it seemed.

This was the scene on the street:

(Dear ipad viewers, you can't see this, but it's a man and his mother performing Russian folk music)

The liquor stores were packed with an incredible range of reasonably priced vodkas...

...some obscure Georgian wines...

And of course, brandy in a bottle shaped like a gun.

Forget buying snow clothes in the discount stores on 6th Avenue - these Russians know how to dress when the temperature drops.

There were stands selling caviar in the street. And many strange smoked fish and meats for sale in the grocery stores. We ate blintzes and knishes in a cafe with terrible decor and a filthy toilet. The disgusting, grimy loo and the general low rent vibe were actually a bit depressing - just like, as a child in Thatcher's Britain, I would imagine Soviet Russia to be.

It wasn't all bad though. That smoked sausage TLOML selected made an excellent appetizer. And the next day I used it in a cod-and-chorizo-stew inspired grouper-and-strange-Russian-sausage stew.

This is Little Russia, aka Brighton Beach. It's a quick ramble along the boardwalk from Coney Island, about an hour on the subway, and yet about a million light years away from West Chelsea.

We enjoyed our visit, but won't be hurrying back. Till the next time we are in the market for caviar, furs or vodka, that is.

Competitive eating

Our first stop in Coney Island was Nathan's hot dog establishment. This is partly because it is the first building we saw as we exited the subway. But also because it is truly a mecca for hot dog lovers. They don't mess about with papaya juice either.

Every year Nathan's hosts a hot dog eating competition. Here's the wall of fame,which is half a block wide.

 The 'international' is a nice touch. Eating competitions seem to me to be a uniquely American occupation. There's a show TLOML and I love called Man Vs Food where this unsurprisingly rotund man called Adam Richman - a hero of TLOML's - travels the US taking on all those food challenges.

You know, challenges like 'Fat Andy's pizza challenge' where the person who can eat a 12 lb pizza in less than an hour wins $500 and the dubious honour of having their photo on Fat Andy's 'wall of pain'. (No-one has won this one yet). Or the San Francisco Creamery's Kitchen Sink Challenge: a 2 gallon sundae which includes 8 scoops of ice cream, 8 toppings and 8 servings of whipped cream. If you eat it in an hour, you earn a place on the Wall of Fame and free icecream for a year. Before Richman, only 4 people had ever succeeded. Richman nailed it in 45 minutes, despite the fact that, as regular viewers know, dairy is his Achilles heel.

TLOML talks proudly of his glory days eating with his buddy JG, who once took down 78 pieces of sushi in a Washington, DC restaurant (TLOML only managed 50 or so). They were apparently in training for weeks, eating 30 or 40 pieces at a time before going to lie on a grassy knoll nearby to recover. If the Senator they worked for hadn't left under a sex scandal cloud I suspect they would have been dismissed for doing nothing but eat and then digest all summer long. And I bet that innocent sushi place doesn't offer 'all you can eat' anymore.

So far, so American. For the first few decades, Americans ruled at Nathan's hot dog eating competition too.

Then along came the Japanese. Suddenly Jay Green's 13 dogs doesn't look so impressive, does it?

 

In fact, for almost a decade Japanese competitive eaters dominated at the Nathan's competition. And these were not big burly dudes either.

TLOML theorises that there's an actual competitive eating institute in Japan where people train. Certainly a fair amount of strategy seems to go into it. Kobayashi does a stretch as he eats, apparently known as the 'Kobayashi Shake', to squish the food down inside him. He also dips his hot dog buns in water before eating them, which he calls the Solomon Method. He is apparently a national legend in Japan.

But don't be downhearted, America. Joey Chestnut bounced onto the scene and won at Nathan's the last few years. He's currently ranked first in the world at eating a lot, according to the International Federation of Competitive Eating. And yes, the IFCE is headquartered in... the US.

Coney Island's finest garden

I guess March 2009 was a quiet month for the Parks and Rec garden competition. Still, here it is, Coney Island's best garden. A little round patch of hope and shrubbery in the wasteland between Nathan's and the boardwalk.

The charming history of Coney Island

As my last post indicated, I didn't exactly fall in love with Coney Island.

One of the disappointments we faced was that there was no Sideshows by the Seashore performance on the day we visited. Sideshows by the Seashore is a modern freakshow, featuring the world's most tattooed woman, and a man known as the human pincushion, and various like-minded buddies.

It looks a bit like the one on Venice beach TLOML always pooh-poohed. I guess life in New York has brought out his darker side because he was actually looking forward to Sideshows.
 

Sideshows is run by an artists collective who also operate the small, slightly dusty, but fascinating Coney Island Museum. We swallowed our disappointment about the show, paid our $1 entrance fee and headed up their staircase to look at the exhibits.

                              
There we learnt about the madness of Coney Island's glory days. Back in the day Coney Island was home to some far crazier spectacles than the human pincushion.

Apparently they used to have incubators with premature babies in there - being cared for by nurses - on display on the boardwalk. A community of Filipinos were somehow, um, persuaded to relocate to Coney Island where they lived in an 'Igorot Village' that daytrippers could pay to look around. And there was a 0.5 scale replica of Nuremburg, populated by 300 little people (or midgets, in 1900s-speak).

Also popular were some crazy re-enactments of terrible disasters. Like the San Francisco earthquake show, or the Galveston Flood show. Both were hugely successful recreations, peopled by actors and with elaborate sets and effects, which were showing within a year or two of those disasters. Kinda like if someone did a Hurricane Katrina IMAX film. Very odd.

So, that's what people did at the beach before the invention of the Kindle or the frisbee.

New York's very own seaside resort

Ever since I saw Annie Hall, where Woody Allen claims to have been brought up under the rollercoaster, I've wanted to visit Coney Island. That's why I put it on that bucket list.

So this weekend TLOML and I took the C and then the F out to the wilds of coastal Brooklyn. It took an awfully long time to get there. We began passing through overground stations with strange names. We were definitely not in Manhattan anymore. The train emptied.

On arrival, the first thing we saw was the legendary Nathan's hot dog place. It cheered TLOML up immediately, and the journey already seemed worthwhile.

Which is a good thing as frankly, it went downhill after that.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting it to be Vegas - or even Brighton. But I was hoping for an out-of-season, picturesque desolation. Not just actual desolation.

Okay, it's November. But somehow I can't imagine Coney Island being any more cheerful when its packed to the gills with screaming children and red faced sunseekers.

I was a little relieved ChaChas was closed. Grandpa Chacha's home style wine is probably the last thing we needed.

There's something about the backdrop that just, well, it aint' pretty.