Emperor's New Pasta

Forget everything you ever knew about pasta. The new pasta is the pasta-free pasta.

We learnt this at Del Posto last weekend, during one of a series of events to celebrate TLOML turning forty. Del Posto is our local special occasion restaurant of choice. Despite having eaten like kings at Quality Meats the night before, we decided to go for the thirty-four course tasting menu.

Okay, I'm exaggerating for effect. It was only 8 courses. Twelve if you include the bar nibbles, 2 rounds of amuse bouches and the takeaway box (more on that later). Whatever, it was the longest and largest meal of my life. We were eating at a steady pace for well over three hours.

We left the restaurant groaning and clutching our stomachs and agreeing that the veal course was overkill. And we would have settled for 50 layers of yesterday's lasagne, not all 100. (We also wondered if there was a discount for getting today's, rather than yesterday's lasagne, but fortunately were not gauche enough to ask the wait staff).

To give you an idea, here's the ostrich course. That's an ostrich carpaccio, an ostrich pate, and a date sealed in ostrich-stock-based aspic. And a barley crisp, obvs. This was actually a slightly controversial course for us, as the wine pairing was, in fact, a beer. A very nice beer but still... for what we were paying we kinda expected fine wines all the way. Anyway all those different ostriches were delicious.

Back to the pasta. Pasta nudi is not, it transpires, pasta served by the rotund waiter in the buff. In fact, it is pasta without pasta. Once you take the ravioli away, ricotta-stuffed ravioli becomes just, well, ricotta.

This is what 'nude' ricotto-stuffed ravioli looks like

I'm being sniffy because it's easy to poke fun at the pretentions of Del Posto. But me-oh-my it is incredibly good food. A most memorable dinner, fantastic service and a pianist playing Burt Baccarach. And the company was not half bad either - our favourite New Yorker and our favourite West Coast Rascal made for a perfect foursome.

And that takeaway box? Two perfect dark chocolate truffles in a jolly little gold box. Sigh. They gave our fridge a nice festive feel for a few hours but I could only resist so long... Perfect for breakfast the day after a 3000 calorie dinner.

Busy busy?

People think of New York as a place where every one is always a hurry.

Not so. A short Sunday afternoon walk through Washington Square Park reveals many many New Yorkers who clearly have way way too much time on their hands

Like these no-hopers.

Thanks, but no thanks.

The dudes who hang out just jamming with their maracas:

And these chumps who get together to show off their silky skills with a hackysack:

 

To the credit of New York, these two weirdos went largely ignored:

Still, a lot of people there with a lot of 'New York minutes' to fill... Actually, it's kind of a nice vibe. Makes a change from the cut and thrust of Rabbit Hutch Towers anyway.

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.

Bucket list updates

Progress on the Bucket List is going pretty well.

We made it to Coney Island - I think I may have mentioned it once or twice lately. And TLOML's birthday prompted a trip to the Intrepid which he loved. He said 'wooah' and 'wow' about a hundred times as we walked around the flight deck. Next week, also for his birthday, we're going to La Boheme at the Met, which takes care of the Lincoln Center.

A couple of impromptu drinks in Wilfie and Nell spat the two of us out, starving, in the West Village. So we went to the hip Spotted Pig. Not sure if it was on the official bucket list but we've wanted to try it for a while. (For what it's worth I prefer the Smith and Mills burger).

But for every thing I tick off the Bucket List, I seem to add something new. Can you believe I've never visited Washington DC? Or eaten crab in Maryland? They are both do-able in a day, or at least an overnight trip, from New York, so there's really no excuse. New Orleans is further but I really want to visit. And I haven't played sax in the subway either (thanks to my little sister for that suggestion).

Plus there are all those bars I've yet to try. Campbell's Apartment, the old school cocktail bar in a former station master's apartment in Grand Central. And Macao, a Chinese-Portugese gambling-themed bar by the same genius mixologists of classic speakeasy Employee's Only. Can I really leave Manhattan without sampling them?

I heard this week that I don't need to rush back right after New Year, and I think I might need that extra week or two. There's still a lot of ground to cover...

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.