May 2006 Archives

As a loyal adopted New Yorker, I am an adamant thin crust pizza supporter. I like my pies so thin and stiff that the acute angle resists gravity droop. But Sullivan Street Bakery's 1 1/2 inch deep, pillowy square pizza carciofi bowled me over. The crunch of the deep golden brown crust, the elastic pull of the tender middle, the perfectly browned spring artichoke heart halves, the saline burst of the rectangular rock salt crystals, the astringent bite of the garlic with the peppery olive oil -- it is a thing of beauty, total pizza perfection. Grab a slice or five while it's in season.

Sullivan Street Bakery
Sullivan and Broome

Wow, switching to Movable Type is turning out to be way more complicated than I thought it would be.  Thanks for your patience.  I hope to be fully functional by early June.  Sorry for the multiple personality disorder. 

I finished the chapter on Masa in Michael Ruhlman's The Reach of a Chef yesterday*, and now I can't stop dreaming and creaming over the day I'll have $420 ($350 + instant 20% gratuity) to fork over to sit at the hinoki wood bar with the Taisho.

But then I saw what may be the most disgusting review I've ever read in my life. I pray to God it's a joke, but you just never know in this town. I hope you didn't just eat a big lunch:

From Menupages:
Posted by Blair** on 05/20/2006
A great halfway point

My fiancé, myself, and a couple of our friends were doing this thing that we do every once in a while where we try to make it from Friday to Wednesday drunk. The rules are that none of us can cook or stay in our own apartments during the “binge,” as we call it, so we spend a lot of time in restaurants and hotels. Luckily, my buddy James had planned ahead for once and booked Masa for that Saturday without telling any of us. A brillant move. By then, we were about twenty-four hours in and the food really hit the spot. Needles to say, I don’t remember much of the evening, but I think the food was excellent, although I felt like we were there for days and plates just kept coming and coming. The sake was a bigger draw than the food– and let me say – the one thing I do remember is some drink like Cakonkou or Kakonnku or something. The waitresses came by and I just kept saying Cakonku and it kept flowing. We were loud, but no one seemed to mind; it was a pretty festive atmosphere, not this “temple” everyone was telling me about. Delicious stuff. It all came to $3500 or something, and my dad was pissed when he saw the AMEX that month, but all that aside it was worth every penny.

*Disclaimer: Yes, the people who employ me publish it. But I bought his first "chef" book when it came out and I wasn't working here.
**Blair! You can't make that shit up. Or can you?

Went to the new Fairway in Red Hook on Saturday with my friend Julie and baby Elijah. Cheap cheap cheap, amazing selection of high and low, everything from gluten free breads to bulk packs of chicken to olive oils from around the world to Cheez Whiz in a squeezable bottle. Thick, beautiful asparagus only $1.49/lb.! Marinated white anchovies and blocks of fresh sheep's cheese! Applegate Farms AND Schaller & Weber AND Boar's Head AND Dietz & Watson AND house-made turkey, all hand-sliced!

But what nutter designs the Fairways? Both this and the Upper West Side Fairway (the only ones I've been to) are like overwhelming culinary K-holes to me. I go in and several hours later I am spit back out, dazed and confused. How do people find things there? The layout defies mental mapping.

It was a weird scene, though -- only Brooklynites with cars, which for the most part meant families from Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, even folks coming from as far as East New York. At one point in the produce aisle, I got stuck in a bottleneck of wide load middle-aged homemakers ambling with their ginormous, 12-pack toilet paper filled carts.

It's definitely one stop suburban-style shopping if you've got a car. I bet the Park Slope stroller pushers will be defecting from the co-op by the boatload.

With a million thanks to my buddy Adam, I'm up and running!!! I know it's ugly, but baby steps, people.

If you somehow managed to find my typepad blog, you are some kind of baby genius.  I broke my website and I'm trying to fix it.  Bear with me, people, you are watching my growing pains.  Believe me, this hurts me a lot more than it hurts you.

So in a fit of post-food poisoning indigestion and insomnia, I went and bought a year of server space.  And the personal version of Movable Type.  And I almost paid them $100 to install it because I am completely techtarded.  And I'm paying my friend to help me redesign this thing.

All of this means that I am making my long dreamed-of move from Typepad to the more flexible Movable Type.  So this site may disappear for a while.  Hopefully it will reappear sometime this month, both NEW and IMPROVED.

In the meantime, don't talk too much shit behind my back.  I am trying to make this world a better place for you and for me and the entire human race.

In the meantime, write me some email -- gandas at gmail dot com.  I miss you already.

xoxo,
Ganda

I think I got food poisoning.  For the life of me, I can't figure out what it was.  Everything seems suspect -- that leftover piece of buffalo mozz, the homemade raita I had for dinner on Saturday, the excessive wine on Sunday night, the soy milk I'm supposed to use within 7-10 days of opening but never do.  Really, it could be anything.  I also got hives on Sunday.  In short, I'm a mess.

A conversation between Doug and me:

ME: [from the dining room where I am working on my laptop] The only thing I had on Sunday was exactly what you had.  Except I put soymilk in my tea.  Maybe it was that cheese sample I had...

DOUG:  [looking up from his computer in the next room, laughing] Oh my God, I just figured out what you are doing.  You are looking for medical advice on the internet.  You can't do that, Ganda.  That is the worst thing you can do.  It's just...paranoia soup.

In case you missed this cherce comment under a Gawker post about the skinny-fying Conde Nast mirrors:

I'll never forgot the day I saw a wraith-like Vo-ghoul having a lunch consisting of lettuce leaves with Sweet N ' Lo sprinkled on top. Ummm, yummy nums! Cancer makes u real skinny.

Why not just kill yourself?

Those Kanoodle ads are being banished forever.  Apologies for the severe lapse.