The Girl Who Ate Everything

I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while. I meant to do a post last night, but ended up wasting the night away for various reasons. Which is why I'm posting this shortly after midnight when I should be sleeping.

For those who don't know, I blog at Serious Eats every day. Admittedly, my blog posts aren't anything like the ones I post here since it's not my main job—I'm mostly in charge of handling the site flow and editing posts. You don't have much time to write stuff when you're doing those things. But I usually post at least one thing, so if you're bored out of your mind and want to be involved in the daily life of 'Boppy, head to Serious Eats. Then I won't feel so...alooone...

Today I posted about this wacked out commercial for a steak house. I didn't get much feedback on it, but I dub it an "instant classic" because I've watched it so many times today that my IQ went down 20 points. Join me, won't you?!

If you didn't like that, we can't be friends. Sorry.

[This is the last entry of my January "Tristan Week," which took place on January 5th. Yup, I am that behind. Funnily perhaps, today is the last full day of my February "Tristan Week"—he just came back to NYC for mooore! With luck you will hear about this in March. I hope that provides some kind of explanation for why I haven't been able to update recently. I really want to, you know. COS I LOOOVE YOUUU!!!]

Want a piece?

Here's a pack of Goetze's caramel creams.

Oops.

And here are the innards of one of those caramels. Next to my shoe.

When Olivia told me that a French chef had offered to come over to her apartment and cook a dinner for her and her friends, I, for some reason, failed to ask who, how, or why—I simply replied, "Hell yeah, I'll be there!" Not exactly the inquisitive type, you see.

Robert Arbor, Olivia and Kathy

The chef ended up being Robert Arbor, proprietor of Le Gamin, a sizable chain of French restaurants in New York City, and author of the cookbook Joie de Vivre. (By the way, I'd just like to note that if you buy things through my amazon.com associates code thingymajigger, you are helping me fund my life as purchased through amazon.com, which adds up to about 50% of my possessions. Don't you want me to be happy? Don't you want me to have material goods?!) As for how Olivia convinced him to spend a Thursday night (January 17th) holed up in her small East Village apartment and cook a meal for her, Kathy, and me, it was as simple as telling him that her love for him burned deeply and she regularly made offerings to the shrine that she erected in his honor. That Olivia; she's one dedicated gal.

Oh wait, she didn't make a shrine...I did. And it wasn't for Robert Arbor, but for Jakob Dylan. And this took place in 1998 when I was the ripe age of 13. And I'm only 25% joking.

Mm, gelato

It was just another one of those days. The kind that starts with gelato and ends with cake, interrupted by a feast of Chinese food to pad the stomach in between snacks. That's all that dinner is anyway: "The act of nutritional replenishment that occurs between snacks." I didn't get that from a dictionary—it's all in here...[taps skull]...

[hollow noise resonates]

Before death, there is pizza.

"We're gonna have at least 15 pizzas."

People usually ask me if working at Serious Eats entails gorging on free food all the time. No, most definitely not. ...I mean, there is a ginormous apple pie in the fridge right now (about the size of a baby's bathtub or an obese cat) that I eat a slice of nearly every day and will probably last for the rest of the month, but we don't usually have giant pies lurking in our kitchen. I swear.

But sometimes you just have to rate questionably edible delivery pizza for the good of the Super Bowl-watching public. I think this is referred to as, "taking one for the team, or "decreasing your life span."

I'M A LITTLE TEAPOT

Congee Village is a well-known Chinese restaurant in NYC for congee, spacious rooms equipped to hold giant dinner parties, and incongruous eye-raping decor. Okay, maybe...blinding is a better word. It's not really that bad. Just a little off, if you know what I mean. Bright, saturated colored lights shining out of every crevice, lots of red, lots of gold, a mishmash of things like that. It's far from dingy—perhaps "refined tackiness" would be a way to describe it.

I picked Congee Village for dinner about two Fridays ago in order to accommodate a large group (Olivia, Tristan, John, Paul, Lihan, and myself) and give the restaurant another shot. The first (and only) time I had eaten there was more than two years ago, an experience that I emerged from somewhat underwhelmed. I didn't get to try that many dishes and not liking congee with a burning passion (the passion that seemingly all Chinese people are born with except for myself...seriously, there are people who flip their shit about congee like it's a big bowl of molten unicorn babies, and that's totally cool because I do the same thing about many foods, just not for congee) may have had something to do with my "meh" response.

My second try was only a little bit better. I'm still underwhelmed though.

If you were trying to get to Williamsburg from Penn Station on February 2nd then you'll remember taking the A to 14th Street and 8th Ave, at which you were barred from boarding the L train because it only ran from Union Square, causing you to wait for the bus and slowly roll a few avenues over, then get on the L to Bedford Ave and arrive way later than you had expected to.

Weeeee. I love NYC Transit when it works. And I want to stab things when it doesn't.

People!

Greenpoint Coffee House

When Tristan and I finally did get to Williamsburg to meet up with Nathan, we ended up taking a stroll through the backwoods of Brooklyn (except replacing the woods with abandoned-looking plastic bag importers and manufacturers) to eat brunch at Greenpoint Coffeehouse, a cozy restaurant with a warm copper-tiled ceiling and a refurbished-worn-in feel. The wooden furniture and leather booths looked like they had seen better days, but that's not a bad thing as long as that doesn't mean my chair will fall apart when I sit on it. It gives character, like an old home, but without the cobwebs or funny smell.

If you ever find yourself going to Bensonhurst, which is—according to Google Maps—a narrow gridded rectangle tucked away in the southwest edge of Brooklyn, it's either because you live there or know someone who does. Although I have no quantitative evidence of this, the chances of anyone saying, "Hey, let's hang out in Bensonhurst this weekend even though we don't live there or no anyone who does!" is roughly 500,253.6 to one.

Does it rhyme with "potato"?

So why did I meet up with eight friends—Diana, Alice, Allen, Tristan, Kathy, Jeremiah, Olia, and Ian—at Pho Tay Ho? Because Diana, Alice and Allen live in Bensonhurst. And because we were hungry. And because we like Vietnamese food. And because someone named Peter, who supposedly reads this blog but is probably luuurking (poke poke!), had recommended it to Diana after a random run-in at a Japanese restaurant in Park Slope. It's a small world after all. After Allen also gave the restaurant his thumbs up, I was set on stuffing myself with lots and lots of Vietnamese food, even if that involved trekking out to Bensonhurst on a Sunday morning from Northern New Jersey. (It's not the worst experience in the world, but considerably less fun than, say, rolling around in a mountain of pillows.)

Sam Won Gahk

"So my parents own this restaurant in Flushing..."

Whoa, wait a second there, Lauren. I've known you for how long? And you tell me about your Korean-Chinese restaurant empire now?

Actually, my first thought was, "Can I be adopted by your family?" But I thought that question might fall until the heading of "creepy."

It wasn't the first time that I found out a friend's family was in the restaurant business. I can think of at least six other people with restaurant business in their blood. As far as I know, no one in my extended family owns a restaurant, nor does anyone in the extended family's extended family own a restaurant either. Maybe my family hates feeding people.

...Not that I'd open one or anything. It's too much work.

Indeed, I am proud of this hideous collage!

So I wrote this Top Ten Crazy Asian Pizza Crusts post on Slice with the hope that people would love it and cherish it and coddle it like a Gund teddy bear, but so far it's kinda just sitting there and silently dying in a dark corner of the Internet. The length of time it took to write the post was around "really freakin' long," mostly because it required cutting out 99% of the East Asian pizza data I had accrued over the past week. There's a lot of it out there, dude.

If you want to make me feel less like a bucket of fail, please check out the post (the kind of post I would never write here) and Digg it. And if anyone is willing to airmail me some pizza from Japan or Korea, I'm open to that as well.

Update (2/27/08): Woo, I noticed that you guys have been clicking through and sometimes commenting! Thanks for the loooove!