The Girl Who Ate Everything

Organic Tofu House

The first time I ate at Organic Tofu House, there weren't any customers besides my mom and myself. I blamed the lack of tofu-loving diners on the blizzard that had blanketed the streets in a thick blanket of fluffy, frozen rain bits, thus preventing any cars from moving at a speed higher than "sloth."

However, when I visited again last Tuesday with my mom, my brother Bert, and Tristan, it was still semi-deserted. There was just one customer in the restaurant before us and no more had come in during our meal. It was a little late at the time—around 8:15 PM—and maybe restaurants aren't hopping on Tuesday nights, but I now fear that Organic Tofu House isn't getting enough business (a telling sign was the notice put up in their window within the past few weeks saying they would no longer be open on Sundays), which would suck most heinously because it is my closest source of Korean tofu stew and I need my Korean tofu stew, oh god, how I need those chunks of soybean curds.

But my ads will be in English, not Russian.

Instead of quietly rolling out my new BlogHerAds, I figured I'd just announce it in all its money-making glory.

So there it is. [points to the right column]

I've never put banner ads on any of my websites before because interrupting my website's design (you know, this beautiful white and orange theme I've got going on) with a random ad to make a few bucks was never worth it, but now that I appear to have a sizable audience, it might actually pay off. (We'll find out at the end of the month, I guess.) Some extra bit of income would be really helpful in the (rare) case that I move to NYC or want to splurge on some more photography equipment. ...Or, um, eat at a nice restaurant. Or eventually have to renew my web hosting bill. Basically I'm thinking of how ad revenues could pay for stuff directly related to this site, which makes me feel less bad about the overt commercialism.

Having ads may even encourage me to post more often. Because you know, It's all about page views, baby. Then again, my posting schedule is pretty regular (about twice a week) and I can't imagine what else I'd shove in between those too-long posts of mine. Hohum, it's a thought.

I suspect many of you read my site on a feed reader, in which case you won't be faced with ads. Yay! Not that I want to prevent you from visiting my site. Um. Please continue to come to my little corner of the web outside of your feed reader. :)

As a crappy reward, I present you with a video Tristan took of me talking about chicken (you might have to be logged into Facebook to view it). The context is that moments before he had pressed the "record" button on his camera, we had passed a take-out shop with a sign proclaiming the presence of ROTISSERIE CHICKEN. Apparently I make the word "chicken" sound cute. If I raise enough monies, maybe I can invest in a new segment called "boppyVision" during which I just say the names of foods in funny voices.

View Larger Map

This is an extreme work-in-progress, but I wanted to point out that I've made google map-based archives for some of my entries. Yeah, some—this stuff takes for freakin' ever to input and format. I'd almost be willing to pay someone to do it. Almost. I just have a few more years of archives to get through and I'm done! Haha! Kill me please!

You'll definitely want to view the larger versions of the maps. I hope you find this feature helpful; many priceless hours of sitting on my butt went into it. I benefit from the maps too, of course; with a quick glance I can see how far my gorging has taken me. It's rather frightening.

(Oh yeah, I do plan on my next entry to actually be of the "food review" category. Too busy and tired to do it right now though. PLEASE STAND BY.)

"I feel like I'm in Disneyland!" exclaimed Kathy as we stepped off the train onto the Brighton Beach subway platform.

"Yeah...if everything were written in Russian."

Brighton Beach is the Russian-saturated section way out on the southern-most tip of Brooklyn by Coney Island. You could say that it has a Disneyland-like quality to it in that it feels...unreal. You're no longer in America—you're in the land of signs written in Cyrilic. There aren't any people walking around in costumes meant to resemble popular characters from animated films, but we did see a decrepit life-sized display of what we think was supposed to be a male waiter, if the waiter had an ax blade stuck in his forehead and a disease that caused one of his thumbs to rot off.

Cafe Glechik

Kathy and I walked to Cafe Glechik to meet up with Olia (our Russian guide), Jeremiah, Natty, Ian and Diana. The radiant sunflowers on the facade made me feel welcome and safe. Almost as though I were walking down Sesame Street. Little did I know that by the end of my meal an unprecedented amount of hard liquor would find its way down my esophagus.

But first, there was food.

Some foods. Previously eaten.

If my brain were less stupid I would've mentioned Choice Eats, the Village Voice's food fest featuring 30+ restaurants picked by Robert Sietsema (meaning that they cover all kinds of cuisines and many are probably awesome) earlier. Because it's on March 11th (this coming Tuesday) from 6:30 to 10:30 and advance tickets have already sold out. You can buy them at the door for $35 (although I'm not sure how limited those tickets are) or you can try to win a pair from Ed Levine.

So why am I mentioning it now even though tickets are mostly gone and I've had this press release since the end of January? Besides that I don't really post press releases, I figured that in the possibility that you're walking near the Puck Building on Tuesday night with a rumbling belly, now you know that you can pony up $35 and eat shittons of food and drink buckets of booze. Okay, maybe not that much, but I suspect there will be pleeeenty of goodies for you to stuff your face with.

If I thought I could eat $35 worth of food, I think I'd go. I mean, it's worth it when you have that many restaurants at your fingertips, but at the same time I can't really enjoy food if my stomach is so engorged that it feels like it's pressing against all my other vital organs, my lungs in particular. Out of the list of participating restaurants, here are the ones that I've been to:

• Chiyono
• Hummus Place
• Kampuchea Noodle Bar
• Kuma Inn
• Maremma
• Vanessa's Dumpling House (I've never written a review of their food, but I've been there a few times and was mildly traumatized during my first visit. ...Years ago. My favorite cheap dumpling place is Fried Dumpling on Allen Street, but since Vanessa's Dumpling House has gotten a huge make-over it's probably worth checking out again. )

Damn, I have a lot of work to do.

FOOD OF MANY NATIONS!

INTERNATIONAL!

In my humble, food-obsessed, and possibly "deprived of conventional joys" opinion, few things are as fun as oogling at the aisles and shelves of ethnic grocery stores packed with unfamiliar items, sometimes laugh-inducing by way of ungrammatically correct English names and descriptions. I was more than happy (+1 happy) to drag my dumpling and vodka-laden body to Russian (and more) supermarket wonderland M&I International Food under the watchful eyes of my friends, who were afraid that I would keel over from the surge of alcohol in my bloodstream.

[Preamble: I'm going to try this newfangled thing where I write entries that you can actually finish reading in less time than it takes the Earth to complete one rotation. Let's see how this works.]

"I hate you."

When Tristan says he hates me—an expression he uses about once every three days—he doesn't really mean it. He only hates me when I make him do things he wouldn't normally do, hurling him into a slippery vortex of sin lined with poisoned spikes of regret.

Behold.

The agent of his hatred was the fatty pork that came with our bowls of ramen at Minca. While I'm totally cool with knocking back a few slices of the sweet, tender pork blanketed by a layer of rich swinely fat, Tristan—who follows a roughly 99% vegetarian diet, the missing 1% mostly being my fault—is less accustomed to such atherosclerosis-causing hedonism.

The sandwiches at Westville automatically come with mixed greens, but you can do away with anything containing minerals and chlorophyll with just one extra dollar!

"What? Please tell me more!" (Pretend we're having a conversation and that's what you just said. Work with me here.)

I would be happy to tell you more! And you can tell I'm happy because I'm using more than one exclamation mark!!

By relinquishing this extra dollar, you can replace your greens with french fries! Is this a good idea? When is it not a good idea to substitute fresh infant vegetation pulled from Mother Nature's bosom (or somewhere in that vicinity; as though I know where salad comes from) with sticks of potato bathed in a pool of burninatingly hot oil? Never. That's when. (No nutritionists were consulted in the reaching of this conclusion.)

CHEESE

But sometimes, just once in a blue moon, fries can be overwhelming. Perhaps I wasn't that hungry. Maybe my fried food quota had already been reached for the day. Because when my grilled cheese sandwich platter was plopped in front of me, all I could focus on was the 75% of my large oval plate that was covered with a jumbled mass of fries too large to fit into my stomach. My brain attempted to find an eloquent solution to this spacial problem, but all it could come up with was, "Shit, son, that's a lot of fries."

Sorry for not giving you a "real" entry when you so deserving of one (although if you want a one-sentence summary of what I ate yesterday, here it is: for lunch, a most excellent harissa falafel pita sandwich from Taim; an assortment of goodies from Bouchon Bakery including a buttery scone, moist carrot muffin, and bloated passion fruit cream-filled donut; and for dinner, red Thai curry sauce and vegetable-laden whole-grain pasta from Chez Tristan accompanied by The Mighty Boosh), but I have a random, potentially relevant question:

Do any of you ("you" being a reader who hopefully likes my blog) live in Chile? Santiago, more specifically. I know it's a long shot, but if so, please leave a comment or email me (roboppy@gmail.com). Thanks!

What the.

"Robyn, you need to take a picture of that sign!"

The sign in question that Lauren was referring to touted the mouthwatering offerings of baby lamb, baby goat, and baby pig. All babies, all the time.

I wasn't planning on whipping out my camera in the drizzling rain while on our way to Taverna Kyclades to meet up with Tristan for lunch, but it's not every day you read an awning that uses the word "BABY" so prolifically in relation to food. And you know how amusing the word "baby" is. Very amusing.

I will spare you a photo of what was hanging in the window, mostly because I didn't take one. The window was too fogged up to take a clear photo, but the image of the bulging blue eyes of whatever skinned animal that was hanging, its full length and pink meatiness displayed to passersby, is burned into my skull.

And then we dug into a delicious Greek meal!

Since I work about a 30-second stroll from Korean take-out Kofoo, it's easily the place that I eat at the most in New York City. Not necessarily every week, but sometimes three times in a row. Or more. It depends how lazy I am; can't take 10 minutes to make my own sandwich (usually of a boring composition, preferably filled with mortadella)? Kofoo, it is!

Since I have the opportunity to eat there so often, I've given myself the goal of ordering everything on their menu, an easily attainable goal because it thankfully doesn't cover the breadth of a typical Chinese take-out menu. There's kimbap (what I like to call, "sushi on steroids"), rice dishes, noodle dishes, soup dishes, and sides. It's a condensation of my favorite Korean foods, most of which are freshly made and won't set me back more than $10.

Does the name cold, chewy noodles appeal to you? ...Yeah, not exactly as mouth-watering as "fried chicken." Or most other foods. But I hadn't tried it before and, dammit, I had a goal in mind. A goal that once attained would mean absolutely nothing. Like graduating high school.

It's cold and chewy.

I didn't know what exactly to expect when I handed over $7 for the experience of eating noodles that possessed the prized qualities of being cold and chewy, but I definitely hadn't envisioned a clear saucer-shaped bucket filled with a tangled mass of semi-white noodles atop a bed of chopped romaine lettuce and carrot strips, topped with buttloads ("buttloads" equating to "a lot") of shredded cucumber and some other shredded vegetable that was possibly radish, with half of a hard boiled egg plopped in the center and sesame seeds sprinkled over everything. The container was barely large enough to contain the excessively huge mountain of noodles and vegetable matter within. I can't exactly say why, but I was kind of scared.

Last Friday night, Tristan, his flatmate Kim, and I took a cab to Bedford Avenue in search of midnight pizza. The first place we stopped at was large, crowded and, according to Tristan and Kim, not even good.

Vinnie's Pizzeria

Don't let the hipsters misguide you. Walk up to Vinnie's Pizzeria a cozy, not overly stuffed with humans (although it probably should be) vegan-friendly pizzeria where just one slice of their specialty pizza will knock out your hunger.

Start off with some horchata

Yola's Cafe

"I'll take a horchata." I didn't plan on ordering horchata—I tend to stick with the flavorless and free tap water—but about half a second (or less) after seeing the row of horchata-filled cups in the refrigerator behind the counter at Yola's Cafe, the craving set in.

"I'll take one too," added Tristan.

Why do I love horchata so much? Mostly because its flavor combines sweet, cinnamon, milk, and rice into a light beverage that tastes like drinkable rice pudding, a great quality when you want rice pudding without the inconvenience of chewing. Also, unlike my other favorite beverage, milkshakes, downing a glass of horchata makes me comfortably refreshed, not like my stomach has been leadened by molten ice cream. The version at Yola's Cafe was sweeter than what I was expecting, but horchata has tasted a little different at every place I've gotten it from, and I always happily gulp it down.

Hello there.

This is the chargrilled burger from The Spotted Pig. The general reaction to this burger upon first impression is, "Holy jebus," or a drool-filled utterance of similar meaning.

Although far from homely, I wouldn't call it super fancy either. It's just...very pretty. The brioche bun is so perfectly plump as to appear inflated, and the evenly spaced and darkened grill marks look as though they had been skillfully painted on. In between the bun halves is a thick puck of meat that, while glistening in beef juices, doesn't sloppily extrude any excess liquid. Next to this perfectly coiffed burger (a burger can be coiffed, right?) is a messy pile of golden shoestring fries possessing a crack-like addictive quality by the addition of fresh rosemary, fried garlic slices, and that magical seasoning called "salt."

This is the main reason I brought my friend Rebecca, who was visiting from Seattle, to the Spotted Pig for lunch. Not just any lunch, but her first lunch in New York City.

...Also, I wanted the burger. That may have been 50% of the reason.