The Girl Who Ate Everything

My lapse in blogging is the fault of a weekend full of Alex, Jerome (a plush toy), Giant Manatee (also a plush toy), loud music, shouting over loud music, seeing many friends I haven't seen in a long time, and ice cream.

But you'll hear about that later. After I'm done editing all the photos.

Oo, that's not digital

First off, this lil' food blog nugget/shard/scrap was mentioned in last week's South China Morning Post (thanks to Verena for the heads up). The shizzzz! That'll look good on my resumé, right? You can read the article here, or, more easily, by reading it on my Flickr (thanks to Charlotte for the photos). According to Susan Jung, I am pesky and lovable. That can go on a resumé too.

Last month was low on blog posts. :( I'm disappointed with myself. You should be too. With me, not yourself. I blame this partly on trying to cram four seasons of House into two months to catch up with the current season. I succeeded, learning in the process that being addicted to TV shows is incredibly time consuming. I also blame the low blog post count on eating out a lot (yeah, still doing that) and working in a way where the same amount of work takes longer now than it did before. I think that's called "being inefficient" due to "brain cell depletion."

But I still write at least one weekly review on Serious Eats: New York. While I know some of you read Serious Eats, I figure there are more of you who don't. As much as I'd love to believe that once I write something on Serious Eats I'll still feel compelled to write about it for TGWAE in a more relaxed tone laced with more colorful language, like "poop," I'm generally too lazy to do it. Here are about two months of entries for those who don't want to sift through Serious Eats: New York (even though you should be reading it if you live in New York City!):

There's something about coming across a small, nondescript restaurant in a somewhat grody part of East Chinatown that makes my heart go all a-flutter. With happiness—not cardiovascular disease. It's that burst of wonder mixed with excitement, like when a five-year old meets Mickey Mouse for the first time, unless he's scared of people in ginormous costumes, in which case he'll probably cry and make a scene. Those are the kinds of kids who should just stay home.

Nam Zhou

Nam Zhou is one of those small, somewhat nondescript restaurants. Although the street may look grody, the restaurant is less so. It may not sparkle, but it's clean enough, brightly lit, and lacks the tacky decorations that plague many Chinese restaurants. Nick and I came for two things: hand-pulled noodles and handmade dumplings. Not that we had other choices—that's pretty much all they make.

I called. I texted. I attempted to use nonexistent telepathic powers. But there were no replies from Alex, my favorite vegetarian bundle of Parisian joy, who was supposed to arrive in New York City from Philadelphia at 4 p.m. last Friday. Initial worry turned to blissful unawareness as I lost sense of time, which is what usually happens when I'm at work. I swear that blogging and Internet surfing have the ability to speed up time. It's unsettling. You could be watching videos of cute kittens on YouTube for what feels like a few minutes and barely notice that the Earth has made one complete rotation.

Then I felt a tap from behind. Strange—we don't communicate with taps in the office. I turned around.

"OHMYGODALEX!" Insert squeal and mild heart-attack. Alex was right behind me (I'm assuming not for too long; that would've been odd), sporting a new, super short haircut, but the same bright smile and happiness-shooting eyes as always. Yes, they shoot happiness. Like pew, pew, pew, yay! I let out some more gasps and "omgs" while thinking, ":D :D :) :D :)." That really is the best way to approach a friend you haven't seen in months: pop into their office unannounced. He didn't do it on purpose though; it just turned out that his phone wasn't working before.

For dinner we met up with Caroline and Tristan at homey Japanese restaurant Soy in the Lower East Side, previously mentioned in my vegetarian recommendations post as possibly being good. Now I can confirm: It's good.

Soy

Look how cozy this place is. It's small without feeling too cramped, has just enough lighting, and isn't polluted by loud music. There was even an edamame-shaped pillow on my seat. I wish my living room were so cute.

I just wanted to point out that I just made my blog mildly more 2008-compliant by activating tags. I haven't put them in for all the entries yet, but somewhat recent ones, yes. You'll find them at the end of each entry.

Don't ask why I waited until now to actually make them appear (I had been inputting them into entries for a while); fiddling with Movable Type's template tends to make me want to throw objects and strangle things, so I avoid it as much as possible. While making the tags work, I also fiddled with the search page template, which looked like a bucket of crap for the past four years.

SO SEARCH AWAY! And click on those tags. And if the search page or tags looks weird in anything besides Firefox, well...it's still functional.

Boston cream!

After the Night of the Manatee, Alex and I met up with Kathy at Alpha Donuts to help her with her epic Donut Hunt of 2008. The donut hunt is for an upcoming post on Serious Eats: New York, so I won't reveal too much besides that we're pretty sick of donuts and New York City is not a good donut town. Alpha Donuts was alright—nice if you live nearby, but not worth going out of your way for. Imagine that I'm doing that see-saw motion with my hand, the one that says, "Ehh, you know." (At least, that's what my hand says. It speaks to me. It's perfectly normal.)

Unsurprisingly, my stomach hurt after that. I think it wanted "real food," or a vitamin, or salt, or something.

Many things have happened lately. For example, the earth moved around the sun for a bit, and I ate a lot of stuff. But first, there's this.

DOUGHNUTS!!

A few weeks ago I went on a doughnut hunt with Kathy for a Serious Eats New York assignment. The fruits of our labors (labors that exploited our insensitivities to sugar overloads) are now available for your reading pleasure: A Guide to the Best Doughnuts in New York. You can view my whole photoset for outtakes and doughnuts that sucked so hard that they didn't make the final cut.

I didn't eat every doughnut that Kathy did; we did an 11-location hunt in one day while she ate the bombolonis on other occasions. But 11 is still a lot. And despite that we had planned our route to be so excessive, we still ate at Shopsin's for lunch (which was unplanned) Best and worst idea ever. ...No, it's the best.

So I hope you enjoy that. Less than halfway through out doughnut day—which lasted from 8:30 to about 4:00—we were already sick of doughnuts. My pick for best doughnuts goes to Doughnut Plant, but only the cake doughnuts, not the yeast.

And on to the second part of this entry, which isn't a "real" entry but my explanation for why I'm not writing a "real" entry: Why the hell am I so busy?

"So...what do you want to do?"

"Oh, I'm dunno. Just walk around?"

That's Kåre (pronounced something like "koh-rah" with a rolled r, in case you ever hear me say his name in real life and have no idea who I'm talking about), laid back and content with doing anything, or nothing in particular, as always. He arrived at my office last Thursday, fresh from Norway. Or not so fresh, but after half a day (or was it more?) of traveling, with a stopover in Amsterdam. It was his first time in New York City—hell, his first time outside of Europe—and I wanted to think of a good way to occupy his time before I got out of work.

"Well, this area is kind of...not interesting," I said while pulling up a map of Chelsea on my computer, "this area" being my block of 27th Street between 7th and 8th avenues. "If you go west, you'll hit galleries. If you go east, you'll hit...stuff. If you go north, you'll hit Times Square. You basically want to go anywhere outside of the few blocks around my office. ...Wait, are you hungry?"

"Oh yes," he replied, while smiling. I think he was hungrier than his voice led on. He was probably thinking, "JESUS CHRIST, FEED ME, I've been eating airplane food for the past 12 hours." But he wouldn't actually say that.

I printed out a map."Go to the Shake Shack," I said while drawing a circle around Madison Square Park. "Get a burger. It's awesome."

So Kåre's first meal in New York City was at the Shake Shack. (He liked it, of course, or else we couldn't be friends.) I think I steered him in the right direction.

Harissa falafel sandwich from Taim

And for his second meal, falafel and fries from Taim. Bringing people from out of town to Taim is such an easy choice: It's awesome, cheap, and in an easily accessible, interesting food-filled neighborhood, with the unintentional plus of being vegetarian.

Note: This entry originally took place on October 17.

Anthony Bourdain's back and David Chang

"Hey, Olivia!" I said as she rounded the corner of Momofuku Ssam Bar.

"ANTHONY BOURDAIN. IN THERE." Her eyes were aglow with the fiery passion that is, "I Am In Love with Anthony Bourdain."

"Yeah, David Chang's in there too, looks like they're taping some—"

"ANTHONY BOURDAIN! OH MY GOD." Her eyes went up one notch crazier to, "I Am Going to Kidnap Anthony Bourdain."

"Yup..."

"ANTHONYYYyyyy Anthonyyyy Anthonyyyy..." She trailed off with some foaming at the mouth.

I mean, in her mind she was probably foaming at the mouth. In real life, she appeared to be mentally stable. But then again, don't we all? Don't we all?

LUNCH MENU, win

Although I consider Ssam Bar a splurge meal, their semi-new prix fixe menu of three courses for $28 is a great deal that'll leave you stuffed for half the price of dinner. Kåre and I each ordered from the prix fixe menu and got different items to maximizing our diversity. You'd be dumb not to. Since Olivia is a newly christened celiac (insert sad face), she just ordered ham and brussels sprouts and shared whatever non-gluten-tainted dishes we had ordered.

Note: This entry originally took place on October 17.

When Kåre and I stepped off the Staten Island Ferry, we decided to take in some of the Staten Island sights.

It's the sun!

OH YEAH, CHECK OUT THAT SKYLINE!!!

But the most fun we had (or was it just me?) was when we took advantage of the beautiful clear blue sky, the lack of human interference, and the abundant space by shooting jumping photos.

For a while, every time we took this photo it looked like he was standing on the railing.

Kåre went for the cannonball look.

Note: This post originally took place on October 18.

A few months ago I was made the editor of Serious Eats' burger blog, A Hamburger Today, despite that my burger fiend quotient is 1/100,000th of these guys. Yet I'm at the top of the page (eating gelato; not even a burger!), thus giving the impression that my diminutive head is brimming with burger knowledge. Lies. All lies. I'm mostly good at blogging things and keeping the content a-flowing.

But this doesn't mean I don't love burgers or that I'm not opinionated about them. Being the AHT editor has given me an all-access pass to "Screwing Moderation," meaning that I can stuff myself with more juicy patties of ground beef than ever before—I'm shooting for at least one a week—in order to catch up to my burger-loving peers and inch closer to death. I still can't write about burgers in any authoritative way, but I'm discovering what sucks and doesn't suck about burgers. This is the stuff they don't teach you in college. This is real life, man.

Dumont Burger

Dumont Burger has been on my "to eat" list for a while. Although it got mixed reviews from my friends and the Internet, it seemed dumb not to try one of the most famous burgers within walking distance of my apartment. Kathy, Tina, Alex, and Kåre joined me on my burger-eating quest; we would all success—or fail—together.