Category: Manhattan

Something Blue, Something Lent, Something New

For Carnival, P and I went to see Brokeback Mountain to prepare for the Sunday Oscar party that we’re attending. Don’t normally like Westerns, but of course it’s not really about that. Ang Lee strikes again with his patented twist/tragedy/unrequited love M.O. Recommended. On the other hand, Loews Cinema Village IV on Third Av. had a mouse run down the aisle. Not recommended.

Had Japanese twice in a row. Tuesday night after the movie we went to Zen Sushi (113 St. Marks Place), which had really yummy half-price sushi and ramen. The mackerel was outstanding – after finishing the two that came with the tonkatsu ramen set menu, I ordered another in a pickled and pressed sushi style. On Ash Wednesday, had the charashi from Nanatori on Montegue St. to satisfy fish day.

New: Short film Take it or Leave It by J.P. Chan (know him from NYU) on tour at the SF Film Festival.

Amazing Race 9 gets its groove back – 60,000 miles in 29 days! Teams of two! Woo Hoo! I’m rooting for the hippie team BJ and Tyler – while their choice of Beatle outfits from the Yellow Submarine era is a little questionable, they are not Ugly Americans. Their years of travel experience show.

Flashdance, What a Feeling

Saturday was an event-packed APA fest, and probably would have been a logistical nightmare if it were anywhere other than New York. Bright and early that morning I was helping out a moot court workshop for law students in midtown. P- was doing errands, and I met her at the Pathmark in Chinatown with the Zipcar.

After a flurry of SMS’s, voicemails and phone exchanges, we met up with champion blogger MJ visiting from San Francisco. While on a personal hiatus, she’s been travelling across North America and hooking up with bloggers across the country. I told her she should really be writing a book about her trip.

After navigating back from Brooklyn over the Brooklyn Bridge up the FDR Drive really quickly, it took a silly amount of time to get across Houston because of construction. MJ was handed off to us from Uberchick and we navigated towards Flushing. After missing the Queensboro Bridge exit, we came back down from 96th street. Then we went along Northern Boulevard over the hills, through the curves, and into Flushing and the muni lot.

Dinner was at Mimi’s Shabu-Shabu, which is a uniquely American way of having hot pot – instead of the entire group sharing the same pot of simmering broth, each diner gets their own mini-hotpot to operate as they want. Individuality triumphs! For the protein, MJ went all American beef, P- went for the lamb, and I went for the surf & turf shrimps and beef.
Because of the late start and missing the exit to the bridge, we had to hussle through gale force winds to get to Flushing Town Hall for a performance of Slant, an Asian American performance group. They reprised their original production from 1995, which explored Asian men and masculinity/emasculinity. The group has had a long connection with NYU, so I’ve seen many of their productions, but never saw their first one, so I was happy to see this reprise. I also bumped into a guy, P, who I knew from law school, but I was just having a senior moment and couldn’t remember his name for about 15 minutes. He turned out to be the brother in law of one of the group’s members.

After that, we ran through the cold back to the car, and zoomed back to CBGB’s, the famed club that’s due to close in the next year after arranging a temporary reprive from escalating rents. I probably hadn’t been there in like 15 years, back in my club promoting era.

MJ’s frend’s band Dogs of Winter was performing at 11:30 PM. We got there a good 1 1/2 hours early, but spent the next 45 minutes trying to find parking. I finally found a spot in front of the Blue Man Group theater.

We suffered through a really pathetic warmup act (you kind of take competent drumming and split jumps for granted, but when the guy can’t keep time, and the lead guitar had to do everything in his power to avoid crashing into the bass or the drum set when landing, you know they need help). We were much relieved when Dogs of Winter showed up. DoW’s set had a variety of unrequited alt-punk and a Roy Orbison cover. Frontman Brian is a tall lanky guy with big guns for arms and good chops with his axes. P- got his autograph after the performance.
After leaving MJ to the whims of the Dogs of Winter (and we are having a dog of a winter this weekend), we went to Oh Taisho! on St. Mark’s Place for a quick midnight bite, which included ramen, some skewers, and roasted rice balls (yum!!). Afterwards, we found the car (cold and still in one piece) and rode off into Brooklyn, being the youngest and oldest we have been in a long time.

The sides of the Ninja, +1K

P & I slept in during the morning on Saturday watching Food Network’s Mangia Mania week, which is all Italian food. We must have watched 3 separate pizza shows – we’re going to try out some apparently new ones in New York this week – counterbalancing my gym visit on Friday.

The rest of the afternoon we visited Chelsea Market, which houses the world headquarters of the Food Network. Crazy looks through the Fat Witch (brownies), Jimmy’s Gelato (had an awesome green apple sorbet, as well as green tea gelato – yum!), Bowery Kitchen Supplies (can’t believe that there is a device called a Spätzle-Ass), and Buonitalia Imports (the place to get a 3 kg bottle of Nutella). The free weekend ballroom dancing was also happening.

We got out and it was like 20 degrees and we had 15 minutes to get to Ninja Restaurant, our next stop, so we hopped into a taxi. That was definately a good move. We got there just in time to meet one of our dinner guests, and the host/ringleader was on her way. We waited in the lounge before she arrived, and then were lead through a secret passageway led and intercepted by ninjas before arriving at the ninja village.

We didn’t have high hopes, since the New York Times gave such a poor review, but we actually had a great time. Maybe it was partly the good company, partially that we got a good ninja, partially that the restaurant took some of the critiques to heart, but we think that the reviews were completely wrong. The food was actually pretty good, the ambiance was believable, and nobody took themselves too seriously (the ninjas spoke Japanese, but quickly switched into witty English.)

Things can be really expensive if you were to order a la carte, but the key is to pick from the set menus – they have the best value. Ask for the “secret menu” – it’s sort of like the other menu at Chinese restaurants that has the stuff that only those in the know want to eat. The secret menu arrived in a gold box and has 2 more economical set menus that didn’t look like they were going to be filling, but they were very nice. Then we had a choice of 5 desserts, which were shown to us by M- the Ninja on the secret side menu, which she presented to us on a 1 x 3″ slip of parchment.

If ordered in a set menu, the items that we received were worth the price. The courses included: red miso soup with clams, grilled salmon with a rice sauce, cubed steak in a choice of wasabi or terayaki sauce, 5 piece nigiri sushi, and the fateful choice of dessert. The quality was quite good, and the sushi was served with real wasabi root grated at the table. One of our dinner guests also ordered the 5 flight sake tasting menu, which were full sized samples – it was deemed excellent. The funniest exchange concerning the white frog (actually a cheesecake) dessert – P: “I can’t eat it – it’s too cute” – Ninja M: “He was destined to die”.)

If you think of it as just food, it’s a bit on the pricy side, especially if you stray off of the set menus, but if you think of it as dinner theater, it’s well worth it – much better value than Jekyll & Hyde or Mars 2112. And you’d be supporting NYC’s better struggling Asian actors and actresses (our dining host had actually been on a casting call for Ninja waitstaff). Recommended if you want to splurge a bit.

Also, this is the 1,000th (or maybe 1,001 if SSW posts before me) post! Can’t believe we made it this far…. next post will be more of a long form reminiscence.