A Night Out

Museums and Debaugheries

The day started out (for me, at least) with lunch with Lisa L, Jenny and Vince; a small Berkeley CED reunion, at Ponsri Thai Restaurant in Mid-Town. It was a friendly place busy with white collars laborers here for lunch. A lunch spot frequent by Lisa L. The tom yum noodle soup with chicken with the addition of iced Thai coffee was indeed refreshing, good kick for me to start the day...We dropped by Lisa L's office nearby, a firm specialized in courthouse and correctional facility design. After having a little chat with her boss, we left and went to check out the FIT Museum right across the street.

The highlight of today's itinerary was the Tenement Museum at the Lower East Side, which I've been wanting to see for at least 2 years, and we picked a tour on the early immigrants and the New York garment Industry, just to tied together out earlier visit to the FIT Museum...after the tour some refreshments and chillexing felt absolutely necessary having gone through the whole "tenement experience," thus we stepped into White Slab Palace right by the corner, a Scandinavian bar. While the cold meat and cheese tasting was a perfect snack and the service was friendly, I have to say it was extremely slow and unprofessional at best. We were planing on checking out MOCA (Museum of Chinese in America) right after, but the slowness of service kept us here for about 2 hours so we had to start heading towards dinner, another big event of the day.

Restaurant Week has allowed us to try out the super upscale Russian Tea Room. A place of long history and lineage, and was renovated not long ago. The extreme contrast of dark green, bright red and shiny gold was pretty overwhelming; and the music being played was either the completely cheesy elevator fake classical for extremely ethnic Russian, which feels quite out of place from the supposedly classy overall atmosphere. Like all other restaurant week meals, the 3 courses were watered down for the set price, but the desserts were very enjoyable with the accompaniment of an $8 dollar cup of coffee.

In the Mood for Chicken Soup

Since mom brought me a huge bag of Chinese herbs when she and dad came to NYC for my graduation in May, making medicinal soup has been one of my past time. Chicken soup was a little too hot in this weather, it was still nonetheless a satisfying traditional delicacy with the addition of some nicely cooked noodles. So this soup contains: goji berries, Chinese dates, astragalus, white ginseng, dong quai, and tien ma. I also added black wood ear fungus and lots of ginger. The taste was a little on the mild side, in spite of all these herbs, but a pretty balanced blend with the taste of chicken.

Books and Chocolates

Finally went to the Strand Bookstore that I've been hearing about so much from classmates and professors. Spent a good two hours there with Jenny and Vince. Though there weren't as many architectural books as I was expecting, it was definitely a great place for discounted books old and new, and so many of them. A book worm's hide out for sure. On the other hand, after I went home and compared prices and availabilities between Strand and Amazon, I have to say the long tail effects of online stores still trumped in the area of niche books, though in one instance Strand trumped the price tag. In any case, I still got pretty carried away by some really low price and ended up buying 6 books.
And what better to follow an afternoon of books than hot chocolate? Conveniently Max Brenner was right across the street. Though I have to admit that the Italian dark chocolate I got was way too thick for me, we had an interesting experience with extreme sweetness and spicy-sour-sweetness with the hot chocolate and chicken wings.

Chez Jenny

Vince is visiting NYC from Austin, TX this week! A night of home cooking at Jenny's cozy studio was a great way to spend the evening. The highlight of the menu was Jenny and Vince's Chinese zucchini duck soup (the recipe called for goose, but for some reason only ready-made duck could be found...I wonder if goose and duck would have different properties) with mushrooms and Chinese dates, a recipe that's believed to detox and refresh in the hot summer. Dinner was followed by Jenny's signature snow fungus sweet soup for dessert, which she brewed for over 3 hours.

Ling's rendition of the evening.

Brooklyn Walk

Very glad that Peter found this total gem on Amsterdam between 103rd and 104th, Busters NYC: Spatinental Cuisine, by eavesdropping on a conversation between his friend and one of our professors. Though a very small place with modest to none decorations, its very bright and clean and evidently all investments went into the qualities of food. The owner/business mind behind, Fidel Hernandez and Glenn Trickel, are dedicated to the usage of fresh ingredients coming straight from local farms around the NYC area. Extremely fresh and tasty, with the friendly and energetic service, it's such a perfect place to grab a sandwich or salad!

We are really no experts on where to go in Brooklyn; a casual walk around the Downtown area and Williamsburg was really quite nice, but hot. Found this Japanese style coffee/wine bar place in Williamsburge, Supercore, pretty cozy and a good place to take a breather from our exploring. However, the green tea crepe with red bean paste and my iced strawberry latte was really just ok on the taste, and the service was barely acceptable. Conclusion: more investigation in this neighborhood to come later.

Quick dinner before an Inception fiesco

So the plan to watch big summer hit Inception with a number of good friends did not go very smoothly, but grabbing a quick bite at East Village's Udon West was a very good idea suggested by Hao Hsin. The ume flavored cold udon was definitely refreshing in a hot raining day. It definitely kept me in good shape while dealing with the chaos trying to see a movie, which no one would've thought would be that difficult...