Matt, Josh and myself, along with Mrs. Matt, were on hand for the opening of Lower East Side Vietnamese noodle house Slurp.
Matt had been anxiously monitoring its construction so we were excited to see what they had to offer.
First, let’s chat about the only reason to write about a restaurant: the food. There were some great dishes, and some which, at best, were just OK.
On the good side was my crab meat and shrimp pho. I really enjoyed the noodles and sprouts served in a very interestingly-flavored beef broth (more on that later: I think it had anise in it. Matt says clove), and found the portion size to be spot-on with my expectations.
But, and this is a very big point, the contents of the dish included imitation crab meat, which is an abomination to anyone who takes seafood even remotely seriously.
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Forbes just published an article: America’s Most Obese Cities.
Unfortunately the news in this article isn’t that surprising. Americans tend to be obese, shocking. This obesity is caused, at least in part, by eating poorly and being lazy. Did I mention how shocked I was by this information. High poverty rates also tend to add to obesity which seems counter intuitive (don’t the poor have less to spend on food?) until you consider that fast food restaurants are usually highly concentrated in less affluent neighborhoods.
Though they list 20 cities in the article we’ll only list the top 5 here: Read more »
First we have the noodle bar trend that we mentioned the other week, this has been going on for a bit and seems to be hitting its stride, what we have cropping up now is a trend in food on the move:
Of course we have the original Mister Softie, a NYC classic, not much needs to be said about it, but clearly that isn’t up to snuff for the foodies of New York.
Following a similar model we had Treats Truck, serving up really nice cookies, and definitely a step-up from Mister Softee with great desserts. I am a huge fan of them. I have no complaints about the Treats Truck. I even have them on speed dial so I can find out where they are on any given day. They even had set up a little “Customer of the Month” section.
Now, of course, since the model for high-end mobile desserts has proven successful, here come the imitators:
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Friday and Saturday did not have the nicest weather, from the misting all day Friday to the pouring almost all throughout Saturday. It was just really pretty wet. That made it the perfect combination of days to spend indoors at the Cook. Eat. Drink. Live. event on the pier.
Now first, let me bitch for a second (and this is really only a problem because it was so wet this weekend): Why the hell are there no subways that go that far west? Walking over to Pier 94 (or was it 92?) in the pouring rain from 60th and 8th Avenue is just not fun. Okay, good, got that out of my system, moving on…
Cook. Eat. Drink. Live. was a massive 2 day event on the pier. There were lines of exhibit booths where you could sample wines, various packaged foods, caterers, some beers and a whole lot of booze. Beyond the booths, there were classes and demonstrations throughout the day, almost every hour on the hour. Usually, there was a cooking demonstration in the main room, a cocktail demonstration or wine tasting in one of the two side rooms, and another cooking demo or tasting in the other side room. The events started around 11 in the morning and went until 5.
In writing this up, I am finding I have the same problem as when I arrived at Pier 94 on the first day: I am overwhelmed by it all. When I got there, I wandered in a circle around the booths 3 times just trying to take it all in. I was totally overwhelmed by it. Everything looked incredible and I just wasn’t sure where I wanted to start. Today, though, we are just going to start with the cooking demos.
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That seemed like an obvious way to go with titling the post since we’re talking about a revolution: Revolution Tea that is… Okay, I know, that was bad, I’ll try and cut down on the cheese factor. Moving right along.
This isn’t my first time writing about tea. I am, what I would consider, a pretty big tea fan. Sitting at my desk at work I go through about 4 cups of tea a day. You might think it is my body craving caffeine that I could get from one or two cups of coffee, but for one I don’t drink coffee; never have, I just think it is bitter. And another point, a lot of the tea I drink is either low in caffeine or herbal, without caffeine. In fact, for the longest time I avoided black teas. Like coffee I thought they were just too bitter and didn’t really have enough flavor to back up all the bitterness.
During the past week and a half I have been trying out some new teas I discovered. Revolution Tea is a small tea company (well, in comparison to say Lipton or Celestial Seasonings at least) located in Arizona. They are producing full-leaf tea in high quality infuser bags instead of your typical ground-up tea in a paper bags. Their packaging is all simple and clean, with a modern feel and design. They have your typical boxes with the tea stored inside a plastic box inside to keep out moisture, travel tins with 6 tea bags, tea tins for larger bags (for brewing pots of tea) and single serving packages; small cardboard boxes with their unique infuser tea bag inside.
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