The Stroll

Last week, R and I walked the length of Manhattan, top to bottom, 17.4 miles. It's possible to be a bit more direct -- Google puts the straight shot at 12.2 -- but I will always choose food and views over convenience. Besides, the whole point was to spend the day doing the things we do best: wandering, eating, and taking pictures.

First stop, of course, was breakfast. We took the A as far up the island as we could, and headed straight to Cachapas y Mas for a chicharron cachapa and some passion fruit juice. I'd already forced R to skip his usual muesli, so I relented and didn't force him to walk to the very very tip top of Manhattan first. We'd tacked on some extra mileage by walking from the Times Square Q to the Port Authority A anyway, so starting the real trek from 207th St seemed... fine.

Trinity Cemetery

First thing after breakfast was our biggest elevation of the day -- straight up Fort George Hill. NY doesn't have much in the way of hills, if you don't count bridges, but those few up in Washington Heights, the Bronx, and Yonkers make up for the lack elsewhere. (We got lost trying to find the South County Trailway out of Van Cortlandt Park once, and it was brutal.)

Washington Heights is really all about the food. I wanted to keep us lean and mean (ie able to make lots of food stops along the way), so we went pretty straight through, but you could easily have a full batido-empanada-mofongo-patacon-etc-tour day up there.

Grant's Tomb

Our first real landmark was Grant's Tomb. I have a lingering fondness for this area, from when my college roommate, who's lived on Claremont for the last 15 years, let me crash on her futon the summer I came back from Japan, but I've rarely had occasion to go back since. It has just that perfect snootiness to mark the beginning of the UWS proper.

We crossed through Columbia, so I could point out where Joseph Gordon-Levitt parked his burrito in Premium Rush, then down past St John the Divine. (It's not a great movie, but there are silly bikey things, and it was New Year's Eve and I was high on officially prescribed oxycodone when we watched it.) I can't be in this neighborhood without visiting my favorite statue, of St Michael with some giraffes and a crab, lopping off Satan's head, so we sat in the garden there for a minute while we figured out our next move.

The Cannibal

We'd only split the cachapa, so lunch seemed, as it so often does, like a good next step. Also I thought a little iced coffee wouldn't go amiss, especially if we could get it with condensed milk -- like at Saiguette. I'd been there once before, and got something fancy, but this time we opted for the Classic sandwich. It did not disappoint. I'm a little sad that I'm not still getting my banh mi for $4 from the back of a jewelry store in Chinatown, but... this was really good, and we ate it on a bench in Central Park. Sometimes I can't hate gentrification.

That fueled us through the park and, after The Classiest Bathroom Break at Lincoln Center, on to Gotham West Market. My intention was to just do a quick walk-through and check the place out, but then it was mid-afternoon, it was mostly empty, and I saw a blackboard advertising slushie cocktails. Sold. One icy negroni later and I was ready for anything -- including the High Line. (We did maybe 30 blocks of Central Park, plus the High Line, but I refused to do any other non-street walking. The whole point was Manhattan, after all. Walking down the West Side Greenway, for instance, only shows you the West Side Greenway, and I've seen it plenty on my bike.)

By the time we hit ground again in the West Village, we were starting to flag a bit. It was time to bring out the big guns, aka Taiwanese shaved ice. Green tea and black sesame drizzled with condensed milk and topped with strawberries. Oh, and we got a Double Decker at Myers of Keswick, because for some reason we'd stayed up two hours late the previous weekend talking about chocolate bars. Next three miles were nuthin'.

We ended down by the water a bit after 6, not much the worse for wear. I'd done this walk once before, with 20ish other people, and that was much harder than doing it with just the two of us. Going at our own pace, deciding where we wanted to stop as we went, made the whole thing a lot easier.

I debated finishing things off with a beer on The World's Best Free Boat Ride (ie the Staten Island Ferry), and if there'd been good food next door to the terminal on the other side... Well, it still might have been nice, but we opted instead to just use the bathroom and go home. Which is to say, home to our shiny new local delicious pizza place. And beer.

MAP

RECIPE: Pasta alla Norma, furthering the Mark Bittman obsession that began when I picked up a free copy of How To Cook Everything Vegetarian on a stoop in Park Slope.

Books

How does anyone afford to buy books? I'll pick up a couple a year as presents, but if I were to pay for all the ones I actually read, well, let's just say it would make owning a car and smoking cigarettes (neither of which I do either) look like entirely reasonable budgetary propositions.

I ride the subway to work every day, about an hour each way. This is a lot of concentrated reading time, and I make use of it. (For details, feel free to friend me on GoodReads.) Almost all of my reading material comes from the library. Their website may suck, but the actual machinery of the hold system behind it is fantastic. I'm always up against the 30-item limit, constantly maintaining and editing the queue.

However, none of this has in any wise diminished my fondness for bookstores. I wish I could support them more, financially, but until the aforementioned library raises my salary considerably, I'll have to stick with just giving them my love. And despite Barnes & Noble, Amazon, etc, there are still some great bookstores in NY that are very deserving of it. Far more in fact, than I'm going to list here. These are just the ones that are regularly a part of my life:

The Strand
King of all used bookstores. (Except Powell's, I suppose, but I've never been to Powell's on account of its location on the wrong coast, so I can't compare.) It's a tourist destination, and rightly so, but also a tried and true local institution. Sometimes I treat myself by selling them books I don't need, and then turning around and immediately spending everything I've just made. It's also my preferred Union Square bathroom stop, being less crowded than Barnes & Noble, slightly easier to access, and generally just more awesome all around.

Books of Wonder
Not a used bookstore, but a purveyor of new ones exclusively for children, from picture board books on up through dystopia. It's only a few blocks from the Strand, and right across the street from City Bakery, so it easily slots into the tourist itinerary whether or not you have a small human in tow. There's also a small cafe, more bathrooms, and a great back area with artwork and rare editions. Take someone here on a first date, and you'll learn everything you need to know.

Forbidden Planet
The final point in our Union Square trifecta. Just a little south of the Strand, this is the place for all your geek needs. Comics, graphic novels, novels, toys/models/figurines, t-shirts. This is where my father took me as a child, while my mother went to ABC. Full disclosure: I also once worked for Forbidden Planet in Edinburgh, and I can still name all the Dragonball Z characters, despite having never actually seen any Dragonball Z.

Unnameable Books
My local, or as close as it gets. It has a much smaller footprint than any of the others, but the teetering piles of books and tall, cramped shelves make it feel even easier to get lost in. I fault them only for their very small "genre fiction" section, although I suppose that's balanced by the rather larger comics/graphic novels area. They sell some new books, but the majority are used, as is the overall feeling of the place.

BookCourt
Carroll Gardens is always a pleasant stroll, and this is one of the pleasantest stops along it. All new books, but if you'll find plenty to take note of and order from the library later.

Greenlight Bookstore
Meeting someone at BAM? Twenty minutes early? Here's the place to spend them: at another nicely curated new bookstore.

powerHouse
Since I'm not in a bookstore to buy books, browsability is pretty important. powerHouse comes through here with a lot of tables, rather than shelves, allowing books to be displayed face-up. This isn't where you come to find your next novel, but if you want to flip through a massive photo book entitled Tattooed Cyclists of Shibuya or something, it's great.

MAP

RECIPE: Macaroni & Cheese. Make it this way once and you'll never do bechamel again.

Recent Eats III

Some of these eats are not really "recent" anymore. But that's the way it goes. If I posted them in a timely fashion, I'd never have room to post anything else. (Which could be a good thing? We'll take a poll later.)

Chez Oskar
Nice local bistro. Hard to give a real review, since we were there for a set menu -- didn't get the full experience. Still, had a very tasty lamb shank and the atmosphere was pleasantly romantic.

Gaonnuri
I'd say it's all about the view, but frankly the meat was pretty good too. I mean, why have Korean BBQ on ground level when you can do it on the 39th floor, all things being equal?

Lobster Joint
I sometimes say that if I won the lottery, the only thing that would really change would be that I would eat more lobster rolls. That may not be strictly true, but the point stands. In any event, since I'm unlikely to either win the lottery or move to Maine, I do the best I can with what I have. The $12 slider special at Lobster Joint helps.

Midwood Flats
This is a recent eat in the sense that it is always a recent eat, since this place is directly across the street from our apartment. We were suspicious of it at first, I don't know why, but the switch flipped as soon as we went in. A duck torta with a fried egg on top may not be the only path to my heart, but it'll certainly get you there. The great beer selection can certainly come along for the ride.

Parkside Pizza
Lamb sausage pizza, olive pizza. Promising-looking cocktails.

Oaxaca Taqueria
This place fills a very particular need: Close enough to swing into before BAM and pick up food that we can eat while we see a movie. There isn't a lot of competition in this category, but I'm satisfied with Oaxaca for now. Their flavors are good, but as is so often the case they suffer a bit with layout. People eat their burritos from one side or the other, so ingredients need to be layered, like in a proper paté. You can't have one end be sausage and the other end potato. Take pride in your burritos! This is especially an issue when you're sharing burritos back and forth, as R and I tend to do.

Grindhaus
This place was on my "to try" list for a while. Sadly, it did not make the jump to any kind of recommended list. It's not that the food was bad, but it wasn't mind-blowing, and I am extremely unwilling to pay, for example, $23 for a teacup-sized portion of non-mind-blowing gnocchi.

Brooklyn Bell's The Local
It's 60F; it's February; it's ice cream time. Prospect Heights has no shortage of ice cream, with Ample Hills on Vanderbilt, Blue Marble on Underhill, and now The Local on Classon. I'll make an argument for any of them, but this latest addition may currently have the largest portion of my heart. They make only very small batches -- a tub or two at a time, and then it's on to something else. When we showed up the options were: vanilla, black lava caramel, banana bread, bananas foster (an unplanned bananza, apparently), some kind of pecan brittle with pretzels and rice krispies (I don't remember the exact name, but I had it, and it was good)... and three other things. Sorry, not great reportage here. But the owner/ice cream creator served us -- I think it's basically just him and his wife running the place -- and we came away with an impression of a very short supply chain and deep attention to detail.

And a special shoutout to Trader Joe's peanut-butter-filled pretzels, the ones with salt: my constant office companion.

MAP

RECIPE: Mushroom Moussaka. A misleading name, because only some of the lamb is replaced with mushrooms, yielding a slightly lighter, cheaper, healthier dish.