I Had My Druthers

Someone asked me what my New Years Resolution was yesterday.

"Play less Candy Crush on the subway," I said.

He laughed. He lives in Albany.

I can't make a resolution to lose weight, exercise more, or write more. I just have to do it.

I can resolve not to waste my hours (or as many hours) on those addicting phone apps.

On the subway to work, I did not play games. I composed the beginning of a blog post.

At 12:30, I headed to Penn Station and boarded Amtrak to Albany.

I met up with work friends and we went to a fabulous place called Druthers, where I drank their Oatmeal Stout

and their "Against the Grain Smoked Weizen."

And then I ate this:

That's their "Memphis BBQ Mac N Cheese." It is what it says it is. Pulled pork, barbecue sauce, coleslaw and mac  n cheese. 

I ate half.

The weather is single digits win Albany on day one of my trip.

I went back to the hotel, worked, and posted on Tattoosday (here) for the first time in almost a month.

Clever Restaurant Name O' the Day

Spotted this one on 11th Avenue in Brooklyn. Generally, the zillions of Chinese restaurants in New York City don't have clever names. This is a shining exception:


Or is it just an awning typo? I'd like to think not. "Men at Wok" is such a great name.

New York Minute: Egg Creams at Sammy's Roumanian Steak House

Behold, the making of an egg cream:



At a Bar Mitzvah reception on October 20, 2007, at famous Sammy's Roumanian Steak House, 157 Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side.

Ouzi at First Oasis in Bay Ridge

The Mother of BillyBlog was visiting last night (through this weekend) and she came out to our place in Bay Ridge. We dined at the affordable and delicious First Oasis. This Syrian restaurant has delectable food. Trust me, I don't use the word delectable very often, so if I say it is so, it is so.

I brought my camera along because I knew what I was having, and knew it would be blogworthy. Behold, the Lamb Ouzi:


You can see the whole menu here where you would learn that this dish, a house specialty, is a big pastry of phylo dough. And when you cut it open, steam pours out, in an aromatic blend of lamb (or chicken or veggies, depending on what you choose), rice, raisins, nuts and vegetables.
It's like shepherd's pie meets an oversized Middle Eastern manapua.

The kids split the chicken kabob. BillyBlogMom had the lamb kabob. Melanie had the sole. The First Oasis vegetarian combo platter started us all off on the right track. Delicious hummus and top-rate grape leaves, along with falafel and baba ghanoush.

I have never had a bad dining experience there. The one significant flaw is that, despite not being crowded, the service is slow. If you're in a hurry, go somewhere else. But if you go expecting a wait, you can relish the anticipation and acknowledge that, once the food passes your lips, it was worth the delay.

Read a review here.

Weekend Update

I know the week is almost over, but I'd like to take a fond look back and walk down memory lane.

Please indulge me as I pry open my brain pan and revel in the pleasant time I had one weekend, oh, it seems like it all happened yesterday ... Isn't that how it always is?

(Pausing for a moment of silent reflection)

So, last weekend, my calendar was full.

Friday night we joined our good friend Lisa at a 40th birthday celebration dinner she hosted at a nice restaurant called Compass on West 70th Street.

On the way, I snapped this shot, looking West down 72nd toward the Hudson River.


Anyway, Lisa had reserved a private room and we had a tasty dinner.

For appetizers, I had the fennel and arugula salad. Melanie had the spice crusted tuna carpaccio. My main course was pork loin with morels and Melanie had the bass, I think. She'll comment if she didn't. Vanilla chocolate cheesecake for dessert.

Pictured (below) is Lisa blowing out her candles.


Saturday morning, Shayna had her first "July League" baseball game. A select group from her league that played April-June were asked to continue at a higher level. Kids born in 1999 were eligible to participate in a sort of round-robin abbreviated two-week tourney.

Shayna had been one of the older kids on her team previously in a league in which the coaches pitched, everyone batted, and no one walked or struck out.

Now, she is on a team with 8, 9, 10, and 11-year olds. The pitchers are 11 and, as far as I an tell, Shayna is the only girl playing.

Well, her first game on Saturday morning found her there but not there. Something upset her and/or she had some serious butterflies. The end result was that she sat out and did not play. She missed her Sunday game (more on that later), but she did suit up and was in the line-up Wedneday, so we're guessing the nerves are behind her.

Despite the early disappointment, the day impropved significantly as Grandpa Barry Liss was in town and through a friend, had 2 extra tickets to the Yankees-Angels game.


The first ticket was for me, a birthday gift from Barry, and the second ticket went to Shayna, who is definitely getting her share of games (this was her 3rd this year, one prior Yankees, and one Mets).

What made this even more special was that it was "Old Timer's Day" at Yankee Stadium, so we got to see a lot of old players introduced and welcomed by the masses.

Even though I have only recently (since moving to New York in 1997) become a Yankees fan, there's still a thrill seeing the old Yankees take the field. Chris Chambliss, Oscar Gamble, Bucky Dent, Reggie Jackson, Goose Gossage and Ron Guidry, to name a few. Below, Goose acknowledges the crowd as Paul O'Neill looks on.



The Yankees were honoring the 30th anniversary of the 1977 championship season,
so the honorees were all recognizable to someone who was 10 that year, the stepson of a Yankee fan (at the time), and a collector of baseball cards. When the introduced Ed Figueroa, I told Shayna I had, like, fifty of his "traded" cards.

We all got collector's pins (above) affixed to special cards (below).


More info on Old Timer's Day at Yankee Stadium here.

By the time the actual game started at 3:50, the sun was behind us, leaving us in shadows. Sure we were in the upper deck, but the views were sweet.


The game was a classic, of sorts. Roger Clemens was on the mound.
He had thrown a gem in his previous start, so I expected to be disappointed. However, he was good, aided by some great fielding. John Lackey, from the Angels, was better, striking out 11 Yankees to Clemens' 3. At the end of the 8th inning, the score was knotted at 1 apiece.






The good pitching continued and Shayna, who has seen more extra-inning games than 9-inning ones, got another doozy.


Unfortunately, Miguel Cairo threw away the game in the top of the 13th inning, committing two errors on one play.

Despite runners on the corners with only one out in the bottom of the 13th, the Bronx Bombers couldn't get anyone across home plate, leaving the crowd disappointed.

An article about the game is here.

On Sunday (July 8), we headed to Paramus to celebrate cousin Alexis' 6th birthday. The party was at the Paramus firehouse and had a movie theme. Check out this cake:

In case you can't tell, the cake was gigantic. Here's another perspective:


After watching Ice Age 2: The Great Meltdown, Jolee and Shayna checked out the firetrucks.

After the party, we were invited by other cousins, Natalia and David Schull, along with their sons Nico and Matt, to join them for swimming at the Mamaroneck Beach and Yacht Club. The kids all had a great time playing together at the pool, and the adults had some nice R&R time. Below, Jolee relaxes (and tries not to pose) at the beach, before we had a nice dinner with the cousins at the club.

After a long day, Grandpa Barry drove us back to Brooklyn and I snapped some pictures from the car:

Quite a weekend. Much busier than most, yet very enjoyable for all!

Friday from Four to Ten

Family post here. A break from the officiousness of music reviews and t-shirt hawking (keep the orders coming!)

Friday afternoon, we decided to take advantage of Free Friday Nights at the Museum of Modern Art. Even though I recently discovered that MoMA's admission prices for kids were quite reasonable (read: Under 16 = Free), the idea we could walk into the high-priced MoMA for free (Adults = $20, regularly, which is steep, by museum standards), was too sweet to pass up. And, as the week had gone by without any take-advantage-of-living-in-New-York-the-greatest-city-in-the-world moments, I really felt morally obligated to take advantage of the offer.

The plan was to hit MoMA for a couple hours, thenn let the girls bowl at Chelsea Piers, meeting up with Melanie after her adult gymnastics class for dessert.

The line was a bit long when they got to MoMA at 3:45, but it moved rather quickly.

Experiencing a museum with two strong-minded young ladies is quite the adventure. The kids really liked the architecture and design section. Jolee wanted this chair, designed by Charles Eames:

Shayna's favorite piece was created by Mona Hatoum:



It may not look like much, but:

This work is a large-scale re-creation of the kinetic sculpture Self-Erasing Drawing Hatoum made in 1979. Replacing conventional artists’ tools (pencil and paper, paint and canvas) with a motorized, toothed metal arm and a circular bed of sand, Hatoum mechanizes the practices of mark-making and erasure. At a rate of five rotations per minute, the sculpture's hypnotic and continual grooving and smoothing of sand evokes polarities of building and destroying, existence and disappearance, displacement and migration.

Overall, it was enjoyable, but when I got to the floor which had the most notable works of art, the sand had run out of their art-appreciation hourglasses. For example:

"Daddy, I want to get out of here. It's too crowded."

"That's because the most famous art is here. Everyone wants to see it."

"So, let's leave."



"Look: Van Gogh's Starry Night."

"So."

"So, it's Starry Night."

"So, I've seen it before."

"Not in person."

And so it went. Note to self: next time we do MoMA, we're starting on the top floor.

From MoMA, we rendez-vous'ed met up with Melanie and we headed over to Chelsea Piers. The plan was to head over to the bowling alley and let the kids bowl and spend mindless amounts of money on arcade games so they could each get $2 worth of crappy toys for $20 worth of games.

Alas, the Alley was packed, and said plans were thwarted by a corporate party's monopolization of the lanes.

Disappointed (well, at least 2/3rds of us), we headed back to the Field House, where Jolee watched Melanie tumble her heart out, and Shayna watched a couple of indoor soccer games. I plodded toward the end of The Show I'll Never Forget.

When all was said and done, we headed out to a late dinner.

We stopped at a new restaurant called Burgers & Cupcakes, on West 23rd between 7th and 8th Avenues.

We had to wait a bit for a booth, but the delay was well worth it. The menu is simple, affordable and the food was delicious.

I ordered the chiptole chicken burger with pepper jack cheese and grilled mushrooms. Melanie had the vension burger with goat cheese crumbled over salad. Jolee and Shayna had turkey burgers.

Unfortunately for us, the kids were not so fond of their burgers. They are accustomed, through a failure in parenting, to pre-processed turkey burgers, as are commonly served in Brooklyn diners.

However, the "fresh cut-twice fried potatoes" were spectacular and the chocolate raspberry truffle cupcake was a delightful flourish to end the meal. The kids had basic chocolate cupcakes.

Check out the menu here.

Website: Burgers & Cupcakes.