I feel the way she looks.
Eniko Mihalik
I want to watch the TV series “Thirty Something“. I don’t recall watching an entire episode since I was in my teens, but now it seems kind of interesting and pertinent to my life. (Bushy eyebrows and shoulder pads FTW!)
Unbeknownst to me I was going to the wrong restaurant to meet my beau when I came across the Cupcake Stop truck!
AND they were giving out free pumpkin cheesecake cupcakes on that day…holla!
I also got red velvet cupcakes at $2.50 each. Honestly I didn’t think they even tasted like red velvet. It tasted like plain yellow cake to me with sweet frosting. It was still good nonetheless, but the red velvet taste was hardly there.
 Pumpkin cheesecake |
 Red Velvet |
Although the pumpkin cupcake looks inferior to the red velvets, I thought it tasted better. I love that combo to begin with so maybe I’m partial to it and the frosting was creamy and rich but not too sweet.
I was supposed to meet my date at Baoguette in the East Village but I went to the one on Lexington Ave & 25th. (I went to the Web site that only had the location in Murray Hill listed. Interestingly they have another Web site where all the locations are listed. ) Although it was unfortunate that I went to the wrong place, it ended up being a nice mistake to have picked up the cupcakes along the way.
Journey, Ian Kim
“Lonesome Journey”
This image was created for a story about a Korean man who left Pyongyang in 1905 with hopes of a better life in America with his wife, sister and mother. The three women toiled laboriously on crop plantations year after year so that he could get an education and become a lawyer — a dream that citizenship ineligibility laws prevented him from realizing. - One Inch Punch
Just visited for brunch. I don’t think I can write a review of a restaurant based on its brunch unless it’s a brunch place. (exception: dovetail. Its brunch will still blow you away) You’d have to be really horrible place to mess up an omelette.
We were seated downstairs which seemed darker than upstairs but the decor was still nice: brick and dark wood walls, large mirrors and candles. The other thing I liked about it was that there were community tables which reminded me of Le Pain Quotidien.
My beau and I had the calamari for appetizer. It was good and lightly breaded but the lime in the dipping sauce was overpowering. I preferred it plain with just a spritz of lemon.
Calamari with lime
The omelette with goat cheese was good; nothing stellar. Like I said, you’d have to be really bad to mess it up, or to mess up the potatoes or greens that came with it. At $13, it’s kind of pricey but it’s Mercer.
you have to be dumb to mess up an omelette. But this was good.
I liked my date’s bagel with salmon the best. The bread was toasted just right, and with the cream cheese, onions, tomatoes and capers, it made for a pleasant combination. It was $15; again not the cheapest bagel sandwich but they did give you plenty of salmon and thought it was the best item we had. I’m beginning to realize that what really makes a sandwich is how perfectly toasted it is; it’s the reason why I loved “The Wreck” so much at Potbelly’s.
the best item on the table
All in all, it was a little pricey but pleasant brunch to have in Soho. My suggestion would be to check it out for dinner with a date.
Sugar Sweet Sunshine
126 Rivington St.
New York, NY 10002
I’ll make this short and sweet and say Sugar Sweet was okay. I always measure a cupcake shop by its Red Velvet and their “Sexy Red Velvet” just wasn’t. Maybe I just have a problem with their “moose” frosting which tastes like butter. I did however, like their “Ooey Gooey” and thought it was better than their other chocolate cupcake, the “Bob”, which has a hint of almond in the frosting.
But at $1.50, these cupcakes are probably the most bang for your buck anywhere. I heard the pistachio cupcake and banana pudding are good and I’d like to try their pumpkin cupcake with cream cheese frosting next time.
Intelligentsia Coffee Lab
594 Broadway Suite 909 A
New York, NY 10012
Got to visit the Intelligentsia Coffee Lab for a coffee cupping in Soho on Halloween. After visiting the Intelligentsia cafe in Chicago, I was eager to see what the NY coffee lab was all about.
Coffee cupping is like wine tasting, but with coffee. It’s $10 to go and usually lasts an hour. They have eight spots open but but my date and I were the only ones who came since I suppose everyone else in the city was prepping for Halloween. It made for a much more cozy atmosphere where we asked all the questions we wanted and I took the liberty to take just as many photos.
Our barista/professor was Ramine (spelling?!), a pretty laid-back guy who owns a coffee shop in Brooklyn. After some small talk over coffee, he laid out four cups of different coffee grinds for each of us and our first step was to smell each cup and write down our thoughts about the aromas on a chart.
I used mostly generic adjectives such as “rich”, “dark”, or “sweet” to describe what I smelled. I haven’t gotten to the point of training my nose to detect a hint of lemon, blackberry or persimmon that others may catch with their snobby olfactory senses. But who says a common coffee lover can’t enjoy smelling coffee? I took the pleasure of taking it all in by putting the brim of the cup over my nose as if it was an oxygen mask that dropped out from the ceiling of a plane and I was inhaling for my life.
Next Ramine poured water into each cup so we could describe the wet aroma by breaking the foam in the coffee. It definitely brings out other flavors you can’t smell with the dry aroma but for whatever reason, I liked the dry aroma better.
Wet aroma
Finally Ramine took all the foam out and we took a spoonful of each coffee and slurped the coffee to check for flavor, body, acidity and finish. There were definitely coffees I didn’t like (#2, #3,) because they were too dark or bitter for my taste. I like #1 and #4 better; particularly #4 because it was “fruity,” “sweet,” and “clean.”
Turns out that #1 was “La Maravilla,” a coffee from Guatemala, and #4 was “Kenya Gichathaini.” My date gravitated toward the #2 which was from Zambia and the #3, the “Pacamara Peaberry,” which was from Nicaragua.
Ramine was sweet enough to give us all four coffee bags to take home with us, even though it doesn’t say on the Web site that that would be part of the deal. It’ll be our little secret.
Another sweet thing? Intelligentsia is a do-gooder and participates in direct trade with the coffee farmers and buys seasonally for you ethically conscious consumers out there. I can’t guarantee that you’ll get to bring any free coffee home after a cupping though, unless you sign up for the $200 barista class….
Finally. A female Korean street fighter. Why couldn’t they come up with this 15 years ago when I was still at a respectable age to play?
Honestly I don’t like her all that much. I hate the double ponytails, the upward slanted eyes, the outfit (purple crotch pants? and …purple?), random stripes on her body and what’s up with the fake eye? Stupid. Another concoction of a nerdy guy’s fantasies. Wouldn’t it be amazingly different if we can have a fully clothed female fighter, like the one below?
Juri with taekwondo uniform. Much better.
Was Juri modeled after Yuna Kim, South Korea’s adoring little figure skater?
Especially when you pride yourself on ethnic homogeneity and some nationalism.
Korean power (NYT)
I heard Marianne Williamson say once that when you ask God into your life, you think he or she is going to come into your psychic house, look around, and see that you just need a new floor or better furniture and that everything needs just a little cleaning - and so you go along for the first six months thinking how nice life is now that God is there. Then you look out the window one day and see that there’s a wrecking ball outside. It turns out that God actually thinks your whole foundation is shot and you’re going to have to start over from scratch.
