Category

West Village

  • Bangkok Supper Club

    Bangkok Supper Club

    [From the 3/20/25 Amateur Gourmet Newsletter] On Tuesday we went with our friends Henry and Chris to Bangkok Supper Club in the West Village. The food was so good! Zippy and extremely flavorful. The highlights were these chicken wings that had an electric citric acid-like powder on them: The pork jowl that came on garlic…

  • Via Carota

    Via Carota

    [From the 7/11/25 newsletter] Just like asparagus has a season, so does eating out at restaurants and that season is now. Sure, it’s lovely to walk into a little French bistro on a snowy day in the dead of winter, but it’s also lovely to cook soup at home in the dead of winter. Not…

  • Fedora

    Fedora

    [From the 7/21/25 newsletter] We went with our friends Chris and Lance to the newly revamped Fedora on Friday night and had a lot of fun. I’ve been trying to drink less since my Parkinson’s diagnosis, but my doctor says I can drink “moderately,” so when everyone ordered the signature martini, I didn’t want to…

  • Cecchi’s

    Cecchi’s

    [From the 9/8/25 newsletter] We went to Cecchi’s for the first time on Friday night and it was gorgeous inside — the Art Deco, old-school, New Yorky restaurant of your dreams — only, it was so pretty out, we decided to eat on the patio. This weather is so wonderful, I wish I could bottle…

  • My Hummus Place Habit

    My Hummus Place Habit

    The West Village is not an easy place to grab a cheap lunch. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a wonderful place to grab lunch. There’s Market Table, ‘ino, Pearl Oyster Bar, The Spotted Pig, Barbuto, etc, etc, and so on. But the operative word in my first sentence was “cheap” and while all of those…

  • What I Ate During Hurricane Irene

    What I Ate During Hurricane Irene

    This weekend on the East Coast, many of us prepared for and then endured a hurricane. How badly we endured it depended on a variety of factors; for those of us in the West Village, things weren’t too bad: some downed branches, a few giant puddles here and there. But before it happened and while…

  • Imperial Woodpecker Sno-Balls

    Imperial Woodpecker Sno-Balls

    You may recall that on our recent trip to New Orleans, we enjoyed something called a Sno-Ball. We ate this Sno-Ball at a place called Hansen’s Sno-Bliz and though I was wary at first–“isn’t it just ice and syrup?”–I was quickly won over by the texture of that ice and the intense flavor of that…

  • The Warm Chocolate Chip Cookie at Jacques Torres

    The Warm Chocolate Chip Cookie at Jacques Torres

    Citizens of America, it is my duty to inform you about something unholy, something sinful that is going on in that wicked city known as New York. Deep in the bowels of a village known as “West” is a veritable Sodom & Gomorrah of chocolate whose creator, a Frenchman!, is trying to tempt our children…

  • The First Meal

    The First Meal

    The first meal that you cook in a new apartment is very, very important. We all remember what happened last time, don’t we? I attempted to inaugurate our Park Slope apartment three years ago with Edna Lewis’s fried chicken (fried in butter and lard) and didn’t get the fat hot enough. The result? Gooey, gloppy,…

  • Back to the Big Apple

    Big changes are afoot, loyal followers of my blog. For three years now I’ve lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn–steps away from Franny’s (one of my top three favorite restaurants in New York)–and pretty content with my BK lifestyle: brooding with the other writers at Gorilla Coffee, skirting over to Key Foods for catchy 60s ditties…