[Pink Pig Time Machine by Wilfrid: September 8, 2008]
I ran out of time last week to turn the heavy, vellum pages of my memoirs, so we had better catch up to Labor Day, 1998 at least.
I returned from my brief trip to Chicago late (delayed), shook up (the plane was blown off course coming in to land and had to rear away sharply and make a second approach) and food-poisoned (some garbage consumed while hanging around O'Hare, I assume). Still, I managed to force down a samosa and a shish kebab at the Afghan Kebab House in Hell's Kitchen the next night - a meal disrupted by the casual progression of a cockroach across the table.
I dared to step outside again a couple of days later for a raucous dinner at what was then a downtown hotspot, reserved by some of work colleagues. First was on 1st Avenue, of course, and was what Sam De Marco did with himself during the second half of the nineties. The party ordered appetizers "for the table", which is always a good way of tasting nothing properly. Fried oysters and soft shell crab, buffalo wings, whatever else.
Long Island duck was glazed with honey and soy, which doesn't seem a bad idea, and arrived with both yucca and rice. I seem to recall some terrible business with sambuca at the bar afterwards, ending in a lively girl fight. Oh, well.
Check shock at the next restaurant that week. F.Illi Ponte has been a looming presence on the Hudson waterfront for more than three decades. A big, old building - I assume owned by the family - dining rooms, bars and a piano bar thread spaciously over several floors. In 1998, the restaurant smoking ban was undreamt of, and the upstairs bar was home to men in expensive suits puffing prestige stogies.
The restaurant bills itself today as the home of the "angry lobster". Ten years ago, it was the home of the angry lobster customer. I learned an important New York lesson the hard way: you need to know when to ask the price of the specials recited by the server. After some simple, grilled calamari came a lobster special. A reasonably large lobster, it's true, doused in some special sauce. And it turned out, of course, to be handsomely priced by the pound - an astonishing three figure sum on a check bumped up in any case my choice of a '95 premier cru Chablis to accompany it.
My date that evening enjoys telling the story to this day, concentrating particularly on the expression on my face. I did my best to reduce the captain to tears, and like to think I came close.
Chastened, I ate penitential cotechino and lentils at home the next evening. I suspect I found the aromatic, fat cooking sausage at Dom's on Lafayette.
And finally, as summer ends, a dinner at very much a winter restaurant - the Firebird Russian Restaurant on Restaurant Row. This place was rather fun when it first opened in a dramatic, iron-gated, arch-windowed mansion on West 46th Street. Staff wore elaborate pre-Lenin uniforms. The downstairs bar was grand; a staircase swept you up to the candlelit, white table-clothed upstairs dining room. A version of imperial Russian cooking and a vodka list. Why not?
I ate seared sweetbreads with cherry tomatos and dill-flavored gnocchi. Champagne with this, of course. Then grilled sturgeon, good enough, with some tired vegetables and a bottle of white. And off in my carriage to sea the show (okay, the late performance of "The Season" at The Triad).
Next week, my first encounter with Wayne Nish's March.
