Good Eats

The past week has been a bit of a whirlwind with a slew of after-work appointments and not enough time in the gym despite the three day weekend (help, I'm slipping!). Three day weekends (loving the bank holidays!) are the best for going out on Saturday night as they give you time to sleep in on Sunday and still recover your sleep schedule in time for work on Tuesday. So Sean, Alan, Cathy, and I met up on Saturday night and grabbed some sushi downtown before heading out to wander around the East Village. First up, we hit D.B.A. For some reason, I don't think that stands for DataBase Administrator, but that's the first thing that came to mind. I hadn't been there before, but they had a fantastic beer and whiskey list and is only the second spot I've found in the city that serves Spezial Rauchbier, a variant of German beer that is brewed in Bamberg, the small city where my friend Alex studies. It's special because it actually tastes like smoked bacon, which may or may not be a turn-on. I order it for the principle of the fact and out of respect for my German homies :o)

Anyway, afterwards we headed over to the nightclub Nublu which had some funky dance music going on and then an acid jazz band started playing, which absolutely killed the mood. The place just kind of died and it was more like a coffee shop with people watching the band, undoubtedly waiting for the band to finish and the music to get pumping again. So that was weird.

Sunday, Alan, Andrea, and I met up to go to a happy hour place and socialize (since Andrea was out sick the night before and I won't see Alan for another month). We were set on NoLIta House downtown, and it looked pretty cool from the website. I hadn't really eaten all day, so I was adequately famished and looked forward to munching on some food while we were there. So we go all the way downtown only to find out the place is closed for a private party or something. Lame!!! We start wandering around looking for something to eat when it dawned on me that this always happens in New York. We have the best food in the world (IMO), but when you don't have an objective in mind, you won't find anything that you want to eat. So we ended up walking for about an hour walking by restaurant after restaurant and not finding anything that we all wanted to eat. Finally, we ended up at a neighborhoody corner in the West Village with three restaurants on it and we decided that we would eat at one of them. After looking at the menus (and prices!!) of the places, we decided on Extra Virgin, which was a pretty neat little place with fantastic food - and interesting beverages. So we didn't get a cheap meal that night, but it was nice and relaxing. We of course followed that up with Magnolia Bakery's cupcakes and banana pudding.

On Monday, I met up with Susannah to try a place that was supposedly "SoCal" style Mexican food. I've accepted the fact that the Mexican food outside of California is terrible, so I don't even bother trying places now, but this place was named after a gang down in Los Angeles, so it had some legitimacy about itself. Unfortunately, it's hours weren't legitimate Los Angeles hours as it was closed on Monday nights. :o( After wandering around SoHo looking for another option, I decided we should check out La Esquina's secret downstairs eating area, which I've read all about. The food and environment (probably later at night) were fantastic! I ate a carne asada steak which was killer...

I'm running out of time, but one last destination for the week: home!! I had a couple friends over on Wednesday and I bought some teryaki/spice marinated pork tenderloins (my favorite meat!) at Grand Central Market and fried up some sweet potatoes with onions and then green beans with salt, pepper, and Italian spices that turned out wonderful. Oh, pork tenderloin how I love you!!! It was so moist and...tender, hence the name!

J. Riley, I'm off to Peru!