My sister Dana and I hung out in Williamsburg, Brooklyn today for sightseeing and vintage-clothing shopping. (The above photo of her and the happy hearts was taken on N. 10th Street between Bedford and Driggs.) At Buffalo Exchange she found and bought a crazy Stussy sweatshirt from the ’80s, pink with blue stars on it. She was impressed by the storied local clothing exchange store, Beacon’s Closet, and its organized-by-color convention but it was very busy and difficult to shop with a clear head.

For a late brunch, we took a long walk over to hit Diner. Despite the odd time of 3 p.m., the place was already/still packed, so we ate at the bar. I liked the typewritten menus and the snug diner-design of the place, and the guy behind the bar who was visibly confused by the extra-long-intro version of Steely Dan’s “Do it Again” played over the sound system. (He wondered aloud if it was an instrumental karaoke version.) In the mood for drinking a unfamiliar drink, I had a Van Vleet, followed quickly by a second. I’d not have guessed lemon juice, maple syrup and rum would conspire for sweet-tart tastiness. Dana got the Gruyere cheese breakfast sandwich and I had the ricotta cheese/fresh herb omelet both of which were fantastic, fresh and appreciated. I will have to return someday for dinner when the menu is more dynamic than the more standard brunch fare. Walking back under the Williamsburg Bridge on our way back to the L train, we noticed this vibrantly graffitied truck, which I photographed for the benefit of my friends named Joe.

Diner

• 85 Broadway (at Berry Street), Brooklyn
• (718) 486-3077
• Meal 55 of 52: two van Vleets ($8 each) and a omelet with roast potatoes ($10).

In advance of her impending birthday, I invited Katie to dinner at an isolated little tapas place in the East Village, Grape and Grain. We drank a lot of wine, split a pizza with Portobello mushrooms, roasted red peppers and garlic comfit, split a sandwich featuring roasted chicken breast, arugula, sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese/black olive spread, and an artisanal cheese plate featuring Murray’s finest, including a “smoky blue” from Rogue Creamery that’s a new favorite. Instead of going to see a movie as we’d planned originally, we had even more wire. Our server, who kept giving us free refills because we were so charming, was knowledgeable about a great many things: which wine would go best with which dessert, cheese in general, the best hipster songs to play in a candlelit restaurant (we presumed the soundtrack-playlist was emanating from her iPod) and that it was a bad idea to be checking out the cool-looking apartment on the third-floor of the building across the street because its owner has a habit of parading around naked.

Grape and Grain

• 620 E. 6th St. (between Avenues B and C)
• (212) 420-0002
• Meal 54 of 52: three-selection cheese plate ($15), pizza ($12), chicken sandwich ($10), an apple tart for dessert and like a gallon of wine.

Comfortably uptown from the meatball-baited guido trap of Little Italy is Luzzo’s, a really nice trattoria at which to get classic Napoletana coal-oven pizza as well as friendly service from a large staff of Italian-speaking folks.

“You been here before?” asked Pasquale, my waiter. “We were rated best pizza in New York, two months ago,” he said proudly, genuinely proudly enough that I didn’t have the heart to tell him that a.) I don’t give credence to such accolades; and b.) Their rating is a good thing because I’ve been rated Most Important Man in New York City for three years running.¹)

But he was a super nice guy. He let me take a sturdy, lacquered four-top booth instead of an inevitably wobbly table-for-two.

After I attempted to sneakily photograph my meal, I misjudged the position of my bag on the seat of my booth and the camera fell to the unfinished wood floor. My server rushed over and fished around under the table to retrieve it for me. Then he brought me a big stack of paper napkins, perhaps assuming dexterity eating equaled that of my camera sheathing.

Made by a man named Michele with fresh bufala mozzarella, my 12" pizza was a little greasier than expected but thin and delicious, topped with fresh basil. I ate the entire thing while drinking two glasses of nero d’avola (a popular Sicilian red wine) and watching the Italian equivalent of VH1 on the large TV over the bar at the far end of the restaurant. If I would have showed up on Tuesday, according to a flyer at the door, I could have heard “the fabulous Alessandra” sing Neapolitan classics as well as Italian, American, Portuguese and Spanish standards.

¹ As rated by my mom. [back]

Luzzo’s

• 211-13 First Ave. (between 12th and 13th Streets)
• (212) 473-7447
• Meal 53 of 52: mozzarella di bufala pizza ($15) and two glasses of nero d’avola wine ($9 each).

It’s something that comes to mind often during outings for the 52 Meals Project: the whole capital-lettered thing of the Dining Experience. Some places, maybe they’re not all that special but the diner imbues them with his own magic: the combination of a certain time and certain company with a certain frame of mind.

That birthday dinner with Iggy comes to mind. Or that West Village bar, the one I went to with Katie, Andie and Jimi in the blustery winter many moons ago, that one with the white Christmas lights and the worn wood booths and the Russian boxing matches on the TV over the bar. Where was that place? (No, really: Where the fuck was it? I want to go back and confirm whether it’s as great as I remember.)

Other establishments actively strive to create magic, to buttress your own or to do the heavy lifting, should your imagination be in a weakened or absent state. But careful: too much magic-mongering on the business end and, hey presto, you’ve got a theme restaurant. (e.g. any dining establishment within a block radius of Times Square.)

It’s a difficult balance, a confluence of factors, as they say.

Friend of a Farmer excels at this balancing act, though. And we almost didn’t go. The diner across the street had perfectly serviceable brunch, the menfolk grumbled. (They’d been up late, watching a documentary on ants.) But Megan convinced Vincent and I to slog through the first snow of the season to Gramercy Park.

We ate upstairs, up the wood staircase, banister entwined with strands of pine and white Christmas lights; an antique cabinet on the landing held gourds, tin soldiers and Mason jars of dry beans. The second floor was a cozy, clapboard-clad cocoon. Santas and ceramic roosters perched on the mantelshelf above a crackling fire. Yellowed wallpaper of wildflowers enveloped the room. Large, condensation-fogged windows overlooked the flurries on Irving Place, where I kept expecting to see a hansom cab ramble by. A giant Christmas tree huddled in our corner, heavy with lights and ornaments, while lantern style lamps hung from the bare-raftered ceiling.

Practically like my own Grandma’s farmhouse in the wilds of Ohio, or a slightly more idyllic version of it, although Grandma would start at the prices here, and if memory serves, she never hung a hand-calligraphed paper sign on her Christmas tree that read, “Please Do Not Touch Tree.”¹

What sealed the deal was this possibly Grandma-aged lady wearing the ultimate Grandma-type sweater. She sat across from us at a table where she silently read part of the Sunday Times while her husband read another chunk; after a time, they wordlessly swapped sections.

Yes, those are squirrels. I was so excited to document this wardrobe splendor that I almost knocked over my orange juice. Which reminds me: the food fit flush with the experience. My omelet, bulging with cheddar and mushrooms, was served in a frying pan, nestled up to some nicely spiced potatoes. Tracy, our waitress, had on one of those knit caps that cool yet down-to-earth girls always seem to be wearing, and said things in earnest like “You got it!”, “Holler if you need me!” and “Thanks a bunch!” Also, I think I may have heard her address a diner as “Darlin’.” Almost too much.

You know, I run on at times. Megan, on the other hand, summed the Dining Experience in one well-turned sentence: “I feel like I’m being hugged by this entire restaurant.”

Good call, Megs.

P.S. How about that? I’ve now eaten a meal at 52 different establishments in New York City this year and I have nearly a month left. It’s strangely anticlimactic for me, especially recalling the unfulfilled struggles of the 52 Meals Project’s first two years. I’m going to keep counting and reviewing past 52 for any additional new meals I eat in 2007.

¹ Although she did hide a pickle ornament in it. [back]

Friend of a Farmer

• 77 Irving Place (between East 18th and 19th Streets)
• (212) 477-2188
• Meal 52 of 52: country omelet ($12.95), large orange juice ($4) and a mug of coffee ($2.25; free refills).

I had dinner with Megan and Vincent at the Chinatown standby, Big Wong King. Most patrons appear to be Chinese, which is a good sign that the food’s the real deal. Super-speedy service and great prices. We had several beers with our roasted meats and good times.

Big Wong King

• 67 Mott St. (near Bayard Street)
• (212) 964-0540
• Meal 51 of 52: roast pork ($5.50), sliced beef soup with noodles ($4) and a few bottled beers.

In a rush to catch I’m Not There at the Film Forum, Katie and I didn’t have time to give Home Restaurant its due, but Katie deemed it “cute” and I’d add “cozy,” with its locally sourced home-cooking dishes, scuffed wood floors, mismatched dinnerware and sconces, and generally laid-back attitude (their business card notes, “Fine Wine. Fine Ketchup.” Katie had the smoked duck salad with grilled apple, candied cashews and orange vinaigrette and said it was tasty. My mac-and-cheese was cheesy with a crunchy breaded topping that also included tomato and my hot mulled cider hit the spot for the chilly evening.

Home Restaurant

• 20 Cornelia St.
• 212-243-9579
• Meal 50 of 52: small mac-and-cheese ($10) and hot mulled cider ($8).

Every neighborhood in New York has one of these places: the mysterious Chinese/Mexican restaurant. I don’t know what the connection is: hearsay informs that they were started by Mexicans working in Chinese restaurants, where the former picked up the latter’s culinary secrets and set off to open their own combo restaurants. Or it’s the other way around; I think I’ve only ever seen Asian people in the kitchens of these places. They all have the same lousy backlit photos of their featured dishes, bland decors, prominent what-to-do-if-someone-is-choking posters and conspicuous notices of regular inspection by the health department. I don’t even know the name of this place and I walk by every time I get off the A train at 190th Street and cross Broadway. What more do I need to know? It’s my local Chinese/Mexican restaurant.

You don’t want to eat-in unless you enjoy chipped formica booths, bad fluorescent lighting and a constant stream of delivery guys and neighborhood folks stopping in for carry-out. If Edward Hopper had painted Nighthawks today, he’d have set it in a Chinese/Mexican restaurant, not the least of why because there aren’t many/any genuine diners left in New York City. I tried a black bean burrito, which had a lightly toasted (fried?) flour tortilla, and, on the Chinese side, some tofu and steamed vegetables. Cheap, basic, hearty: the perfect delivery-food/carry-out.

That Local Chinese/Mexican Place

• on Broadway, just south of 193rd Street
• Meal 49 of 52: black bean burrito (cheap) and steamed vegetables with tofu (also cheap).

The benefit of having a coworker who spends a lot of time in Brooklyn is her restaurant recommendations. I’m still digging into the list she supplied me that led me to try Bonita last month with Vincent and Megan, and then Maggie Brown today for a late lunch/early dinner with Beth. I’d been told Maggie’s specialized in what was termed “fancified mac and cheese” style dishes, home-cooking made with locally sourced ingredients, and including actual mac and cheese, which I ordered mainly because its topping of toasted breadcrumbs, bacon (yes!) and onions, the tastiness levels of which made me overlook the fact it was made with shells not elbow macaroni, as proper homemade mac-and-cheese should be. I started with something called the “deviled egg of the day” which I believe was normal deviled eggs with a touch of pesto in the yolk mixture.

It’s a small, cozy place that does a bang-up brunch business for the locals. I arrived at a dead-zone time when brunch was still being eaten but no new patrons were allowed inside so the restaurant could take out trash and prep the dinner menu. Once seated, we noticed the skull of some unfortunate animal, tastefully mounted on a plaque, eye sockets trained over the room, which pleased Beth, as animal skulls often do. Grandma-style parlor chandeliers hovered near the ceiling and the wallpaper resembled repeated velvet Rorschach blots in time-forgotten shades of purple and green. The floors are scuffed wooden planks and the trio of booths feature distressed leather upholstery and tabletops of heavily lacquered wood slabs that are easily three inches thick. Rustic touches here and there included mason jars of cherries and olives at the bar, behind which the liquor bottles gathered snugly on neatly labeled glass shelves. The music was an 80’s pop combo of perennially hip or hip-with-passage-of-time cuts (David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” “What I Am” by Edie Brickell & New Bohemians) mixed with songs from the same era that certain people may be ashamed to admit appear on their iPods (“Love Is A Battlefield,” anyone?).

We topped the evening with two poorly rolled games of bowling at Melody Lanes in Sunset Park. Waiting for a lane to free up, we knocked back some plastic cups of beer at the bar, staffed by an alternately jovial and angry old Danny DeVito-shaped guy with a New York accent, big eyeglasses, suspenders and receding, slicked-back gray hair who remembered my name then laughed and flipped me off when I couldn’t remember his. Throughout the evening, over the Mr. Microphone-quality PA system, we heard his increasingly surly requests for delivery of clean pitchers. After lacing up and navigating the computerized scoring system, I managed to knock down a few pins here and there, and turkey without capitalizing on the following frame. I mixed it up with a pink 10-pound house ball and, most importantly, had fun. The couple at the lane next to ours featured a young lady with a formless, prim toss that netted an impressive number of strikes, while her guy was aiming more for her attention than the pins as he unleashed a sidearm whip that looked like the beginning of a face-bruising karate move but failed to topple much wood.

Maggie Brown

• 455 Myrtle Ave., Fort Greene, Brooklyn
• (718) 643-7001
• Meal 48 of 52: deviled egg of the day (four halves) ($4), mac and cheese ($9) and some drinks.

A friend of a friend works for a major rum distributor, which you better believe has its perks. I got comped a ticket to an “epicurean trend” event at Pier 94 this afternoon called “Cook. Eat. Drink. Live.” I’m not sure who this show was targeting, but tickets listed for $300+ and there was tons of free food and drinks, chef demonstrations, a luxury car showroom (an apparent new trend coming soon to a dealer near you: cars with matte paint jobs), and free massages, the waiting time for which was so long, I passed for the opportunity to get seconds of shredded barbecued beef over corn bread from the booth of caterer Great American BBQ Co.

Let’s see: I also tried beef carpaccio with toasted pine nuts and pumpkin seeds from Abboccato Ristorante, savory chicken stew (with nice firm carrots) from Paris Commune, lobster cannellini with butternut squash puree from Cer Té, kobe beef from Primehouse New York, beef kabobs with mushrooms, peppers and onion from Dos Caminos, white stilton with mango and ginger from igourmet.com, salmon with foie gras and aged balsamic from The Forum, and large slices of dry streak sandwiches from Gallagher’s Steak House.

For drinks there were two cachaça suppliers so you better bet I got caipirinhas. I requested an extra-peaty single-malt from a scotch distributor and received a delicious Lagavulin 16-year-old, "the aristocrat of Islays." The bartenders from Smith & Mills, including one who has a 1920’s moustache with waxed tips, poured bourbon into large waxed-paper cups of extra-hot mulled cider. Delicious. And a bunch of wine; each attendee’s complementary vinyl tote bag contained a wine glass, which made it a little too convenient.

“Cook. Eat. Drink. Live.”

• Pier 94 (12th Avenue at 55th Street)
• Meal 47 of 52: about 15 pounds of free food and alcohol.

Here’s a nice semi-fancy restaurant, up the hill near Fort Tryon Park, where the white people who make more money than I do live, to take friends or family for a well-prepared basic “neighborhood place” meal that doesn’t involve pizza-by-the-slice or fried chicken. Although 107 West did nearly overdo it with the nothing-but-Paul-Simon soundtrack.

Wine: tasty. Field greens salad: fine and basic. Vegetable lasagna: lots of fresh squash and zucchini, still crisp, lots of cheese and smothered with a homemade tomato sauce. And fresh basil, which always gets a +10 from me.

107 West

• 2787 Broadway (at 107th Street)
• (212) 864-1555
• Meal 46 of 52: glass of merlot ($7), tossed field greens ($5.50), vegetable lasagna ($10.95), slice of pumpkin pie ($4.95) and an Irish coffee ($6).

I was to meet Megan and Vincent for dinner at Bonita in Fort Greene, only when I showed up, they didn’t seem to be there, despite cellphone discussion indicating otherwise. Were they at the Williamsburg location? They assured me they were not. I even asked the server if the place had a patio out back that I wasn’t noticing. Those sly devils: they were sitting on the same side of a table in the far back, purposely obscured by a partition, and I’m sure the look on my face was priceless when I stuck it back there.

We enjoyed the spicy alcoholic beverages, our hearty traditional Mexican entrees and an especially awesome pico de gallo that turned out not to be complementary. Megan tried a mysterious, unlabeled salsa-like condiment resting inconspicuously in a chutney-style container on the table and it was possibly the spiciest thing she’d ever tasted.

Afterwards we enjoyed drinks, company and a mangled communal slice of red velvet cake in a plastic clamshell container for a friend of a friend of a friend’s birthday celebration at Frank’s Cocktail Lounge on Fulton Street near South Elliot Place. The email invite referred to it as an “old-man bar” and New York magazine’s review praised its “truly authentic kitsch,” which all just means it’s a bar not a marketing department’s approximation of an Authentic New York-Style Bargoing Experience. It featured basic, relatively cheap drinks, generous pours, a small stage in the back for bands, and a poster-based decor that appeared to have been selected and arranged by someone with as much design sense as your dad. I liked the plastic bowl of complimentary snack-sized bags of chips at the bar. Frank, a man in an electric blue suit, leaned on the wall near the stage and kept an eye on things. He ordered our group a free round and after we called our thanks, he nodded in our direction.

Bonita

• 243 Dekalb Ave. (between Clermont and Vanderbilt Avenues), Brooklyn
• (718) 622-5300
• Meal 45 of 52: Two baskets of chips with pico de gallo for the table ($11), an order of vegetarian tacos ($7.50) and two caipirinhas ($7.50 each).

Crossing Nagle Avenue in my neighborhood this morning on my way downtown for some belated used-CD shopping, I ran into Vincent and Megan who were on their way to help my neighbor Kelly move a futon into her new apartment. I decided to join the merry band and we walked the dozen blocks uptown together to the woman who’d advertised the sofa-bed on craigslist. If we’d had more time, we would have stopped by the intersection of Cumming Street and Seaman Avenue for a quick photo-op at that infamous signpost.

Let it be said: futons are a bitch to move. The mattress easily weighed as much as a tackling dummy and this one even looked like one once we’d bound it with twine and bungee cords and propped it up on a hand cart to wheel haltingly down Broadway. We took turns pushing it and hoisting the unwieldy wooden slats and frames we’d disassembled and by the time we’d deposited everything in Kelly’s apartment, we had a thirst for cold beers.

Despite my moaning that there’s not a good place to get general diner-style food in my neighborhood, Kelly proved to be much more perceptive than I by leading us to the Park View Cafe for lunch, near the corner of Dyckman and Broadway. It’s got a full-featured diner-style menu with many salads and sandwiches, steaks and pasta, and tasty omelet-intensive breakfasts served late daily. Although they’re not 24/7, they’re open daily until 10 or 11 p.m. And they deliver! I chowed down on a portabella mushroom sandwich and fries with a Negra Modello.

Park View Cafe

• 219 Dyckman St. (just off Broadway)
• (212) 544-9024
• Meal 44 of 52: portabella mushroom sandwich platter ($7) and a cold beer ($3.50)

Never in the illustrious 2.75-year history of the 52 Meals Project has a restaurant I wanted to attend been closed upon arrival. Until tonight.

I’d called ahead to get the hours for Cafe Glechik, a Russian place on Brighton Beach recommended by a Russian ex-coworker, and a woman had, in hesitant and broken English, claimed the hours of operation for Saturdays were “10 to 7,” which didn’t seem right. The place was shuttered and locked upon arrival; so much for the plastic bottle of cold Smirnoff in my bag (Cafe Glechik is B.Y.O.B.). Which lead to another first of the 52 Meals Project: in a strange and unfamiliar neighborhood, how does one find a decent place to eat when all appears closed or bodega-related?

Why, stop a stranger.

“How about . . . that guy,” Carmella said, pointing to a random pedestrian in the fast-moving crowd on the sidewalk of Brighton Beach Avenue. He was a solid man, stubbly and balding, with a furrowed brow, as one often is in this city while striding purposely forward with a briefcase. But after I excused our intrusion and explained our plight, he was happy to discuss our options in a thick, Eastern-European (Russian?) accent. The Russian restaurants on the Boardwalk are fancy, he said, and too expensive, which he defined as having entrees in the $20 range. He was keen to steer us toward a Turkish restaurant instead, but supplied directions for both it and the Russian joints before we parted ways. Carmella and I decided to give the Turkish place a try and biked off to Istanbul Restaurant.

Our waiter, Sohrab, had a mystical stare that seemed to pass through us as he took our orders and presented our dishes; we thought maybe it was a Turkish thing but probably more likely drugs. I had the baby lamb shish kebab, which arrived, as the menu promised “grilled to delight” while Carmella opted for the Izgara Köfte meatballs, which were actually mini meat patties. Everything was O.K., perhaps bland, and we weren’t flabbergasted; the presentation wasn’t engrossing, either, as both of our entrees arrived with the same slaw-based accouterments and garnishes, as if churned out of a cafeteria assembly line.

The view from our sidewalk seating of the bay was picturesque, with a mist in the distance and low buildings lining the water, strangely pretty and unlike New York, resembling Amsterdam, or California, we thought.

I notice now, at the bottom of the receipt, the slogan “Our place is yours until you are full.” We certainly were, but I can tell you there’s nothing better to burn down a belly of Turkish meats than to take an hour-long bike-ride through Brooklyn on Ocean Parkway, home to the nation’s first bike path, upon which we ignored the “bicycles permitted on west mall only” rule and discovered that Carmella’s newly installed dynamo-powered bicycle lights don’t work despite looking really cool.

Istanbul Restaurant

• 1715 Emmons Ave., Brooklyn
• (718) 368-3587
• Meal 43 of 52: shish kebab ($15.95), cheese roll ($6.95), Ispanak (spinach spread) $5.95 and two glasses of red house wine ($6.75 each)

There was a shrieking baby in the main dining area at Spain Restaurant & Bar, the not-so-cleverly named Spanish restaurant Andie, Katie and I met at for dinner tonight, so we requested a little one-table nook—a separate room, about the size of a largish elevator—that we’d passed on the way back. Our request was granted and we dined in peace and splendor. There’s an abundance of free tapas appetizers—oysters, spareribs, shrimp in garlic butter sauce—and we filled up on those and the sangria (made with maraschino cherries) before our entrees. Those were adequate. The chicken Katie and I ordered was hit-or-miss: one of the quartered chunks might be delectable, while the next was dry. Andie wasn’t wholly satisfied with her paella, either. Our private room was a nice touch, though.

Spain Restaurant & Bar

• 113 W 13th St. (between Sixth and Seventh Avenues)
• (212) 929-9580
• Meal 42 of 52: chicken dinner and like two pitchers of sangria ($33 total, tax and tip included)

Vincent treated me tonight to a dinner of crisp and savory Korean fried chicken at Bon Chon Chicken. We got one basket of soy-flavored drumsticks and another of spicy, the latter of which was clear favorite, providing a nose-running punch in the head and warmth in the belly.

Megan and Kelly, also present, represented vegetarian and got some noodle or soy something-or-other that was also spicy but didn’t appear to be as hearty as our manly fare.

Bon Chon Chicken

• 314 Fifth Ave., Second Floor (between 31st and 32nd Streets)
• (212) 221-2222
• Meal 41 of 52: chicken! beer! Vincent paid for everything!

I caught the Frogs: A Chorus of Colors exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History this afternoon in its last day. In addition to being a confusing space with not enough directional signage in general, the frog exhibit had some of the worst graphic and typographic design ever, with conflicting hard-to-read fonts (and too many of them), rainbow-gradient horizontal spacers reminiscent of a webpage from 12 years ago, and the florescent palette of the Ocean Pacific clothing line, circa 1987.

Many of my questions went answered by the explanatory text on the placards. Do poisonous frogs secrete poison at will or is it on their skin all the time? At what point is a predator going to stop eating a poisonous frog? (I’d think a good chomp from a bird would be enough to permanently disable both predator and prey, which crimps the Darwinian cycle and doesn’t do either party any good.) A placard on mating noted the embrace lasts anywhere from a few hours to a few days, but didn’t mention how frogs might avoid predators the whole time they’re doin’ it in this sitting-duck stance. Also, what’s with the weird names? The Kermit-colored fellow pictured above? Waxy Monkey Tree Frog. No, I don’t get it, either, and that was one of the more normal names. I’m aware that you or I can find the answers to these questions and so much more on the internet, but when I’m paying $15 for an exhibit, I’d like it explained to me then and there, and via an eye-appealing design.

The frogs themselves, on the other hand, are pretty cool, although they don’t do much. Occasionally, I saw one slowly making its way down a tree trunk, or breathing, but mostly they sat there, unblinking. The poisonous ones were the most active and also the most colorful, although some of the others featured such an unnatural shade and sheen of green that they seemed to have been molded from plastic. I expected that if I turned one over, raised text on its underside would indicate “Made in China.”

I think as a general rule, larval is the most disturbing stage of animal development. Maggots, for instance, get no love, other than from hungry birds and reptiles. In the case of frogs, tadpoles are creepy, those translucent, featureless fluke-like beings that propel themselves through water by some strange magic. “They look like fish,” mused someone. “They’re not fish! They’re tadpoles!” piped the precocious human larva who’d earlier demonstrated that by smacking the plexiglas terrariums, she could annoy the smaller frogs enough that they’d hop. In fact there were many children running around the exhibit area, wreaking havoc. Is it possible this show was geared toward kids and that’s why I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have?

Shifting the day to more adult activities, I stopped by Blondies Sports Bar, which is the place to be if you wish to root for your favorite sports team while wearing the jersey of your favorite sports team, as many were today for the Browns/Steelers game. Because the Browns were getting crushed and the place was packed tighter than a rush-hour subway car, I retreated back to Amsterdam for a late brunch at Monaco.

Monaco

• 421 Amsterdam Ave. (at the corner of West 80th Street
• (212) 873-3100
• Meal 40 of 52: goat cheese and portobello mushroom omelet, with home fries and wheat toast ($12.50) and two mojitos ($9 each).

At the third-annual Art Parade this afternoon, performance pieces and artistic floats advanced down West Broadway between Houston and Grand Streets. It recalled a miniature Village Halloween Parade, except more surreal, if that’s possible. The Halloween Parade, for instance, is slightly less likely to feature a float resembling the corpse of Snoopy.

I didn’t get a photo of this one so you’ll just have to trust me. A bunch of guys strained forward to haul a wheeled platform on which the large papier-mâché puppy lay, in his familiar atop-the-doghouse repose, except that he appeared to have been dead for some time and ravaged by vultures, his ribcage arching up from his skeleton. A party of followers held thought-balloon signs filled in with various non-sequiturs.

We didn’t understand it, but it was fun to watch and see if the next group in the parade could top the act before it. Also, we had catbird seats at the bar, then a table on the sidewalk facing the street, at a bistro named Diva, where we knocked back numerous drinks and ate an early pizza dinner.

A few sticks of dynamite sprinted by, as did a bunch of chefs with others dressed as food. I walked to the barricades between the street and the sidewalk to get a closer look and some photos.

There was an apparently unironic mariachi band, and a full marching band that appeared to have wandered over from a high-school football game halftime show as it played “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”

A man in a head-to-toe costume of plastic shopping bags paused at intervals to lie on the street, which Beth noted didn’t seem very sanitary, even for a hulking human wad of garbage.

A circle of maidens approached, each girl’s long hair braided together with the hair of the next. They moved gingerly with their heads held rigid and bringing up the rear was a girl whose pigtails were held aloft by a pair of helium balloons.

I appreciated this lone gentleman whose conical head covering tapered to the ground with a wheel at its terminus.

After the parade, Beth and I stumbled around Canal Street among the tourists and the men who sell them fake watches and luxury handbags. We spotted a large bright light a few blocks away and decided it was safe to approach as we didn’t appear to be near death. According to a brisk gentleman in a headset blocking foot traffic, Nickelodeon was filming a commercial. It appeared to involve kids dressed as bees throwing black and yellow paint on one another.

At the famed discount art supply store, Pearl Paint, we climbed the stairs to the markers floor and rifled through the small sketchbooks used for testing the writing utensils, then removed some of our favorites.

A short jaunt up Broadway and we arrived at Pearl River, where we fiddled with the tin wind-up toys, the alarm clocks and the parasols. I bought a golden, two-inch-tall figurine of a roly-poly pig with a different face on each side like Janus and Beth said she’d return to buy the string of lights mounted in colorful wicker spheres.

We had dessert at Souen, a natural/organic/macrobiotic restaurant on Sixth Avenue at Prince Street. My fruit compote was paved with a busted-up heap of homemade granola while Beth’s tofu cheesecake, glazed with a fruit gel, was softer and more gooey than cheesecake has a right to be.

Diva

• 341 W. Broadway
• (212) 941-9024
• Meal 39 of 52: goat cheese and black-olive pizza ($12.00) and several mojitos (?$).

After work today, I joined Andie in her three-bedroom apartment hunt in my neck of the woods. The first, on Cabrini near the upper 190th Street station on the A train, was too small. Another grubbier place further downtown was also too tiny and claustrophobic to boot, with very high ceilings and a distinct lack of windows. The broker, Meg, grew up on Arden in Inwood, which made me glad I didn’t rag on the neighborhood too much.

In discussing the gentrification of Upper Manhattan, she kept starting sentences with, “Back when I was growing up here,” which made me want to say something like, “You mean last week?” because she appeared to be in her mid-20s. She seemed to be nervous about showing us around, unable to unlock the door of the one apartment in less than 10 tries, and mousily shuffling through scraps of paper in her binder trying to find the address of another place she thought Andie would like when we should have told her not to bother.

She had a curiously impassioned defense about the infamous murder rates in Washington Heights in the ’80s and ’90s: the mafia, not fully sold on the wonders of New Jersey marshlands for disposing of corpses, had been using Fort Tryon Park as a dumping ground, she told me, and, apparently, murders are tallied where the body is found, not where the murder took place, so WaHi got a bad rap back in the day. O.K., maybe, though it seemed a little too much information for a real estate broker to be revealing, as talk about murders and crime rates typically don’t do much in the way of assisting a sale.

Afterwards, Andie and I had dinner at The Heights. The rooftop eating area was full but we were seated in the center of the giant second-floor picture window overlooking Broadway, the famous red neon sign of Tom’s Restaurant visible through the trees. My chicken timpano was billed as lasagna-like but was really a salmagundi of tortillas, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream, shredded chicken, and other staple Mexican ingredients. It was fresh and hearty though not what I’d expected.

The Heights Bar & Grill

• 2867 Broadway
• (212) 866-7035
• Meal 38 of 52: chicken timpano ($10.95), chips and salsa ($3) and a margarita ($7).

I like the location of Dallas Jones Bar-B-Q, snug in a nook where West Houston and Bedford Street meet just off Sixth Avenue in the Village, right around the corner from the Film Forum. There are only three tables in the place, which is about the size of my bedroom, but judging by the flurry of deliverymen coming and going, they do most of their business via phoned-in orders from neighborhood denizens.

My pulled pork sandwich featured a generous pile of sweet and spicy meat on a soft bun, and my wine was fine, although I’m not entirely clear why I ordered white, which I don’t like and which didn’t complement the BBQ well, as if any wine could.

Dallas Jones Bar-B-Q

• 178 W. Houston St. (corner of Bedford)
• (212) 731-7390
• Meal 37 of 52: pulled pork sandwich ($10.95) and a glass of Pinot Grigio ($7).

Franny’s pizza reminds me of Grimaldi’s, which is probably some sort of massive insult to New York pizza-eating elite, especially because it’s a hipster joint in Park Slope. I’ve been meaning to go here since learning, in January 2006, that they don’t deliver. My pizza was up to snuff: thin, lightly charred crust, super fresh rounds of cheese, whole leaves of basil. It wasn’t segmented into slices so I ate the whole thing with a knife and fork, which involved a lot of scooting the pizza around on my plate. I wanted a fresh cocktail in the mojito family, so I tried one of the house drinks, the Sparkling Mint, which in addition to mint, lime juice and mint syrup, was made with the Champagne-like Prosecco and Cynar, for which I required a translation from my server. She described the Italian liqueur as having the flavor of “bitter artichoke”, and yet I still ordered the drink, and indeed, was refreshed by it and its strange bitterness. For dessert I had the panna cotta, which I’d describe as a creamy flan, topped with a grape syrup. Yum.

Franny’s

• 295 Flatbush Ave., Brooklyn
• (718) 230-0221
• Meal 36 of 52: Sparkling Mint cocktail ($11), pizza ($15), panna cotta ($8) and espresso ($3.50).

I made my way in the cold rain to Fort Greene for dinner at Habana Outpost, which is just a block away from The Smoke Joint, the BBQ restaurant I went to earlier this month. I’d made a note then to return because Habana Outpost appeared to be a visual cross between a Havana bar and a music video by The B-52’s. I forgot all about it of course, but then Time Out New York did a mini writeup on it this week, so I figured someone was trying to tell me something and I’d better go.

Orders are placed and beverage collected at the counter inside, then you walk your meal ticket outside to the cooks inside the bright red mail truck parked in the restaurant’s courtyard. The grilled corn-on-the-cob sprinkled with crumbled cotija cheese and spices: so good. The Cuban sandwich, roast pork, ham, Swiss cheese, pickles and chipotle mayo lovingly smooshed between two big pieces of toasted flatbread, was satisfying though nothing out of the ordinary.

Because of the rain, it wasn’t as hopping out there as it can supposedly get, though there was a D.J. and a few stalwarts huddled under the tables with umbrellas. In nicer weather, they hook up a blender to the stationary bike near the fence and you can pedal-blend your own margarita. There’s a bunch of other hippie crap, too: biodegradable plates and cups and silverware, a recycling station that’s just plain confusing if you’ve been drinking, and some strange restrooms that are like corrugated sheet metal outhouses located out back. On Sundays, they show movies outdoors, projected on the side of the building, but apparently not when it’s raining. I can’t imagine this place stays open in the winter, but if it does, it loses a full half of its charm.

Habana Outpost

• 757 Fulton St. (at South Portland Avenue), Brooklyn
• (718) 858-9500
• Meal 35 of 52: Cuban sandwich ($7.25), corn-on-the-cob ($2) and some beers.

Instant ramen noodles constituted a formative brick of my collegiate food pyramid. I will admit eating many a pack of chicken-, sometimes beef- flavored Maruchan Ramen back in the day, bought for pennies apiece and flavored with a salty powder included in a foil square reminiscent of a wrapped condom.

In my adult life, ramen ranks among my favored home remedies of tempering a sinus headache. I hold my face close over the hot steam as the noodles boil, then fork down the gunk to rebalance my electrolytes and ease my fatigue, or something like that.

My sense before tonight of eating ramen in an actual ramen establishment seems informed by dystopic sci-fi movies¹. In The Fifth Element, Bruce Willis learns from a wizened Asian ramen-vendor that he’s been fired. In Blade Runner, Harrison Ford learns from a wizened Asian ramen-vendor that he’s being arrested by Edward James Olmos. “He say you under arrest, Mr. Deckard,” quoth the wizened Asian ramen-vendor. “He say you Blade Runner.”

Taking place in a futuristic Los Angeles (“November, 2019”), Blade Runner visually adds, as I think William Gibson has, that you must eat your ramen while wearing an overcoat and seated at a counter of a stall-like street vendor, beneath a florescent-lit awning, as around you, the cold rain pours and crowds mill by under umbrellas with rods that appear to be light sabers.

Well, it was dark and cold and rainy tonight, and New York, at least the East Village, is probably as grittily deteriorated a match to Los Angeles 2019, so I took the L east then walked over, under my unlit umbrella, to Ramen Setagaya, an outpost of a Japanese noodle chain. There are a scant few tables for two and I sat at the narrow counter on a black-lacquered wooden stool. I was only about two feet away from the two cooks, who scurried about the tiny kitchen preparing dishes in clouds of fragrant steam. Each gentleman wore a yellow T-shirt printed with the chain’s logo and, oddly, had a white terry-cloth hand-towel wrapped around his head and tied in the back, as if he’d just exited a shower.

A flat-screen TV near the entrance looped a bewildering array of cooking shows, gameshows, commercials and promotional videos, all of which seemed to feature Setagaya ramen, and none of which had subtitles or a lick of English otherwise. After calling for a Sapporo, I started out with the Oshinko pickled vegetables, none of which I recognized but all three of which were tasty. For my noodles, I opted for the pork BBQ salt ramen (or “cha-syu-men,” according to the mostly Japanese menu, unless that’s actually a pronunciation guide). The tender, thin-sliced pork floated in a rich noodle broth of various chopped vegetables, seaweed and half of a soft-boiled egg with a vibrant yellow, goopy yolk, floating there like a lifeboat.

Unless this is a prank on Westerners, I’m told that in Japan it is good manners to slurp one’s noodles, as if to audibly yet nonverbally complement the chef. Suspicious of this, I ate mine silently and with a minimum of wet whiplash, although two Asian gentlemen down the counter to my right were consistently and noisily Hoovering in large tangles from their bowls. A sideways glance revealed that, with noodles dangling from their faces, they resembled Cthulhu and his “awful squid-head with writhing feelers.”

All told, and as expected, much heartier and tastier ramen than those dehydrated bricks from my youth, and better yet, nothing bad happened to me during my meal, unless you count that giant puddle I accidentally stepped in on First Avenue afterwards.

Ramen Setagaya

• 141 First Ave. (between St. Marks Place and East 9th Street)
• (212) 529-2740
• Meal 34 of 52: pickled vegetables ($2), pork BBQ ramen ($11) and a bottle of Sapporo ($4).

¹ I’ve seen Tampopo, but I’m going to conveniently ignore that here. [back]

Storms this morning washed out the full function of nearly every line in the subway system and on the streets, irritated commuters fought for cabs and clustered among dozens waiting for full busses that didn’t stop.

My own 1 train made it downtown to 137th Street before going out of service due to flooding. After a pair of halfhearted attempts waiting for a bus, I decided to walk, and surprised myself when I was able to make the entire 100 blocks without sore feet or tiring. It took about an hour and 45 minutes, though I did stop for a cinnamon raisin bagel and some orange juice at H&H Bagels on the Upper West Side.

After work, after buying a plum-colored polo shirt from American Apparel to replace my sweaty work shirt, I met up with Andie, her coworker Ian and some of his friends at Therapy, a gay bar/lounge in Hell’s Kitchen. We were there to watch So You Think You Can Dance, which the bar broadcasts on a large screen on the second floor. Here are Andie and Ian, voguing during a commercial break.

The dancing was impressive but I think this is one of those shows that requires a long-term investment in the characters to vote accurately and consistently for the “best” dancing.

For dinner I had a turkey burger and fries, which were not bad, and two mojitos, that were also not bad but extremely expensive. I was most impressed by the fishbowl of free, elusive NYC Condoms at the door.

Therapy

• 348 W. 52nd St.
• (212) 397-1700
• Meal 33 of 52: turkey burger and fries ($11.07) and two mojitos ($18.45).

I caught another free concert at McCarren Park Pool this afternoon with Beth and friends. As before, we delighted in spotting noteworthy fashions among the crowd both impressive and wayward, including bikini-clad ladies in cowboy boots, some dude in corduroy short-pants and two sets of sneakers featuring an eye-searing array of DayGlo.

After sitting around near the back of the pool to better people-watch and listen to the openers (one of which resembled the Polyphonic Spree and covered Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” to much delight and confetti), we moved front and center for the headliner, Blonde Redhead. As the crowd waited for the band to take the stage, the guy to the left with the shaved head and the foam earplugs was engrossed in EJ Hobsbawm’s potboiler, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality while the girl to the right wormed her way through a soduku. The guy directly in front of us, in shades and curly blonde hair, grabbed any beach balls that bounced his way, deflated them and snuck them into his backpack.

I’d heard of Blonde Redhead but hadn’t heard them until today, very lush in both lowercase and capitalized forms of the word, blending Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, with ethereal vocals by a self-admittedly drink-addled Kazu Makino (depicted below), and from the Pace brothers, washes of electric guitar with odd effects and solid, crafty drumbeats, plus a few odd synths and samples thrown into the mix.

After refreshments at a local bar, Beth, her sister Katie, their friend Brett and I were famished and spotting a restaurant name similar enough to the girls’ own last name made the selection of Raymund’s Place automatic. It featured an animal skull mounted festively on the wall, which pleased Beth, and served Polish home cooking. We feasted on potato pancakes, beet soup and pierogies, those doughy lumps of goodness I remember fondly from Parma, Ohio. The pierogies at Raymund arrive not only with a bit of sour cream, but a small side of bacon bits nestled in their own liquid grease: genius.

Raymund’s Place

• 124 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn
• (718) 388-4200
• Meal 32 of 52: potato and cheese pierogies with cucumber salad and beets ($6.75).

The Smoke Joint, a new BBQ place in Fort Greene, has been getting press lately over what “style” of barbecue it serves. Where another rib place would drawl on about Texas or Tennessee, the guys at Smoke Joint have seen it fit to reply, bluntly, that their BBQ is “Brooklyn style,” whatever that might be. Even after eating it, I don’t know, other than it’s cheap and delicious and I’d get it again. Juicy, spicy and tender summed up my “tips and bits,” which didn’t seem to be a hearty portion for $7 at first, but which probably works out to nearly a rack of ribs, without the bones and large fat deposits.

The styling of the place is as no-nonsense as the food: functional-basic décor, regular tables and chairs with a semienclosed, sort-of porch area sticking out into the sidewalk and napkins that appear to be the same tri-fold paper towels dispensed in restrooms. Even the soundtrack is straight-up classic radio: Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps,” the Raspberries’ “Go All the Way,” Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” and the 11-minute-plus version of Traffic’s “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys.”

The Smoke Joint

• 87 S. Elliott Place, Brooklyn
• (718) 797-1011
• Meal 31 of 52: “Tips and Bits” ($7), a beer ($4) and BBQ beans ($3).

My Mom’s side of the family is rural German and I fondly recall dinners of my childhood for which she’d make cabbage rolls and sauerbraten, and roulades fashioned from thin-sliced beef rolled up with bacon and a dill pickle.

Yesterday, Gridskipper ran a list of the scant few German restaurants in New York, and reading it, I realized I hadn’t yet been to a German restaurant yet in New York, so I gave Hallo Berlin a go. In addition to many stray umlauts, it serves a cornucopia of wurst, including the prefixes weiner, Alpen, bock, knock, bauern, brat, curry and liver.

I gave their roulade a try and it was bland and sopped in a sad brown gravy. The spaetzle was greasy and flavorless and the red cabbage and string beans on the side tasted fresh-from-the-can. It wasn’t all a bust, as my large glass stein of Köstritzer black beer had a pleasantly sticky-sweet bitterness about it. It seemed like bar food, although the staff and regulars were pleasant. The bunch of delivery guys at the bar were engaged in a long and heated discussion about the film versions of American Psycho and Trainspotting versus the book versions. The consensus reached was that the books are more graphic and therefore better.

So though I didn’t like my dish at Hallo Berlin much—maybe I’d have been better off with some of that wurst—I still respect my heritage and do not begrudge the country of Germany and its heavy food at large. To show there’s no hard feelings, here’s a file photo from January 2002 of me enjoying a pig ride in Köln. Where does the time go?

Hallo Berlin

• 626 10th Ave.
• (212) 977-1944
• Meal 30 of 52: roulade with red cabbage, string beans and cucumber salad, plus bread and butter, and soup ($18) and a stein of Köstritzer ($7).

The real estate development and investment firm that owns the New York Mets occasionally invites employees at my work out to ballgame functions and tonight we had reign of a private loge, the Diamond View Suite, from which we could watch the Pittsburgh Pirates get crushed, 6 to 3. It was my first time to Shea Stadium, and it is worn and dumpy, or as we say in real estate parlance, particularly when the owner of the asset is standing right there, “tired.” Not to worry: Citi Field, the new stadium, is under construction next door, and when complete, old Shea will revert to a parking lot.

We had a fine first baseline vantage point and all the hot dogs and Cracker Jack we could handle, though it took me a while to get over the distraction of airplanes continually taking off from LaGuardia. Also I was dismayed to learn that the Cracker Jack people apparently no longer include toy prizes inside their snack but instead small paperboard cards featuring riddles and triva with rub-to-reveal answers. Lame.

Waiting afterwards for my Long Island Railroad train to arrive, I immersed myself in the drunken and ecstatic throng of fans on the platform. A particularly loud group of guys had obviously had a lot to drink, judging by the several of them who stepped down off the end of the platform to urinate near the tracks, all the while shouting, “Let’s — go — Mets!”

Guys:

Let’s go Mets! Let’s go Mets! Let’s go Mets!

Speaker:

Westbound train arriving on track number 1.

Guys:

Westbound train! Westbound train! Westbound train!

As the train pulled into the station, they moved down the platform to the last car, where a woman in a business suit was waiting to board.

“I am not getting on the same car as you guys,” she said to them, holding up her hands as if to banish them. She walked to a different car but the leader of the drunk guys shouted, “Follow her!” and they stumbled off in pursuit. On board, I could hear them shouting “Let’s go Mets!” from a car away until either they debarked in Queens or the businesswoman subdued them with her briefcase.

Shea Stadium

• 123-01 Roosevelt Ave., Flushing
• (718) 507-8499
• Meal 29 of 52: a hot dog with mustard and onions (free).

Mezcal’s, in Park Slope, has a dining area out back, on a fenced-in patio snuggled between two quiet apartment buildings. That’s cool.

Mezcal’s Mexican Restaurant

• 396 Fifth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn
• (718) 965-6050
• Meal 28 of 52: quesadillas rancheras ($5.95), black bean soup ($3) and two margaritas ($6 each).

The forced variety of my meals resolution obscures the fact that one of my favorite food groups is Latin American, usually Mexican. Also, I just don't eat a lot of it because the real deal is tough to find in New York. That changed today when I stopped by Red Hook Park to enjoy lunch from the Latin American food vendors there. Bienvenidos Red Hook!

Man, what a find. The vendors began ostensibly, about 10 years ago, I’m told, to feed the soccer players and fans at the adjacent field. These days (roughly May through September, on the weekends) most people show up for the food. Flanking the southeast entrance to the park are about a dozen vendors—Mexican, Ecuadoran, Salvadoran, Chilean—each set up under a makeshift tent, usually a temporary aluminum frame propping up a tarp or plastic roof, under which the food is prepared and distributed from long folding tables. Adjacent most tents are communal tables and chairs; upon placing an order, you’re asked, as you are in restaurants here, “to stay or to go?”

Selecting a vendor to patronize wasn’t difficult. I don't know if it's because I hail from a corn-intensive part of the country, but whenever I catch that robust aroma of a foodstuff featuring fresh-cooked corn, whether corn on the cob, cornbread or cornmeal mush, I get a little slobbery. That’s what drew me to one of the Salvadoran pupusa tents, which had its own array of aluminum foil-skirted griddles lined up on a folding table. The saucer-shaped treats of masa (corn dough) tortillas sandwich a selection of toppings, including beans, white cheese, a variety of meats, and unexpected vegetables, such as zucchini and loroco flowers. Each is made to order, so it takes shape slowly.

It was worth the wait for the nicely browned, bean and white cheese variety I ordered, crispy, delicious and filling, with the cheesy-beany guts creeping out the sides of the squashed disk. The elder woman of the tent who scooped the dough from a large bowl, rolled it into a ball, and passed it to the ladies on the grill to flatten, fill and fry. She formed the doughballs rapidly, without even looking at her hands or the bowl, while carrying on conversation with customers in both Spanish and English.

You could call this street food (and it’s certainly cheap and filling like street food), but the atmosphere is accommodating and communal like a picnic, and not just because it’s in a park and there’s some dudes playing soccer right over there. The spicy purple-cabbage slaw was resting in one of those 20-gallon plastic utility tubs with rope handles and my tangy-sweet cashew fruit drink was dispensed from a large picnic-style beverage dispenser.

If the vendors of Red Hook Park sound appealing to you and you are a New York local, I urge you to go while you still can. I’ve since read a Grub Street article from earlier this summer that reports the Department of Parks and Recreation will not renew the vendors’ permit because it would rather ferment a bidding war among commercial concessionaires, presumably the ones that serve the same food and drink at seemingly every street fair in New York. As it stands, September 8th will be the final day for the current vendors. This angers me and I am interested in expressing my displeasure to Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Julius Spiegel, ideally by punching him directly in the cock.

Red Hook Park

• corner of Clinton and Bay Streets, Red Hook, Brooklyn
• Meal 27 of 52: two bean-and-cheese pupusas, a side of purple-cabbage slaw and a cashew fruit drink ($5.50).

What a fiasco for me to subway from home to Park Slope with insufficient planning. The A train magically became an F train south of Fourth Street, so I thought I could transfer to the M at Delancey Street. But there didn’t seem to be a way to take that train downtown from that station and regardless, I learned, the M only runs on weekdays. Criminy. I hailed a cab instead and for most of the ride the driver complained about the suicidal nature of New York City bicyclists as he attempted to ram a few of them off the road.

Lunch at Maria’s Mexican Bistro was spicy and tasty, once I got past a short and snotty young woman who squinted at me as if I were a cretin when I asked her how to get to the restaurant’s secluded patio. In fairness, it’s more of a walled-in garden area than a patio, but still. To show us she cared, the same woman took our order, brought us someone else’s entrées, then whisked them back and eventually got it right.

My vegetable tacos were made with what tasted like homemade corn tortillas and the vegetables were unassailably fresh. Good margaritas, too.

Maria’s Mexican Bistro

• 669 Union St. (at 4th Avenue), Brooklyn
• (718) 638-2344
• Meal 26 of 52: margarita ($6) and vegetable tacos ($6).

There are exactly nine tables for two in Westville, a comfy diner approximately the size of an A train car. Some diners (or “American traditional” restaurants, or “restaurants that serve comfort food” as they can be referred to now in New York) try too hard to meet expectations of the archetype—chrome, a Chuck Berry-intensive jukebox, checkerboard patterns on the tile floors or the menus or the tablecloths—when all I want is a clean, well-lighted place to sit, eat a sandwich and read.

Westville is just that place. The only things on the walls other than the menus are a few photos, two mirrors and a hand-painted woodcut of a trotting horse. Near my table, a glass vase of fresh flowers sat on the shelf among the extra ketchup bottles. And by the order-in window, a small rack of hooks had hanging on it someone’s purple backpack and a lavender canvas tote screen-printed with a stencil of Debbie Harry circa 1976.

I was in an odd dinner mood, craving both fresh vegetables as well as the opposite of fresh vegetables, which is bacon, so I ordered a salad special that featured four jumbo scallops wrapped with prosciutto atop arugula salad greens, orange segments, purple onions, cherry tomatoes and avocado slices: an unusual yet flavorful summery mix. My side of fries arrived in a white ceramic salad bowl big enough to serve four, easily. “Is this really a side portion of fries?” I asked my server. She said, “I always tell people, ‘Are you sure you want the side of fries? It’s a lot of fries.’” Which was strange because I don’t remember her revealing this. She was however able to sway me to try the peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream. It wasn’t as crusty as I like it but there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues like cobbler.

Westville

• 210 W. 10th St. (between Bleecker and West 4th Streets)
• (212) 741-7971
• Meal 25 of 52: salad with prosciutto-wrapped scallops ($17), Bass Ale ($5), giant salad bowl of fries ($5) and peach cobbler with ice cream ($6).

It’s criminal I’d never been to Two Boots before today. It’s a New York pizza institution! Their shtick is tastily topped pies named after celebrities and fictional characters, many of which happen to be personal heroes of mine. "The Dude," for example, is a Cajun bacon-cheeseburger confection with tasso (seasoned pork), ground beef, cheddar and mozzarella that sounds as if it’d go well with two oat sodas. I tried "the Larry Tate," a white pie with spinach, plum tomatoes and fresh garlic, while Katie opted for "the Tony Clifton," wild mushrooms, Vidalia onions, sweet red pepper pesto and mozzarella. Very tasty. Plus, the crisp crust-bottoms at Two Boots are dusted with semolina, which makes for a messier eating experience and a less-burnt crust but lends taste and texture not found in average pizza crusts. Cheap, too.

Two Boots

• 74 Bleecker St. (at Broadway)
• (212) 777-1033
• Meal 24 of 52: a slice of pizza ($3.50) and a Boylan cream soda ($1.75).

Chelsea newcomer Hill Country is not only the friendliest BBQ restaurant I’ve been to, it’s perhaps the friendliest restaurant I’ve been to, period. And that unnerved me. I half expected Charlton Heston to burst through the door mid-meal and shout that my ribs were made out of people.

The Hill Country cult begins with the charming young lady in a white smock and a navy Hill Country logo baseball cap standing outside the door. Unexpectedly, she was stationed there not to fast-talk me inside, but to greet me as I entered. Fucking Bob Evans doesn’t even do that.

Inside, another woman wearing a white smock and a navy Hill Country logo baseball cap handed me a meal card and asked if I’d been to the restaurant before. I grow leery when a restaurant staffperson asks me this because it often signals a gimmick of preparation or presentation, something like, “For every entrée you finish, we will release a cascade of party balloons directly over your table” or “Once you’re seated, you should expect our in-house mime to enact the wine list.”

And the meal card thing is a little gimmicky, but it sort of makes sense. You pick up a cafeteria-style tray and take the card first to the beverage area, which is a vintage 1950’s style corner-shop soda cooler. There you pick your Pabst or from a variety of other bottled beers and a smattering of old-time-favorite sodas (Welch‘s Grape! Big Red!). Then you move to the station with the pork, beef and chicken, sold by the pound and stickered with a deli-style UPC. Finally, you make your way to the side-dish station for yams and mac & cheese and baked beans and such, and if your eyes are bigger than your stomach, the “Sweets & Treats” station featuring pies, cobblers, cakes and, direct from Texas, Blue Bell ice cream. Everything ordered is duly checked-off the card, which you present at a register near the front after you’ve seated yourself and eaten.

At the beverage and food-group counters, everyone is as cheerful as costumed theme-park mascots. I tell you I am not exaggerating: behind the meat-and-sausage counter stood six guys, each wearing the smock/cap uniform and each burly but friendly in a “guy behind the meat counter” sort of way. Each also had an overeager smile and attitude, poised at the ready to serve my every need, or at least every one involving a meat product. It was eerie. They all smiled and stared at me as I scrutinized the menu board above their heads and glinting teeth. After I’d decided on the pork ribs, the meat man nearest me advanced to dish out my selection and nothing appeared to give him more satisfaction then when he plunked them onto a sheet of brown butcher paper, weighed and stickered the order, then twisted the ends of the paper and crinkled up the sides to form a cozy nest of fatty, smoked goodness.

As usual I’m being a tad unfair for attempted entertainment purposes because I was eating at 5:30 p.m., when dinner hasn’t yet entered the average New Yorker’s conscious. As the time wore on during my meal, the place filled with customers, steadily necessitating those brigades of cheerful meatmongers and other servers.

The ribs were great: jumbo and oak-smoked with a crackling, snappy skin. They were dry-rubbed, so no sauce, though there was some in a caddy atop the table, along with the silverware (in a mason jar, naturally) and—hurrah!—a big stack of those individually rolled heavy-duty wet-naps. Rustic charm abounds: wood-plank floors, unfinished straight-backed wooden chairs and tables, big ol’ stacks of firewood in the back, various old photos and signs all over the place, like an antiques barn or eBay exploded in there. Seems like a great place for parties, and for people who really like really, really friendly service.

Hill Country

• 30 W. 26th St. (between Sixth and Broadway)
• (212) 255-4544
• Meal 23 of 52: a mess of pork ribs ($15.40), a small mac & cheese ($4.50) and a PBR ($4).

In a short review on Monday, positive about the food at Ed’s Lobster Bar, less so about the rest, The New Yorker singled out the staff’s complacency and the restaurant’s “unaccommodating space.” Agreed.

When I walked in tonight, the long bar at which to dine had available only a spotting of undesirable single seats, recalling the body-bumping jamboree of the 1 train at 7 a.m. I strode purposely to the far end to survey the situation more clearly and got flagged down by the cock behind the bar (Ed?) with a “Can I help you?”

“One for dinner,” I said.

“You can sit anywhere at the bar,” he said with the open arms of a simpleton. No deal, barman. I didn’t want to sit at the bar. As a frequent single diner, I already knew the dozen small tables in the cramped back room were off limits. But the marble ledge with five stools opposite the bar appeared open and accommodating, so I took my seat there. As punishment, I was ignored by the floor staff for the next 10 minutes. No, they weren’t too busy. I’m a patient man and I’ve played this game before. It concludes with a server stopping by with an exaggerated look of concern to ask, “Oh, have you been helped yet?”

“Don’t mind me,” I didn’t say, failing to add: “I like sitting in restaurants, reading The Onion from cover to cover. I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I’m done with this Janeane Garofalo interview.”

Nah, I’m a nice guy, so I devoted my full attention to the server, not only because I was hungry, thirsty and wanted to place my order but because she was cute as a button and also wearing a halter top, the restaurant’s apparent idea of a nautical dress code. She pulled the classic Appetizer Upsell and sold me on the fried oysters, which arrived piping hot and crunchy, in an overally extravagant presentation, nestled in half-shells filled with homemade chunky tartar sauce and assorted greenery.

The lobster roll, which is the entrée at Ed’s everyone’s gabbing about, really is that good: chunks of fresh lobster meat blended with a smidge of mayo on an ultra brown-buttered oblong roll. For $23 (“market price,” according to the menu), it’s steep. I washed it down with two pints of the smutty porter, thick and bitter, with the deep taste and color of cocoa.

Ed’s Lobster Bar

• 222 Lafayette St. (between Spring and Broome Streets)
• (212) 343-3236
• Meal 22 of 52: fried oysters ($10), lobster roll (“market price,” which today was $23) and two pints of porter ($6 each).

Do you have the feeling that I’m cramming in my dinner outings to catch-up on the 26-meals-by-the-end-of-June midpoint milepost of the 52 Meals Project? If so, you are correct. But also I have been much less busy at work and therefore leaving at 5 p.m. sharp, that I might dine sumptuously and write about it for purposes of your entertainment.

So tonight I went to the Lucky Strike. Not bad but it’s more of a bar that happens to have better-than-average bar food. It’s of the comfortable yet archetypical Soho bistro, with heavy wood-plank floors, high-ceilings, age-fogged mirrors behind the pressed metal bar, etc. And the tables are copper topped! That’s neat. The place also seems to be a haven for creative young professionals just off from work. On my left, a guy was telling a girl about his trip to Cuba for business purposes. On my right, a writer and a book editor were talking about . . . writing and editing.

My penne pasta entrée featured fresh asparagus, pine nuts and shavings of what I think was Manchego cheese. Delicious, as were my two passionfruit mojitos.

What really made my day, though, was just after I exited the restaurant. On the sidewalk outside, a stooped man in a black garbage-bag poncho hassled a pair of middle-aged ladies for a handout. I overhead him mumble, “Spare some change? Penny, nickel, quarter?” Then he saw me striding his way and sized me up. “Spare a dollar?” he asked hopefully, turning on the Keane eyes as I passed him by.

“Looking sharp,” I thought to myself.

Lucky Strike

• 59 Grand St. (between Wooster and West Broadway)
• (212) 941-0772
• Meal 21 of 52: penne pasta with asparagus ($14.50) and two mojitos ($9 each).

“Eat me!” demands the cursive fiberglass mustard strung on the blatant red frankfurter hung outside Crif Dogs, an East Village snack shack. It fits like a pair of Lou Reed’s Levi’s to have that command/curse overlook this slouch of sooty brick and peeling paint on St. Mark’s Place, named for the patron saint of barristers, Venice and an Old New York that barely exists. Grubby vestiges of the latter near Crif include a tattoo parlor, thrift shop, record store, yoga studio, a place that sells a hundred different kinds of tea, a bookstore whose musty pulp-fiction scent reaches the sidewalk, a hipster cafe I’ve been to before, a famous Led Zeppelin reference and pedestrians who appear to be cloned from the DNA and clothing of Sonic Youth, circa 1986.

As soon as I’d walked in the Crif doghouse and passed the vintage Ms. Pac Man and Centipede cabinets, the pierced and tattooed countergirl, clad in strategically torn clothing, welcomed me as buddy and continued to call me that. “Yeah, you, buddy,” she added with friendly mischief after I turned to ensure there wasn’t someone more buddy-like standing behind me. She took my order and delivered it within five minutes, during which time Morrissey moped through “Will Never Marry” and the Dead Kennedys churned out “Viva Las Vegas” over the bipolar sound system. A bedraggled old guy wandered in and ordered two dogs with everything. After a pregnant pause, he wavered unsteadily and shouted “And a Pabst!” (“Comin’ right up, buddy!”)

Whatever your condition, hot dogs hit the spot. Add them to the golden scroll of foodstuffs that become improbably even less healthy yet more scrumptious when deep fried, which is Crif’s shtick. I got mine topped with raw onions and mustard so I could savor that extra-snappy, fryer-fresh knurl. Yummy, buddy.

Crif Dogs

• 113 St. Mark’s Pl. (between First Avenue and Avenue A)
• (212) 614-2728
• Meal 20 of 52: a Crif dog ($2.25) and a Stewart’s Root Beer ($1.25)

Ah, Brazil. My memory flits to the Spanish-Latin mash of Portuguese, cold rain, hot cheese sandwiches on Varig, the favellas of Rio, a soapstone giant, monkeys in the trees, potato-shaped mountains and the ocean.

There’s a little place on the corner of Elizabeth and East Houston, Colonial Cafe, which I’m legally bound to refer to as “charming,” that offers a concisely representative menu of Brazilian cuisine and fine sidewalk seating. I enjoy sidewalk seating on warm, breezy days like today although my cheap aluminum chair had been manufactured by the Hitler Youth for maximum spine-jabbing and lower-back discomfort.

My grilled free-range sirloin steak was tendony but reclined in juicy ease on a bed of mashed potatoes and topped with a black bean lime salsa and salty sautéed kale.

Throughout my meal, as a sort of serenade, a dowdy woman wearing large dark sunglasses and with two large black dogs in tow, yakked on her cell about various recent sexual escapades she’d taken part in. Fortunately I was able to devote most of my attention to enjoying people-watching, eating my dinner and enjoying my two caipirinhas, tart and bracing.

Colonial Cafe

• 276 Elizabeth St. (at East Houston)
• (212) 274-0044
• Meal 19 of 52: steak ($18) and two caipirinhas ($7.50 each).

Megan led us on a grand walking tour of Williamsburg that ended up lasting longer than expected when she discovered the restaurant she’d chosen for our group had newspapered windows and a curt notice of closure from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. So instead she led us further and deeper into Brooklyn, and after asking several pedestrians and drivers stopped at lights for directions, passing under the BQE several times by my count, learning there are actually two Grand Streets, plus making our way through a neighborhood of Puerto Ricans getting juiced up for their home country’s big pride parade tomorrow, we came upon Taco Chulo.

By then we were all hungry enough to gnaw off our own legs so it worked well that the food there is delicious and inexpensive, though we quickly sought to nullify the latter half of that value by purchasing a large amount of liquor. Any Mexican restaurant that offers tequila flights, as this one did, cannot go wrong by me, so it was a special bonus to discover the food was also great. Our chips came with the freshest salsa I think I’ve ever tasted. I had a vegetarian burrito, which can be pedestrian enough, but the starkly fresh pico de gallo punched it up, with shredded cabbage, sliced radishes and sautéed potato chunks livening the taste and texture of the refried-bean-and-avocado base. They’re as large as the ones at Chipotle but much more flavorful and textural and I didn’t feel like a McDonald’s-supporting stooge when I laid down my $7.50.

Here I am sitting at the table making a face about something. Definitely not the food. Very tasty, Taco Chulo.

Taco Chulo

• 318 Grand Street, Brooklyn (between Havemeyer and Marcy Streets)
• (718) 302-2485
• Meal 18 of 52: probably like a whole basket of tortilla chips ($1 per basket), a flight of tequilla (three one-ounce shots for $13) and a vegetarian burrito ($7.50).

The attraction of barbecue on breezy sun-dappled days like today is enough to draw me to Brooklyn as it did tonight for dinner at the new-this-year Fette Sau in Williamsburg.

Inside a converted garage squeezed between an old apartment building and an auto-body repair shop, the place is decorated like a New Yorker’s idea of an Alabama shotgun shack. The smoker is visible in the back, and seating is a half dozen large, heavy lacquered picnic tables inside and out. The strangest touch is a widescreen television mounted inside a mock hardwood-framed fireplace that loops a video of a crackling fire.

You line up and order your meats and sides based on what’s available behind the thick glass counter. The order is plunked, sans plate, directly onto a waxed paper-covered metal tray. Frills are few. “Can I, like, get the pulled pork on a sandwich?” asked the guy in line behind me. “I can give you a dinner roll and you can make your own,” countered the server.

Seats at the bar are old steel tractor seats bolted to posts. Overhead, battered gramophone horns shade Edison bulbs. Setting the aural atmosphere, ancient tin-canned jingles intermingle with po-boy hits by the likes of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Big Mama Thornton and Creedence. Behind the bar, old butcher’s knives serve as handles for the ten beer taps mounted into the white tile wall. In keeping with the coonskin-cap theme, a Fess Parker is one of the only wines available, but the bar’s specialty is bourbon, dozens of varieties, the names and prices chalked on a giant slateboard.

I’m no bourbon expert so I asked the bartender to recommend one. He immediately grabbed a squat, sharply faceted bottle of Blanton’s. “It’s a steal at $10 a glass,” he said, “and it goes good with food,” a description that did not fill me with confidence in his descriptive skills. “It won’t let you down,” he added, as if sensing I thought his recommendation might.

Tasty, and it did go well with my food, a half-rack of spareribs, charred to perfection. I am a rib extremist: if ribs are of the sauced variety, I want them saucier than Jessica Alba in hotpants (and that sauce better be tasty, not reminiscent of Spaghetti-O’s). If they are of the charred, dry rub variety, I want them not only spicy but blackened like satan’s hooves. Which these were. Spicy and savory though the portion was miniscule for $11. I had a side of beans, too, ladled in a food service cup but rich with chunks of pork and spicy. In keeping with the German name of the place (which means “fat pig”) other sides include potato salad, sauerkraut and, though technically Russo-Jewish, Guss’ famous Half-Sour kosher pickles.

Fette Sau

• 354 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn (between Roebling and Havemeyer Streets)
• (718) 963-3404
• Meal 17 of 52: half-rack of spareribs ($11), beans ($5) and a bourbon ($10).

I’ve filed away Giorgione as a quaint SoHo-ish restaurant for before or after Film Forum outings. It’s a few blocks away, south and west, but not on the best part of Spring for sitting at the tables outside, even on a warm spring night. At rush hour, a slow procession of surly Holland Tunnel traffic blocks any potentially romantic views.

Inside lingered the smoky scent of a wood-burning stove and an endless Beatles-based soundtrack that mingled singles with comparatively obscure album-track favorites (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “Getting Better,” “Golden Slumbers,” “Taxman” and one of George’s electric-sitar freakouts). Tables-for-two, wrapped in gleaming industrial sheet-metal, were adorned with a metal pot in which was planted a fresh herb or spice, a different one for each table. Mine was parsley. All very comforting.

My Carciofi Alla Giudea appetizer (“Roman Jewish-style” deep-fried artichokes) resembled large mutant pinecones, the crisp brown petals striated like wood. I don’t recall ever having eaten a food before that rustled. It was all right but I’m suspicious of deep frying items like artichokes because you theoretically end up eating parts of the vegetable you wouldn’t if it was served fresh, those stems and tougher leaves. The best part of it remained the best part of any artichoke, the heart. In the deep-fried version, the clutch of outer armor spares the center a crispy wrath; instead it turns warm, tender, oily and very delicious. On my previously orderly plate, I left a pile of dead autumn leaves, as if disturbed by a mischievous child.

My glasses of cabernet sauvignon complemented my homemade cavatelli entrée, blended with fresh ricotta, bacon, arugula and pepperoncino, as well as the New Yorker article on the comically puritan life of Milton Bradley I read on the side. Tiramisu for dessert was juicy with liqueur and boxed by small sheets of cocoa-streaked chocolate.

The last piece of this candy stayed stubbornly glued to my plate with mascarpone and as I stabbed at it with my fork, two pleasant young ladies arrived and sat at the table placed a New York-style inch away from mine. I had a woozy conversation with the one about her laptop bag. She said she’d be putting it on the floor between us and that I should know it would be there lest I accidentally step on it. Then she thought better and moved it under her chair, but her purse was already there and the bag poked into the aisle, so she placed it against the wall. Just then the waitstaff dimmed the lights and lit a fire in the wood-burning stove which was, naturally, against the wall right next to the bag. So after confirming with me that it would be O.K., she moved the bag under my chair, a sufficient distance from the flames yet near enough for her to keep an eye on it, positioning it perfectly so that when I rose to leave and bid them a pleasant evening, I tripped over it anyway. With the fire and the ghost of John Lennon and the good food and the ladies, I strode to the subway elated and satiated. Only the next day did I realize my bill, which in my winey haze I had thought excessive, was for a different table. I discerned this after realizing with a start that the polipetti entry on my receipt marked the consumption of two baby octopus salads. I’d probably return to Giorgione anway.

Giorgione

• 307 Spring St. (between Greenwich and Hudson Streets)
• (212) 352-2269
• Meal 16 of 52: fried artichokes ($10), cavatelli ($16), wine and tiramisu.

I’d been given my dinner and my short, rosy-cheeked server stood to the side with an attentiveness that soon bordered on loitering. She was glancing at me with a faint smile, her hands clasped, so I turned to meet her eye and she came back over to my table. “I get nervous,” she explained in a presumably Greek accent, “when I see you writing in your notebook that you’re a reviewer, maybe.”

I hadn’t expected that. It’s true, I was scribbling in my Moleskine, but I was clumsily transcribing the names of my delicious appetizer and entrée. “I’m on a budget so I keep track of my meals and other expenses,” I lied, because no one wants to admit he’s writing down the Greek word for pork meatballs. It’s a long, confusing pileup of consonants and even deadlier is the one for braised rabbit and wide egg noodles topped with grated cheese, although abbreviated versions of both appeared on my receipt as keftedes and helopites, respectively.

Note to self: writing in my notebook while still wearing my necktie-based work clothes could lead to unexpected perks in newish, eager-to-please restaurants. Although in this case it’s curious my server thought I was a reviewer. Having kept tabs on local food reportage from February through March, I can tell you that since it opened, Kefi has already been kissed full on the lips by the biggest food snots in town. The New York Times reviewer dubbed its menu of “affordable and approachable Greek cuisine” as “immensely appealing,” while managing to squeeze in a Thomas Bulfinch pun, the wanker. New York magazine subheaded with “high quality, low prices, and killer souvlaki.” Time Out New York included Kefi among its precious few Critics’ Choices in its annual Eating & Drinking issue. And I noticed one of those ubiquitous “Zagat Recommended” stickers in the window.

All deserved, I’d say. (Except for the Zagat sticker; even I have one of those.) The meatballs were rich and served in a tomato sauce of whole baked cloves of garlic, scallions, and olives, of both the green and black variety. The rabbit, which I ate in honor of spring finally hauling its sorry ass into town, confounded with disparate ingredients that conspired to throw a happy-times party in my mouth. In addition to the pleasantly gamey shredded meat in a strangely sweet sauce, there were the big egg noodles, small French fried onion rings, fresh shredded cheese, scallions, tomatoes, grapes, leafy greens, minced carrot, strange spices and onions that I swear I could taste had been sautéed in something approaching a cup of butter. In a lively, bright atmosphere packed mainly with locals, the dining area is located down a long hall on the ground flood of a townhouse, stocked with small wood block tables, simple chairs, Aegean blue walls, and waves of white and blue fabric arcing across the ceiling. You should go next time you’re on the Upper West Side with a fistful of cash (they don’t take credit). Bring your notebook.

Kefi

• 222 West 79th Street (between Amsterdam and Broadway)
• (212) 873-0200
• Meal 15 of 52: keftedes ($5.95) and helopites ($10.95).

Manhattan is filled with so-called secrets: secret parks, secret rooms, secret stations, secret menu items, countless “exclusive” clubs and bars with unmarked entrances and at least one ultradubious “Best Kept Secret”. There are some secrets I cannot reveal, lest I lose my budding New Yorker status. But, really, on an island of millions it’s tough to keep anything to yourself.

Case in point: the secret burger joint hidden at Le Parker Meridien hotel. When I read about it—and it’s gotten more press than any secret I’ve ever known—I imagined it would be the Starwood marketing department’s approximation of a greasy spoon, much as how any eating establishment (particularly in a mall or an airport) billed as “authentic” isn’t.

From the hotel’s lobby of polished marble, glass and mirrors, just past the registration desk on the far side of a giant tan curtain, there’s an unmarked dark, narrow hallway lit at the end by a small neon sign of a steaming burger and a red arrow pointing right. Follow it and it’s like Lucy through the wardrobe, only instead of a snow-dappled fairyland there’s a nasty diner. There may have even been a faun in there. It was very crowded and who’s to say; the Burger Joint is the size of an average Manhattan apartment and jam packed with lines: lines waiting to order, lines waiting to pick up orders and lines waiting to sit, with people needing to grab a straw or a ketchup packet from the counter cutting all over the place. I know, sounds charming, right? But the bustle of it is oddly exciting.

Above the counter, from which orders are taken and dispensed and behind which are the grills, deep fryer and a poor overworked blender for the milkshakes, hangs a grid of rough wooden shelves, wrapped with Christmas lights and laden with institutional-sized jugs of condiments and pickles, stacks of bagged hamburger buns and a mismatched collection of bobblehead dolls (Spider-Man, a hula girl, Archie, some Yankees player, a leprechaun). Two signs are affixed to the shelves, both written in Magic Marker on crudely cut pieces of brown corrugated cardboard. One, in a classic New York blend of courtesy and hostility, reads, “We don’t spit on your food so please. . . Don’t write on our walls.” (It’s unclear whether the sign went up before or after the far, white-painted brick wall got covered with Sharpied graffiti.) The other sign, twice as large, offers ordering instructions in neat block capitals, as curt and hassled as the counterstaff:

THE FASTEST WAY TO GET IT RIGHT

STEP 1: HAMBURGER -or- CHEESEBURGER

STEP 2: HOW D’YA WANT IT COOKED (RARE, MED. RARE, MEDIUM, MED. WELL, WELL)

STEP 3: WHAT D’YA WANT ON IT (LETTUCE, TOMATO, ONION, PICKLE, KETCHUP, MAYO, MUSTARD)
WITH EVERYTHING CALL IT “THE WORKS”

BE READY OR ELSE YOU GO TO THE END OF THE LINE

Cellophane-taped to the fake wood-paneled walls are random movie and TV show posters (Narc, Sex and the City). The ceiling is one of those hated acoustic drop-tile numbers. Greasy formica tables, only about 12 of them, line the perimeter, with a shared table and tall stools near the counter. Classic rock hums in the background and there was a phone forever ringing somewhere that no one ever answered.

It’s good they didn’t as it would only distract from the flame broiling. You couldn’t ask for a better burger: thick and juicy on a toasted bun, plenty of toppings, swaddled in waxed paper. You get the fries plunked on a plate or in a small brown paper bag that quickly spots with grease. The shakes are rich and sweet. Good stuff. The secret is not safe with me.

“The Burger Joint”

• 118 W. 57th Street (off Sixth Avenue)
• 212-708-7414
• Meal 14 of 52: cheeseburger with the works, fries and a shake ($14).

I had dinner last night at Frankies 17, the Manhattan outpost of the original Frankies Spuntino in Carroll Gardens, Brookyln. Walking over from the Delancey Street station of the curséd F train, I had a vision that the Lower East Side is what my neighborhood, Inwood, will resemble in perhaps 15-20 years, after the high rents and whites migrate that far north because there’s nowhere else to go: charming bistros and bars and ugly new condo high-rises nudging up against grubby old-world apartment buildings occupied by Hispanics and college-age kids. (Although the facades of the old buildings on the LES are more beautiful in general than the ones in Inwood, which resemble slices of sheet cake adorned with fire escapes.)

Frankies occupies a narrow cozy space on Clinton Street with checkered tile floors, black lacquered tables and chairs for two, tin ceiling painted creamy white, bare bulbs, a small white candle on each table, etc. The apple-gorgonzola salad I started with was presented with small triangles of Gorgonzola and slices of baked apple organized on a plate on top of which loomed a teetering hill of watercress. It was a Chia Pet gone haywire and I couldn’t even see the cheese or the fruit. Although tasty, it was visually strange.

For my entree, my server gently pointed out that I had pronounced gnocchi wrong, but she bought it quickly and was real helpful, so I couldn’t begrudge her. It was topped with a marinara sauce and fresh ricotta and dense enough, in typical gnocchi fashion, to last several meals. It was delicious but basic and If I dined here again (which I would), I’d try something more adventurous, like the luncheon meatball sandwich I’ve heard good things about, or the dinner dish I was considering and wish I would have ordered instead, the homemade cavatelli with hot sausage and browned sage butter.

Frankies 17

• 17 Clinton Street (off Houston)
• (212) 253-2303
• Meal 13 of 52: apple-gorgonzola salad ($11), gnocchi marinara ($13) and a glass of house red wine ($6).

After we’d downed a few free shots of 12- and 18-year-old Jameson Irish whiskey during a tasting at Columbus Avenue Wine & Spirits tonight, Iggy, Sam and I trudged down to Bella Luna for dinner.

It’s a comfy Italian restaurant catering more towards the well-dressed Upper West Side crowd. Lots of potted palms and trim waiters who, in addition to the fresh ground pepper log, make the rounds separately with a fresh ground Parmesan grinder, which is a nice touch. Food was moderately inexpensive and rich. I had the Rigatoni Alla Norma with tomato sauce, eggplant and ricotta. For dessert, I had tiramisu and a cappuccino.

On my walk back to the subway in the howling bitter weather, I reasoned that Wintry Mix resembles Chex Mix in that both generally appear for a limited time near the holidays and both sting when flung in one’s face at high velocity.

Bella Luna

• 584 Columbus Ave. (between 88th and 89th Streets)
• (212) 877-2267
• Meal 12 of 52: rigatoni ($10.50), glass of Chianti, tiramisu and a cappuccino.

With a restaurant name like Burgers & Cupcakes, I expected a sweeter variant of the Luther Burger. But no, it’s just that: burgers, and also cupcakes.

Key are the toppings: six kinds of cheese, vegetarian chili, grilled onions and mushrooms, and more. I chose the mushrooms, avocado and “double thick bacon,” which I asked my server about in advance. “It’s pork but it’s like this,” she said, holding her thumb and index finger a pencil-width apart. “It’s outrageous.”

It certainly was. It was like Beggin’ Strips, with the consistency of pemmicam thick enough to repel my incisors. Delicious, though, especially complemented by the cool avocado slices and the juicy jumbo mushrooms. I rounded it off with a bottle of Stewart’s Black Cherry soda and a basket of fries.

For dessert, I walked up to the cupcake display case and picked out a white-and-chocolate marbled variety gooped with chocolate frosting and sprinkled with tiny candy hearts. My server said, “This one’s on me, sweetie,” and paper-bagged it for me to-go. That was nice. If you stop by, ask for Makeda.

Burgers & Cupcakes

• 458 Ninth Ave. (between 35th and 36th Streets)
• (212) 643-1200
• Meal 11 of 52: burger with three toppings ($7.95), fries ($2) and a bottle of Stewart’s ($2).

Late one recent night in Brooklyn, Ned needed to get from one end of the Slope to the other, so he hailed a cab. Of all the taxis in all the neighborhoods in all of New York City, he walked into Philip Frabosilo’s, an overt Christian who preaches to his fares, dishing out smiley-face advice, miniature paperback bibles with orange covers and hand-labeled copies of his own documentary/biopic, Rolling for Jesus. He gave Ned a copy of this DVD after not charging him for the ride, so it was practically a given that it would be first-up in the rotation for Ned’s Movie Night II tonight.

Phil, who’s had his medallion about 37 years, has removed the partition from his cab and tricked out the interior with dozens of photos, inspirational messages and Beanie Babies, in order to utilize it as a “ministry for Jesus.” A big part of this is acting as a bread truck, stopping by breakfast cart vendors and relieving them of their day-old donuts and bagels. He loads the stale dough into plastic bags, crams them in his trunk and tools around the city donating them to the poor, if a fare happens to take him near a shelter or homeless person. In between stints preaching at storefront churches and missions, Phil takes his rods to the East River and fishes for striped bass. (Thank god he doesn’t eat his catches or attempt to multiply them because they’ve got to be among the filthiest, garbage-choked creatures in all the land.)

Most of Phil’s preaching is Praise the Lord boilerplate but when the camera catches him in slightly less scripted moments, he tosses out funny and confused metaphors, like how he’s “discovered that most New Yorkers are like clams, way down at the bottom of the ocean.” Phil’s married but spends more time at his Mom’s place, where she handles all of his taxi and ministry-related paperwork from her kitchen table and owns some of the coolest, most hideous wallpaper ever.

Most of the times he’s shown with his wife, it’s in 30-year-old wedding photos. She’s interviewed separately wearing a denim shirt that she appears to have embroidered and sewn a bunch of decorative buttons to. In the movie’s best line, she admits, in a statement phrased like a question, “I’m proud of Philip but I’m not [pause] proud of Phillip.” Earlier she’s admitted they have a constant “hot and cold relationship,” in part because Phil’s Mom lives in the same apartment building and demands a lot of his time, and in part because they ‘re both argumentative types.

From the documentary, here’s what would seem to be a typical exchange, best imagined with thick New York accents:

Phil:

[proudly waves tube of heat-and-serve biscuits] I bought buttermilk biscuits.

Phil’s Wife:

[defensively] For who? What kind of diet are you on?

Phil:

These were three for a dollar!

Phil’s Wife:

Yeah?

Phil:

So I bought four of them.

Phil’s Wife:

So who are they for? You buy me diet bread [angrily shakes loaf of “Light Style Wheat” at Phil] and then you buy buttermilk biscuits! Where is the logic?

For the requisite bad movie segment of Movie Night, Megan couldn’t locate a copy of Riding the Bus With My Sister on short notice so she settled for Gigli, which also features an offensive rendition of a mentally disabled person, in this case played by Justin Bartha as a watered-down Rain Man. An ultra-guido Ben Affleck mocks and manhandles the kid while getting cutesy/obnoxious with J-Lo in some of the most stilted dialogue ever scripted. After about 20 minutes in, two things became clear:

1. The Christopher Walken cameo would be the movie’s high point.
2. Ned’s head would explode Scanners-style if we didn’t play another movie fast.

So we put in Jesus Camp. You know those kids in the Middle East who are taught that it’s a good idea to strap on belts of handmade explosives to kill their enemies because their god (who apparently is not the same as their enemies’ god) will smile upon them and grant them afterlife bonus prizes of virgins, goblets of honey and all the free cable television they can handle? The evangelical Christians shown in this documentary are just as scary, if not moreso. In one scene, one of the adults even compares the teaching of their children to the education of young holy warriors. And these folks aren’t strangers living in a desert halfway around the world; they’re from Missouri and more powerful than bombs. The movie reminds that the growing ranks of this “religious right” helped bring our current president to office.

Cute as the devil and just as spooky, the spawn of the adult evangelicals attend bible camp, pray, attempt to convert strangers, speak in tongues, weep in religious ecstasy and talk in ways that sound well-coached. (There they are, praying for the souls of the unborn near the abortion clinic, just like regular fifth-graders.) They’re largely home-schooled and essentially brainwashed by their parents and teachers who keep them closeted from the world in their homes and communities. They’re not even allowed to read Harry Potter books (although some of them do anyway).

I have questions and comments for this film: foremost, what were the filmmakers’ motivations for making it? There is no voiceover, few text overlays other than a handful of stark facts about the staggering numbers of evangelicals in the U.S., and no commentary, other than occasional footage of Mike Papantonio, co-host of the Air America Radio program Ring of Fire, during a live show on evangelicals during which he takes their calls and intelligently knocks holes in their dogma.

Also, I’d be interested in seeing what happens, Seven Up!-style, once these kids hit puberty and/or a time when they might have an option to experience the world beyond all they’ve ever known. Do many of them wise up and leave it behind or do they go on?

Finally, as with any documentary, I wondered about what was left unfilmed or on the cutting room floor and what was magnified by selective editing. When we watched the deleted scenes on the DVD we saw the kids goofing around and playing like normal kids their age; but none of this made the movie, where they’re presented as robots.

Ned’s a Herzog fan (you may recall we watched that director’s Grizzly Man during Ned’s inaugural Movie Night) so we caught the first bit of The Wild Blue Yonder. Brad Dourif stars as a wild-haired, conspiratorial and shifty eyed alien, as if he’ll steal your wheel covers as soon as your back is turned. Then there was a bunch of NASA space travel footage cut in and I lost track. You can slag Herr Herzog as you please but you cannot deny the man takes creative risks and keeps his work always unexpected.

To cap the evening, Ned and Megan were shocked and appalled that neither Katie nor I had ever seen H.R. Pufnstuf (“Sid and Marty Krofft?” they asked, dismayed as we shrugged.) I’d try explaining it but mere words cannot do justice to something so surreal. The pilot episode from 1969 that we watched is an acid-tinged version of The Wizard of Oz, so at least I had a shaky point of reference amid the lumbering Muppets, an amphetamine-cranked witch, singing flute and rapscallion British boy.

For sustenance during this marathon session we ordered in from Song, a fine, very tasty and cheap Thai restaurant. I ordered my favorite Thai dish, tofu pad see ew, which is flat rice noodles, broccoli and bits of grilled scrambled egg in a sweet brown sauce. I would have tried the tasty-looking som tam grated papaya salad but like a lot of Thai food, it was rife with chopped peanuts.

Song

• 295 5th Ave. (between First and Second)
• Brooklyn, New York
• (718) 965-1108
• Meal 10 of 52: pad see ew ($6.50).

You’re really kind of setting yourself up when you name your restaurant Good, don’t you think? I thought for sure I’d be writing that its fare was, “unsurprisingly, good.” But it wasn’t even. My barbequed pork sandwich had no flavor whatsoever-no sweetness, no tanginess, no saltiness, no spiciness-nothing. I could see there was some sort of sauce on that pork. But I could not taste it. It was very strange.

The tomato-basil soup that came as a side to the sandwich had a taste, but it was that of marinara sauce.

Décor was fairly de rigeur for this part of town: craft-paper draped tables, wooden chairs, bare bulbs, a compact but well-stocked bar off to the side selling $10 mojitos and such. The place also had that vague basementy odor that you get when you don’t clean your beer taps or traps well enough. Or maybe it was literally the basement I was smelling.

I did enjoy the article on poisonous spiders in the current issue of the New Yorker.

Good

• 89 Greenwich Ave. (at Bank Street)
• (212) 691-8080
• Meal 9 of 52: barbecued pork sandwich with a side of tomato-basil soup ($9.95).

Stars align, planets turn, an asteroid angles to blindside earth: mere trifles of the universe. After all, it’s Iggy’s birthday. The man is cooler than you; give it up and deal with it. Do you have full Fu-Manchu facial hair? Did you steal James Brown’s soul while his body was still warm? Does your coat contain at least three arrestable offenses, including shuriken? Have you ever sat on a sofa with a bathrobe-clad Miles Davis? I didn’t think so; to the back of the line with you.

So, you see, to bacchanalate properly we needed a venue alive with pleasure. We tried this East Side Moroccan joint, Zerza, but it was only just O.K. and shall receive my bile.

It’s good the 12 of us (14? 13? I wasn’t paying attention to begin with and I fully lost track after a few drinks) were such a giddy fun-loving bunch because my dish wasn’t. What was billed as a vegetarian casserole was a watery bunch of TV dinner peas, some carrot chunks and a scatter of lonely chickpeas. Thankfully the mojitos, although expensive, were tasty, as was the baklava.

But worst, we’d selected the place for its promise of gyrating, ululating, finger-cymbal rocking, vision-questing entertainments. To wit, we were told there would be a hookah; there was no hookah. We were told there would be belly dancing; there was no belly dancing. (Other than, eventually, among our own group; but this is a family blog and I can divulge no further detail.) ¿Dónde está belly dancer? “She left,” our waitress said, not so helpfully. Later, perhaps taking stock of our mojito-fogged minds, she suggested the tip wasn’t included in our colossal bill when in fact it was. That ain’t right. The free flutes of champagne the manager dispatched to our table didn’t make up for these transgressions but we drank it anyway.

On the gleeful slouch back to our respective subways and trains, we stopped at Astor Place to rotate The Alamo in Iggy’s honor. Some imps had pranked the top of the hulking metal cube with LED throwies, glowing like candyraver fireflies. We spun ol’ Alamo so fast, it began to shudder. “It’s oscillating! It’s oscillating!” Iggy shouted, and I thought it might whip loose from its pivot and hurtle down the Bowery, taking us with it.

Zerza

• 304 E. 6th St. (at Second Avenue)
• (212) 529-8250
• Meal 8 of 52: vegetarian casserole thing (something like $14), mojitos ($10 each), baklava ($?) and an espresso ($?)

I’ve got a lot of catching up to do on my hip East Side restaurants. I could’ve done worse than rekindle my L-train patronage by hitting Momofuku Ssäm Bar at lunch today. The name means “lucky peach” but could it be a reference to the cheap noodle daddy himself?

This I know is true: Momofuku snags enough bloggy snark, it’s got it’s own Gawker tag, which delineates everything from 29-year-old restaurateur David Chang waxing sarcastic on his predicted one-star Bruni review of the months-old Ssäm Bar (it received a “very good” two stars) to the Shake Shackesque “worth an hour wait for glorified fast food?” ruminations on the restaurant’s original incarnation, Momofuku Noodle Bar. But you know you’re blessed with full mass in the NYC restaurant universe when a fangirl grants you your very own Urban Outfitters-style T-shirt.

Ssäm is Korean for something like “wrapped food” and it’s tough not to notice the similarities to the goods of a certain McDonald’s majority-owned burrito chain. You wait on a cafiteria-like line, all gleaming and spotless stainless steel, and direct your white-clad counterman to load up your flour pancake with kimchi, edamame, pickled shiitake or eight other Asian extras. I tried an order of the infamous pork buns ($8 for two baseball-sized bundles) and found them reminiscent of the best street-vendor snacks: tasty, sloppy, foil-wrapped and boasting potent alcohol-absorbing power. The buns, bleached whalebone white, are freshly plucked from a steambox in a Copperfield puff of fragrant steam. Tongue-shaped and spongy like a Dr. Scholl’s insole, they’re folded over a savory wad of pulled Berkshire pork, a slop of spicy-sweet hoisin, crisp pickled cucumber and slaw. It’s all folded-over and twist-wrapped in a sheet of foil for on-the-go goodness.

Those who opt to eat in can sit at the bar or a number of tables, all sleekness and right angles, in grand contrast to the no-name facade brooding on a boring corner across from the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary. But, yeah, I’d eat there again. Damn hipsters.

Momofuku Ssäm Bar

• 207 Second Ave. (at E. 13th Street)
• (212) 254-3500
• Meal 7 of 52: an order of steamed pork buns ($8)

Today I took the E train over to the East Side to try Pampano Taqueria for lunch, based on New York magazine’s review of the place as “the closest you’ll get in Manhattan to the taco stands of Acapulco.” Having never travelled that far south in Mexico nor having eaten many varieties of tacos in Manhattan, I can neither confirm nor deny this statement. The trio of pescado tacos I ordered were rich with chunks of whitefish, shredded cabbage and a greasy-spicy chipotle sauce, but I’m not sure they were worth the trip.

What I enjoyed more was experiencing the differences between the workday pedestrians on the East Side versus the ones in Midtown where my office is located. On the East Side, the white collars dress sharply and fashionably, and seemingly everyone has great posture and skin. Meanwhile, my stretch of Eighth, still in the grubby blue-collar grip of its Garment District past, is the opposite. If forced to choose an analogous locale from the Star Wars universe, I would select Mos Eisley, that wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Not that Midtown Eighth isn’t trying to get more fashionable. Perhaps hoping to dispel notions of shirtwaist factory fires and child labor laws, the Fashion Center Business Improvement District quietly renamed the neighborhood the Fashion District in ’93 although everyone I know still uses the old name. The area’s still home to many clothing and fabric wholesalers with low-rent offices inhabiting old sweatshop space. On the other hand, just a few blocks uptown, the New York Times chose to erect its new HQ skyscraper directly across the street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. For the time being, however, the most distinctive people on the sidewalks in this area are the illicit cigarette resellers. Clad in giant puffy winter coats, they hang out near the methadone clinic and mutter “NewportsNewportsNewportsNewports” to random passers-by, so as not to arouse the suspicions of roving beat cops.

Without too much effort, I’m sure I could track down equally ghetto-fabulous tacos on this side of town, probably even cheaper than Pampano Taqueria’s.

Pampano Taqueria

• 805 Third Ave. (between 49th and 50th)
• (212) 751-5257
• Meal 6 of 52: three fish tacos ($2.75 each)

The watermelon pickle/pork belly salad at Fatty Crab, a snug little Malaysian outpost perilously near the Meatpacking District, is genius. Pan-fried cubes of tender pork mingle with hunks of watermelon, bits of pickled watermelon rind, basil leaves, julieanned raw scallions and sesame seeds, drizzled with citrus.

Why should fried pork and watermelon taste so scrumptious together? I think it’s the one key similarity—both are presented as crisp cubes—combined with qualities pleasing in their opposition: salty vs. sweet, warm vs. cool and “rich” vs. “clean.”

My specialty entrée, the fatty duck, was overambitious and looked pretty until I started hacking away at it. Resting atop a small hill of rice were three chunks of duck—one brined, one fried and one steamed so rare, when I poked it with my fork I thought I heard it say “Rabbit season!” Covering the meat and rice were bits of fresh peppers, onions, exotic spices, a sweet sauce, cilantro leaves and more, including sneaky bits of Guatemalan insanity pepper that had me slugging away most of my Tiger. There were almost too many flavors, all throwing a riot in my mouth. One forkful alone would start sweet, turn salty, then citrusy, then that pepper would rear its capsicum.

Fatty Crab’s dining area is small, with carved chairs, sturdy tarred-wood tables for two sporting white candles and slim crocks of multicolored chopsticks, surrounded by deep red walls and lit by bare bulbs sprouting down from the ceiling on unadorned fixtures. At my table against the drafty front windows, a space heater nearly ignited my dangling scarf. To his credit, my server had insisted I’d be more comfortable at the bar but I insisted on the elbow room at the table. A white hipster soundtrack set the mood: several tracks each by The Streets and The Decemberists, that live White Stripes cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” a mashup of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” and, uh, “More Than a Feeling” by Boston (“I love this song!” said two girls simultaneously at the table of six next to mine).

Walking back to the A station at 14th, I passed a German-sounding guy in a peacoat gamboling around the dog run on Horatio with his puggle puppy. He was talking to it and making airplane noises as he ran, as if he was playing with a child. On the subway uptown, I strapped on my headphones and nearly fell asleep to a warm lullaby of dinner contentment and Cat Power.

Fatty Crab

• 643 Hudson St. (near Horatio Street)
• (212) 352-3590
• Meal 5 of 52: watermelon-pork salad ($10), fatty duck ($14) and a bottle of Tiger beer ($6).

Stopped by Mayrose for dinner tonight. It’s a no frills place, with black and white hexagon tile floors and cathedral-high ceilings. Tons of choices of “comfortable food,” as the menu calls it; it used to be called “diner food.” But whatever. I got the mac-and-cheese and it arrived sizzling in an oblong ceramic dish resting ceremoniously atop a doily on a plate. Very satisfying.

The soundtrack echoes through the space created by those high ceilings, a K-Tel hits compilation of ’50s and ’60s pop: “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets, “Runaway” by Del Shannon, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” by Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by the Platters, “Barbara Ann” by the Beach Boys, and so on.

Mayrose

• 920 Broadway (at East 21st Street)
• (212) 533-3663
• Meal 4 of 52: mac and cheese ($9.95) and a bottle of Brooklyn Lager ($5))

If the first explorers of this landmass had showed up 500-some years late this Sunday, sailing up the Hudson and docking in present-day west Chelsea, I think after disembarking a few avenue blocks inland, they would have named their new world “Brunchland.” (Maps would further indicate “Here there be condo construction,” crude illustrations of long-necked cranes poking through the clouds.)

What I’m trying to say is, in this piece of Manhattan, there are many choices for brunch, a meal with a compounded draw when unseasonably balmy weekend weather makes visions of bacon and flapjacks dance in one’s hypothalamus. How to choose a place? Serendipitously, I had earlier come across a local girl’s Flickr page featuring artful macro photos of brunch entrées and accoutrements tagged cookshop. I looked up the place. The website was designed well enough, I liked the cut of their logotype and the menu enticed me, so I hit OpenTable and made a reservation.

I had the cornmeal pancakes with lemon butter and pear compote, rounded by a plate all-American bacon and a cuppa coffee. Yeah! The food was fine and I really liked the atmosphere of the place. It’s on a quiet, unassuming block of 10th avenue, a thinly trafficked neighborhood of townhouses and churches to the east, while to the west lie the warehouses and light industrial buildings of numbered days near the High Line, which I could see from my seat.

The restaurant’s interior is large and open, with cream-colored walls and industrial-style waxed poured-cement floors. The tables are close but not right on top of each other. Décor and furniture feature clean, simple lines. Best, the entire southern and western walls are floor-to-ceiling windows that let in the morning sun and perk up the atmosphere. On a bright day like today, everyone and their food was sexily softboxed. Two British ladies at the table to the left of mine spoke of scones, herbal flu remedies and Amsterdam while across the way, young Turks in Chucks downed coffee and expelled excited chatter.

The waitstaff weren’t bothersome or wankish, dressed in jeans and light-blue Oxford shirts, with long white aprons tied around their waists. Mine managed a trendy new shoulder grasp so natural I wasn’t unnerved by it.

I heartily recommend Cookshop as a prime brunch destination, whether by yourself, with friends or family. It’s bustling but not oppressive, conducive to conversation and people-watching, and priced well enough.

But enjoy it while it lasts, maybe, for this is a neighborhood in transition, with grand plans to revitalize the High Line as a pedestrian parkway, flanked by upscale residential, retail, restaurants and hotels, and new home to Frank Gehry’s first building in Manhattan, the near-completed headquarters for Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, located only a few blocks from the restaurant. Ten stories or so of concrete wrapped in a curiously gradated white glass facade, it’s meant to conjure a ship in full sail. (Hard starboard! AMF Chelsea Piers Lanes off the bow!) Mainly you notice it because it’s A Frank Gehry Building, with strange surface materials and funhouse angles, sprouting from the bland landscape. As I’ve noticed with photos I’ve taken of previous Gehry buildings, this one, when framed without scale-establishing or other surrounding elements, resembles a rendering or sci-fi structure.

Cookshop

• 156 10th Avenue (at 20th Street)
• (212) 924-4440
• Meal 3 of 52: cornmeal pancakes ($12), bacon ($5) and coffee ($2.75).

Does an organic beef patty free from antibiotics, hormones, nitrates and fillers, sandwiched in an all-natural wheat bun made without artificial ingredients and refined sugar, taste any different than a burger that may contain these assaults to the average Whole Foods Market shopper? I don’t think so. Better Burger’s 1/4-pound burger was a fine specimen and all, chargrilled and topped with the usual fixings (onion, pickle, lettuce and tomato; cheddar or jack cheese $1 extra). But it was not gustatorily flabbergasting.

On the other hand, the fries suffer. Billed proudly as “air-baked NOT FRIED,” they illustrate why you shouldn’t fuck with the way certain classic foods are prepared. Partially heat a bag of frozen French fries in the oven, cool them, then reheat them in the microwave and you will experience a taste and texture similar to Better Burger’s fries. These sad, dry pieces of potato yearned for a dunk in a sizzling pool of cardiovascular-crimping oil

I did like Better Burger’s condiment counter: a lineup of self-serve varieties in stainless-steel pump-action dispensers, including “karma ketchup” (the one I tried, spiced with curry, onion and coriander), spicy ketchup, chipotle-honey mustard, spiced wasabi sauce, vegan mayonnaise and so on, as well as plain-old (organic) ketchup for the traditional and the wary.

Better Burger

• 178 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street)
• (212) 989-6688
• Meal 2 of 52: burger ($5.95) and fries ($2.75).

For sexy, open-faced sandwiches on toast, you cannot beat the Blue Ribbon Bakery Market, a tiny extension of the Blue Ribbon Bakery, the full-fledged restaurant down the street. The market outpost in the West Villiage is a sandwich joint with no seats inside and a small wooden bench outside.

What friendly countermen! Greeted enthusiastically by them as a repeat customer was a tall, trim man in a suit who, with a plum British accent, ordered “a small flaxseed,” closed the paper-wrapped loaf in his nearly empty black leather briefcase and left without another word. He was followed by a perky and chatty young lady with springy black hair who ordered “a new cheese” on her usual sandwich (“surprise me!”) then quipped that she should just have a percentage of her paychecks sent directly to Blue Ribbon. “I can give you our routing number,” one of the clerks replied.

I had a gloriously delicious sandwich involving toast slathered with “three onion cream,” piled with shavings of fresh, house-smoked salmon and sprinkled with capers and minced purple onions. I inhaled that thing, despite the fact my attempt at a clever photo makes it resemble a wound of some sort.

Blue Ribbon also crafts sandwiches made with pork, duck, smoked trout or sturgeon, fancy ham and pickled tongue. Other toppings include a variety of raw honey from Mexico and a range of churned butters.

Blue Ribbon Bakery Market

• 14 Bedford St. (near Downing Street)
• (212) 647-0408
• Meal 1 of 52: smoked salmon sandwich ($8.50)