Jimi, The Man and I had dinner last night at one of their new favorite places, Whym, a restaurant that shares owners with the nearby Eatery. Very hip and tasty. I had the thick and juicy pan-roasted organic chicken breast, topped with a pistachio-eggplant caponata and crushed tomato vinaigrette, complemented by a glass of cabernet sauvignon. For dessert, my pear cobbler was served with toasted almond streusel, cinnamon gelato and four plump blackberries placed at compass points on the plate. As he cleared the table, our server pointed out I had missed eating one, but at that moment I was ready to burst from the goodness. He also pointed out, sort-of seriously, that the owners are suspicious of diners who photograph their food. That’s how the competition poaches presentation ideas, he explained. Luckily for him and his competition, these are crappy photos.

Whym

• 889 Ninth Avenue (at 58th Street)
• (212) 315-0088
• Meal 36 of 52: chicken breast ($18.95), glass of wine ($10) and pear cobbler ($8.95)

If there’s a newish barbecue establishment in this city, I’m likely to catch wind and give it a try. Rack and Soul is another one of those that got graced with a few graphs in The New Yorker when it opened, this summer, I think. The rack of baby back ribs I carried-out tonight was yummy, although strangely not very smoky. The sauce was mild but flavorful so I didn’t care too much. I wish there was another way to say the meat on barbecue was “fall off the bone tender” but there isn’t and it was. For sides I got the yams (rich and sweet) and the baked beans, which had big ol’ chunks of pork in there. All that and the requisite mini-loaf of cornbread. Nice well-lit and warm decor: sort of diner style, with a lot of small tables and wooden chairs, as well as some tables for larger parties featuring bright red vinyl booths. A wee pricy, but that’s to be expected from what’s nearly my old Upper West Side neighborhood.

Rack and Soul

• 2818 Broadway (at West 110th Street)
• (212) 222-4800
• Meal 35 of 52: 1/4 rack baby back ribs with cornbread and two sides ($13.95).

After Dirty Bird To-Go, which fries your chicken when you place your order, I fear no other fried chicken will ever taste as hot and crisp. It sure wasn’t at Soul Fixins, where the skin was limp, oily and warm, as if it was leftover from lunch under the heatlamps. To their credit, it was a large plump and juicy breast (with wing attached) and the mac-and-cheese side was delicious (my other side, corn, was just...corn). My friend Joe and I initially tried eating here today for lunch but the half-dozen tables were packed so we came back for dinner. Not much atmosphere, O.K. food and somewhat decent prices for the neighborhood, at least according toTime Out New York’s Cheap Eats issue earlier this year.

Soul Fixins

• 371 W. 34th St. (just off Ninth Avenue)
• (212) 736-1345
• Meal 34 of 52: a breast of fried chicken and two side dishes ($9.95).

I was beginning to think that all it took for a hip new restaurant in Manhattan was a one-word name rendered in a crisp sans-serif logo. Not anymore. I ordered the chicken shawarma at Chickpea and it was a flavorless fistful of grease gopped into a pita. Much worse and more costly than the same dish I could have bought at any number of Middle Eastern joints in the city. Maybe Chickpea’s other menu items are better but I don’t know if I want to risk a return.

Chickpea

• 210 E. 14th St. (between Second and Third Avenues)
• (212) 228-3445
• Meal 33 of 52: chicken shawarma pita ($5.95).

After the movie, Jimi, the Man and I braced ourselves against the cold wind on our walk to dinner at Cafe Luxembourg, an Upper West Side restaurant with Belgian fare and seemingly the ritzier overflow from the French Roast. I had the apricot-glazed pork chop, a good inch thick, with garlic green beans and German potato salad as sides, and to drink, a homebrew Weihenstephan wheat beer, golden and cloudy but tasty. Dessert was awesome: a fantastic blend of two of my favorite autumn pies, pecan and pumpkin.

Cafe Luxembourg

• 200 W. 70th Street (off Amsterdam)
• (212) 873-7411
• Meal 32 of 52: beer ($7), pork chop ($29), pumpkin-pecan pie ($10) and cappiccino ($4).

People who use foot and inch marks instead of typographer quotes drive me to distraction. A foot mark is ' and an inch mark is " and both are poor substitutes for an actual apostrophe (’) and double-quote marks (“”).

But I admire the designer of the logo for S’Mac, the new mac-and-cheese restaurant I supped at today, because its apostrophe resembles an elbow of macaroni. The cheesy connection extends inside to the pasta-colored wood floors, injection-molded orange plastic chairs and especially the hanging lights with orange and yellow shades and bulbs that bathe the front window and interior in the glow of the ’70s or of those heat-lamps that warm movie popcorn and McDonald’s fries.

Each variety of mac-and-cheese is served piping hot in a small, medium or large cast-iron skillet and can be made with traditional macaroni or whole wheat pasta if you demand a fractionally healthier meal. Optionally, your mac-and-cheese can be topped with breadcrumbs. Oh my, yes; I highly recommend the breadcrumbs. They brown up all crispy and crunchety and so very tastily. I am salivating now recalling this meal.

Fans of cheese must go to S’Mac. I had the four-cheese mac-and-cheese, made with Muenster, American, Gorgonzola and topped with a separate stratum of cheddar, which sounds impressive. But they also have goat cheese, Gruyere, Manchego and Brie varieties.

Being located in the East Village it goes without saying that the busy dinner crowd hunkered over its skillets was disproportionally clad in chunky glasses, ironic T-shirts, thrift-store sweaters and expensively tousled hair. But if you can put up with that and more of the same on the L train ride across town, S’Mac’s a winner.

I wonder about the shelf-life of “one dish” restaurants like this. In theory, they’re gimmicky, and Manhattan has a strong bullshit detector. But it seems at least to have worked for restaurants that, say, slather everything with peanut butter or serve nothing but sushi from a buffet the length of an aircraft carrier. And mac-and-cheese is such an American tradition, I think it’s a safe bet for success. Live long and prosper, S’Mac.

S’Mac

• 345 E. 12th St. (between First and Second Avenue)
• (212) 358-7912
• Meal 31 of 52: small mac-and-cheese ($5.75).

Walking through Chelsea for dinner after work late last week, I realized at this time of night, in this season, I was once a kid in the suburbs of northwest Ohio, dressed in my hooded sweatshirt, playing tag or Mr. Fox with friends in the backyard. The streetlights would sputter on earlier than ever and our parents would call out to us from home that it was time for dinner.

Up there on my list of childhood comfort food, especially for chilly autumn nights like these, would be meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, various meat-and-potatoes casseroles, and last but not least, chicken. I headed downtown to Dirty Bird To-Go, purveyors of the best fried chicken in New York City, at least for a trendy white neighborhood. I’d been wanting to try this place since reading a positive capsule review of it in The New Yorker.

It’s all free-range chicken so I guess that means you’re meant to savor the rich taste of avian leisure, not the acidic tang of birds who lived and died cooped in mosh-pit pens, angry with the world and wobbling from the weight of their hormone-swollen chests.

Included on the menu are rotisserie and “chicken fingers,” but an evolutionary craving for hot and hearty fried food dictated my order. The goods at Dirty Bird are far removed from the greasy and salty catcher’s-mitt meat of KFC: they’re brined overnight, soaked in buttermilk, double-coated in a thick and sweetly spiced batter, then deep-fried until golden brown. Golden brown is an overused phrase, but in this case it’s literal. This is skin so crisp and succulent, biting into it sounds like audition day for a potato chip commercial. It’s hot and seals in the juiciness of the meat, which is still steaming because they don’t fry your order until you place it. For a side, I got the “dirty” rice, made with chopped shallots and giblets, among other mystery organ bits. Rounding out the dinner are two triangles of cornbread the consistency of fried mush (not a bad thing).

Décor is clean and basic, with six orange-painted wooden stools arranged at narrow ledges in the front windows and the walls aside the order/kitchen area. Reportedly they do a brisk takeout and delivery business.

Dirty Bird To-Go

• 204 W. 14th St.
• (212) 620-4836
• Meal 30 of 52: two-piece fried chicken with one side ($8.99) and a Boylan Black Cherry Soda ($2.00).

For breakfast, Mom, Dad and I hiked from my apartment uphill through Fort Tryon Park for brunch at the New Leaf Café, an enterprise of Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project, a not-for-profit organization that’s revitalizing grubby public spaces in the city.

I had the challah French toast, served with braised strawberries and, on the side, two plump links of mildly sweet chicken-apple sausage. Delicious. Our server was peculiar in a kindergarten teacher sort of way, not blinking enough as she spoke slowly and obliquely about things like how the gardens at Fort Tryon reminded her of Maurice Sendak illustrations. (The gardens are beautiful, but they’re not Maurice caliber.) Her name was Allison and she signed our receipt with “Allison Wonderland,” which contributed to our suspicions that she was an actor, a stripper, or both.

Afterwards, the garden tour at the Cloisters was informative, although Mom recognized immediately our guide’s mistaken identity of the lavender. “At least she was pointing in the general direction,” Mom said. The tour extended inside to discussion of plant elements in the museum’s famous unicorn tapestries. We learned factual errors, like that pomegranates don’t grow on trees, and that the tapestries teem with allusions to elixirs. Closely grouped but seemingly random varieties of flowers and herbs were depicted to reference the fact that they could be combined to make, for example, an aphrodisiac or a beverage purposed to help women conceive a thoughtful child. Medieval viewers would have instantly caught these references, but to the modern viewer, there’s nothing there but a tangle of plants.

New Leaf Café

• Fort Tryon Park
• (212) 568-5323
• Meal 29 of 52: challah French toast with coffee and orange juice ($15.95).

Mom and Dad, who arrived at my apartment this morning to visit for the weekend, had a crusty Jewish cabdriver drive them in from LaGuardia who told entertaining stories, like that I was smart to be living in Inwood because it’s inexpensive although there are all those Dominicans to contend with. I was happy to hear the ride was much cheaper than I originally quoted; I thought outward fares from LaGuardia were flat-rate like the $45 ones from JFK, but I was mistaken.

We got lunch at Bite, a closet-sized East Village salad and panini sandwich shop that Time Out New York rated best bet for Union Square environs in its recent and annual “Cheap Eats” cover story. I had the toasted and pressed Nutella-banana sandwich (only $3) and it was a mouth-watering mix of warm, sweet, melty and chewy tastiness. Sandwiches in tow, we walked a few blocks south and gathered at the Alamo cube on Astor Place for a Big Onion walking tour of the Bowery.

We were relieved to see our tour guide, David, at least appeared to be the real deal: he was shouldering a canvas bag from the Strand, and was dressed in jeans that kept falling down a bit and what appeared to be a thrift-store shirt. (Later I learned he’s a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Columbia.) He carried a small stack of laminated handouts he’d occasionally pass around, a pocketwatch on a chain that he’d check for time, and a beard that he would stroke not theatrically but with genuine thoughtfulness. He had a passion for facts both entertaining and enlightening, a keen knowledge of local history and a grudge for gentrification and development. He reminded us in some ways of my friend Joe.

We learned the Bowery is one of the two oldest streets in the city (Broadway’s the other) and that its name comes from the Dutch word for farm; most of the area on which we stood, including Cooper Union, two Starbucks less than a block apart and a Kmart, was once part of Peter Stuyvesant’s farm. At Cooper Union, the country’s first tuition-free institution of higher learning, we were told how the founder made his fortune collecting and disposing the horse carcasses that littered the city’s streets. (Because they’re so heavy, owners often left them where they fell.) Giving fresh meaning to the aphorism “if life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” Peter Cooper started a glue company, then obtained the first American patent for manufacturing “portable gelatine,” a treat that would eventually be known as Jell-O. His 1845 patent application even specified lemon or lime flavoring. What it didn’t recommend was gelatin made from horse hooves; Cooper called for isinglass gelatin, which is made from fish viscera, but let’s not let the facts spoil a good anecdote. As if his school-founding and dessert-inventing wasn’t enough, Cooper still found time to develop what’s perhaps the first steam locomotive prototype.

David also told of Cooper Union’s place in American history as a rallying point for mobs and more recently home to speeches by political firebrands. An interesting architectual detail: the school was built from blocks of brownstone, a mud-colored sandstone considered a shabby excuse for construction material at the time. After the school gained fame, its unconventional look sparked a short-lived brownstone fad, culminating in buildings of that name sprouting up all over Harlem and Brooklyn.

As we headed down Bowery, we looked at and learned of McSorley’s Old Ale House, at 150+ perhaps the city’s oldest pub and one that didn’t even admit women until 1970 when a court forced it to. It was a happy coincidence to hear David reference Joseph Mitchell’s excellent 1945 essay collection, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, which is among my current stack of bedside books.

We also made stops outside flophouses (several of which are still active), the Amato Opera House, the doomed CBGB, the Bowery Savings Bank and McGuirk’s Suicide Hall, one of the most notorious drinking establishments ever, the site of which is now a colossally ugly new glass-and-steel condo complex. I wish for the yuppies who will live there to know that there used to be a bar on the spot that would combine the dregs from the glasses at closing time into a barrel, thread a long tube into the swill, then charge a nickel for one all-you-could-drink suck. Adding a contemporary spin to the seedy topics of the tour, I spotted a fat man near Rivington Street who appeared to be mating with a stove. That’s tough love, man.

The tour ended in Chinatown, so we bought bubble tea at Ten Ren’s Tea Time and took it to drink at Columbus Park, where Chinese men crowded around the game tables to watch rounds of Xiangqi. We walked up to McNally Robinson where we pursued travel guides for Italy and found on a globe Zambia, where my sister Dana may be living and working next. After drinks at Republic, we ate dinner at Craft. For post-dinner drinks and lively conversation, we attended Andie and Eric’s cocktail party. Mom advised Ali, newly a nurse, in the ancient arts of the RN. It was like Yoda and Luke at Dagobah.

Bite

• 211 E. 14th Street (between Third and Second Avenues)
• (212) 677-3123
• Meal 28 of 52: Nutella Banana Ciabatta ($3.00).

The restaurant Gino is renowned for its glossy red wallpaper, printed with slung arrows and leaping zebras, their white yellowed but stripes still vivid black. It’s like the pattern on the necktie of a crazy uncle, and probably as old. Until the post-6:00 p.m. dinner crowd began trickling in, I appeared to be the only diner there who hadn’t lived through World War II, which is when the restaurant opened.

Five people were already eating dinner when I arrived, or one for every member of the waitstaff, who talked among themselves against the far wall. The servers were dressed in starched gray tuxedo jackets with cuffs trimmed red, black bow ties and pants. They greeted by name several of the regular patrons, who were tight-faced women in big sunglasses, gorgon hair or Bloomingdale’s hats, and lots of rings. The men were dressed in knit shirts and sportscoats.

Bluebloods aside, loosened-tie neighborhood types drank at the polished wooden bar in front, and after awhile, additional younger people arrived to eat. A strange scene, although unless the draw is an ironic hipness to mingle with the elderly, it’s probably for the large menu and no-nonsense Italian food.

I had the stuffed zucchini, topped with finely chopped herbed meat, breaded, sauced, then draped with three stripes of mozzarella and broiled. Tasty! Post meal, my server brought out my espresso still in its old-fashioned aluminum moka pot and poured it for me.

Gino

• 780 Lexington Ave. (between 60th and 61st Streets)
• (212) 758-4466
• Meal 27 of 52: stuffed zucchini ($14.50), glass of house red wine ($5.50) and an espresso ($3.50).

To avoid hassles with the public and the paparazzi, the Fancy Restaurant Club is loath to reveal the site of its outings too far in advance. Our resident calligrapher and messenger, Amanzio, has taken to writing the upcoming restaurant’s name on ornamental scrolls or small colored cards that he secrets away in the city, along with a series of cunning clues hidden elsewhere to lead the way. To learn the location of tonight’s outing, I was required to learn phonetic Belarusian, infiltrate the abandoned subway station at 91st Street, and at last, scale the locked gate of Gramercy Park late one humid night last week, to pluck a cream colored card from the hand of the Edwin Booth statue. In Amanzio’s steady script and iron-gall ink was written “Union Square Cafe.”

If only the end had justified the means. For starters, there’s no flair in the décor there. The upholstery pattern of our booth seating, for example, was blocky and grey, like from an Applebee’s. In an especially meta-moment, we consulted my travel copy of the Zagat Survey for next month’s outing, while hanging on the wall above our table was a cheesy Matisse-ish painting depicting a bottle of wine, a table set for dinner and a 1997 copy of Zagat’s. Was this a clever reference to Union Square Cafe’s vote mongering among the local food fanatics? This year, the guidebook ranked it the second most-popular restaurant in New York City. We were ready to be blown away, but we were only touched by a light breeze. Literally! The air conditioning wasn’t running full-throttle in our cozy corner, so the lady of the table waved a dainty paper fan from her purse.

Our meals were adequate and only our appetizers creative. The black bean soup ordered by one was hearty, served with a slice of lemon and an optional pour of Australian sherry. Me and my sweet tooth enjoyed the stone fruit salad of mixed wild greens, fresh peaches, black cherries and candied pecans, drizzled with a white balsamic vinaigrette and sprinkled with savory shavings of Manchego cheese. As a sometimes-cook, dishes like this make me smack my forehead and wonder why I can’t dream up combinations this fresh and exciting. They seem so obvious upon reflection.

As for main dishes, my shell steak was all right, though a tad too smokehousy and salty, even if I wouldn’t have shaken salt on it before a taste. Other entrées served at our table included salmon and scallops, and they were deemed O.K., but nothing to make us tumble from our seats.

Desserts were presented attractively. A peach tart was flaky but not as perky tasting as it should have been. The chocolate fudge cake was incredibly moist yet firm. Perfectly smooth scoops of sorbet, the size and shape of eggs, nestled in miniature ceramic cups by flavor. The lemon variety had the harsh, super-sweet flavor of eating Minute Maid frozen lemonade concentrate directly from the cardboard can.

The popularity of the Union Square Cafe mystifies me. Part of me wants to admit the experience doesn’t differ greatly from Craft, but while the Craft entrées are also prototypical “New American” dishes, they’re prepared and seasoned more attentively. And the atmosphere at Craft is darker, richer and more luxuriant without being smarmy. Union Square Cafe must be doing something extraordinary for a large segment of the Zagat-voting public. Maybe there’s a special room in the sub-basement where the food and atmosphere are peerless.

Union Square Cafe

• 21 E. 16th St. (between Fifth Avenue and Union Square West)
• (212) 243-4020
• Meal 26 of 52: summer stone fruit salad ($12) and grilled smoked Cedar River shell steak with mashed potatoes and frizzled leeks ($32).

Lunch at Craft’s breakfast/luncheon division, ’wichcraft. Yeah, it was just chicken salad, but chicken salad with roasted tomatoes, pickled red onions and frisée lettuce on multigrain bread.

Mmm...expensive sandwich.

’wichcraft

• Bryant Park (four kiosks on the Sixth Avenue side between 40th and 42nd Streets)
• (212) 780-0577
• Meal 25 of 52: chicken salad sandwich ($9.50) and a bottle of Boylan Sugar Cane soda ($2.25).

I wanted pizza for lunch, but where’s the challenge in that, so I took the A train over to Brooklyn to get some Grimaldi’s. Although the pizzeria has been around in New York since the ’60s in various guises, Grimaldi’s has been in its current location since 1990, but under slightly different names, a result of the usual factions and legal squabbles of successful family-owned businesses.

They promote themselves as being “under the Brooklyn Bridge,” which they aren’t quite, but close enough, and they’re definitely a draw for hungry local businesspeople and tourists too. As I stood outside waiting for my carry-out, what appeared to be an entire class of rowdy grade school students attempted to enter at once. Just as quickly, they exited, followed by a surly fellow in a black Grimaldi’s T-shirt, who explained to their leader that eight of them could enter at a time.

Grimaldi’s is famed for its oven-fired pizzas, which you notice as soon as you step in the large square dining room. The stone oven is straight in the back, behind the buffet-like station where dough is tossed and toppings applied, and you can see the flames lick at the arms of the guys who shuffle the pies in and out of the coals.

The signature taste of these sorts of pizzas is a slight sootiness. Check out the nearly burnt crust in the lower-right corner of the photo. What’s great is that it’s gently charred on both sides, but not burnt to a crisp. The bottom is speckled with ash while the edges boast deliciously crisped blisters where the dough has bubbled up and singed. The crust is slightly puffed and crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside and not at all greasy. We’re talking about an inch wide on the edge all around the pie, which is my kind of crust.

Grimaldi’s also uses fresh mozzarella, placed in thin-sliced rounds on the dough, appealing in its fresh white color and chewy texture, in contrast to the greasy goo that blankets most chain-store pizzas. The mushrooms were fresh, the pepperoni thick, and a few basil leaves were sprinkled about, lending a tannic tang.

It’s not all fun times at Grimaldi’s. Lunch is very busy but dinnertime gets so bad they bring out the crowd-control stanchions to the sidewalk. The prices are moderately high; $12 nets you a toppingless 16" small pie. And there’s a laundry list of “no’s”—no slices, no credit cards, no delivery, no reservations, and no entire classrooms attempting to enter at once. But I can put up with it all because the place offers one of the tastiest pies I’ve sampled.

Grimaldi’s Pizzeria

• 19 Old Fulton St. (“under the Brooklyn Bridge”)
• (718) 858-4300
• Meal 24 of 52: small pepperoni and mushroom pie ($17.40).

The Delta Grill is one of those Cajun-ish restaurants with décor I can best describe as “bait shop,” with its craft-paper tablecloths, worn wooden signs, old photos and other curios on the walls. There was even a bluegrass band in the corner loudly covering the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” complete with accordion. I had a barbecued pork po’ boy, which had a sweet sauce and fresh-cut pickle and tomato slices. Not too shabby.

The Delta Grill

• 700 Ninth Ave. (corner of 48th Street)
• (212) 956-0934
• Meal 23 of 52: pulled pork po’ boy with French fries ($9) and a glass of iced tea.

I’d wondered about Bar Pitti, a Tuscan Italian trattoria on Sixth Avenue in the Village that I often pass on my way to Film Forum. Summer nights especially, its wide outdoor seating section is always packed with people. Then this past weekend, I was listening to Wes Anderson’s director’s commentary on the The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou DVD and he mentioned not only that he’s a Film Forum fan, but that he and Noah Baumbach wrote most of the film’s script at Bar Pitti. They’d meet for lunch, start writing and usually still be there by dinner. They even went so far as to record the DVD’s commentary at the restaurant. In the background you can hear diners talking and silverware clinking; at one point, someone drops a glass.

Despite the driving rain this afternoon, it was as good a time as any to try the place, so I stopped in for dinner after work. It’s my kind of neighborhood restaurant: popular enough to attract celebrities but locals, too, with an unassuming décor inside (plain walls with wicker-seated wooden chairs for the dozen or so small tables), and outside, the extensive sidewalk seating (about 42 seats under a sturdy awning, where I sat protected and watched pedestrians try to dodge the deluge). The menu features the basics of Italian cuisine, in fine-sized portions at even finer prices. This is one of those places where the glass of wine is likely to cost as much as the entrée.

The waiters, most of which spoke Italian, were brisk but courteous, and knew most of the locals, whether they were stopping in to eat or just passing by. They spread the cheer around, joshing with the guys at Da Silvano, another Italian restaurant next door, as well as themselves. “Would you believe this rain?” one asked the other, letting his wide, animated gestures do most of the talking. When a mom and her son walked by, the kid trailing an orange helium balloon, one of the waiters joked, “Hey buddy, don’t fly away!” These guys had genuinely good spirits, which is all the atmosphere I need in a restaurant.

My eggplant Parmesan was rich with cheese and tasty. I had it with a glass of the house red wine, a generous 12-ounce or so pour in a sturdy glass. For dessert I had an espresso and a lemon tart, the crust of which seemed to be made with actual butter in taste and texture, while the mouth-watering filling radiated a refreshing chill.

Bar Pitti

• 268 Sixth Ave. (between Bleecker and Houston)
• (212) 982-3300
• Meal 22 of 52: Eggplant Parmesan ($8.50), a glass of house red wine ($7), lemon tart ($5) and espresso ($3).

I’ve been granted temporary membership to the Fancy Restaurant Club, a hallowed and exclusive New York society deemed secret up until the point I started writing this sentence.

The Fancy Restaurant Club meets the last Monday of each month for dinner at a New York restaurant rated among the Zagat Survey’s top-25 or so for the current calendar year. This means costly and luxuriously long meals, which I’m not typically big on. But when I realized membership would spur activity and quality within the languishing 52 Meals Project, I filled out my application and secured my sponsor. That was in December. Since then I’d been awaiting the day I would be tapped to join, watching as I missed out on Club outings at the likes of Babbo and the Gotham Bar and Grill.

Because of club bylaws, I can’t divulge who else is a member without risking the revocation of my club card and commemorative lapel pin. Would it surprise you to learn that six U.S. presidents, two secretaries of state and Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, have at one time been members of the Fancy Restaurant Club? This much I can tell you for certain: it’s a tight-knit group of at least one saucy lady, several dapper men-about-town, and now myself. It’s a lot like the Algonquin Round Table; we too aim to change the nature of American comedy and establish the tastes of a new artistic era, one cocktail at a time. But mostly—if I may speak for the group—we savor good food presented attractively and attentively within an atmosphere of good company and conversation.

The Club’s choice tonight fit the bill: dinner at Craft, the flagship restaurant in chef/owner Tom Colicchio’s Craft portfolio, which also includes a steakhouse, a few sandwich and baked goods outposts, and a less-formal version of Craft; he also owns the storied Gramercy Tavern.

Craft is a cozy place. Thick, smooth-paneled wooden tables are topped with individual placemats instead of a tablecloth. The lighting is dim, provided by clear light bulbs, filaments aglow, strung hanging down from the ceiling in grids. The servers, decked out in checked shirts and striped ties, were helpful explaining dishes, flavors and unfamiliar French phrases, and promptly cleared dishes, refilled water glasses and refolded napkins.

I started with the Craft cocktail, made with a Champagne-like alcohol and fresh diced rhubarb, which made for a strange yet pleasingly tart summertime taste. The menu specializes in smaller portions of artfully adorned and presented comfort foods. Sharing dishes is encouraged, so we started with a cold beet salad, colorful from the other chopped root vegetables that were blended in. We also ordered the foie gras, which I avoided, as I generally make it a point not to eat internal organs that filter toxins and secrete bile. I did try a bit of pâté that was served as a between-course palate-cleanser; it was salty, buttery and topped with what I believe was a wine reduction. These interspersed treats were strange but welcome; another one was little shot glasses of ginger ale mixed with strawberry juice and the closing treat was a batch of warm caramel corn.

Side dishes included sautéed sugar snap peas, roasted wild mushrooms and potatoes au gratin, and for our main courses, we feasted upon Scottish salmon, roasted organic chicken (served in a small iron pot), prawns and Maine diver scallops.

The four entrees we ordered were basic and not seasoned excitingly, but were well-prepared, textbook examples of each dish. I’m leery of scallops because they’re often rubbery or tasteless, but Craft’s were large, fresh-tasting and done perfectly. The salmon flaked at the touch of a fork and the chicken, although still a bit pink, was tender and delicious. Craft’s menu is large enough to attract diners back if only to try different dishes; also, it would seem the selections change often, because the restaurant prints new menus daily. On a repeat visit I’d want to sample some of the more semi-exotic main dishes, like the braised duck, John Dory (an Australian fish) or quail. I’d enjoy watching someone else eat sweetbreads, as I feel the same way about thymus glands and pancreas as I do livers.

For dessert, I had a sweetly rich lemon créme brûlèe and to drink, espresso, although I very nearly ordered a glass of locally brewed mead, which I will try next time. The lady of the table had the chocolate soufflé, presented in a miniature copper pot that could only be described as cute, complemented by a plate of raspberries.

Craft

• 43 E. 19th St.
• (212) 780-0880
• Meal 21 of 52: beet salad ($14), foie gras ($26), Scottish salmon ($26), roasted organic chicken ($28), Maine diver scallops ($28), potatoes au gratin ($10), and a bunch of other stuff.

After watching X-Men: The Last Stand tonight, Jimi, his crew and I tromped over to Spanky’s BBQ for dinner, a spot owned by the Heartland Brewery and heavily promoted by them via outdoor ad signage throughout the city.

My half-rack order of St. Louis-style pork ribs was salty and of the “dry-rub” variety, a la that other Times Square BBQ hotspot, Virgil’s. I like ’em saucy, so they weren’t much to my liking. The atmosphere smacked of TGI Friday’s and the soundtrack of ’90s college pop-rock gave me flashbacks, and not the good kind. Also, Spanky seems keen to blacken all of his meat; like my ribs, Mike’s chicken was scabbed over with carbon. Oh, and overpriced.

All was not lost; for no discernable reason (though perhaps because we were one of the sole groups among the scattering of patrons in the cavernous dining room), the bartender had a round of his specialty cosmos sent over to our table, then followed it up with a complementary round of shots.

Spanky’s BBQ

• 127 W. 43rd St.
• (212) 575-5848
• Meal 20 of 52: half-rack of ribs (with one side and a corn bread muffin) ($14.95) and a can of PBR ($2.50).

I thought I’d never eaten tapas before, but I was wrong; upon close inspection, it turns out they’re actually appetizers. I’ll stop there because I’m sure Seinfeld wrung any unfunny humor from this foodstuff back when it first became popular in 1992 or so.

The tapas in question were delicious and eaten at La Paella during a dinner commemorating The Man’s birthday and featuring him and his mom, Jimi, Lee-Ann, Mike and myself. This photo shows, from left, Jimi, the Man and his Mom.

Some of the table also got paella and although I passed because I had gorged on a medley of fillet, chicken and vegetarian tapas, it was an oceanic bounty, including those jumbo shrimp that still have their eye stalks attached.

We drank sangria and for dessert, it was flan aplenty and some warm chocolate cake. Because the waiters weren’t up to it, we all sang “Happy Birthday.”

Afterwards, the kids took the subway uptown from Eighth Street before we went our separate ways. We joshed around while waiting for our train and if a production executive from NBC Entertainment would have happened by and overheard our banter, he would have optioned our act immediately as a mid-season replacement for whatever sitcom is starring John Lithgow. We’re like Friends meets a United Colors of Benetton ad, plus sexual innuendo, vicious racial slurs and “yo mama” jokes.

La Paella

• 214 E. 9th St. (between Second and Third Avenues)
• (212) 598-4321
• Meal 19 of 52: lots of tapas, sangria and flan that Jimi graciously paid for, unless I owe him money and don’t know it.

I went with Jimi and the boys (who I think I shall start calling “the J. Crew” to avoid writing “Jimi, The Man and Michael” each time) to catch Mission: Impossible III.

We crammed into one of the colossal theaters upstairs at the Lowe’s on 42nd Street with approximately the rest of Manhattan, although it was an attentive and well behaved group.

During his brief moments on-screen, villain Philip Seymour Hoffman is dull and angry, like he was just shaken awake from a nap. Instead of spending time trading zingers in a hero-villian showdown, this movie is more about Cruise globetrotting to retrieve a rogue plot device known as the Rabbit’s Foot, which appears to be an amber liquid in a glass cylinder.

Tons of shaky handheld camera work, to dizzying effect, particularly because our movie screen was one of those so wide that during a two-shot scene, I had to move my head back and forth to track the actors talk to one another.

But as usual, this is a movie less about talk and more about rock. There’s Tom in Rome, China and Germany, dodging missiles and bullets, firing guns, walking up walls, sliding down buildings, impersonating people with those CGI/latex masks again, and freefalling off tall buildings, all within the Violence Lite confines of the PG-13 rating. There’s an amusing scene with Tom scribbling what appear to be advanced geometric equations to plan a swing from one skyscraper to another, Spider-Man style.

There’s so much action, I had forgotten all of it by the time the movie was over. I did however remember the trailers for Over the Hedge and Nacho Libre (starring Jack Black as Chris Farley in Beverly Hills Ninja), both of which I’d like to see; and to a lesser extent, X-Men: The Last Stand and Superman Returns, to fulfill my summertime superhero movie quota.

Afterwards we walked over to the Film Center Cafe for dinner. It’s located in the Theater Distric across the street from the Film Center and keeping in the theme, features a décor of movie posters. Plus, I saw some chick wearing a Ghostbusters T-shirt. For a nice price, I had an extra large and delicious hamburger smothered with mushrooms.

Film Center Cafe

• 635 Ninth Ave.
• (212) 262-2525
• Meal 18 of 52: mushroom burger with fries and cole salw ($9) and a pint of Guinness ($5).

The Man planned a cunning and elaborate surprise for Jimi’s birthday today. A limo picked up our party—Lee-Anne, The Man, Jimi, Mike and myself—outside Jimi’s apartment. Jimi attempted to drink a full glass of ginger ale as the limo lurched around and ended up having to drink most of it at stoplights to avoid slopping it all over the place. We were dropped off for a delicious family-style Italian dinner at Tony’s di Napoli. You must try the sangria; we had two pitchers. The spaghetti is primo, too, with extra-tasty homemade meatballs the size of racquetballs. Jimi ordered a fresh berry parfait dessert, which arrived topped with a candle and a gaggle of servers belting out “Happy Birthday.” The table of hyperactive kids across the room even joined in.

We were then whisked again by limo to Leisure Time for beer and two games of bowling in the near-dark, under strobelights and black lights that made the bowling balls, white clothing and teeth fluoresce.

Tony’s di Napoli

• 147 W. 43rd St.
• (212) 221-0100
• Meal 17 of 52: spaghetti with racquetball-sized meatballs ($19.95, serves two to three) and sangria.

On the weekends, no self-respecting New Yorker wants to mingle with the sidewalk-clogging Canal Street tourists, with their maps, bootleg designer handbags and body fat, but I made an exception today for Taste of Chinatown.

Mmm-mmm! Can you taste the excitement? The fourth since October 2004, Taste of Chinatown is a giant neighborhood street fair with crowds, entertainments and, most importantly, 50+ restaurants, bakeries and shops peddling sample plates of their food and drink for the flat fee of $1 or $2.

A map and menu are provided online and one is wise to consult both beforehand because all street food looks tempting when you’re standing there, on the street. After practically leaping from the congestion on Canal, I arrived on Mott, the street featuring the most food choices. I quickly located the famous Peking Duck House because it was the only food station with a 30-minute-wait line, even though it was 1 p.m. and the festival had only just begun. There was a smaller line I briefly queued into until a fellow in chef garb announced that everyone who thought he was standing in the Peking Duck Line was actually standing in the Duck Bones Line. That line remained short.

Back in the correct line, I entertained questions from passers by, mainly “What’s this line for?”, followed by “Is it worth it?” or a derisive snort. The best part of my wait, other than watching small flocks of people cutting into the front of the line, was when some tourist lady passing by stopped an elderly local man with a flower-laden pushcart and asked him if she could take his picture. Then she did so, without waiting for an answer and after physically maneuvering him into the frame so her photo would look more symmetrical. Offhandedly she asked what the flowers were for. “Funeral,” the man said. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” the woman gushed, grasping the confused man’s arm, who was likely only a deliveryman.

Eventually I reached the serving table with its bustle of service and hungry people pressing foward while waving greenbacks. The namesake dish from Peking Duck House was worth the wait and I’d be willing to entertain an entrée portion. The samples today were small and wrapped in a sort of tortilla along with some crisp julienne cucumber. It was tender and just sweet enough, with crackly tasty skin. Wish I would have gotten two.

I followed this up with another respected Chinatown classic, Big Wong King, which offered a selection of roast pork, roast pig (which is apparently something different than roast pork), roast duck and BBQ spare ribs. I opted for the ribs and it was a moist, plentiful portion, tasty and dyed that mysterious Chinese Meat Red.

Lung Moon Bakery on Mulberry Street displayed a marvelous spread of goods and after I selected the angel food cake, craftily baked into squares of wax paper to resemble a tiny bouquet for ease of eating on-the-go.

To help wash this down, I walked over to buy some Black Bubble Tea from Ten Ren’s Tea Time, passing along the way several roving segments of Chinese Dragon, which reminded me of the arcade game Centipede.

Bubble tea, which I understand to be a tired novelty at this point in its lifespan, is milky iced tea in which is floating large caviar-like beads of flavored tapioca. You get a triple-wide straw to suck up these bubbles along with your tea. If you’re lucky, you inhale them directly into your respiratory system.

Other than arriving on-time, hungry and ideally with someone else to talk with in line, the best recommendation I can offer for Taste of Chinatown is to take your meal to eat over in nearby Columbus Park. It’s cliché to call one landscaped parcel or another in Manhattan “a gem,” but I’d call it that anyway and overextend the metaphor by adding “recently polished.”

Although it was designed by celebrated Central Park co-architect Calvert Vaux, Columbus Park opened in 1897 adjacent the unsavory Five Points neighborhood, which features into Herbert Asbury’s book The Gangs of New York and Scorsese’s film of the same name. The park was so filthy at the time, it was dissed in print by no less than Jacob Riis and Charles Dickens.

Well after the turn of the century, improvements arrived in slow order: a limestone rec center in the mid-’30s, a playground and basketball courts in the ’80s and ’90s. Then, last year, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation injected the north end of the park with improvement funding. It now features a plaza with benches, chess and picnic tables, new landscaping, fencing and lighting, and the final element under construction, a handsome stone pavilion. There’s also a soccer field, open to the public but not dogs, with the greenest, most evenly cropped grass I’ve yet seen in Manhattan; I had to touch it to convince myself it was real. You will trust me when I say this is grass to make a hard-boiled golfer jealous. I am clearly an idiot; the grass is fake.

Despite these agreeable surroundings, there were few people from the festival eating in the park. It was mostly Asian guys at the picnic and game tables, playing what may have been Go Xiangqi with small, illustrated discs. These old guys’ discs were wooden and their game drew only three onlookers, including myself. (That’s the pavilion in the background.)

Meanwhile, groups of young turks playing at other tables boasted professional engraved disc sets, as well as small entourages that would call out suggestions, praise strategies and heckle failures, like a Greek chorus, only in Chinese.

I blew out of the Town just as the bitterly cold rain blew in around 3:00 p.m. I read later in The New York Times that by 3:30, the intensified rain caused many restaurants to pull in their tables, effectively closing down the festival early. But there will be another one in October. I’ll be back, Taste of Chinatown. I’ll be back.

Taste of Chinatown

• Meal 16 of 52:
• Peking Duck from Peking Duck House, 28 Mott St. ($2)
• BBQ spareribs from Big Wong King, 67 Mott St. ($2)
• angel food cake from Lung Moon Bakery, 83 Mulberry St. ($1)
• Black Bubble Tea from Ten Ren’s Tea Time, 79 Mott St. ($2)

The gods were punishing me for waiting until this morning to complete my taxes because Jimi invited me over for a Easter brunch of homemade waffles that I had to begrudgingly decline. But later in the afternoon, by which time I’d checked my math and wrapped up the paperwork, Katie called to invite me to a Film Forum outing.

We had originally planned on going to the Chipotle around the corner for dinner, but Katie decided it’d be cheaper and better to “go local” and eat at Fresh Tortilla Express around the other corner. It’s Mexican food, made by Asian people and depicted on a menu board above the counter in unappetizingly color-leached photos. But it was cheap and tasty. I noticed the dish I wanted and eventually ordered, guacamole nachos, had a small dot next to it on the menu board, as did several other items. What did it mean? Bonus side dish? Extra-spicy? Recommended? I had the following exchange with the two Asian people behind the counter, both of them wearing white paper hats.

Me: What’s the dot mean?
Man: Dot?
Me: The dot next to some of the menu items.
Man: Dot?
Me: [pointing to dot] That dot.
Man: [to woman] Dot?
Woman: No dot.
Man: [to me, in satisfied agreement] No dot.

At home later, I was looking at the carryout menu and discovered that the dots mean the dish is vegetarian. I also found this aggressive and curiously written warning:

NOTICE BEWARE OF IMITATORS USING OUR MENU
“Fresh Tortillas”
to Provide their foods. Make no mistake, we are the one & only restaurant on Varick Street who can guarantee our high standard of quality. If you encounter any imitators, please inform us by calling 212-242-3520 so that we can take legal action against them

I think that I speak for myself and for the legal council of Fresh Tortilla Express when I say “Dot!”

Fresh Tortilla Express

• 206 Varick Street
• (212) 242-3520
• Meal 15 of 52: guacamole nachos ($4).

Vatan Indian: a restaurant after my heart. Consider: excellent, varied and all-you-can-eat vegetarian Indian food; a nice price; cozy, open atmosphere; and some of the best service I’ve had in a restaurant of any nationality.

It’s a strange concept: a prix fixe multi-course meal for $22.95 per person, but you can request more of anything you like, from any of the three courses at any time, whether appetizer, entree or dessert. Most of the greatest hits of Gujarati and Punjabi food are represented: miniature samosas (like something Totino’s would concoct), puri (small puffballs of whole wheat bread for sopping up other dishes), bhaji (sautéed spinach and chickpeas), kheer (sweet rice pudding), all manner of chutneys and other spicy sauces, homemade mango ice cream, chai tea with ginger, cardamom and milk.

Our server was extremely attentive, replenishing our metal cups of water constantly, replacing napkins, patiently explaining what the devil we were eating and bringing more if it was tasty.

Nice decor, too, with floral prints, various Indian gods and goddesses, all servers decked out in traditional dress.

With my dinner companions, Jimi, the Man and Mike, we sat in an elevated, three-wall-enclosed booth with a low square table that we sat cross-legged at (after removing our shoes) . If you’re old, or made a reservation (which various websites say you are required to do, but which you’re not), you can sit at a table, but what’s the fun in that? If your party is but two, you want to request the romantic table under the giant fake tree.

To amuse ourselves while waiting for the cab and during the ride crosstown, we invented and played a fast-paced game of wit and cunning that I will call “Which is Worse.” Two comparable New York City irks are presented; a debate ensues as to which is more heinous. For example, here are five rounds we played:

1. On the subway:
   1. A beggar with a prepared speech.
   2. A beggar with a musical act and/or something to sell.
2. Also on the subway:
   1. People who take up more than one seat.
   2. People who cling to a pole.
3. On the weekends:
   1. Fat, Midwestern tourists.
   2. Riffraff from Jersey.
4. People who ride bicycles:
   1. On the sidewalk.
   2. Against traffic.
5. Presented by Jimi for your consideration:
   1. Dykes with guns.
   2. Drag queens.

Correct answers:

1. B. They’re more in-your-face and harder to drown out.
2. B. They take up more space and create more of a bottleneck.
3. B. Tourists have an excuse for their stupidity. And tourists at least know they’re tourists.
4. A. More annoying, although more satisfying accidents result from the against-traffic buccaneers.
5. A. Because, you know, they got guns.

Vatan Indian

• 409 Third Avenue (at 29th Street)
• (212) 689-5666
• Meal 14 of 52: a whole crapload of Indian food ($22.95).

An NYU grad I know recommended this college-grubby West Village haunt to procure tasty cheesesteak sandwiches. It was decent, but not what I expected from cheesesteak. It started with the usual thin-sliced ribeye with cheese, but also a huge gob of marinated onions, spicy pepper relish and served on a round poppy-seed Kaiser bun. It more closely resembled “cheesesteak sloppy Joes,” and was even served with a Wet Nap (for the sloppiness) and two chocolate-mint candies (for the onions). I don’t know if this is a good or a bad sign for business, but half of the already-small shop has been overtaken by a startup bakery that specializes in miniature cupcakes.

BB Sandwich Bar

• 120 W. 3rd St. (between MacDougal and Sixth Avenue)
• (212) 473-7500
• Meal 13 of 52: cheesesteak sandwich ($4.50) and a bottle of Boylan orange soda ($2.00).

Katie kept the stuff I bought at Ikea yesterday in her car until she got off work early this evening, then drove up to my place and we unloaded it. Katie gets irritable when she’s hungry and she was hungry. Me leading her around Upper Manhattan to restaurants that didn’t seem to exist or had two-hour waits didn’t improve matters.

Then she realized that we were in the vicinity of Sylvia’s, Harlem’s famous soul food restaurant, but that she didn’t remember exactly where it was. Fortunately, while tooling down W. 125th Street, we caught a glimpse of its lights off on Lenox Avenue. And we arrived just in time, 7:45 p.m.—they stop seating on Sunday nights at 8:00.

While waiting for our table, we started out at the bar with some expensive but tasty rum punch. Although an apparent advantage of arriving at Sylvia’s later is that the crowds aren’t as intense, they also plan for the food to run out at the end of the night. So they didn’t have the pickled beets I wanted as a side. More heinously, they had run out of mashed potatoes; Katie mentioned several times that her gravy-smothered chicken steak would have been even better had it only a dollop of mashed potatoes. Instead she got the candied yams, which she recommended, just as I can recommend my black-eyed peas and macaroni-and-cheese, made with real cheddar (which you’d think all restaurant mac-and-cheese would be, but you’d be wrong).

For my entree, I got the ribs, of course, and I highly recommend them. In fact, they are sneaking into my top three. Thickly sweet-sauced, tender meat, not too fatty: perfecto. Also, love the full name: Sylvia’s World Famous Talked About Bar-B-Que Ribs with Her Original Sassy Sauce. Entrees also come with your choice of mimosa or Bloody Mary, a nice touch.

The layout is utilitarian but family friendly, with tons of tables, and chairs that look like they were swiped from a chain hotel’s ballroom. The brightly painted walls are hung with framed photos of Sylvia, who has owned and operated the place with her family since 1962, posing with a variety of celebrities.

Sylvia’s

• 328 Lenox Avenue
• (212) 996-0660
• Meal 12 of 52: rum punch ($10) and bar-b-que ribs entree ($12.95 with corn bread, a bloody Mary, mimosa or soft drink, and two sides).

One of our receptionists who’s Hispanic kept telling me I needed to try a chimichurri from my friendly neighborhood taco truck and I finally did after my Found Footage Festival outing earlier tonight because my only dinner was a gallon of Guinness.

Like most street food, my chimi was cheap and tasty, with high sodium content and alcohol-absorbing power.

Chimichurris are the Dominican version of the fast-food hamburger: a large, thin and greasy beef patty on lightly toasted rectangular buns of thick and chewy pan de agua (“water bread”), slopped with lots of chopped onions and tomatoes, ketchup and mayo, shredded cabbage and chimi sauce, a sweet sort of watery ranch dressing. The whole business is bundled in foil and the size of an extra-large baked potato. I learned that if you want the works, it’s chimi todos, and that everyone’s got his own chimichurri recipe. I snacked this one down quickly because of its tastiness.

Apparently, you can get a chimichurri on most any street corner of Santo Domingo from stands like those in this city that peddle hot dogs, pretzels and kebabs.

that taco truck on Sherman

• Sherman Avenue at Dyckman Street
• Meal 11 of 52: a chimichurri ($3).

I had the Monday-only All You Can Eat special at Brothers BBQ in SoHo tonight, knowing well I’d be too full for seconds. But the price was right for a combo platter of four different barbequed meats and two sides.

Things started poorly when my server alleged the bar was out of Guinness. (Don’t bars prepare for St. Patrick’s Day runs on the black stuff?) They had nothing on tap stronger than Bud, so I had a pint of that anemic brew. My bread basket was an inspired mix of cornbread, sliced white bread and hush puppies, which I hadn’t eaten since childhood trips to Red Lobster were considered a special treat. But the selection was barely warm and the cornbread was just plain stale.

My meats weren’t much better. Again, in theory, it’s an excellently priced and well-varied mix: a large breast of barbequed chicken, spare ribs, pulled pork and beef brisket. As I’ve suggested in my many BBQ write-ups, I like saucy BBQ and this wasn’t saucy. The chicken, while moist and tender, had little flavor other than a vague smokiness. The spare ribs were greasy and the meat flavorless. The pulled pork was of the vinegar variety, which I’m not a fan of. Merely holding a tender forkful of the meat near my mouth was enough for the pungent vapors to open my sinuses. I had held out the most hope for the brisket, presented in large, well-sauced chunks, but the sauce had the exact industrial-tomato flavor of (I kid you not) SpaghettiOs. I’ve got nothing against SpaghettiOs, per se, but I don’t want my BBQ sauce tasting like ’em.

Not even my side dishes were appetizing. My mac-and-cheese was gummy and bland while my baked beans had no adherence whatsoever; they were more like beans plunked in a watery BBQ sauce.

Booo.

Brothers BBQ

• 225 Varick Street
• (212) 727-2775
• Meal 10 of 52: All-I-Could-Have-Eaten BBQ platter (Monday-only special) ($14.95) and a pint of Bud ($4).

The modest tagline of Pick-a-Pita is “The best falafel place in New York.” New York magazine puts it more accurately and nearly as succinctly in a one-sentence review: “The best falafel you’ll find at the end of a loading dock.”

The magazine, which isn’t being entirely snide, classifies Pick-a-Pita among several “gold mines for good grub” on West 38th Street, a dingy swath of the Garment District that isn’t exactly teeming with linens and fine china during chowtime.

They’re not kidding about the loading dock, either. You walk down a dim alley directly off the sidewalk, back to one of those cheap white-painted aluminum storm doors found chiefly in the suburbs. Inside is a handful of tables and a brisk takeout business at the counter, staffed by a bunch of motormouthed, quick-moving lads in white paper hats who will address you as “boss” or “chief” as they snap up your order, dish out fresh tabouli and man the slowly rotating vertical spits of sliced lamb and chicken for the shawarma.

That’s what I had, the chicken shawarma. Oh, yeah. Nothing better on an unseasonably warm day (nearly 60 degrees!), particularly those chilled, fresh-spiced cucumbers.

Pick-a-Pita

• 247 West 38th (between Seventh and Eighth Avenues)
• (212) 730-7482
• Meal 9 of 52: chicken shawarma ($7.50).

Continuing the surreal theme of the day, I went to the Paul Klee exhibit Klee and America at the Neue Galerie, a converted mansion on the Upper East Side with a small permanent collection from the likes of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele on the second floor and four rooms on the third floor for the Klee exhibition. Spread through three of these rooms are 58 works by Klee, chiefly from the ’30s and ’40s when he was first being discovered in America. His champions included one of the twentieth century’s original Power Couples of art, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the latter of whom declared Klee the world’s greatest “child/poet.”

Ironically, Klee’s recognition in the U.S. came just as he felt he was gaining it in Europe. Nearing the cusp of his popularity there, he was dismissed from his Bauhaus teaching post in Germany by the Nazis, who had classified his work, along with most of the modern canon, as degenerate art.

The style of Klee is hard to nail down but he’s best known for what one of my art history professors in college called “subconscious doodles,” thin, strange stick figures and symbols he usually sketched in pen or pencil. While he adhered to these instruments, oils and watercolors as his core media, the surfaces on which he worked varied greatly: cardboard, cotton, canvas, wood, many types of paper, burlap (by itself and primed with other media, such as chalk), and black casein ground. Each leant a unique texture. The casein ground, for instance, brought the paint’s pigment, rather than its oil, to the surface, for a result akin to colored scratchboard. Combining watercolors and paste paint on cardboard, the color and texture of The Sick Heart resembles frosting on sugar cookies, while in Orpheus, watercolored cotton conjures the luminous swaths of color in a stained glass window.

Klee often used a technique (which he may have originated) called oil transfer drawing that gave his works gently shifting translucent hues, juxtaposed by his sharply drawn caricature. The famous Red Balloon (depicted above) is an oil transfer drawing and was described in 2003 by the Guggenheim Museum for its show From Picasso to Pollock: Classics of Modern Art:

He brushed a thinned oil paint onto one side of a piece of paper, then like making a carbon copy, he drew on the back of the painted sheet with a pen or stylus. The resulting lines have a feathered, smudged quality, as the artist stated, ‘saving transfer of my fundamental graphic talent into the domain of painting.’ Devised during Klee’s Bauhaus years, the oil transfer method was used for watercolors and oil paintings that are among the artist’s most idiosyncratically playful images.

I had an early dinner at the museum’s Café Sabarsky, which specializes in Viennese cuisine. I got the hearty Gulaschsuppe mit Kartoffen (goulash with potatoes) and Glühwein, heated red wine with spices, orange and cloves that smelled more pleasant than it tasted. Overall better than the stereotypical museum café fare of overpriced, uninspired sandwiches.

For after-dinner drinks and company, Andie invited me over to her apartment to join her, Eric, Katie and the girls’ parents, who are visiting this weekend. We had carry-out tiramisu from Carmine’s and reviewed the group’s adventures, which included a trip to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, Macy’s and the New York City Opera for the revival of Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, starring family relation Lisa Vroman.

Café Sabarsky

• 1048 Fifth Avenue (at 86th Street)
• (212) 288-0665
• Meal 8 of 52: potato goulash ($12) and mulled wine ($10).

I bought a shirt at Urban Outfitters as part of their 50%-off sale, stopped by Andie’s Barnes & Noble to say hello, then went over to Jimi’s. Mike, The Man and I decided to get Indian food, so the four of us walked a few blocks over to Baluchi’s.

Eh. It was O.K. My mango lassi was cheaper than I expected at $3 for a medium-size drinking-glassful. But the saag paneer I ordered, like I usually do at Indian restaurants, had fresh spinach yet was bland overall. I imagine the benefit here is the same as at most chains: you get a consistent level of food, presentation and cleanliness. It’s just that this particular consistency isn’t all that thrilling. But with so many other Indian restaurants in the city, you’d be better off going local.

Baluchi’s

• 240 W. 56th St. (one of 16 NYC locations)
• (212) 397-0707
• Meal 7 of 52: mango lassi ($3) and saag paneer ($10.95).

After work, I took the F train over to Park Slope in Brooklyn and had fun escaping from the aboveground Fourth Avenue/Ninth Street station, which resembles a haunted castle. I was on my way to Ned’s, who resembles Keith Haring¹ and is the brother of a friend, Megan. In addition to the siblings and myself, Katie showed up. Until they left to go see Munich, some sub-letters of Ned’s from Amsterdam were hanging out, too: Antony, Rosa and their white yarn-haired dog, Max. Actually, Max didn’t go to the movie, instead staying with us and moping around for lack of attention after we stopped petting him.

After we determined Franny’s, one of the area’s most-lauded newish pizza joints, didn’t deliver, we pored over a flurry of takeout menus and settled on Aunt Suzie, Ned’s favorite Italian restaurant. My eggplant Parmigiana was rich and tasty! They were out of tiramisu (blast!) but the replacement cannoli were mighty good; Aunt Suzie doesn’t fill them until they’re ordered, so the shells stay nice and crisp.

We convened at Ned’s primarily to watch Trapped in The Closet, R&B musician R. Kelly’s “hip-hopera,” which began its deformed life as a music video, expanded to several and is now available in 12 “chapters” on DVD. It is the foresworn duty of Ned and Megan to promote Trapped in the Closet as the next so-bad-it’s-good Rocky Horror Picture Show-like cult classic. I think they’re on the right track; it’s already been mocked by South Park and Mad T.V. (“Trapped in the Cupboard”).

Man, is it ever bad. It’s like a poorly acted community theater play without dialogue, only R. Kelly’s monotonous describe-the-action song lyrics and the rare sound effect. He stretches a lot on these rhymes, pairing “Beretta” with “dresser” at one point, or when he can’t think of one, rhyming the same word. He also has trouble pronouncing the “th” in certain words, like “baffroom.” He plays the lead character, Sylvester, as well as “the narrator.” The plot, a convoluted tale of infidelity, is pitted with gaping holes, unlikely coincidences and a cast of characters that grows larger and more caricatured until it includes a woman named Bridget, which necessitates the rhyming inclusion of a midget and subsequent appearance thereof.

We decided we hadn’t enough punishment and watched the whole thing again with director’s commentary, which is R. Kelly sitting in a darkened room, smoking a cigar and watching his film on a widescreen. He turns around frequently to mug at the camera, explain what’s going on in a particular scene and why it’s genius, and talk about the “cliffhangers” that join the chapters, one of which involves a woman brandishing a spatula, which he speculates is a cliffhanger because it’s not a cliffhanger, an anti-cliffhanger, if you will. The whole mess culminates in a comment along the lines that “the whole world is trapped in a closet” and a threat that he will continue releasing Trapped in the Closet chapters until he is stopped.

We followed this up with the documentary Grizzly Man which is about Timothy Treadwell, who lived among the giant grizzlies of Alaska under the guise of protecting them, even though they live in a national park and exist in numbers great enough that it’s legal to hunt a certain percentage of them each year. Treadwell captures frequently amazing footage of the bears, particularly a scene of two of them rearing up and attacking each other on a beach, where they resemble extremely tall sumo wrestlers. But most of it is Timothy’s self-videotaped ruminations on himself and the bears, which he’s given cutsie names, and scenes of him getting really, really close to them and then acting surprised when they lash out. Not to ruin anything for you, but Treadwell and his girlfriend end up getting killed and eaten by a bear, their remains, collected from the ground and the euthanized bear’s stomach, filling four garbage bags. Idiots.

We agreed that if we would have been in high school, our assignment at this point would have been to compare and contrast the two movies, focusing on the narcissism of the protagonists. Instead, Katie, Megan and I took the F train home because it was like 3 a.m. at that point. Good times.

Aunt Suzie

• 247 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn (Between Carroll and Garfield Place)
• (718) 788-2868
• Meal 6 of 52: eggplant Parmigiana with salad ($11.90) and half a cannoli ($2.90 for whole cannoli).

¹ Katie and I had each met Ned once before and I had mentioned to her earlier the Keith Haring comparison. She wasn’t in a position to agree or disagree because she didn’t know what Keith Haring looked like. Then, when we arrived at Ned’s apartment, what should he have hanging at the end of a hallway but a large, framed Keith Haring print. That still doesn’t help out Katie with what Keith Haring looks like, but maybe it suggests Ned is aware of the connection. I don’t know; I forgot to ask him. [back]

With a name like Sushi A-Go-Go, how could I not go here? True to the sixties spirit, the place is light and fun, with large decoupage flowers on the walls. Apparently, Wednesday is “theater night” in the city (I thought every night was theater night in New York) and because this place is so close to Lincoln Center, it was packed. I had the choice of waiting 20 minutes for a table or sitting at the sushi bar and I chose the latter.

There are five seats there and I was stuck with the center; on each side was a couple of which the man seemed to be trying to impress the woman. On my right, the guy was rhapsodizing on the varying grades of sake and talking about trips he’d taken to Paris. On my left, the guy ordered a good half dozen different combo platters of sushi and kept telling the woman “Try this! It’s great!” Then he got into an argument with the waiter over bringing him a certain sauce that he was unable to describe, other than he thought it was dark colored and sweet and he’d had it once in New Jersey and it was great. I’m not sure how well these guys’ ladies were getting on because they didn’t get much of a chance to talk.

I had miso soup, served in a wood bowl, and an order of spider rolls, which were large and attractively presented with pieces of lettuce sticking out like sails. I ordered one bottle of warm sake, then another, while watching white-smocked Asian sushi chefs behind the counter smoosh fish bits into artful shapes with their bare hands.

Sushi A-Go-Go

• 1900 Broadway
• (212) 724-7340
• Meal 5 of 52: miso soup ($2.75), spider roll platter ($9.50) and two warm sakes ($6.50 each).

Andie, Katie and I met up for dinner at Angus McIndoe, apparently the owner’s actual name, as Andie discovered when she enquired about the restaurant’s party room and was told to give the fellow a call.

The server was obnoxious although it didn’t seem she was trying to be. In addition to her constant gum chewing, she gave me trouble when I asked in earnest about my soup options. (Dialogue recall likely only 60% accurate, as I wasn’t talking notes.)

Me: Do you have any soup specials?
She: We have a chicken curry soup.
Me: What’s that?
She: [trying to be cute, as Katie said later, but failing] It’s like chicken soup with curry in it.
Me: So it’s just curry-flavored chicken soup?
She: No, it’s got little pieces of, like, pasta in it.
Me: You mean like couscous?
She: Kind of, but a little bigger. Balls. [“tee-hee” moment with herself] Balls of pasta. But tiny.

I opted out of the soup. The burger I had wasn’t bad. It was lightly charred on the outside (which I like), indicating an actual grill with rungs was used, and perfectly cooked medium in the middle, as I had requested. The rest of the menu was basic but decent, and the place is certainly conveniently located for anyone going out to a show afterwards, Broadway or otherwise.

Angus McIndoe

• 258 W. 44th St. (between Seventh and Eighth Avenues)
• (212) 221-9222
• Meal 4 of 52: glass of Murphy’s Irish Stout ($5), hamburger with Swiss cheese and bacon and a side of fries ($13), coffee ($2.50).

Andie and I tackled our hunger at the Malaysian outpost on the Upper West Side, Penang. After settling down at a table that wasn’t all wobbly in the low-ceilinged downstairs lounge, I ordered the Penang house cocktail, which tasted orangey, like liquid DayGlo. After some soup made with minced pork and shrimp wontons, I ordered Andie’s entrée recommendation, the rendang, made with big, tender chunks of beef, cooked with a paste of ground onions, lemon grass and chili, then simmered in rich coconut curry gravy. I had it with hainanese rice, which is made with chicken broth. Mmm.

We left just as the jazz band arrived, which was just fine, as we had wanted to eat and talk, not listen to music.

Penang

• 240 Columbus Ave. (at West 71st Street)
• (212) 769-8889
• Meal 3 of 52: Penang Cocktail ($9), wonton soup ($3.50), beef rendang ($12.95) and a side of rice ($1.75).

Truth be told, I’ve been here before, but I only drank a Diet Coke, then picked at a side salad, rearranging it on my plate so it looked like I’d eaten more than I had.

This was when I was an editor with the real estate magazine and was being asked out to lunch by some PR flack every week. The one who took me here was a run down middle-aged woman whose agency name included her own last name, and whose clients were insignificant or irrelevant to the magazine. I designed to eat little, if anything, because although she was paying, I didn’t want to give the idea I was keen on her services. She ended up causing a scene when she knocked her glass of wine over the table and ended up confiding to me that she was having some sort of operation the next day and was nervous about her prospects. That was weird. Whatever happened to that lady?

I went to Lazzara’s after work today for dinner and it was dead. When I was there before at lunch, it was packed, as I’m sure it often is, because the chief fare is billed as the Garment District’s best thin-crust pizza, and it ranks highly be me.

I ordered the John’s Special, made with the restaurant’s fresh-tomato and basil sauce, diced spicy pepperoni, red and green pepper slices and fresh mushrooms. The crust was crisp, the pizza entirely greasy and satisfying. I could only eat three of the six squares (Lazzara’s pizzas are rectangular), but the other half will be my dinner tomorrow.

The decor is pleasant and dark at Lazzara’s, with warm traces of the building’s original ornaments: small leaded glass windows in the outer front door, wood floors, scuffed black-painted chairs all at two-person tables, ceilings of painted pressed tin bordered by decorative molding. The doorway directly into the dining room has a handsomely inconspicuous stained-glass transom window, and hanging on the walls were giant, lingering Christmas wreaths, big framed mirrors and a turn-of-the-century print of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Lazzara’s

• 221 West 38th Street (between Seventh and Eighth Avenues)
• (212) 944-7792
• Meal 2 of 52: John’s Special pizza ($16) and a nice chianti ($6).

Yes, it was good.

Goodburger

• 800 Second Avenue (at East 43rd Street)
• (212) 922-1700
• Meal 1 of 52: Goodburger with the works (ketchup, mustard, mayo, purple onion, lettuce, tomato and pickles) ($5.25), fries ($1.95) and a regular Diet Coke ($1.75).