what about the plastic animals?

Three Boats at Sunset

Reading the paper and people watching in Riverside Park was a good way to end the holiday weekend.

Sookk

As I was out to get a haircut this noon I noticed a new Thai restaurant on Broadway.  They had a $7 lunch special.  How could I resist?  The special included an appetizer and an entree.  I had chicken satay and vegetable pad thai.  Both were done well.  Usually I don't get the most generic items on a menu.  Next time I'll be more adventurous.  Their specialty is Bangkok/Yaowarat cuisine.  Yaowarat being Bangkok's Chinatown.  The Bangkok Chicken Pumpkin Curry and the Ginger Coconut Herbal Pepper Sirloin Steak both sound good (despite the length of the latter's name), but neither are available as lunch specials.  All in all a good complement to the excellent Thai Market a few blocks further uptown on Amsterdam.

Horses

Now with larger pictures and only two columns!

Is there a proper name for these rides?  All I can think of is kiddie rides but that doesn't seem to be the proper name.  At least my google searches for kiddie rides turns up unsatisfactory results.

Murder Ink

Murder Ink and it's sister bookstore Ivy's Books closed some time ago (last winter?) a victim of rising rents on the Upper West Side.  I just happened to have a tripod while walking by this evening.

No Line in the Rain

Upper West Siders are not wet weather gelato eaters!  I happened to pass by Grom on my way home this rainy evening and there was almost no line.  The lemon sorbet was good but unmemorable.  The coconut sorbet was excellent.  it was so smooth and creamy I'd have sworn it was ice cream rather than sorbet.

Theory on why the lines might be long at Grom:

While friendly customer service is always appreciated, the hyper-neurotic woman ordering gelato to go was obviously insane.  She asked questions in rapid succession, as she moved back and forth around the display so nobody else could order, but didn't bother listening to anyone's answers, which meant the question and answer had to be repeated several times before she paid attention.  At one point she said she had been to Grom several times since they had opened.  It is not too far-fetched to surmise that she alone was responsible for the line each day.

At some point a quick, polite, but firm, "Thank you very much may I help the next customer please" would have been appreciated by the next customer in line.   The neurotic woman would probably appreciate it as well, as her gelato was well on its way to being melted by the time she got to her destination.  Somehow I get the impression she would blame Grom for the melted gelato even though she refused the styrofoam containers with lids ("I don't like styrofoam") and kept talking and talking and talking after getting the frozen treats in uninsulated paper cups without lids.

Unrelated:  After putting it through a wash cycle I now have the cleanest MetroCard in the city.

Grom is Good

Guido Martinetti (left) and Frederico Grom (right), owners of Grom

Luna Rosso (raspberry and cream), May's flavor of the month

I guess I was in an ice cream mood today.  Now that the weather is getting warmer I've been thinking of making gelato.  I went to the bookstore this evening to check out books of ice cream recipes.  There was nothing worth buying, but glancing at the recipes did reinforce my notion that ice cream, gelato, and sorbet are relatively easy to make.  Get the basic proportions right and you're good to go.

Between Barnes and Noble and Fairway lies Grom, an Italian gelato maker that opened today.  They were giving away samples yesterday.  The line was a block long in the afternoon.  There were only a dozen people in line this evening.  Mr. Grom was working the crowd.  He said there was a line all day today, and that the cash register's computer died earlier in the day.  Despite the computer outage the line moved quick.

As an aside, the Times carried an article about the shop last week.  Toward the end of the article there's a bizarre paragraph where the reporter explains that the name of the shop was "neither a marketing concept nor a cute acronym" but Mr. Grom's surname, which "reflected the winemaking tradition of putting the family name on the label."  I guess the Times couldn't trust their readers to make the connection between Grom, the shop, and Frederico Grom, the co-owner, who is quoted and referred to several times in the article and whose picture accompanies the article.

Grom mixes the liquid base for their flavors in Turin.  The base is frozen and sent to their outlets, where it is thawed and whipped into gelato or sorbet.  I ordered a small luna rosso, which was the flavor of the month.  It was quite good --dense and creamy.  It was also expensive --$4.75 plus tax for that a small cup.  That cup, by the way, is made of biodegradable paper, unlike the plastic cups used by Il Laboratorio del Gelato on the Lower East Side.

Anyway, at $4.75 a small serving I don't see myself becoming a regular.  While I was in San Francisco I tried ice cream that was far, far better and roughly half the price.  Sure, the price of getting to San Francisco raises the per scoop charge, but it might be worth the extra cost.  That's a story for another day.

Riverside Park Art

Art Alert!

Untitled (The Grates), by Elana Herzog.

Detail of On, Under and Between by Emil Lukas

North Overlook by McKendree Key

Silver Tunnel by Mischa Kuball

This year is the 20th anniversary of the Riverside Park Fund, the organization that supports the park.  To celebrate, the fund is sponsoring the park's first ever public art exhibit, Studio in the park.  There are eleven different works placed in the park from 72nd to 145th Streets.  The last photo, Silver Tunnel, is quite a sight but was falling apart on the first day of the exhibit.  The On, Under and Between work consists of four big pieces of cast concrete that pull double duty as benches.  The tops of the pieces have designs embedded in them.  When I stopped by the artist, Emil Lukas, was there handing out sheets of paper and pencils to people interested in making a rubbing of the surface.

As I was taking pictures of the art several people stopped and asked me if I was a professional photographer.   I don't know if it was because I was using a tripod or the subject matter.  If only they had seen my experiments with long exposure close-ups of the river...

Studio in the park remains in the park all summer.

Double Take

I saw One Eighty a week or so ago.   I was a little confused when I saw One Seventy Five yesterday.  Different block, different side of the street.

Neighborhood Watch:  Harlem Fur moves in literally around the corner.

Obviously from the Upper East Side

I was enjoying the views and weather at the 79th Street Boat Basin Saturday afternoon when four people walked through this archway.  They looked to be a young couple and a set of parents.  That's when I heard:

Younger woman pointing westward:  Over there is New Jersey.
Mom:  That's so weird.
Younger woman:  Yeah, really weird isn't it?

Along Central Park West at Night

The building in the foreground was originally the New York Cancer Hospital at 106th and Central Park West.  It was the first hospital in the United States devoted to treating cancer patients.  After sitting empty for many years it was recently rebuilt into condos.  The tower in the background is part of the condo complex. 

This is a small tree in Central Park with "help" from me fooling around with Photoshop.