Rayuela

Went to this spot last night in the LES with Jessica and her friend from Seattle. It had a tree growing out of the middle of it. Food was great. I had the Chilean Seabass but I'd recommend the Duck Confit.

Mercat Negre

Tonight, Josh and I had another Sunday dinner out and this time Andrew came. We tried Mercat Negre in Williamsburg on a recommendation from Time Out NY. Wow, the Catalonian fare here was just incredibly tasty. Our favorite "platas" was the duck burger but the bravas were super good too. We ended the night right with a delicious desert, the Pa Amb Xocolata which is just chocolate on toast with olive oil and sea salt. I definitely recommend this new spot if you can find where it's hidden (Grand & Wythe). Also it's only $80 for three people.

Resto

Last night, Colin came uptown for dinner with me and Josh. We had a delicious supper at this Belgian spot called Resto. It is conveniently located a block from the 6 at 29th and Park. My hanger steak was great and everyone enjoyed the frites and the interesting peanut butter dessert.

More New York Spots

Last night I was all over town with my sister, her friends and then Nick and Steve.  We hit up a bunch of cool places I hadn't been to before but would now recommend.  Sadly, I didn't take any pictures but I did want to share on the blog so these spots aren't forgotten.

  • Westville - My sister and her friends went to this West Village restaurant for dinner and said it was really good.  I didn't have anything but the menu looked interesting.
  • Fat Cat - This basement jazz hall is more of a cavern than a hole.  The space is huge and filled with all kinds of tables for games.  There was chess, checkers, scrabble, backgammon, pool, ping pong and shuffleboard.  The place was packed and the beer was good.
  • Vol de Nuit - This Belgian bar was a little hipper scene than Fat Cat was.  Beer was great.  The space is really interesting.  When you enter, you are in a kind of alley between buildings.  You can enter two different bars from in the alley space.  The back space was way crowded but the front bar was open.  I had a La Chouffe and a Leffe Blond but there were also Chimays and other very fine Belgian beers to try if that's what you're into.
  • Pegu Club - We chose to ignore the old adage, "Beer before liquor never been sicker," and went to Pegu for cocktails.  They were very, very good.  I got the Old Cuban, which was a fancy mojito with champagne mixed in.  The decor is Asian and the Caucasian waitresses are dressed like geishas which is always a little unsettling to me.
  • L'Express - I was still full from the beer and my dinner earlier but Nick insisted we go to L'Express at 3am to cap off a fun night with some french breakfast.  I got the croissant sandwich which was an incredibly delicious but utterly unnecessary meal.  Very cool though, to now know a 24-hour french spot for ending future nights right.

Infinite Jest

So I finished David Foster Wallace's  Infinite Jest yesterday and it feels like a very small epoch of my life just ended.  Wallace's 1,000+ page tour-de-force first piqued my interest interest last May when I was in the final stage of CFA Exam prep.  Sick of reading about bonds and balance sheets, I planned to read some solid piece of fiction after I got the test out of the way.  I will admit that I have a penchant for lengthy works (my bookshelf proudly declares I've read The Naked And The Dead, Atlas Shrugged, East of Eden, The Fountainhead, and most of Anna Karenina).  However, what really led me to this book, as it happens so often in life, I noticed one of my most creative and humorous friends was reading it.  I figured if my crazy/brilliant ex-roommate, the lead guitarist for Nightheart found it worthwhile to slog through a book measured in pounds rather than pages, then this book must certainly meet my far looser literary standards.

While I certainly cannot say I was disappointed in Wallace's work; for all its girth, the book left something missing for me.  Probably, as a less sophisticated reader, I needed more of the plot lines neatly tied down at the conclusion.  As I caught a second wind during the last 200 pages, I felt a growing dread that given Wallace's meandering pace, the story could not be finished in the pages that remained.  Although in the end I was right, the plot is left unresolved, I am starting to accept and even admire this way of concluding things right at the most intense, dramatic place in the story.  Our chaotic, insane world is forever cartwheeling from crisis to crisis.  Peace never returns to the kingdom, another struggle always ensues.  The maelstrom of conflicting and often irrational human desires forbids any sort of tidy ending.  (Cue the Sopranos Final Episode reference here)

I enjoyed Infinite Jest despite never really knowing where it was taking me. The hundreds of incredibly descriptive but entirely tangential little vignettes are just so entertaining to read and its dozens of minor characters are depicted as unique but so utterly human that it is ultimately refreshing to explore their curious but very much, real lives.  If you have the two to three months of patience that Infinite Jest demands, I definitely recommend you read it.