Day 13 (The Penultimate Day) The Simple Cafe &

For lunch we went back to the Simple cafe of which I have nothing new to say. I ate the exact same thing and had a very similar experience. Grrr... if a salad's $10 I do not want it to be "simple".

The accursed burger with no-bun of the wheat intolerant.

For dinner me and Kirstin Planned on splitting up. A plan I'm glad to say we failed in because we ended up going to a place I've been wanting to go back to for some time. A little Japanese place on St. Mark's called "Go".

All the food I've had at Go has been good (except the time I tried Natto there, but that was the Natto's fault). The one thing I wanted to go back for was the Ochazuke, a Japanese "peasant dish" made by pouring green tea mixed with dashi over rice and topping it with varying ingredients.

We ordered the Umeboshi one. It's deep hearty dish that you can just imagine tastes even better in the cold winter months of Kyoto. I've never seen it on any other menu in the U.S. and I've been looking for it for years. Having finally gotten to taste it again I think I've figured it out and I'm intent on trying it at home. In fact I bought all the ingredients today.

Day 7 The Rabbit Hole, Philoxenia

This morningwe had a completely opposite experience of the Rabbit Hole from the one I’d had the night before. We walked in and said we wanted to use our computers so they sat us in the bar with another guy and his computer.

I opened my computer and clicked on there network but I still wasn’t able to connect to the internet. Kirstin had the same problem so we asked the other guy there how his was working and he told us it was fine until about five minutes ago and that they probably just needed to restart their modem.

I asked the bartender if he could restart it and he told me they didn’t really offer wireless on the weekends so “it was probably just off” then he pointed a sign by the door as proof. The sign read “In order to maintain a more pleasant atmosphere we ask that all computers be put away by 5:30 p.m.” It said absolutely nothing about weekends.

I had a burger with no bun and fries which was fine but they really didn’t want to give me any ketchup. Kirstin had her usual eggs with fruit instead of potatoes. Half way through our meal, already feeling rather unwelcome, a woman came up to Kirstin and said “we normally don’t do that.” I had no idea what she was talking about. Was this about the ketchup? No it was about the fruit. She wanted Kirstin to know not to expect to be able to substitute fruit whenever she wanted to.

This was not the pleasant atmosphere I’d experienced there just 12 hours earlier.

For dinner we went to Philoxenia in Astoria, Queens. A little Greek place I’d gone to last time I was in town and have fond memories of. Having lived in Astoria for years before moving back to the bay area I was very familiar with Greek food and I missed it more than anything else about New York.

We sat outside on the patio at the same table we’d sat at last time. Me, Kirstin and Erin shared everything we ordered and we ate it all down to the last drop of sauce.

We had beets with skordalia, a Greek potato garlic dip, a green salad, grilled octopus, mussels with feta and Ouzo tomato sauce and lemon potatoes. Everything was perfect and just what I wanted. The beets served as a welcome and unexpected vehicle for the garlicky "skordalia" I’d missed so much (Erin says she’s going to give me her Greek grandmothers recipe). The salad was a mix of chopped romaine and olives perfectly tossed with a lemon oil dressing and fresh dill. The sauce for the mussels made me wonder why I don’t mix tomato sauce and cheese more often, the octopus was grilled perfectly tender and not at all rubbery and the potatoes, although not as good as the ones at their more famous neighbor Uncle George's, were still better than anything I’ve had back home.

This eating experience brought me back to my years living here in Astoria. The years where I first learned about food and cooking. Eating the simple elegant Greek fair I remembered again the joy of marveling at food you can just barely figure out how they made but could never make yourself.