the gateway nuts at m.wells diner.
When word went around last week that M. Wells would be closing at the end of August because of a landlord lease dispute, everyone — including yours truly — went into a bit of a panic. Brunch lines that were already long started to become insane: my coworker went on Saturday afternoon, only to languish in line for two hours. Was that going to stop me? Nope. Panic only makes me more determined to consume awesomeness.
So, armed with general panic and knowledge of the potentially long lines awaiting us, Mark and I left Brooklyn just at 9 a.m. on Sunday morning, hoping to get there just as the restaurant opened it doors at 10. We emerged from the subway at 9:52am. There was already a line maybe 12-15 people deep. On a Sunday morning. In Queens.
But we got in, in the first wave of seating, and from our seats at the counter, began to let our stomachs do the ordering. From the top:
1. Biscuit with I think strawberry jam. Also, Mark got a Bloody Mary which, in Fujicolor 200, shows up much, much Jolly Rancher redder than I think it actually was. (I had a glass of wine.)
2. The famed egg-sausage sandwich, on a big english muffin, with pickled jalapeno, cheddar, and a perhaps overexhuberant dollop of mayonnaise. It’s the standby on the brunch menu, and if you’ve never been to M. Wells before, it’s a must-have. To the right of the sandwich was the grilled cheese + foie gras. You heard me. Foie Effing Gras. Tucked neatly inside a grilled cheese on I think Challah. (Brioche? Forgive me, it was barely 10am on a Sunday morning.) Surprisingly, the foie tasted a bit like a portabello mushroom. Weird, right? Super tasty.
3. THIS IS THE THING TO ORDER OH MY LORD. So M. Wells has a standard Spanish tortilla, which is like a frittata with potatoes and onions inside. You can get that, or you can see what the special add-on of the day is. When we went, the special was duck testicles. YOU HEARD ME. DUCK NUTS. Inside a tortilla. And it was mind-bogglingly delicious. The tortilla had a slightly crispy outer shell, almost croquette-like, and the duck nuts — well, I’ll just say that, like, say, sweetbreads, they’ve got a particular (some might say peculiar) texture, a bit … squidgy, not really gamey per se, but a little funky, a bit salty. And really awesome. I can’t wait to try other iterations of, er, this. M. Wells has made a very desirous woman out of me.
So yeah. We devoured our brunch. Other groups also splurged, quantity-wise, ordering 3-4 dishes for every two people. M. Wells will do that to you on a good day. On a day approaching the end of the restaurant in its current location — they supposedly have a new spot lined up, though no one knows how long it will be before they reopen in that location — M. Wells nudges you into taking it to the next level. Nuts and all.
upstate aisles.
No weekend in Walton is complete without a trip to the local supermarket, which announces in a huge banner out front that it has the largest refrigerated beer section — its own room, mind you — in the region. While everyone gathered supplies for the weekend — including, obviously, a well-chilled case of Miller High Life — I wandered around the store with the Yashica, photographing aisle upon aisle of edible wares. There was nothing particularly unique about this supermarket, except maybe that the width of the aisles made it clear that we had left the confines of the city many miles ago (cf my earlier post, for instance, on this place).
That said, the length and width of these aisles upstate have nothing on the glory that is, and will always be, Wegmans. Man alive, I miss Wegmans.
singular vs. plural.
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Over the last year or so, I’ve moved away from taking a lot of extreme, up-close photographs of my meals, the so-called food porn genre of visual/gastronomic consumption, and towards a more expansive sense of how a series of photographs can come together to tell a story, or give a sense of place and time, or perhaps a mood. Using the Zeiss Biogon 35/2 lens helps in that endeavour, in that the focal length makes it nearly impossible to get very close to any particular dish, or face, or anything, really. I’ve forced myself, in a good way I think, to take in a broader view of the world; the viewfinder takes in so much more in each frame. I try to incorporate disparate subject matter and locations, to have them intersect in order to give the reader a sense of where I’ve been recently, what I’ve seen, in a way that many times, a single image cannot.
That said, on rare occasions, I’ll take a photo that takes in so much, in such a lovely way, that I don’t think I need anything else to juxtapose it with in order to give you a better sense of time, place, context, or anything else. This is one of those photographs. Including another photograph here would, I suspect, rob this one of its visual potency. It’s a beautiful image, if I do say so myself, but just take a proper look — there’s so much to see.
And, maybe it’s just me, but there’s something so New York City about it that I’m getting weirdly nostalgic — and I still live here.
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two meals (and a view).
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We got into Walton just after ten on Friday night, too tired to really make a proper meal. Luckily, Shannon and I had made some last-minute purchases at the Essex Street Market before we left the city, so a feast of fancy cheeses and artisanal bread was had before we moved onto the scotch portion of the evening (not pictured). The next morning, one by one, we groggily came downstairs, ready for breakfast. Alice made a huge pile of scrambled eggs, while Bernard fired up (er, turned on?) the griddle and made pancakes with super-fresh blueberries. The rest of us helped set the table, et voila! A veritable breakfast of champions. Between those two meals, it was a great start to the weekend upstate.
And here is the view that I woke up to on Saturday morning. Doesn’t get much better than that.
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late lunch.
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A handful of us went this weekend to our friend Bernard’s country house in Walton, NY, about 150 miles northwest of the city. We got there Friday night, and left Sunday afternoon; inbetween, we made use of the huge kitchen, collaborating on every meal. Saturday afternoon, after running a couple of errands, we sat down for the most langorous late lunch I think I’ve ever been a part of, starting at around 3:30 and ending some time after 6, when the store-bought apple pie had been polished off and everyone went this way and that, mostly to find comfortable spots under the trees to siesta.
But the lunch itself: a salad of local greens, radishes, and green beans, finished off with less-local grape tomatoes, onions, and a peppery homemade balsamic vinaigrette. Leftover cheese and bread from the previous evening’s dinner provided a bit of fatty, carby joy. And, since we were planning for a late dinner and a generally late evening, we made an executive decision to eschew straight-up wine in favor of wine spritzers, perfect for the late July weather.
And oh yes, the weather! Hot, but never humid, with cool grass underfoot, without any of the NYC asphalt radiating heat upwards. The perfect weather to take it slow, yes, but also to take it all in — the quiet, the lushness, the stillness of a summer weekend away from the lovable insanity of the city. Even the fruit followed suit.
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Many, many more photos from the weekend, to be posted as the week unfolds.
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recently consumed.
So here’s the thing: I’ve been experiencing this odd, sharp pain in my lower left leg for a few months now. Last week I finally got around to seeing a sports medicine doctor, this one at the excellent Women’s Sports Medicine Clinic at the Hospital for Special Surgery. Turns out that I’ve pretty much run my way into a stress fracture. What this means, treatment-wise, is that I’m stuck with a splint for the next four weeks; if fracture doesn’t heal by that point, they’re going to put me in the boot. Yeah. Fun times!
And so in my mild depression from not being able to do much at all — running is out of the question, and even though walking is allowed, the splint is not unlike walking around with saran wrap sticking to your leg — I’ve decided to just kind of …. pork out. Relentlessly. I’ve eaten ridiculously, and ridiculously well, the last 8 days. And pictured above are only three of those meals. I didn’t take a photo of it, but do not get me started on the glory that is the summer corn and fregola antipasto dish at Otto. (You can see someone else’s photo of it here on Flickr.) Good lord, I could eat that all summer long. Alongside everything else I’ve been consuming, of course.
From the top:
1. bun tom cha gio — vermicelli with grilled shrimp & spring roll at An Choi.
2. duck larb at Zabb Elee (which is fast becoming my go-to spot in the East Village).
3. biscuits benedict with bacon gravy at Char No.4
4. the communal table at An Choi.
5. som tum thai — green papaya salad with dried shrimp and peanuts at Zabb Elee.
6. gravlax on crispy potato pancake with fried egg, and smoked+fried pork nuggets at Char No.4 (I wasn’t kidding about the porking out).
sundays.
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A lot of them involve some combination of Shannon, Marshall Stack, the fat NY Times, the Sunday crossword (always completed in blue, non-ballpoint pen), white wine (or, in this case, on a 90+ degree day, something a bit bubblier), and an order of the Afterschool Special — pizza sauce and cheese toasted atop English muffin halves.
The best Sundays — such as the one this past weekend — include all of the above.
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the order of things.
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Sunday morning, Brooklyn. This is how it’s done, folks:
Coffee (strong)
Pancakes (blueberry, homemade, proper maple syrup)
Eggs (sunnyside up, pinch of s&p, pinch of herbes de Provence)
Salad (fruit, honey)
Company (good, of the breakfast-making variety, the kind who will oblige your inane request to “turn the pancake upside down so people can see the blueberries”)
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late july, lower east side.
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It is hot and sticky and just all around sweaty here in the city. In these conditions, the imprecision of a Lomo seems to capture the haze and lethargy pretty well; as an added heatwave bonus, there’s no focusing mechanism on the Lomo lens, so there’s one less thing to expend energy on — more movement = more sweatiness. I need to go lay down beside my air conditioner right now.
(What in god’s name are those guys doing playing basketball in this heat? I’m getting sweaty just looking at that photograph.)
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(I know those boxes are probably empty, but the idea of fresh seafood languishing in this heat does not inspire confidence. Or appetite.)
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after the rain.
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One afternoon last week, a skies opened up briefly but potently, just long enough to unleash a rain shower that turned the city into a humid, sticky, wet mess. Afterwards, the clouds disappeared and the sun returned. Everyone at the local piled outside, their eyes to the skies, to see if a rainbow was in the works; sure enough, a double rainbow appeared to the east, faint but definitely there.
I brought out the Leica and kept my eyes on the pavement. After a rainfall, and especially on a crosstown street like Canal, wide enough to let quite a bit of the late afternoon sun bear down, the streets just sort of shimmer: the sun reflects off the rain-slicked asphalt, and this magical light appears. Canal Street suddenly becomes awash in this near-aura-like glow, and everyone who walks by is nearly ablaze in the light. It’s pretty great, downright luminous.
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hong-an tran 