Eating With My Peers: Osso Bucco and Sharaku

Eating around NYU is often a treat. You’re near the East Village, you’re near the West Village. You have many options available. Sometimes you make good choices, sometimes you make bad choices. But you make choices. Except when you’re force fed in which case you had no choice. But most of the time you aren’t force fed.

So last week was the Marathon Festival of Student Work for my class and we each had to present 30 minutes of material. This was a stressful time—I presented 30 minutes from my play “Bethany” and had to fine-tune it several times to get it where it needed to be. My piece was the last one to show on the last night, and so I invited Lisa along to see it. She enjoyed it. At least she said she did.

Afterwards, we joined my classmate John (who also went up that night and did a great job) and his sig oth and distinguished actor Ben for dinner. We also went with John’s co-workers Kristen and Ryan. Where would we go? We were hungry. We stumbled upon Osso Bucco on University. Let’s eat there, we decided.

To explain our dining experience, I’m going to use math.

Great Food, Great Atmosphere, Great Service X dismal company = mediocre experience

Dismal food, noisy atmosphere and hostile service X great company = fun fun fun

The latter explains our dinner at Osso Bucco. I think this place is a huge rip off. It’s family style, you pay a lot of money for it, and the food is a hair above The Olive Garden. Seriously. In fact, I think I prefer the Olive Garden because they don’t pretend to be fancy when they serve you iceberg lettuce in a bowl with an onion and a tomato. Osso Bucco does and charges you $12 for it.

Anyway, though, here’s Ben and John saying cheese with cheese:

Afterwards, we somehow ended up at The Duplex, and upstairs there was this weird piano bar place where they let audience members come up and sing show tunes. Lisa wanted to sing “Suddenly, Seymour” with me. The piano player didn’t have the music for it. I knew it, though, so I asked if I could play. They said all right. Here we are—the Captain and Tenille, Kiki and Herb:

That was a ton of fun.

*****

Then, Tuesday night, after our Adaptation class and before our Play Lab, I joined Patty, Colin and Alex for dinner at a sushi place in the East Village–Sharaku. Here’s a picture that I felt insecure about because it seemed blurry but which James Felder praised and said, “It’s great! It looks like they could be in Rangoon.”

[Can I ask you tekkies a question? Ok, so I upload these pictures to my .mac homepage, right? You can see the page I loaded it on here. Now when you click the individual pictures, they blow up into much larger versions. So, for example, the picture above is way big when you click here. So how can I use that fact to make the pictures I post on my site bigger? Like when I link to the picture you see above I type in the HTML the open carrot thing (<) then img alt="IMG_1.JPG" src="address of the image." close carrot(>). I guess I’m asking how to use the fact that I’m using lots of space to host a big fat image to improve the girth of what I post on my site. Haha, I said girth.)

Where were we? Oh yes, Sharaku. This place is good. We had saki, edamame (I almost choked on one), some kind of shrimp dumpling, and then I ordered this sushi platter:

I was way stuffed afterwards. And it was a tiny bit pricey. But the saki was reasonable. And the company was great. And as we know, when it comes to dinner math, great company is like pi r squared. (The area of a circle?) Yes. Exactly that.