West Village Archives

My Hummus Place Habit

The West Village is not an easy place to grab a cheap lunch. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a wonderful place to grab lunch. There’s Market Table, ‘ino, Pearl Oyster Bar, The Spotted Pig, Barbuto, etc, etc, and so on. But the operative word in my first sentence was “cheap” and while all of those places have wonderful food, if I ate at one of them every day, I’d be broke. Which is why, upon moving here two years ago, I was in search of a place I could visit on a weekly basis, where I could eat quickly and cheaply and relatively healthfully, a place that was convenient to my apartment and convenient to the coffee shop where I do most of my work (Joe). The place I settled upon was Hummus Place.

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What I Ate During Hurricane Irene

This weekend on the East Coast, many of us prepared for and then endured a hurricane. How badly we endured it depended on a variety of factors; for those of us in the West Village, things weren’t too bad: some downed branches, a few giant puddles here and there. But before it happened and while it was happening, we didn’t really know what to expect. And during that time I did what many others in my position did too: I ate.

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Imperial Woodpecker Sno-Balls

You may recall that on our recent trip to New Orleans, we enjoyed something called a Sno-Ball. We ate this Sno-Ball at a place called Hansen’s Sno-Bliz and though I was wary at first–“isn’t it just ice and syrup?”–I was quickly won over by the texture of that ice and the intense flavor of that syrup. So imagine my delight and surprise when I learned that over in the old West Village City Bakery space (at 7th Ave. and Charles) a New Orleans-style Sno-Ball place had just opened up, a place called Imperial Woodpecker.

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The Warm Chocolate Chip Cookie at Jacques Torres

Citizens of America, it is my duty to inform you about something unholy, something sinful that is going on in that wicked city known as New York. Deep in the bowels of a village known as “West” is a veritable Sodom & Gomorrah of chocolate whose creator, a Frenchman!, is trying to tempt our children into evil with a contraption known as the “cookie warmer.” This sick device results in the dangerous, corrupting specimen you see above!

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The First Meal

The first meal that you cook in a new apartment is very, very important. We all remember what happened last time, don’t we? I attempted to inaugurate our Park Slope apartment three years ago with Edna Lewis’s fried chicken (fried in butter and lard) and didn’t get the fat hot enough. The result? Gooey, gloppy, undercooked chicken and a cursed apartment that gave us bad heat over three harsh winters. (OK, I exaggerate: I liked that apartment. But the heat did suck).

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Back to the Big Apple

Big changes are afoot, loyal followers of my blog. For three years now I’ve lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn–steps away from Fr an ny’s (one of my top three favorite restaurants in New York)–and pretty content with my BK lifestyle: brooding with the other writers at Gorilla Coffee, skirting over to Key Foods for catchy 60s ditties as I buy vegetables wrapped in plastic, and traipsing over to Grand Army Plaza on Saturdays for the weekly farmer’s market. Content, that is, except for one major factor: our heat. It went out repeatedly. Last year, it went out so many times our landlord bought us two space heaters–one of which almost set our couch on fire. So, suffice it to say, when our lease came up again I put my foot down and decided not to renew. This started an epic quest on Craigslist to find a new apartment, but little did we know that this bold decision–a decision that gave us only four weeks to find a new place to live–would lead us to the apartment of our dreams.

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McNulty’s Blue Eyes Herbal Tea

Last week I had a tiny bit of a hangover after meeting friends for drinks the night before. The solution? I fried up two eggs, sunnyside up, toasted some bread and squished it all together into an oily, decadent sandwich. And because I was craving something greasy and yolky, it was seriously one of the best bites I can remember having in recent memory: it totally and completely hit the spot.

What does that have to do with tea? Well a week before last, both Craig and I were sick with nasty, ugly colds. And with our sore throats, we didn’t want coffee, we wanted tea. I reached into my cabinet and pulled out a gift that my friend Matthew Horovitz gave me for my birthday: tea from Mcnulty’s Tea & Coffee Co. in the West Village.

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Karahi (Indian Food in the West Village)

We all know that the first rule of real estate is “location! location! location!” Apparently, though, it’s also the first rule of New York friendships. Want to see a lot of someone you really like? It helps to live in the same borough.

Take my friend Lisa, for example. There was a time we both lived in Chelsea and when we lived close together we made videos about bulimic tomatoes and miracle almond cakes. Then I moved to Brooklyn and she moved to the Upper West Side. We still see each other, of course, but we’d see each other a lot more if she came to her senses and moved to Brooklyn or if I came to my senses and moved back to Manhattan. Either way, the point is that Lisa has a boyfriend named Eric who I hadn’t met yet and so we made a date to meet for Indian food on Sunday so Craig and I could meet this Eric character.

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