Two Cuisines Seperated By A Common Cholesterol Count

Somehow my wife and I triumphed Sunday morning, by making it to Zabar's before the morning rush (stocking up on leaden unleaveneds for Passover) AND then to Barney Greengrass, (the temple of Jewish gastronomy and top-referrer to Mt. Sinai's cardiology department) in time to get a table for breakfast without a wait. Since I'd already had my heart healthy oatmeal breakfast at home, I opted for discretion and just ate an appetizer sized plate of novy with a toasted bialy and scallion cream cheese.
But more satisfying than beating the crowds at both institutions of gourmandizing or the smoked fish was the fact that the time-worn wallpaper at Barney's is a vintage 1950's-style view of my other home, New Orleans. How and why it came to be there is a question I need to ask third generation owner Gary Greengrass. But one feels to be the cat that ate the proverbial cream when you sit down, eat an order of novy, sturgeon, eggs and onions, in a sea of NY-Times snapping, essers and fressers, with the City of a Million Dreams hanging on the walls in plain view.

David Mitchell is a master and so is Rishi Reddi

"Black Swan Green" is perhaps the best novel I've read in the past year. Mitchell's promise as a writer-partially displayed in fine, yet gimmicky books like "Cloud Atlas" ("It flows backwards then forwards again! Each chapter has a different character in a different era with some connection to the previous chapter's protagonist!") or "Ghostwritten"-is met here. There are far too many novels of adolescent angst, and almost as many that resolve the same through wise yet wacky elders or exotics. But Mitchell steers through these shoals and paints a convincing and compelling potrait of a bright, perceptive teenage boy growing up in rural England during the Falklands war. And hey, you just want to see how it all ends. Buy today.
While you're there, pick up a paperback original of my friend Rishi Reddi's new collection of short stories, Karma. One of them was included in the Best American Short Stories of 2005. The four that I had the pleasure of reading belonged there as well. Reddi focuses on the Indian emigre community in the Boston area, and captures the confusion, sadness and longing of those trying to bridge two worlds masterfully.

Heaven Itself

I am perhaps the only person I know who looks forward to jury duty. Not for the two days spent in a dingy jury room in lower Manhattan, but for the two hour lunches that permit me to ramble through a neighborhood I have loved for more than thirty years-Chinatown. On my first day, after escaping from voir dire in a child molestation trial, I figured I needed a reward, and given the semi-decent weather, went to one of my favorites in the neighborhood, a tiny Vietnamese sandwich joint, Banh Mi Saigon, on Mott just downtown of Grand Street.

For those of you who have never eaten banh mi, it is the perhaps the finest refutation that colonialism was all bad. The mission civilisatrice of the French Empire may not have ended that well, but damn, they taught the Vietnamese to bake. Bread, that is. These are the finest baguettes I've had outside of Paris.

I first made my acquaintance with these loaves and sandwiches in my dear former home of New Orleans. I was escaping a court appearance on the piquant West Bank, where lawyers from New Orleans proper were regarded as a dangerous virus from a half-mile away across the Mississsippi, and I needed some proper sustenance. My sister, who worked on behalf of battered women nearby, agreed to meet me, and suggested a Vietnamese place in the shadow of the bridge over the river-Pho Tau Bay.

I was intrigued by the menu heading "Vietnamese Po-Boys." I ordered a spicy chicken specimen, and encountered the fantastic product of the clash of civilizations-Vietnamese herb marinated chicken, pickled vegetables, fresh mint, hot peppers, with the eggiest of home made French-style mayonnaises on perfect, crisp French bread. Three bucks for two worlds between two pieces of bread. Needless to say I was addicted, and when a branch of Pho Tay Bay opened near my own office a few years later, I went for lunch almost every day. (Falling in love with three or four of the staff-Cathy, Anne, Alice and Vy, je t'aime!-didn't hurt either).

Further, shockingly, it was the best bread in New Orleans. Despite the City's vaunted Creole heritage, the bread at even the most ancien Creole restaurants was mediocre. The scandal of New Orleans bread was an open one. Like a beloved uncle with a drinking problem, it was apparent whenever one sat down at table, but never spoken of.

Regrettably, I left New Orleans. Even more regrettably, most of Pho Tau Bays restaurants, which had grown to four in number, all incredibly successful on the backs of those sandwiches, folded after damage from Katrina. Vy Banh and family I believe are making them now in a restaurant in Lancaster, Pennsylvania-I think it's called "Rice and Noodles"

But New Yorkers can get an approximation of what I loved at Banh Mi Saigon. It ain't as good. the bread is close, the fillings are close, but there's no yellow mayo, or Cathy or Anne to flirt with.

But it's still the best damned sandwich in the five boroughs

Miracles

At 42, I am old enough to have used eight track tape, cassettes, 45's, l.p.'s, reel to reel tape, and occasionally, 78's. Call it trite, but I have, however, fallen head over heels in love with my Ipod Nano, for one reason. I can now blissfully drift off to sleep, attending a cocktail party in Beverly Hills in 1955. And besides being in bed next to my lovely wife, that's a nice alternative, because it's a cocktail party Art Tatum was booked to play, and was recorded playing. I owned the lp of this recording, "20th Century Piano Genius", and it's probably the greatest record made by the greatest jazz pianist who ever lived. You do the math on that one.

You can hear the clinking of glasses, the murmured requests to, and replies by Art Tatum-and in a beautiful recording, the fantastic improvisations of Art Tatum. The guests literally gasp and laugh in amazement and pleasure when he peels off a cascading torrent of notes, returning from the bridge to the chorus of "Moon Song" (a Tatum favorite-he often played and recorded it, but never better than here).

This is a dense record. There are worlds here. But for pure unalloyed listening pleasure, this is the place to go. And so, when the weight of the world keeps me awake, I belly up to the piano, join the cocktail clinking crowd, and via the miracle of mp3 and the Ipod-blissfully listen to the miracle that was Art Taum.

You should too.

Miracles

At 42, I am old enough to have used eight track tape, cassettes, 45's, l.p.'s, reel to reel tape, and occasionally, 78's. Call it trite, but I have, however, fallen head over heels in love with my Ipod Nano, for one reason. I can now blissfully drift off to sleep, attending a cocktail party in Beverly Hills in 1955. And besides being in bed next to my lovely wife, that's a nice alternative, because it's a cocktail party Art Tatum was booked to play, and was recorded playing. I owned the lp of this recording, "20th Century Piano Genius", and it's probably the greatest record made by the greatest jazz pianist who ever lived. You do the math on that one.

You can hear the clinking of glasses, the murmured requests to, and replies by Art Tatum-and in a beautiful recording, the fantastic improvisations of Art Tatum. The guests literally gasp and laugh in amazement and pleasure when he peels off a cascading torrent of notes, returning from the bridge to the chorus of "Moon Song" (a Tatum favorite-he often played and recorded it, but never better than here).

This is a dense record. There are worlds here. But for pure unalloyed listening pleasure, this is the place to go. And so, when the weight of the world keeps me awake, I belly up to the piano, join the cocktail clinking crowd, and via the miracle of mp3 and the Ipod-blissfully listen to the miracle that was Art Taum.

You should too.

The Piles

Just added to-and then immediately extracted from the pile of reading accumulating by my bedside is "Black Swan Green" by David Mitchell. I thought both "Cloud Atlas" and "Ghostwritten" were terrific, though each had a little bit of the air of a parlor trick about them. "Black Swan Green", from the first few pages anyway, seems firmly set in one place and time, with a narrative that simply goes forward-so we'll see what he can do with it.