blogwallah

Tea, Uptown or Down

Afternoon tea need not be an upturned-pinkies-and-starched-napkins affair, as evidenced by these spots, each with a riff on the midday ritual.

PODUNK

231 East Fifth Street (Second Avenue)

(212) 677-7722

The ineffably charming Podunk, in the East Village, is a self-styled “American tearoom”—the “American” being an important designation for the proprietor, Elspeth Treadwell. Her take on afternoon tea is distinctly more relaxed than is its studied British cousin. (This is the version replicated around town at fine hotels, typically with a harp strumming in the background and with a price beyond the purview of this column.)

For starters, there’s no table service: orders are placed, and picked up, at the counter, under a sign that says “No Sniveling.” Eighteen varieties of tea meals are listed on the menu, and Ms. Treadwell, hands often tucked into apron pockets, will pause from her baking to dispense advice on tea pairings or to concoct a custom blend.

Trays laden with teapots, no two alike, must be navigated through the tight room’s odds-and-ends country décor: garden chairs, a wooden sled and ice skates, bookshelves crowded with Oz books. The very air smells buttered.

The food delivers on that Proustian promise, comforting and nostalgic, with a few subtle surprises. The cucumber sandwiches in the Old Friends’ Tea ($25) are prettily composed of white bread on one side and brown on the other; the strawberry jam is laced with cayenne.

The Blunt & Savory ($25)—intended to “blunt” the appetites of “husbands and boyfriends who complained about eating only cake,” Ms. Treadwell explains—comes with mint-and-parsley-dappled scones and flaky tea pies whose contents on a given day might include mushrooms marinated in red wine; caramelized onions; and a potent mix of spinach, bacon, cranberries and feta.

Part of the fun is mixing and matching: a couple might order both the no-nonsense Shaker Tea ($12), summed up on the menu as “bread; cheese; tea,” and the Chocolate Tea ($14), which takes as its guiding principle the notion that anything—gingersnaps, poppy-seed cookies, brownies, strawberries—can be improved by being dredged in chocolate sauce and whipped cream.

CHA-AN TEAHOUSE

230 East Ninth Street (Third Avenue)

(212) 228-8030

At Cha-an, up a narrow staircase from the street, afternoon tea is less free-form and more sedate, befitting the simple wooden tables and pewlike banquettes.

The Afternoon Tea Set ($18) consists of two miniature bagels, made in house (baking lessons are offered every second Monday; the bagel is rated “intermediate difficulty”), one with smoked salmon, the other slathered with strawberry butter, and an array of doll-size treats, including a scone slightly bitter from an infusion of Earl Grey tea.

The food is Western in provenance, but Japanese in presentation—bagels come in a woven basket, sweets in a bamboo scoop—and in the restraint with sugar; here, texture (crumbliness, cakey-ness) carries the day.

TEA BOX AT TAKASHIMAYA

693 Fifth Avenue (54th Street)

(212) 350-0180

The Tea Box cafe, in the basement of the uptown emporium Takashimaya, has a Tokyo-chic setting—chocolate pillows, metallic wall coverings, tiny light bulbs wrapped in silver mesh—that’s showing its age. But its East-West Afternoon Tea ($20) is exquisite, arranged on a lacquered tray, with lollipops of rock sugar for stirring.

“Sandwiches” include a clear spring roll and finely shaved cucumber pressed into triangles of rice. Cups of spiced nuts and yam chips defy Emily Post’s precept that tea be confined to “bread and cake.” But the cookies, made by the Tokyo-based company Yoku Moku (packages of them are sold in the adjacent store) seem perfunctory.

CENDRILLON

45 Mercer Street (Broome Street)

(212) 343-9012

At Cendrillon the weekend brunch menu features three items for merienda, the Philippine afternoon tea: bibingka ($9.50), a fluffy rice-and-coconut-milk pancake with lodes of gouda and feta; suman ($7.50), deep purple rice steamed in leaves and accompanied by caramel and mango; and halo-halo ($7), a tropical sundae, with purple-yam ice cream atop a swirl of toasted rice, coconut and pineapple gel, jackfruit and adzuki beans.

The tea list is a single page, and the distracted staff may pair delicate clay cups with clunky coffee mugs. But the drowsiness that pervades the exposed-brick space is perfectly conducive to a lazy afternoon retreat. Raid the appetizers for ukoy ($8.50), airy shrimp-and-tofu fritters cut in huge triangular blocks reminiscent of Rice Krispies treats, if you need an excuse to linger.

The New York Times, November 12, 2008

On the East Side, Cambodian Two Ways

Kampuchea

78 Rivington Street (Allen Street)

(212) 529-3901

Cambodian Cuisine

1664 Third Avenue (93rd Street)

(212) 348-9100

It looked as if 2008 might be a breakout year for Cambodian food after epicurious.com predicted in December that it would become the new Thai.

Yet here it is September, and we seem to have only two Cambodian restaurants in New York City: a relocated Cambodian Cuisine and a revived Kampuchea.

Kampuchea isn’t even really Cambodian; Cambodian-inspired is more like it. Kampuchea, Khmer for Cambodia, opened in 2006 on the Lower East Side as Kampuchea Noodle Bar, a name that remains on its awning but not in its publicity. (A good thing too, as noodle bar pretty much says, “I want to be Momofuku.”)

The chef, Ratha Chau, was a child when his family fled Cambodia. This may be why Kampuchea evokes an expatriate’s vision, looking like an old shop front, with dark wood communal tables and drinks in Mason jars.

Initial reviews complained of a reticence in seasoning. Two years on, that has been redressed, as brazenly exemplified by the plate of pickles ($8) that ratchet up in heat clockwise. Equally aggressive is the bwah moun ($15), a chili ginger lime broth laden with rice, shrimp and chicken.

Mr. Chau is ostensibly focused on street food, but he harbors greater ambitions. Green papaya, traditionally a julienne in a salad, is run through a mandoline and paired with strips of cured duck breast ($11), coolly sweet and salty at once. Less successful are sweetbreads, which soak too long in a mushroom broth.

To serve authentic food seems less of a priority than to appeal to the young and restless who haunt the Lower East Side. The grilled corn and chili mayonnaise, sticky with coconut ($6), is more South American than Southeast Asian.

A savory crepe cradles peppered catfish ($14). Variations on num pang, a sandwich akin to the Vietnamese banh mi, come on sturdy baguettes ($12 to $16). Fillings like house-cured bacon, tucked in with charred chilies, earn happy sighs. But veal hoisin meatballs err on the sweet side, and the oxtail was anemic.

In June a less glamorous Cambodian outpost appeared on the Upper East Side. The forthrightly named Cambodian Cuisine started life in Fort Greene, but Manhattanites visiting the Brooklyn Academy of Music urged the chef, Jerry Ley, to move. Trouble with permits, faulty piping and a threat of eviction delayed its opening for nearly three years.

The new space feels like the charming, hodgepodge restaurants you’d find in Phnom Penh: a family affair, with the chef’s wife and sister out front; Khmer wedding music trilling; TVs playing sports with the sound down. (All that’s missing is karaoke.)

The menu is bewilderingly long and vague. Neophytes may wind up with a meal they can get at a Chinese restaurant. Best to heed the house favorites, including ahmok, a highlight of Cambodian home cooking ($14.95). Customarily made with fish steamed in curry until it achieves a mousse-like texture, here it takes the form of chicken, breaded with curry and swamped in coconut curd. It’s delicious, with biting citrus notes and a subtle flare of heat.

The same goes for prahok, the fermented mudfish paste that’s in nearly every Khmer dish. It takes a starring role in prahok ktis, with ground chicken and the national spice palette of galangal, ginger and lemon grass, served with vegetables to dip ($17.95). The flavor is gratifyingly deep.

No meal in Cambodia is complete without soup, or samlor, and the versions found here are the real deal, a pitched battle between sour and sweet, whether teeming with turmeric (samlor mchoo kroeurng, $14.95) or chunky with tomato and pineapple (samlor mchoo moen, $3.95).

In a concession to local palates, salmon is offered: fried, of all things. Go for the tilapia instead ($17.95), a closer approximation of Mekong River fish.

If Cambodian Cuisine represents the old Cambodia, gracious and earnest, Kampuchea is the new: erratic but exciting. Poised at opposite ends of the East Side, the restaurants are not so much rivals as points on a spectrum.

The New York Times, September 17, 2008

Other Lives

by André Brink
(Sourcebooks)

A man awakes one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into—wait, haven’t we heard this story before? This time, the setting is post-apartheid Cape Town, the transformee a vain white architect who specializes in stark modernism and attributes his success to having scrupulously avoided taking a political stance under the old regime. His Gregor Samsa moment comes when, while shaving, he peers into the mirror and sees a black face looking back.

It’s a less subtle metamorphosis than Kafka’s—and not so much a premise as a provocation—but the Afrikaner writer André Brink has always confronted the troubles of his homeland head-on. Early in his career, he chronicled in searing realist fiction the evils of the government’s racial segregation policy. Since the abolition of apartheid and the establishment of a democratic republic, his work has veered toward myth ography, plumbing the colonial origins of oppression. In his latest book, he moves fully into phantasmagoria. Brink’s publisher is calling it “a novel in three parts,” but “Other Lives” is more properly a collection of surreal fables, connected by theme and characters but lacking an overarching plot.

Each of Brink’s three narrators is a white middle-aged male—or, at least, starts off that way. Steve, the modernist architect, is appalled to be thrust into blackness, apparently via the mystical powers of an ornate antique bathroom mirror (his grudging capitulation to his wife’s taste for Victoriana). His first wild thought is that once discovered crouching naked in his white family’s hilltop mansion, he’ll be “pursued to the ends of the earth, hunted down, bludgeoned to death, a messy pulp.” Regaining equilibrium, he looks on the bright side: perhaps in the new South Africa his change in race is a career advantage.

Meanwhile, David, an amateur painter, opens the door to his studio and is embraced by a gorgeous woman, “dark of complexion,” whom he has never met. She is not, apparently, a deluded intruder: there is mail in the front hall addressed to them as husband and wife, and two little children can be heard crying, “Daddy!” It’s an appealing alternate universe in light of the sterility (biological and emotional) of his real marriage, to a white woman. And unlike Steve’s metamorphosis, which can be read as a comeuppance for his political agnosticism, David’s offers a way to redress the past: years earlier, he had an affair with a mixed-race woman that ended when, from lack of courage—such unions were illegal under apartheid—he refused to run off with her.

Rounding out the threesome is Derek, a pianist and philanderer who becomes enamored of a famous soprano, despite her grim track record in romance—one of her lovers committed suicide, while another was found drowned, possibly strangled. She agrees to take him on as her accompanist but extracts a promise that he will never attempt to seduce her, warning that she has been “consorting with ghosts” since she was a child on her family’s remote farm.

Sex is a crucible for each of these men, exposing unpleasant truths about who they really are. David is well meaning but weak; he worries that it’s exploitative to sleep with the beautiful stranger who believes she’s his wife, but does it nevertheless. The soprano reprimands Derek for frittering away his talent, spending too much time pursuing women, but he’s still hellbent on making her his next conquest. And in the book’s most disturbing scene, Steve, stung by barbs—real or imagined—directed at his newly black self, takes out his anger in a violent encounter with his children’s German nanny, an archetypal blue-eyed blonde who makes the mistake of saying flirtatiously: “Your skin. I like how it feel, how it look.” Brink is walking a fine line here: this is virtually “Birth of a Nation” material, dredging up white fears of the powerful black male. The most charitable gloss is that it’s an intentional caricature, an indictment of how whites persist in perceiving racial difference.

Certainly it’s brave of Brink to tangle with these issues, which have grown murkier in the new age of ostensible freedom. But his cause isn’t helped by plodding prose—the voices of all three narrators are numbingly similar, prone to bald, banal statements like “I want to know what it means to be me”—and he overloads his narratives with clichéd horror-story accouterments. David lives on the 13th floor—in Apt. 1313, no less—of a monolithic apartment complex (designed by Steve) that was built over the unmarked graves of slaves and is haunted by an Ancient Mariner type who claims to have been waiting there some 300 years.

The symbolism is likewise heavy-handed and enervating, shucking the characters of life. Still, Brink’s portrait of a contemporary South Africa mobbed by unappeased ghosts has a disquieting resonance as a meditation on how the past continues to infiltrate the present. At one point, David gazes out at the harbor and glimpses Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, “now almost irrelevant, canonized by history, no longer a defining presence, unless one chooses to remember.” “What is past is past,” he declares. “Or isn’t it?”

The New York Times Book Review, September 7, 2008

Scarpetta

355 W. 14th St., at Ninth Ave.
(212-691-0555)

In a town full of whiz-kid chefs, Scott Conant is an anomaly; at thirty-seven, he cooks like an older man—wisely, taking his time, knowing exactly what he’s doing. Having established his mastery of Italian cuisine at L’Impero (where he pulled off the oxymoron of refined rustic) and Alto (where he veered into esoterica), Conant has now relocated, jettisoning the stuffy drapes-and-sconces trappings of his previous restaurants for Scarpetta, a streamlined space on the border of the meatpacking district. Think billionaire’s farmhouse: high rafters; a peaked, retractable roof; mirrors tilting from the walls, strapped in place with giant leather belts.

The most telling design feature, however, is the rows of Edison bulbs, filaments exposed, suspended in glass-and-steel boxes. As a waiter will explain, Conant has decided to strip things down; the philosophy is “Nothing flashy.” It takes cojones (or, given Conant’s field of cuisine, coglioni) to serve as your signature dish something as banal as spaghetti with tomato sauce (and to charge twenty-four dollars for it), but Conant’s version of the Italian warhorse—perfected at L’Impero and reincarnated here—is a small marvel: earthy and sweet, a chiaroscuro of bright and dark notes, the tomatoes and basil achieving a kind of velvety symbiosis with the just-shy-of-tender pasta. The main courses are perhaps too straightforward, albeit cooked with thoughtfulness and nuance. By contrast, the pastas are nearly all wows: octopus is the unexpected star of a vigorous ragù; chickpeas, pancetta, and bitter greens vie for supremacy in a silky, buttery meld with cavatelli. (The lone misstep in this category is the ponderous duck-and-foie-gras ravioli, striped with a sticky-sweet Marsala reduction.)

The crowd reflects the restaurant’s address: weeknights belong to tyro bankers in French-blue button-downs (male) and sweaters knotted around the shoulders (female), weekends to girls in tiny dresses with strategic cutouts and their jockish dates. But Scarpetta has little in common with the oversexed lounges and high-end culinary theme parks (Del Posto, Craftsteak, Morimoto) that dominate the neighborhood. If anything, the most theatrical aspect of the place—the stadium-like retractable ceiling—seems to provoke more anxiety than pride: one waiter confided that he’d had nightmares about sudden rainstorms. There’s something charmingly old-fashioned about the attitude here; the staff even volunteer that Conant is “a really nice guy.” (Open daily for dinner. Entrées $22-$38.)

(Photograph: Honore Brown)

The New Yorker, August 25, 2008

The Delighted States

by Adam Thirlwell
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Ostensibly devoted to the problem of literary translation, this provocative treatise rambles through the Western canon from Cervantes to Bellow, treating novelists less as subjects than as characters in a sprawling intercontinental epic. Thirlwell revels in the anecdotal (Italo Svevo studied English with James Joyce) and the serendipitous (the French word dada was invented as an equivalent for “hobby-horse,” in “ Tristram Shandy”); presents indexes whose entries include “hamburgers” and “squiggles”; and lauds digression as the best means of capturing the “serious nothings” of life. While acknowledging the difficulty of conveying the “perpetual giggle” of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin’s name in any language other than Gogol’s Russian, Thirlwell insists that translation is possible and, to that end, offers his own version of Nabokov’s “Mademoiselle O,” evoking the story’s trilingual origins in fittingly verdant prose.

The New Yorker, August 11, 2008

Steer Toward Rock

by Fae Myenne Ng

(Hyperion)

The first people to be barred from entering the United States were prostitutes and criminals; the next were the Chinese. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act restricted their immigration to all but a few special cases. It wasn’t repealed until 1943, when the government—in the throes of war, with China as a temporary ally—cautiously set a yearly quota of 105 Chinese.

“Steer Toward Rock’’—coming 15 years after Fae Myenne Ng’s acclaimed debut, “Bone’’—grows out of this history, although it’s never explicitly alluded to or raged against. The narrative begins in the 1950s, when the quota is still in effect. To get around it, some Chinese already resident in the United States have manufactured “paper families,” bringing fictitious relatives into the country. Secrecy envelops the community; children are told, “Don’t talk to outsiders,” as government agents try to ferret out not only illegal immigrants but possible Communist sympathizers.

Fittingly for the McCarthy era, the novel opens with a confession. Arriving in San Francisco as a teenager, the narrator, Jack Moon Szeto, declares that nothing about him is true. The name on his identification papers isn’t his own, and the man he calls Father is a gangster to whom he owes $4,000 for his entry into the United States. His marriage is also a sham, arranged as a cover for a young woman brought from China to be the gangster’s mistress.

But in admitting the false, Jack isn’t necessarily articulating the truth; the confession strips him of one identity without revealing another. Everything about him is provisional: the difficult, dirty jobs (selling live birds at the market, scrubbing shirts in a laundry’s “dungeon,” butchering meat with “the flat metal smell of decay’’) and the lonely wives he sleeps with, “grass widows” whose husbands are off working at farms in the Central Valley. Even Jack’s alias is a bastardization of the Chinese Jik Muen.

Joice Qwan, the woman he falls in love with, is shunned because her mother cleans the bodies of the dead. Defiantly, she furthers her outcast status by working at a men’s bathhouse. At first, she’s reluctant to tell Jack her real Chinese name, a revelation that seems far too intimate. When she becomes pregnant, Jack sees only one way out of his false marriage and the gangster’s power: entering the government’s Chinese Confession Program, in which amnesty is offered to anyone who declares his illegal presence in the country—who “concedes alienage,” in an existential turn of phrase. As part of this process, he must name others who have also broken the law. Inevitably, there are gruesome consequences.

Ng is best in close-up, whether describing Joice’s eyelashes, which “fell straight down like a tiny wing,” or noting how Joice’s mother tallies up the cost of each meal “like a recipe: 5 cents of pork, 30 of beef, a nickel bag of soy beans, each morsel flavored with copper and nickel.” In a restaurant kitchen, “the soup cauldrons sat on the counter like oversized helmets, the dark woks hung above the stove like ancient tortoise shells.” Waiting in the dining room, “workers squatted on their chairs, knees clasped to their chests like a school of vultures.”

But when she strains for the poetic, Ng’s prose can feel imprecise. And aside from a delightfully gossipy, foul-mouthed chorus of old men, who interpret some of the book’s key events, the voices of her characters seem strangely stiff, frequently communicating in aphorisms: “Be a merchant of the heart!” “The dead loved deeper than the living.” “Love is the only risk worth more than gold.” “Longevity was the unmapped road ahead.”

At the close of “Steer Toward Rock,” the perspective shifts to Joice and Jack’s daughter, Veda, grown up and feeling isolated and lonely, a condition she blames in part on her father’s refusal to share the secrets of his past. Under the direction of this inchoate character, the narrative founders: a seemingly major event is introduced and dismissed within the span of a few pages, while a clichéd incidental encounter turns out to be a climactic moment of revelation. The novel acquires the feel of a memoir, its sequence of events as unresolved as those in real life—which perhaps is Ng’s intent. “Telling can be a detour,” Jack has observed. “Telling does not necessarily invite completion.”

The New York Times Book Review, August 3, 2008

Personal Days

by Ed Park
(Random House)

This comic and creepy début novel takes place in a Manhattan office depopulated by “the Firings,” where one can “wander vast tracts of lunar workscape before seeing a window.” The downsized staff huddle like the crew of a doomed spaceship, picked off one by one by an invisible predator. Crippled by computer crashes (one worker suggests that the machines are “trying to tell us about the limits of the human”), the survivors eddy in a spiritual inertia; when one of them is banished to “Siberia”—a lone desk on another floor—no one can muster the energy even to reply to her increasingly anguished e-mails, until, one day, she is simply no longer there. Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request “Does anyone want anything from the outside world?”

The New Yorker, June 30, 2008

Bar Q

308-310 Bleecker St.
(212-206-7817)

The middle “B” missing from Bar Q’s name is a warning: you’re not in hill country anymore. There’s no tang of char in the air, no smoke pit seething in a back alley, no long-legged waitresses in denim cutoffs and cowboy boots. Those who come seeking barbecue—the eatery’s ostensible raison d’être—should know that, first and foremost, this is an Anita Lo restaurant, which means elegance, intelligence, and wit. Lo, who presides over the kitchen at the consistently great Annisa, earlier lent her expertise to fast food (Rickshaw Dumpling Bar), and here she seems to be striving for a middle ground. While the décor echoes Annisa’s (white walls, blond wood, swaddling leather booths), the decibel level is decidedly higher, the lighting bright and unmoody. The staff, despite their black uniforms, are almost disconcertingly enthusiastic (“I like your watch!”). One night, you might be served by a former contortionist, the next by a graduate student in clinical psychology.

When it comes to food, however, balancing the innovative and the crowd-pleasing is tricky. Early reports were not encouraging: diners, perhaps expecting sticky kalbi and rolls of paper towels, expressed dismay at the portion sizes, the prices, and the general culinary weirdness. But, to a Lo fan, the most exciting dishes here are precisely those which play havoc with tradition. Tuna ribs—a part of the fish commonly discarded—turn out to be talonlike bones with a thin, dissolvingly tender layer of meat, given subtle snap by yuzu and green chile. Unagi-and-scallion fritters simultaneously evoke the comfort of hush puppies and the delicacy of sushi. Best of all is the grass-fed Australian lamb, lean yet juicy, paired with wedges of cornstarch-thickened, garlic-infused fried milk that riff on creamy tofu, crisp on the outside and oozy on the inside. More conventional offerings are less successful, such as the pork “wings,” served with a ketchupy Asian sauce, and the tea-smoked duck, pulpy and uncomfortably reminiscent of a heart. And, while the short ribs are ably executed—the meat does indeed fall off the bone—the unusual accoutrements (a smear of spicy red-black sauce, a scattering of goji berries, a dollop of chestnut purée) fail to elevate them above the ordinary.

At intervals, Lo emerges from the kitchen, head wrapped in a pink bandanna, to take the temperature of the room. The refinement of the cuisine doesn’t prevent a sense of free-for-all—couples dabble wantonly in each other’s entrées, groups squabble over prospective Vice-Presidential candidates while knocking back shiso juleps. It appears that the experiment is working: nobody seems troubled by a contradiction between dress-up and finger-licking good. (Open Mondays through Saturdays for dinner. Entrées $18-$29.)

The New Yorker, June 30, 2008

(Photograph: Honore Brown)

Attachment

by Isabel Fonseca
(Knopf)

A cultured British couple who pride themselves on unconventionality decamp to an island in the Indian Ocean, intending to continue their careers (his, advertising; hers, a women’s-health column) via the Internet. Then the wife opens a smutty letter to her husband, apparently from a lover. Rather than endure this affair, after twenty-three years of marriage, she goes online masquerading as her husband, and initiates an X-rated e-mail relationship with her rival. The plot strains credulity, but Fonseca’s vivisection of matrimony and desire is cruelly exacting. She likens pornography to a bullfight, at first “mesmerizing, upsetting, with scattered moments of surprising grace,” yet ultimately disappointing. “How in the world,” she wonders, “could it be boring and arousing at the same time?”

The New Yorker, June 23, 2008

The Lost Daughter

by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
(Europa)

In this brutally frank novel of maternal ambivalence, the narrator, a forty-seven-year-old divorcée summering alone on the Ionian coast, becomes obsessed with a beautiful young mother who seems ill at ease with her husband’s rowdy, slightly menacing Neapolitan clan. When this woman’s daughter loses her doll, the older woman commits a small crime that she can’t explain even to herself. Although much of the drama takes place in her head, Ferrante’s gift for psychological horror renders it immediate and visceral, as when the narrator recalls the “animal opacity” with which she first longed for a child, before she was devoured by pregnancy.

The New Yorker, June 9, 2008

Apples and Oranges

by Marie Brenner
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In this elegiac memoir, the author, a reporter, applies the same investigative skills that led to her exposés of the tobacco industry and Enron to a more intimate subject: her contentious relationship with her late brother, Carl. From an eccentric Jewish Texan family of compulsive record keepers—their father maintained a four-page list of his life’s achievements—Marie became a New York liberal, Carl a diehard conservative who abandoned a legal career to farm apples. As a teen-ager, he smashed his sister’s Joan Baez records; as an adult, given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, he informed her via FedEx. Her attempts to smooth over their differences by mastering the language of fruit (Carl often started conversations, “I am going to give you a quiz”) are at once comic and tinged with regret.

The New Yorker, June 2, 2008

Bright Shiny Morning

by James Frey
(Harper)

Two years after Frey’s memoir “A Million Little Pieces” was outed as part fiction, the publicly chastised writer resurfaces with a novel much of which purports to be fact. Set in a Los Angeles populated by miniature-golf moguls, ex-beauty queens, gun-shop owners, debauched child actors, meth dealers, and yoginis in thongs, this gargantuan book is seeded, Melville-like, with chapters cataloguing the city’s snarled highways and quirky innovations (e.g., the world’s first video graveyard). The characters are relentlessly stock: two lovesick kids from the heartland (“nowhere anywhere everywhere”); a bulimic, closeted movie star with a “MEGAWATT!!!!!” smile; a Mexican-American maid with an abusive employer. Frey strives for incantatory but winds up with banal; when it comes to emotion, the best he can muster is “It’s deep, it’s true, and it’s real real real.”

The New Yorker, May 26, 2008

The Invention of Everything Else

by Samantha Hunt
(Houghton Mifflin)

In this surreal historical novel, the aged and forgotten scientist Nikola Tesla is eking out his last days at the Hotel New Yorker in 1943, communing with pigeons and the ghost of Mark Twain. His ruminations on his career (he was exploited by Edison, cheated by Marconi) and on an unrealized love intersect with the inchoate aspirations of a chambermaid whose father wants to use a time machine to be reunited with his dead wife. Hunt is adept at entering the mind of a rudderless young woman, but she is less convincing with the brilliant and possibly crazed eighty-six-year-old Tesla. Still, her vision of punch-drunk, teetering-on-modernity Manhattan dazzles in the details: a vast hotel with its own hospital and ice-skating rink; a Poverty Ball attended by millionaires in rags.

The New Yorker, May 19, 2008

South Gate

154 Central Park S., near Seventh Ave.
(212-484-5120)

There’s something resolutely male about South Gate, the new restaurant at the Jumeirah Essex House, the historic Art Deco hotel across from Central Park. Designed by Tony Chi as part of a ninety-million-dollar renovation, it’s a bachelor pad writ large: walls of mirrors, divided into angled grids, like the peel of a disco ball; leather everywhere, even on the tabletops, in various shades of latte; and, flanked by half-stocked bookshelves, a minimalist gas fireplace in which a long ripple of flame seems to leap straight from stone. All that’s missing is a bearskin rug.

But if the goal here is sly seduction, the service is slightly off-kilter. When asked which dishes best showcased the chef’s style, a waiter proclaimed, “All of them. It is like nothing you have tasted before.” Further details were not forthcoming: a pavé cut was described with karate-chop hand gestures (it turned out to be a square); the word “Lillet” drew a blank; and any question about an entrée was answered with a rearrangement of the ingredients already listed on the menu. (Of the spice-roasted cod with mustard greens: “We take the cod. We roast it with spice. There are mustard greens.”)

The exaggeration does injustice to the chef, Kerry Heffernan, formerly of Eleven Madison Park. There are no pyrotechnics here: the food is straightforward (if highly refined) American, with a gracious nod to the season, and, for the most part, it’s quite good. Tender rings of flash-seared calamari in a lobster-coriander sauce are balanced against the delicate but unmistakable earthiness of a cauliflower custard; edamame-and-ricotta cannelloni, strewn with hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, stand out as a rarity: a truly inventive vegetarian dish. Other offerings suffer slightly in execution. The wild-mushroom Martini, for instance, would be better if simply presented as a soup—its flavors are foresty and deep—rather than poured muddily into a glass, with a ghostly poached egg bobbing to the brown surface and a swampy mass of “spinach fondue” sunk below. Perhaps sensing something amiss, a waiter on a recent evening attempted to spark a conversation between two neighboring tables: “Look! Everyone is ordering the mushroom Martini!” The couples addressed looked over at each other, aghast, and then without a word turned back to their private whispers. (Open Mondays through Saturdays for lunch and dinner, and Sundays for brunch and dinner. Entrées $24-$39.)

(Photograph: Sarah Mangerson)

The New Yorker, May 5, 2008

Pravda

by Edward Docx
(Mariner)

This telescopic tale, sweeping from London to St. Petersburg, has elements of the thriller—the discovery of a dead body in the first chapter; a threatening drug dealer; a disaffected long-lost son with a claim on the family fortune—but it’s primarily a novel of ideas. The overeducated editor of a self-help magazine finds himself paralyzed by the “complete and utter evaporation of all possible belief, or consistency, or any good way for the intelligent man to live”; an aging latter-day Dorian Gray fondly remembers his life of “sexual chaos,” while recognizing that his romanticization of the past is “the true sign of a monster.” Docx has a gift for assessing “the exact shape and weight of other people’s inner selves, the architecture of their spirit,” and although the book teems with characters—the cast reaches nearly Dickensian proportions—even the most ancillary flare into being, vital and insistent.

The New Yorker, May 5, 2008

Death by a Thousand Cuts

by Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue
(Harvard)

In 1904, a French photographer documented the Chinese practice of lingchi, a form of execution that involved slicing off limbs and pieces of flesh. Europeans recoiled from what appeared to be a gruesome, lingering death, citing it as evidence of a uniquely Oriental ruthlessness. This fascinating study argues, however, that lingchi was not entirely about physical suffering—the victim was typically sedated with opium, and killed early in the process—but about a “loss of somatic integrity,” the posthumous shame of having been reduced to body parts. Crimes that merited lingchi ranged from killing a paternal grandparent to, in at least one case, cheating on taxes. Throughout, the authors do their best to downplay the exoticism of their subject, pointing to such Western practices as drawing (disembowelling) and quartering (dismembering): “It is hard to see much distinction in degrees of cruelty.”

The New Yorker, May 5, 2008

National Anthem

by Kevin Prufer
(Four Way)

The America of Prufer’s fourth collection is an empire in decline, a medicated landscape (“snow / like little tranquilizers all over the yard”) peopled by pilgrims to shopping malls. The book opens with a panoramic vision of the aftermath of apocalypse—“expired” cars, silenced TVs, coffins “unmoored and happy with the storm”—but ends intimately, with a child’s memory of his first encounter with death; the thin wire between political failure and personal grief runs taut throughout. In the eerie centerpiece poem, the suburbs are sealed under an enormous parachute, its nylon shimmering; icicles line the seams and crash into the streets, and the narrator walks for days, never finding the edge.

The New Yorker, April 28, 2008

Light Years

by Susanna Moore
(Grove)

When Moore, a novelist, was growing up in Hawaii, in the early fifties, it still took five days to reach the islands by sea from San Francisco. Yet life there for haoles (foreigners) was not unlike that of bluebloods summering in Maine: Moore and her four siblings roamed the landscape at will, while their mother, prone to nervous breakdowns, attempted to outfit them in seersucker shorts. Moore’s recollections are faithful to a child’s purview; she was shocked to learn, later, that “only haoles were allowed to live in the most desirable neighborhoods.” Interwoven in the text are excerpts from Darwin and Woolf, among others, although the most memorable line comes from an early-twentieth-century visitor to Hawaii, who reported that nearly no one was left alive who could play the nose flute “as it should be played, to the excruciation of every nerve in a Caucasian body.”

The New Yorker, April 21, 2008

Dandy in the Underworld

by Sebastian Horsley
(Harper Perennial)

Horsley, a British dandy and putative artist notorious for having undergone a crucifixion, turns a grim childhood into cocktail-party fodder in this compulsively fizzy memoir. He spins tales of his wealthy father’s infidelities and his alcoholic mother’s crashed Jaguars, suicide attempts, sojourns in a mental hospital, and second marriage to a cult member clad entirely in orange. The glee for destructive behavior is less charming in Horsley’s subsequent misadventures with drugs and sex, which, he claims, include sleeping with “more than 1,000 prostitutes, at a cost of £100,000,” and later turning tricks himself. His saving grace is an utter lack of self-pity; instead, he never fails to find himself adorable. The book’s most loving passages detail his quest for sartorial splendor: he shows up for a shark-research expedition carrying a pink lace parasol, and, in the throes of heroin addiction, has his tailor customize his suits to hold hidden syringes.

The New Yorker, April 14, 2008

Chop Suey

714 Seventh Ave., at 48th St., 2nd fl. (212) 261-5200

Chop Suey is not a Chinese restaurant. That’s fitting, since the dish it is named after was invented in America. The food served here is, instead, vaguely Korean, as filtered through the mind and the taste buds of Chop Suey’s consulting chef, Zak Pelaccio. The term “consulting chef” is a kind of warning: don’t expect to see Pelaccio in the kitchen on a nightly basis. He’s likely busy with one of his other consultant gigs (230 Fifth, Borough Food and Drink) or collaborating with a fellow star chef on a side project (rumored to be in the works: a Southeast Asian barbecue spot and a European gastropub).

A sense of absence permeates Chop Suey, which is semi-hidden on the second floor of the Renaissance hotel in Times Square. On recent visits, the dining room was barely a quarter full, which made it feel like a private aerie, perched above the neon ripple of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. The interior is refreshingly free of Asian kitsch, although the décor comes across as more designy than designed: biomorphic lipstick-orange leather chairs, ceiling fixtures that resemble giant toothbrush heads, china and cups with angles that are aggressively askew.

The menu is, alas, similarly wayward. The scallion pancake, a dependable Chinatown staple, was either too salty or too bland, depending on the mouthful. A slow-poached egg, stirred into a stone pot of rice that had been (theoretically) spiked with chile, was a tasteless take on Korean bi bim bop. Ginger chicken, cooked sous vide, appeared déshabillé—a pale huddle of flesh that, if not in fact underdone, was suggestive of underdoneness. The kitchen fared better when it fell back on European technique, as with a lobster omelette, which gained body from a decidedly French beurre blanc.

Just as Pelaccio’s ghost is glimpsed only in passing, so, too, is that of the pastry chef called in to “consult” on the dessert menu, the downtown radical Will Goldfarb, famed for using squid ink and pancetta in his concoctions. A flourless chocolate cake was perfectly serviceable, and forgettable, while “Vietnamese Iced Coffee” was Culinary Deconstruction 101: a condensed-milk sponge layered with chocolate Chantilly cream and espresso granite. The only hint of weirdness came with the pomegranate-poached pear: the fruit, stained violently incarnadine, sat in an unfortunate chartreuse soup, speared with what resembled, in texture, a dog biscuit. It looked awful. It tasted delicious. (Open daily for dinner. Entrées $18-$32.) 

(Photograph: Honore Brown)

The New Yorker, March 24, 2008