Results tagged “brianvan”

This week, Bruni visits Rosanjin in Tribeca for kaseiki, finds it "strange and sometimes wonderful" and awards the restaurant two stars. The meal of many small courses is supposed to provide spiritual uplift in its ceremony. For Bruni, "the glory is in the details," like the uni wrapped in a shiso leaf, then battered and fried. The later courses were letdowns, however, and sometimes the small courses left him hungry two hours later.

It seems like young, affluent hipsters are always finding something new to do with their voluminous free time. Remember the Rated X parties from earlier in the year? The ones that clogged your Flickr streams with low-quality amateur porn every couple of weeks? Well, the phenomenon has mutated and it's been gelatin-ized. The Amateur Female Jello Wrestling people have been staging monthly events since 2003-- but it's only recently that they've captured the attention of the legions of NYC photobloggers. Sadly, the influx of cameras usually marks the shark-jumping moment of any nightlife meme, so you'll have to hurry to get in on the slippery fun.

It turns out that yesterday's successful attempt to free the U.S.S. Intrepid from being mired in Hudson River mud was momentarily in doubt. The tugboats initially managed to move the 29,000 ton aircraft carrier ten feet, but then it stopped. The NY Times reports that towing pilot for McAllister Towing, Jeffrey McAllister "urged tugboat pilots to try to 'wiggle' the hull to break the grip of the mud" which worked. McAllister, though, said, "If we had one less horsepower with us today, we’d still be sitting back there scratching our heads." One tugboat crew member told Newsday, "I'm glad because I'm tired of getting calls about, 'Hey, stuck in the mud.'"

-- And in an unfortunate segue: Happy Jewish new year! Shana tovah, everybody!

To get to the 20th floor of 230 Fifth Avenue you need to walk past security, through turnstiles ready for keycards, past all the stores on the ground floor to a nearly private elevator and the cheetah in the foyer will let you know you’ve made it. And by “made it” we mean “are ready to spend $12 for a well cocktail” or $9 for a beer in a very, very narrow glass. The vitriol you are feeling may be because you’re still in the building — our gimlet didn’t get any cheaper up one flight to the roof but it did taste better with the best view of the area we’ve seen.

New York is literally brimming with Tobey Maguire sightings this week. Apparently Spiderman 3 is shooting around town, and we've been receiving dozens of sightings and reports. Today, Brian Van sent in this shot, along with a report:

On Friday A Hamburger Today and Cupcakes Take The Cake joined forces to take over a particularly niche spot, Burgers & Cupcakes. On a particularly unappealing stretch of Ninth Avenue (our closest landmark is B & H Camera) the restaurant is bright, colorful and more than a little kitsch-y. The staff remained bubbly, gracious and seemingly undaunted as the groups and their readers took all eighty seats hungry.

Stemming from a short piece in the Voice journalist Nerz writes about the history of competitive eating, tracks day to day training of the superstars and his own adventures in hope of gastrointestinal glory.

Brian Van headed over to Trader Joe's at Union Square this morning, and says it was "crowded as hell." He has a set of photographs on Flickr, and we asked him if people were getting green leis, due to St. Patrick's Day. Brian said no, but:

All of the staff were wearing these quirky-patterned shirts (I'd say hawaiian but I'm no authority on shirt patterns) and were happily greeting people. Balloons were everywhere, mostly green and white for St. Patty's day. And there were a TON of food handouts. So many. One guy gave me a handful of some sort of peanut mix, and I happily scarfed it down... only to find out from the searing sensation in my mouth a second later that it was Thai trail mix.

Continue reading "Enter the Trader Joe's Era of Grocery Shopping"

Brian Van sent us this photograph of Nicole Richie delivering Dr. Diet Pepper at 6th Avenue and West 3rd Street. This is 99.9% Nicole Richie, but with this whole "sunglasses bigger than your head" trend, how can we be so sure that it isn't that chick who has been playing JT LeRoy?

Note: a few people were uncomfortable with the picture of Lindsay that we used on this post, so we took it down. We got the warning label from this fun site. Peace and love, y'all!

Sounds like today is just going to be full of boring political news, so Gothamist has decided to flood the zone with Halloween hijinx! Send us links to your favorite costume shots and we'll link them here-- or just leave them in the comments. [Pictured to the right is Gothamist baby #1 Jonas, as an octopus.]

If you missed any of them be sure to get to one of their next shows, you won't regret it.

Reader Eric McGregor let Gothamist know that he checked out the events we'd written about earlier this week: 1 More Time for the 9 party - which is exactly what it sounds like - and Manhunt! Dumbo (hide and seek in the shadows of the Manhattan Bridge). Eric has photographs and video from both events at his site, and notes that DUMBO is perfect for hide and seek because "there's almost no traffic" and "there aren't that many pedestrians."

And as reader Brian Van points out, since favored musical Wicked did not win, we'd like Times public editor Daniel Okrent to make good on his claim that "if [Wicked] loses the Tony I'll eat my black satin jacket from the road company of Jekyll and Hyde." You name the venue, Daniel!