dresese

Waldy's Wood-Fired Pizza & Penne

About 10 months ago I heard about the soon-to-be-open Waldy's Wood-Fired Pizza & Penne. I don't know if the article I read got it wrong, or things were just late, but it opened about 8 months later than it was supposed to. I've been waiting mildly for months now. There already is a great pizza place by where I work, La Pizza Fresca, so I wasn't exactly desperate. But good restaurants in the 6 blocks north of where I work are pretty much nonexistent, so I was curious and hopeful. I went almost as soon as it opened. At the time of writing this, I've been there twice so far, both times with my co-workers.

Waldy's is a tiny, tiny place. Probably only about 10 people have room to sit, with standing room for 4 more. Everyone else must get takeout. I got there early, but there was a huge line at around 12:30.

At Waldy's you can order a fairly expensive pizza (something like $14 for a small pizza, $18 for a large), and can choose from about 10 different varieties, most of them unusual but tasteful.

As you probably guessed from the name, everything is cooked in a wood-fired oven. From what I've read, it is an interesting ventilation design. There was no ventilation for this shop to use, so all of the smoke gets piped out of the front door.

The pizza crust is thicker than normal. It has a tough, hearty consistency. The first time I went, it was undercooked. The second time I went, slightly overcooked. I think even if perfectly cooked, it is not the best crust, certainly, but it isn't bad.

We got, the Margherita Pizza, which was very nice, with a combination of cheese, as well as some cherry tomatoes. This is almost always the best pizza to get at any wood-fired pizza joint in New York, and this time was no exception.

We also got a Clam pizza, which was not generally liked. The clams were nice on the pizza, but there was no sauce, and the pizza was unpleasantly dry. This was the first time I've experienced a clam pizza. Maybe all of them are too dry, but I doubt it.

The "Beacon" pizza was better. It is named for Waldy's restaurant, The Beacon. It has wild mushrooms and onions. A nice mushroom taste, far better than most mushroom pizzas in the city.

And now, one of the most interesting, a pizza with arugula, garlic, and two fried eggs! A wonderful pizza, I thought. The garlic is quite noticeable, so if you don't like garlic, don't get this pizza. And as you can tell from the picture, the egg yolks have broken. The first time we got this pizza, they were whole. Either way, they were runny and delicious. Isn't everything better with fried eggs on it? However, they were not evenly distributed on the pizza, just two fried eggs right beside each other, leaving three quarters of the pizza egg-free. Quite unfortunate. Still, a good pizza, but it really needs more fried eggs.

Waldy's was, on the whole, good. The strength here is the toppings, not the crust. Great pizza has the crust as the strength, so this is not great pizza. But I thought the toppings were interesting and really worked well together. Due to the price, I doubt I'll go here that often, but I'm happy I tried it a few times, and I'll look forward to an occasional visit.

Red Chopsticks

This is yet another in a series of queued-up restaurant posts. I think it was two months ago I ate at Red Chopsticks in Flushing with my friend Ben and his visiting friend from Pittsburg. I've seen this restaurant several times in my wanderings there, and it was always full, which is a good sign. The food was Cantonese in style, with an emphasis on fresh seafood.

We ordered a variety of dishes. As a vegetable we had Si Gua, or Chinese Okra as it is called. I almost always like this vegetable, and this time was no exception. It is sweet and slightly crunchy, which was a good contrast to some of the saltier, tangier dishes we tried.

A specialty of Red Chopsticks was the sticky rice in bamboo. There were several kinds, we got the plain sticky rice, which was delicious. And, as you can see, quite elegantly served.

We also got one of the unusual dishes on the menu, basil snails. The snails were out of the shell, which is the first time I've had snails like that. They had a semi-crunchy, semi-chewy texture, not unlike conch. The dish was surprisingly spicy. Not overwhelmingly so, but more than I would have guessed.

Also slightly unusual was the dish with stir-fried deep-fried anchovies with peanuts. A bit salty, as you might expect. However, it was full of flavor, and had a great chewy texture. This would be good bar food, I think. The most amazing thing about it was contemplating how many creatures actually had to die just to give us an appetizer.

All in all, a very good meal. I'd say this is the best Cantonese-style food I've had in New York, although that isn't saying much. The Cantonese offerings here are fairly limited in comparison to San Francisco. However, this place is good on it's own merits, regardless of location. Keeping in mind that I didn't have any of the fresh seafood that they specialize in, for what I had I'd say that it is perhaps not great, but it certainly was good.

Subway search

Last week the police has started to do random bag checks in random subway stations. I hadn't seen it until Monday, where the police were at the Forest Hills station, searching all bags. I asked if I could take a picture of them, but they said no.

They were fairly thorough, though, at least more thorough than the bag check I go through at the Mid-Manhattan Public Library. I have a backpack with 5 compartments, 3 of which are big enough to hold something dangerous. The library checks one. The police at the subway on Monday checked two. Not bad, but not perfect either. I didn't point it out to them, though. I was anxious to go on to the oven-like subway platform and swelter while waiting for my train.

Decent Pearl Milk Tea

Or, as they call it here, "Bubble Tea". A block away from the B/D station in Chinatown, I noticed a Pearl Milk Tea place I never saw before. As I've written before, getting decent Pearl Milk Tea, even in Chinatown & Flushing, is not easy. A few months ago Ben took me to a decent place, Sago Tea, in Flushing, but although it was good, with later visits I found the place inconsistent.

At any rate, this place in Chinatown was called "Quickly".

I was immediately impressed by the look of the tea. I like it when they cover it with plastic that you have to punch through with a straw. It's a great design, and I think it correlates fairly well with the better places. When I tried the tea, my thoughts were confirmed, and the tea was just as good as I had hoped. Not the best I've had, but maybe the best for New York so far.

I'll definitely come back here on my frequent visits to nearby Dumpling House.

Mac slowdown

After installing Tiger, my Mac has gotten really slow. It has been taking me several minutes just for me to log on. Greta recently said how her account is incredibly slow as well.

I took a look, and found she had RSS feeds automatically set up in Safari, that she never used. The "news" feed had over 1000 articles in it! I figured this may be causing Safari to eat huge amounts of memory, which would cause the slowdown. I deleted all her RSS stuff. It seemed to work, and things are zippy once again. And evidently her Safari was affecting my account, because she always is logged on with Safari running, and I use user switching to switch to my account while hers is still active.

Kind of scary. I wonder how many Mac users don't understand their Safari RSS features, and are suffering from a huge slowdown now because of it.

Bicycle Messenger World Championships

My coworker Brody just went over to Jersey for the Bike Messenger World Championship, where he witnessed all manner of fun. Read all about it on his blog posting. While you are at it, check out his great post about New York vocabulary weirdness.

Westville Market

One night Adam, Ben and I were wandering around the West Village, in search of some food. We wandered by a very interesting looking little restaurant, Westville Market. And it was a very little restaurant indeed, with a sort of rustic Napa Valley-esque charm.

We chose to wait outside, and shortly afterwards we were seated and attempting to pick out which of the many delicious things on the menu we wanted to get. The vegetables were supposedly great, but they were out of the Cuban-style corn. The turkey burger was especially recommended, but no one opted for that. Instead, we got a platter of 4 vegetables: shaved fennel and parmesan, asparagus, mushrooms, and beets. Each of them were delicious in their own way, and the taste of the vegetables really came through.

Adam and I both ordered the same thing. Normally I'm reluctant to do that, but I really couldn't say no to the fish taco offering. It was very tasty, although more like a burrito than a taco. And the fries that it comes with were perfect too.

Ben got a steak sandwich. It looked delicious, but I didn't taste it.

This is a very solid place. Maybe not worth traveling long distances for, but if you are in the neighborhood, try it! I gotta remember to try this place for lunch as well.

WuLiangYe

I first heard of WuLiangYe in China, when I had some of their strong and tasty liquor, and someone bought for me a glass of their liquor with a glass ship inside. It was quite cool, but Greta never let me open the darn thing to drink! I guess somethings are just too nice to use.

The second time I hard of WuLiangYe was at Little Sichuan in San Mateo, California. I had lunch with a few fellow Intraspect employees, and Qingyang told me that as good as Little Sichuan was (and it was oh so good), on her recent trip to New York, she found WuLiangYe's restaurant in Manhattan was even better.

So, after I moved to New York, I was determined to try WuLiangYe's restaurant. After some research, I found that it was probably one of the best Sichuan in Manhattan, competing for that title with Grand Sichuan.

After trying both, I find both excellent, but I slightly prefer WuLiangYe. The latest time I went was with my ex-Intraspect colleagues and friends Tash and Hollander, who probably were there in San Mateo when Qingyang told us how good this place was. We went to WuLiangYe on 48th Street.

First up was the classic dumplings in hot oil. I actually prefer Little Sichuan's to all others, but I can't explain why. I was actually addicted to Little Sichuan's dumplings at one time, and that craving never left. These are more delicate, and really delicious. And look at them. They are beautiful!

Ah, next the Cold Rooster. I love this dish. I've had it before, and it wasn't a huge hit with anyone except me. It's cold, a little salty, and full of those mouth-numbing Sichuan peppercorns. What people dislike is that there are many bones, and not huge amounts of meat. However, I feel that this is all the better for enjoying the wonderful spicy sauce that contains it. The waiter told me we wouldn't like this dish, and he was sort of right, because Tash and Hollander weren't huge fans. But I ate out almost the entire thing. Glorious.

We also got the Sichuan "yu-xiang" eggplant, which is a classic vegetable I usually get at Sichuan restaurants.

Finally, we got the classic "Ants Climbing a Tree", which is cellophane noodles with pork and green onions, in a spicy sauce. Very tasty here.

There's many more great dishes here. If you go, get plenty of things off the inside cover of the menu, and the first two pages of the menu. And be sure to try to WuLiangYe liquor, which has a very interesting robust rice-liquor taste.

Children in the Land of the Dead

I went to see Romero's Land of the Dead today. I decided to go about 2 minutes after it started showing, so I ran to the theater. Luckily for me, I got there just as they were starting the Serenity trailer, which looked wonderful. It actually looked like it was a movie-length version of the last episode.

At any rate, some bozo brought their year-old child, and did not leave throughout the movie, no matter how many people told them to take the damn baby out. The baby didn't cry at all, a fairly impressive feat for a baby watching a zombie film. Instead, it sort of cooed all the time. It sort of went like this:

Guy in movie: OK, I'll just wait for you guys here. I'll be fine! [Zombie pops up and eats the guys face, with flesh and blood splattered everywhere]

Baby: Coo! Gurgle!

Audience member: Take the fucking baby out!

Owner of baby, if there was one: [Silence]

Not only that, but I had another experience that I previously had in watching Eyes Wide Shut. About fifteen minutes into the movie, a mother and 4 of her kids, ranging from 12 to 4 years old, tramped in. For both of these movies, I just don't understand the mentality that a person uses to choose movies. Does she not know this was a zombie movie? I didn't see her later, she probably figured left soon, which was just what the person in Eyes Wide Shut did. Maybe it's the same woman, who specializes in taking her kids to wildly inappropriate movies. She followed me from San Francisco! Now that's scary.

At any rate, it was a good movie. As usual for Romero zombie films, it has some great satire. Kind of depressing though. A lot of people died. I think I'm getting too mellow, that thing would never have upset me before. But at the end I felt pretty good, because with O'Connor resigning, and the administration as usual dragging their heels on climate change in the G8 conference, I was feeling pretty down today. But now I realize that no matter how bad things are, at least we don't have to deal with zombies.