NYC Restaurant Grading System Dismystified

for you, by me:

A = pretty clean but nothing to write home about
B = the staff doesn't wash their hands and/or no soap in the bathroom
C = RATatouille is making your grilled cheese
D = Human-sized rats with 2 heads are the main clientele

Perverse R-rated Addendum to G-Rated Holiday Song Post

Many many oh so many years ago, Jeff and I and another friend Jeff spent a festive Christmas eve at MoMA watching the much-loved holiday classic, Cocksucker Blues.
Somehow wasn't quite the stuff of tradition.

TradishUUUN, tradition! or lack thereof!

God Forbid We Celebrate Thanksgiving Like Normal People

As the child of bohemian, peripatetic  parents, I yearned for traditions, for anchors, for terra firma, for a chance to say, “We always…” about something. “We always make pancakes on Sunday morning,” “We always go see the Christmas windows at Lord & Taylor.” Nobody else seemed to notice we were missing something, so I set out to create some traditions for us, for my family.

I tried to establish an annual tradition where my dad – a man raised in a Kosher home in Borough Park, Brooklyn – would read “A Visit from St. Nick” in his booming voice every Christmas eve. He obliged one year, not unhappily, but it didn’t take; nobody but me cared.

One year – age 8 or 9 -- I gave myself a job usually assigned to a bachelor uncle or the guy who owns the hardware store. For the benefit of my little brother, I dressed myself up as Santa Claus, wearing my snazzy red vinyl coat (Santa as styled by Fiorucci?), and relieving the medicine cabinet of its entire stock of cotton balls. No surprise, this little attempt was a  one-off.

We certainly had no real Thanksgiving traditions, not even at the most basic level, i.e., we couldn't even claim that every year we sat down with family and ate turkey somewhere, anywhere. A couple of times we went to my grandmother’s or my aunt’s in Brooklyn (our big tradition in this scenario was always to be late; sometimes there would be shouting about it). One year my mother tried to make a goose. There was the time we went out to dinner, deeply offending my fantasies of what Thanksgiving was supposed to look like – and I don’t think anyone even ordered turkey. Yet another time my mother woke herself up at 4:00 a.m. to start cooking the damn Bird.

I’ve never liked Thanksgiving. I don’t like turkey white meat; it tastes like nothing, and has a texture reminiscent of a woodchip. And I guess I didn’t like Thanksgiving because of what it represented – a lack of family traditions, our family’s inability to make statements that began, “Every July 4th we…” or “Every time it snows, we…”

As an adult, as a parent, I haven’t really turned things around in this department the way I thought I might, once I was the grown-up. It so happens I’ve had some very lovely Thanksgivings over the past couple of decades, but there’s no “Every year for Thanksgiving, we…”. Jeff and I spent one exceptional and unusual Thanksgiving, pre-kids, in Venice. The mist rose obligingly off the Grand Canal, and there was nary a roasted flightless bird to be found. Another time, we had a lovely Thanksgiving at the country house of friends (a converted farmhouse in a field – a Gourmet magazine photo spread-ready setting), with our kids, and their kids, and another pair of friends and their kids. And here and there, back in Brooklyn, I even managed to turn out a couple of passable birds myself with the help of scandalous amounts of butter.

And one time, 10 years ago, when I was 8 1/2 months  pregnant with my first kid – too pregnant to go anywhere, too pregnant to feed anybody – Jeff and my in-laws and my mother and my sister-in-law and I had a Thanksgiving dinner at a lovely restaurant a couple of blocks from home. Cucina, helmed by Michael Ayoub, was the first “good” restaurant (read: Manhattan-y) in Park Slope, the first one that might induce Manhattanites to cross a river. It no longer exists. There was another restaurant at that address for several years, and it, too, is now gone. This year, Michael Ayoub returned to the site and opened up a new restaurant. And guess what, that’s where my little family is having Thanksgiving this year.

Phew!  I officially have the right to say, “Every ten years we have Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant at 254 5th Avenue that is owned by Michael Ayoub.” A tradition! Michael Ayoub, you'd better cooperate.

Enjoy your version, be it unique to this year, or an always and every. And pass the yams.

ScrooGrinch Songs for the Season - Follow-Up

From some contributing editors:

Happy Xmas (War Is Over) - John and Yoko

I think this is the closest thing to a Beatles Christmas song, but please do correct me if I'm wrong. And send a link!

2000 Miles - Pretenders 

Chrissie's voice tempers any threat of over-done sentimentality. 

River  - Joni Mitchell 

Why don't you just kill us, Joni?

The Christmas Song  - Nat King Cole

What's to be said? The ultimate.

Last Christmas  - WHAM

New one on me! How is that possible, how could I have missed all that hair?

And something I just remembered:

Christmas Wrapping - The Waitresses

Not to be confused with the "Square Pegs" theme song, though it may actually be the same song

Xmas Songs for Scrooges and Grinches - Holiday Tunes That Don't Make My Teeth Ache

Xmas is coming, sort of, eventually; time to start force-feeding the goose. And time for me to wear ear plugs in chain drugstores because most Christmas music sends me looking for bridges and open windows on high floors.

Below, an incomplete list of holiday songs I can tolerate and some I even like:

(NOTE: in many cases, the vids are lame – I am providing links largely for the music):

Christmas, Baby Please Come Home – Darlene Love and Phil Specter and some backup mix of his regular crew of girls; plus Phil Spector’s bizarre-o spoken Christmas message to You, the Listener – where he sounds a hell of a lot like Squiggy -- at the beginning (or maybe it’s at the end?) of his iconic Xmas album (couldn’t find a sound clip)

Christmas Time Is Here - Vince Guaraldi Trio doing any part of the Charlie Brown Xmas special score 

Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth - David Bowie and Bing Crosby's freakazoid yet beautiful duet of “Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth” 

Christmas for the Jews - Darlene Love SNL Claymation Short-- I started humming this on Nov 1

The Who Song (Welcome Christmas) - from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, of course. I always think of it as "Yahoo Doray."

Also, “You’re a Mean One, Mister Grinch,” though not sure this actually counts as a holiday song

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas - warbled tremulously by Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis (grab a full box of Kleenex before you click!) 

Run, Run Rudolph -Chuck Berry

Santa Claus is Comin' to Town - The Boss

Little Saint Nick - The Beach Boys - 

Blue Christmas -  from the Elvis '68 Comeback Special
(I must say, I’m right there with the screaming chicks – sexiest rendition of a xmas song ever?)

The Christmas Song (Chestnuts roasting...) - Sinatra 

Santa Baby - Eartha Kitt  

Let It Snow Dean Martin rendition (suave) – I’ve brought me some corn for poppin…

Let It Snow Sinatra rendition (swingin’)

Christmas in Hollis - Run-DMC

O Holy Night - Paul Schaeffer’s 15 second impersonation of Cher singing “O Holy Night” 

What’s on your list? Check it twice, naughty or nice!

Ever in Search of Fun and Food, my dad was

Memories of my dad, who would've been 89 today. In list form.

Some food Dad liked, from high to low and in between, in no order:

• Caviar
• Mallomars
• Whitefish
• Mama liga with pot cheese, sprinkling of caviar
• Helzel
• 2 buttered rolls
• Borscht, cold, with sour cream
• Frozen cheese blintzes, again with the sour cream
• Halvah
• ½ a grapefruit, eaten aggressively with a spoon, juice flying, a person could go blind!
• Smoked Nova Scotia salmon (not lox)
• Jarslberg cheese on a Carr’s water cracker
• Hot peppers
• Pickles
• Franks-in-blanks
• Enough free samples at Dean & Deluca to make a lunch
• Cantaloupe
• Fig Newtons
• The leftover escargot garlic butter cadged from me with dunking bread – at the old Brasserie
• Egg creams (no eggs, no cream)
• Raw egg – tap a little hole in one end, sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper, and suck that sucker out. Served as a great parlor trick performed at our kitchen in the morning after a sleepover, disgusting and thrilling my little friends. Don’t try this at home in the age of rampant salmonella.
• Instant coffee prepared thusly: heaping spoon of coffee “crystals,” heaping spoon of sugar, AND heaping spoon of honey, served in a small yellow-taxi-themed mug (tire for a handle) Tony gave him
• Breakfast at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton
• Pretty much anything my Aunt Clarice made and brought from Brooklyn

Some things Dad thought were fun, from high to low and in between, in no order

• Reading T.S. Eliot
• Going grocery shopping at the A&P or Gristedes in East Hampton
• Schnorring (funny Yiddish word for begging) lunch at Dean & Deluca, see above
• Playing pinochle
• Starting a company with $1500 he won in a pinochle game
• Breaking tunelessly into song, at top volume
• Humiliating his offspring by doing things like inexplicably yelling “Bop!” in a supermarket (again with the supermarkets!)
• Visiting me in college and dining at our on-campus greasy spoon, The Pub
• The Tonight Show
• Seinfeld
• Thelonius Monk
• Chet Baker
• Al Jolson
• Cole Porter
• Rodgers and Hart and/or Hammerstein
• Bach, iconic performances by Wanda Landowska on harpsichord
• The NY Times crossword puzzle
• William Safire’s column
• Illegally driving on to the beach in East Hampton in a dune buggy -- then getting stuck in the water, having to be pulled out by some large yellow machinery – not sure if that part counted as fun
• Dancing to the rock-n-roll music
• My childhood art work
• Speaking in Yiddish with Norman Podhoretz at fancy parties 
• Xmas tree shopping at Hren's Nursery and joking around with JP Fecteau
• Going "macho frio" -- his made up term for not wearing a coat, but layering, layering, layering, plus "muffler" (tx Tort)
• His family

Some things Dad disapproved of

• Being bored

I'm Not Throwing It Out and You Can't Make Me and I'm Not a Hoarder, exactly

I don’t believe that fashion-makeover-show trope, If you haven’t worn it in two years, throw it out.

I may be making a massive rationalization for my over-stuffed closet. And over-stuffed dresser drawers. And my over-stuffed other closet. And, well, you get the picture.

But for every cry of, Holy shit, how is it possible I still have this Laura Ashley dress? Oh wait, I know – Rose can wear it someday! We can make pillowcases out of it or doll clothes or napkins or fancy silver-polishing rags! there’s another head-slapping moment of, Why did I sell that adorable little Tocca coat to Beacon’s Closet for 4 dollars? Why did I give away those J. Crew riding boots? 

And for every plea of Jeff’s that starts, Do you think we can we get rid of …  there are the smug, satisfied occasions that go like this: I am so glad I never threw out this little Brooks Brothers Barbour-style rain jacket (a treasured item from back in the day when there were only two Brooks stores in the world, the Madison Avenue location, and somewhere in Japan, and not like now in every mall and airport) that I sported freshman year in high school, because today is the perfect day to wear it (ok, can’t zip it, but it’s not really that cold, right?).

And that is what I’m wearing today – a Brooks Brothers boys size 20 olive-green Poland-made (whuh?) rain jacket with drawstring waist and tan and black and red plaid lining and a hood. It’s making me happy. Coming out of a childhood that wasn’t quite rooted, a little nomadic, slightly insecure, I think I treasure – even objectify – certain objects from my past as sort of half-baked family heirlooms, even if they’ve only ever belonged to me, and not handed down from previous generations like normal people’s family heirlooms.

And think about it, if they ever decide to revive Freaks and Geeks, which takes place exactly when I was a freshman in high school (see above, re coat), they can borrow it for some background character who’s neither freak nor geek, but a wanna be preppy-type like I was. I’ll need it back though. Family heirloom and all, you know.