“I am not a Foodie”: Restaurants, Seinfeld, NYC, and Pop Culture.

The View

Consuming: Michael Moore’s The Terms of My Surrender on Broadway and dinner at The View. New shows so far are not so promising. The premier of Ghosted was sort of scattered, Will & Grace was broad and self-referential, and 9 J,K,L was better than I expected, and shockingly Jewish (without ever mentioning anything specifically Jewish) but very broad and retro in style. Way too much horrifying news.

Producing: Got my latest conference proposal in. More conversations with students.

Hope our trip doesn’t go as badly as Elaine and Puddy’s did. NBC.

Started back in on on the book proposal and realized I needed a true outline, something I haven’t done since high school, so I started that.

 

Anticipating:  We are heading out of the country for a week, so there will be no blog.

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 I’m not a foodie. I don’t, “Oh, this is too rare. Oh, it’s too salty.” Just eat it and shut up. I’ll eat anywhere, whatever they’re having. (Seinfeld “The Busboy”).

Melinda Clarke played the woman Jerry took on the Kramer Reality tour and Julie on The OC. Fox.

As the three of you who consistently read my blog know, I’m on a quest to eat at all the places shown on, or mentioned in Seinfeld, to tie in with my current research project. With my visiting aunt, at her request, we just ate at The View, otherwise known as “that revolving restaurant with a view of Times Square”  Newman booked for his Millennium party. If Christopher Cross was there, we did not see or hear him.

Moving to New York City from Saratoga Springs, for me, was a hard choice. On one hand,

Unlike Ilana Milecivecs’s character on Banshee, a show I’ve never seen, (she played Milos the tennis pro’s wife), I nearly never drive anymore.

my boyfriend had moved here three years prior to my doing so, and we wanted to be together, and I was able to keep my job and just move, as our college has locations all over the state, including Manhattan. On the other hand, I’d already lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Miami, and was finally getting used to easy driving and parking,  having a dishwasher and washer/dryer in my unit, and having easy access to friends.

I was incredibly lucky. Unlike when I lived in those other cities, I was moving to NYC already in a relationship and with a good job, and with a rent-stabilized apartment that accepted cats. The fact that my salary would not go nearly as far (downstate faculty get a supplement, but it’s laughably small compared to how much more it costs here to do anything), was compensated somewhat by the “two can live as cheaply as one” factor.

Taking the subway everywhere and having to make choices like shop in the disgusting grocery store near our apartment or order online, and having a trip nearly anywhere in town or seeing friends be a major production is still sometimes a problem, but we do make up for it by really trying to do what is fun about the city, including eating at restaurants. Having a built-in date for this makes it much easier to do this than it was in those earlier, single, poorer incarnations of me.

Marisa Tomei played herself on Seinfeld. Here she is, fine dining, in My Cousin Vinny. 20th Century Fox.

As a “completist,” much the same way I must see every episode of a TV show, and every Oscar-nominated [fictional, full-length, live action, US made] movie each year, my goal quickly became to eat at every restaurant in the Zagat Guide. Of course, there are a number of reasons I cannot do this:

1. According to this site, there were 45,681 eating and drinking establishments in NY City (presumably across all 5 boroughs) in 2015. The 2017 Zagat Guide (which they sent me free after I reviewed some places) doesn’t state anywhere how many entries it has, and I’m too lazy to count, but the first one we got in, I think, 2013, said it had 2013 restaurants in it so it’s somewhere in there.  If we ate dinner out every night at a different Zagat-rated restaurant, it would take us over 5 1/2 years to get through them all. Of course we’d be broke and exhausted if we did this.
2. 

   Michelle Forbes handed Elaine “The Big Salad”. I never watched her in Battlestar Galactica. SciFi Channel.

   I do not, for quasi-religous reasons, eat pork or shellfish, am lactose intolerant, and just an overall picky eater. Many kinds of alcohol don’t agree with me, including red wine, which I love.  I don’t care for most whites, which means I drink rosé year-round like some kind of philistine. And I have to drink the same kind of alcohol (just wine, or just vodka, or just tequila, and I’m even having trouble with that lately), on a given day.  I’d love to be a bon-vivant, but this makes it tough.

3. Even cheap places here are expensive, and expensive places are really expensive. We have not been to a lot of the places considered “best” because it would come to nearly our monthly rent. Many of these have set menus full of scallops and bacon and stuff like that, and although Per Se has a vegetarian option, even if I could see spending that kind of money for food at all, it wouldn’t be for vegetables. Since I don’t care for most fish, Nobu is a similarly silly concept.
4. Places close frequently. New places also open, of course.

Jami Gertz couldn’t “spare a square.” I’ve never even heard of the movie Sibling Rivalry, but it has a Seinfeld overlap of 13 people. Castle Rock.

That all being said, we’re done pretty well for people with all-consuming jobs, not that much energy, and not a ton of disposable income. If there were any chance of buying a home in NYC we might not eat out much, but since there isn’t, we allow ourselves to enjoy the place (though we are saving for retirement. We don’t know where that will be exactly, but it won’t be here). Our home meals tend to revolve around inexpensive things like pasta, salads (and even pasta salads), and broiled chicken.

My policy is never to eat at the same place twice, in order to get further into the Zagat Guide, but we violate that regularly in our own neighborhood (where we have a favorite pub, and a few favorite brunch places), and near work, where coffee and lunch tend to rotate among a few not terribly interesting places.

At first, our choices often revolved around seeing a new part of the City (Chris had been

Mariska Hargitay’s character tried out for Elaine on Jerry. I’m not much for food trucks myself, nor procedural shows. NBC.

here for a few years before I moved but really hadn’t explored much). We are perpetually on a quest for something–usually the Best Cheeseburger (for him), or the Best Fried Chicken (for me). For the record, these are Minetta Tavern (I had a steak so I can’t compare it) and Red Rooster, respectively. I like to go to long-established places before they disappear, only to be replaced with banks and chain stores.

 

We do try to keep the prices down somewhat by going for brunch or lunch instead of dinner, by taking advantage of NYC’s twice yearly “Restaurant Week” (which is about a month), when many places, including famous expensive places, or prix-fixes (that’s how we got to The 21 Club and Le Cirque), have a 3-course limited menu for about $42. We also reserve on Open Table, which gives us a gift-certificate after a certain number of reservations.

Bette Midler also played herself. She also had brunch in The First Wives Club. Paramount.

I nearly always check in on Facebook (at least the first time), and then check it off in “The Guide”, as I tend to have a poor memory. and I write in places not in ZG. They include sit-down, carry-out, delivery. Just coffee, just cupcakes, or full meals. The total is:

 

• 152 that appear in the current Zagat Guide
• 78 places that do not–older ZGs had more chain restaurants like Hale & Hearty, where I often get a salad or soup for lunch, and more restaurants uptown, like the ones in our neighborhood–but the last couple of editions have purged a lot of places.
• For a grand total of 230

As much of “old New York” has vanished and continues to vanish (I read about places closing every day), I hope whenever we move away that I’ll feel like I really “did” the city.