Thursday, December 27, 2007
Step outside and into adventure – Upper West Side, Manhattan
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Attending the Friday dress rehearsal of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera – not an easy opera to like, of which more anon – put us on the Upper West Side at lunchtime, not bad timing for doing some long neglected shopping. You might well ask, why, since we East Midtown people have everything. Not so, UWS Broadway is where you go, to Harry’s at 83rd Street for winter boots and the Town Shop at 81st for fitted undergarments. So, girdling our loins, we started the trek north on Broadway, west of Lincoln Center.
Broadway is pretty dull to 72ND Street, institutional, big shops, then it gets more individualized. In the mid-70s you reach the famed Fairway supermarket, a long stretch of joined stores with big outdoors racks of vegetables and such, not too neat. Then comes Citarella, the famed fish and meat emporium. That is where you begin to see people carrying bright orange- lettered Zabar’s bags, a warning that the great brand-name deli is near.
But before reechoing Zabar’s at 80th Street, there is H & H Bagels, the “Like no other bagel in the world” claimant. There are three food items I test diners and delis on, bagels and Caesar salad (the third escapes me, for now), and this was the appropriate time to test the product at the source, after hearing many “we sell H&H” declarations. Bagels were all that this entire store sold, besides soft drinks in ceiling-high coolers. Ahead of me were two school-girls, each buying a bagel. Interesting, suitable to schoolchildren’s taste? - I had heard more than once that H&H product is too sweet. The bagels were $1.20 apiece, and announced as available in one more store, on 46th Street.
Eventually, testing the H&H “Everything” bagels against our . Metro supermarket’s deli product, 89 cents for two, I found little difference. Both were NY size (that can be up to 5oz, 350 calories), medium crusty, the H&H a bit less dough-ey. My tastes were formed by Zooky’s Deli, once on 17th and 3rd Ave, where you watched the bagel rolling, pre-boiling and baking on long wooden rods, and learned to eat them cool (hot and sticking to your teeth is déclassé). This was sharp contrast to the product of my Bronx-Grand Concourse youth, a glazed egg bagel, which I liked when I knew no better. Nowadays I also see a New Jersey bagel, soft and flavored and favored by the ignorant. Avast, tradition-breakers, you are ruining a heritage. Bagels need a preservationist, like Jack Taylor, to protect our tradition.
Anyway, on to Zabar’s. The store runs half a block long, in joined buildings. The smoked fish are as expected, superb. The mail-order catalog is 32 pages, and they have houseware specials, announced on the PA system by a clipped voice that might have been ordered up by Henry Higgins to represent New York (we just saw Pygmalion at the Roundabout, closing in December). The best bargain is a coffee mug for $1 plus tax, with the familiar Zabar’s orange logo, advertising smoked fish and cheese.
We did stop at their little deli, to have a cup of coffee and a container of whitefish salad (comes with a roll of your choice, $3.75) at the center family table. A well-dressed thin lady, apparently the mother of a physician, was instructing a youngish doctor and her husband in the intricacies of internship at Montefiore Hospital, and the perils of practicing family medicine in New York. When the largely silent couple left, one could head two savants disputing the inside facts of Nixon’s 1972 trip to China. Ah, the West Side!
Having decided against taking home a Reuben corn beef panino with Swiss cheese on fresh foccacia bread ($4.98), we stepped outside. There was a half-block long ray of picnic tables, laden with displays of shrink-wrapped books, all new or nearly new, with handwritten lengthy price labels (Philip Roth’s Human Stain was marked “Only $18, compare to $29.12 at B&N”). There was also a foot-high spider robot with fiery eyes stalking the sidewalk and terrifying small dogs – a wow.wee RoboQuad from Canada, yours for $100, tax-free. Yep, that’s UVS.
The subway trip from 79th Street back home, with transfer at Times Square, once more proved that the young people of New York are decent and polite, despite bad press. Several youngsters, mostly young Asian, Black and Hispanic women, were observed offering their seats to elders, with smiles and without prompting. Genuine, not just the holiday spirit.
As for the latter, the platform performers were out in full force, in the Times Square transfer area between the 1/9 and the R /N trains , the Jaz Band, an Asian ensemble with a nimble clarinetist offering fast beats, and a black shirted group of gymnasts doing somersaults and spins while standing on their heads, and the usual Far Eastern string players in nooks here and there, strumming amplified Haydn. All normal .
Attending the Friday dress rehearsal of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera – not an easy opera to like, of which more anon – put us on the Upper West Side at lunchtime, not bad timing for doing some long neglected shopping. You might well ask, why, since we East Midtown people have everything. Not so, UWS Broadway is where you go, to Harry’s at 83rd Street for winter boots and the Town Shop at 81st for fitted undergarments. So, girdling our loins, we started the trek north on Broadway, west of Lincoln Center.
Broadway is pretty dull to 72ND Street, institutional, big shops, then it gets more individualized. In the mid-70s you reach the famed Fairway supermarket, a long stretch of joined stores with big outdoors racks of vegetables and such, not too neat. Then comes Citarella, the famed fish and meat emporium. That is where you begin to see people carrying bright orange- lettered Zabar’s bags, a warning that the great brand-name deli is near.
But before reechoing Zabar’s at 80th Street, there is H & H Bagels, the “Like no other bagel in the world” claimant. There are three food items I test diners and delis on, bagels and Caesar salad (the third escapes me, for now), and this was the appropriate time to test the product at the source, after hearing many “we sell H&H” declarations. Bagels were all that this entire store sold, besides soft drinks in ceiling-high coolers. Ahead of me were two school-girls, each buying a bagel. Interesting, suitable to schoolchildren’s taste? - I had heard more than once that H&H product is too sweet. The bagels were $1.20 apiece, and announced as available in one more store, on 46th Street.
Eventually, testing the H&H “Everything” bagels against our . Metro supermarket’s deli product, 89 cents for two, I found little difference. Both were NY size (that can be up to 5oz, 350 calories), medium crusty, the H&H a bit less dough-ey. My tastes were formed by Zooky’s Deli, once on 17th and 3rd Ave, where you watched the bagel rolling, pre-boiling and baking on long wooden rods, and learned to eat them cool (hot and sticking to your teeth is déclassé). This was sharp contrast to the product of my Bronx-Grand Concourse youth, a glazed egg bagel, which I liked when I knew no better. Nowadays I also see a New Jersey bagel, soft and flavored and favored by the ignorant. Avast, tradition-breakers, you are ruining a heritage. Bagels need a preservationist, like Jack Taylor, to protect our tradition.
Anyway, on to Zabar’s. The store runs half a block long, in joined buildings. The smoked fish are as expected, superb. The mail-order catalog is 32 pages, and they have houseware specials, announced on the PA system by a clipped voice that might have been ordered up by Henry Higgins to represent New York (we just saw Pygmalion at the Roundabout, closing in December). The best bargain is a coffee mug for $1 plus tax, with the familiar Zabar’s orange logo, advertising smoked fish and cheese.
We did stop at their little deli, to have a cup of coffee and a container of whitefish salad (comes with a roll of your choice, $3.75) at the center family table. A well-dressed thin lady, apparently the mother of a physician, was instructing a youngish doctor and her husband in the intricacies of internship at Montefiore Hospital, and the perils of practicing family medicine in New York. When the largely silent couple left, one could head two savants disputing the inside facts of Nixon’s 1972 trip to China. Ah, the West Side!
Having decided against taking home a Reuben corn beef panino with Swiss cheese on fresh foccacia bread ($4.98), we stepped outside. There was a half-block long ray of picnic tables, laden with displays of shrink-wrapped books, all new or nearly new, with handwritten lengthy price labels (Philip Roth’s Human Stain was marked “Only $18, compare to $29.12 at B&N”). There was also a foot-high spider robot with fiery eyes stalking the sidewalk and terrifying small dogs – a wow.wee RoboQuad from Canada, yours for $100, tax-free. Yep, that’s UVS.
The subway trip from 79th Street back home, with transfer at Times Square, once more proved that the young people of New York are decent and polite, despite bad press. Several youngsters, mostly young Asian, Black and Hispanic women, were observed offering their seats to elders, with smiles and without prompting. Genuine, not just the holiday spirit.
As for the latter, the platform performers were out in full force, in the Times Square transfer area between the 1/9 and the R /N trains , the Jaz Band, an Asian ensemble with a nimble clarinetist offering fast beats, and a black shirted group of gymnasts doing somersaults and spins while standing on their heads, and the usual Far Eastern string players in nooks here and there, strumming amplified Haydn. All normal .
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 2:15 AM 
