Monthly Archives: July 2008

Restaurant Review: Essex

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 14, 2008 – 3:15 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, living in new york is neat, restaurant ramblings
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After a long night of kicking boys’ butts at ping-pong and pool at a local bar, my friends Sonya and Beth and I met up for brunch at Essex around 2 p.m. with my boyfriend Kamran in tow. Well, actually, Kamran and I showed up first and had to wait a few minutes, and I only mention that because two hostesses came by separately to ask us if we were waiting to be seated, which is very rare in this city where people pretend to not notice each other. One of them had wild curly blonde hair cut short and was wearing a vintage-looking pink lace dress (that Beth later informed us was actually from Forever 21), and the other had dyed-platinum unwashed hair and cute thick-framed glasses, so they had every right to act too cool for school, but they didn’t.

The decor was very black/white/red and hip, but the clientele was the same as every other brunch place in Manhattan–a bunch of twentysomething girls in jersey dresses giggling about godknowswhat. (So naturally, we fit right in.) I was amused that they offer a Sunday evening brunch until 8 p.m. after my assertion here that brunch in NYC can last strangely into the evening. Maybe that’s when all of the hip people come in. Or maybe all the hip people got lost, since the entrance to the restaurant is actually on Rivington Street instead of Essex.

Sonya had originally suggested the place solely because they include three drinks with your meal and sell you additional ones for only $3, adding that the menu looked “okay”, too. But the Essex brunch menu turned out to be so full of deliciousness that all four of us had the worst time deciding what to get. Challah french toast with bananas foster sauce? Manchego macaroni and cheese with chicken apple sausage? Chocolate-blueberry pancakes? With mimosas or screwdrivers or bloody marys?

In the end, I ordered The Southern, a biscuit with a sausage patty, scrambled eggs, and sausage gravy. The biscuit would have been too dry on its own, but with the gravy, it was amazing; I couldn’t stop sharing it with Kamran just so I could wait for him to make yummy sounds. Kamran ordered the lobster benedict, which was chopped a bit too small for his liking but still tasted delicious. Sonya ordered the salmon eggs benedict, which arrived with very rare salmon; as someone who doesn’t care for smoked salmon, it would’ve been a pleasant surprise for me, and Sonya eats all manner of salmon, godloveher. Beth ordered poached eggs with chicken apple sausage that she said were “decent”, but Beth is super-picky and can therefore be completely ignored.

The best part of the meal was something that we weren’t supposed to care about, though–the home fries. They were big, soft hunks of potato soaked in . . . I don’t know what. And Kamran, who has the most discerning palate of anyone I know, was just as befuddled. They were sort of orangey-red and spicy, and I could’ve eaten an entire plate of them. Kamran agreed that they were the best, but when I talked to Beth about them later, she said, “The potatoes were okay. I’ve had better.” I said, “Seriously?! Kamran and I loved those potatoes, though I have no idea what was in them,” and Beth said, “Yeah, they were dunked in so much stuff I had trouble finding the actual potato in all the onions and stuff. I like my potatoes a little more crispy and less mushy.” So I guess it all depends on how you take your potatoes, but once again, I vote that we ignore Beth.

The one thing we might have complained about was the drinks included in the meal. Our waitress brought them so quickly that the bartender might have had 50 of them pre-made and lined up on the bar, and going down, they tasted alcoholless. But then we stood up and tried to cross the street pretty unsuccessfully.

Needless to say, we’ll be back.


This is for you, Sonya and Beth, for always complaining that I post the worst pictures of you.

Fags Cancer Sticks Coffin Nails Ciggies Smokey Treats Dugans

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 11, 2008 – 11:37 am
Filed under bigtime celebrity
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I’ve never been a smoker. Although I think it looks cool when really hot people congregate outside trendy clubs and damn the man for banning smoking indoors while they enjoy their menthols and ultra lights, I think it looks an equal amount of gross when ugly people do it. I hate the idea of vices, too, (though I’m clearly addicted to sugar and sunshine) so the people standing twenty feet from our office building on their cigarette breaks in the dead of winter are really unattractive and pathetic-seeming to me. I hate the way smoke smells on people’s clothing, I hate that anyone’s willing to pay $9 per pack for something they don’t even enjoy but have to have, and I really hate the “Cigarettes take ____ years off my life? Well, they’re the shitty years, anyway” argument. I won an award in 6th grade for my outstanding essay on why I was drug-free for our D.A.R.E. program, although naturally I was too cool to show up to receive it, much like the kids who actually did smoke in junior high.

In fact, when there was the possibility that I’d have to smoke as part of my background role in a forthcoming Meryl Streep film (I know I’m a bit of a showoff, but you’re lucky I don’t mention that every day), Boyfriend Kamran had to take me outside his apartment building and show me the hippest ways to light and hold the things. Even under his instruction, I mostly ended up looking like this:


Please note that this is NOT outside Kamran’s apartment. I don’t want you thinking he lives under an overpass.

Still, for some reason, I loooooooooooooooove the way smoke smells on a man’s breath. Please explain.

Disabilities are NOT Funny

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 10, 2008 – 11:06 am
Filed under good times at everyone else's expense
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Growing up, my best friend Tracey and I had another friend whose little sister had Down Syndrome, so while the rest of our classmates heartily enjoyed using the word retarded to describe everything and everyone in sight, we were chastised every time it accidentally escaped our lips. And so like every child who’s told over and over again that she’s not allowed to do something she really wants to, we grew up getting a lot of pleasure from secretly saying the word behind our friend’s back.

Now that we’re a little more mature and our vocabularies are a little less limited, we don’t need that word anymore, but Tracey still loves to entertain me by sending me links to things like Down Syndrome Dolls, which soooooooooo creepily look like this:

And Downi Creations, which (even more creepily?) look like this:

When I saw how cheap the first ones are, I was like, “OMG, I could totally afford to fill my entire house with those things and then invite unassuming friends over! It’s totally worse than being a cat lady!” My co-worker Nathan said, “Don’t you think that’s bad karma?” I said, “Listen, I’ve been making fun of disabled people all my life, and I’ve done pretty well so far.”

Please note that my birthday is October 9th and that a girl doesn’t soon forget a present such as this.

Happy Birthday, U.S.A.!

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 9, 2008 – 1:10 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, holidays don't suck for me, living in new york is neat, no i really do love ohio, restaurant ramblings
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For the past two years I’ve been in New York City for the 4th of July instead of at home in Ohio watching my family burn off their fingers on sparklers like I’m supposed to, I’ve purposely avoided the fireworks and gone to dinner at Serendipity, first with then-boyfriend Todd, who hated crowds, and then with now-boyfriend Kamran, who appreciates a sugar coma as much as I do but still managed to get me back to his house in time to see the throngs of fireworks-viewers streaming off FDR Drive but not a lot of the show itself last year.

This year, though, Kamran was off visiting his family in California, so I let myself get talked into watching the ‘works with my friends Beth, Emily, Sonya, Adam, Christos, and Chad, and Emily’s friends Jeff and Carrie. Emily and Beth had bought us adult sippy cups on their way to my house, so we stopped off at my C-Town to buy Crystal Light and water to mix in with our vodka and rum like the high school girls we are. I was carrying Emily’s brother’s ridiculously adorable Yorkiepoo in a bag over my shoulder, and the checkout girls went crazy over how cute it was. I thought I was the new star of the grocery store until I came back the next day, and they were all like, “Where’s the dog?! . . . Oh, it wasn’t yours? SNUB.”

We spread out the blankets that Emily and Sonya were so kind to bring in the park between the Brooklyn

and Manhattan bridges

and set to sippin’

and piggin’ out.

Just as the show was about to start, it started to rain pretty heavily,

so everyone got out their umbrellas and totally blocked my view (but in kind of a pretty way).

I’ll admit that fireworks viewed through the Brooklyn Bridge are a bit of a novelty

but after they were over, I was like, “That’s IT?! The fireworks in Ohio are 100 times better!” Everyone just sort of shrugged me off, but I seriously think these people don’t understand how seriously Ohio takes its fireworks. Not only do they use the awesomely pun-y name Red, White, and BOOM!, but they have a whole mash-up of America-themed songs playing on a local radio station that the fireworks are timed to perfectly. Everyone brings their portable radios and sings along, the finale lasts at least 20 minutes, and only one or two people get stabbed every year. Honestly, what is the 4th of July without Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America” playing on a million boomboxes around you?!

Once the totally-crappy-and-in-every-way-disappointing-but-for-the-fact-that-Carrie-served-warm-apple-pie-and-vanilla-ice-cream-in-plastic-cups fireworks were over, we decided that the subway was going to be way too crazy and instead chose to take a quick walk down to the neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, where Chad promised us was a great bar. THIRTY-EIGHT MILES LATER (give or take thirty-seven), we were still walking. In the rain. At night. In uncomfortable shoes. I guess I wasn’t doing anything to hide how cranky I was, because Chad kept saying, “Who’s the biggest trouper here? Katie! She wins the trouper award!” and when I wouldn’t fold up my umbrella and enjoy the rain like everyone else, Emily and Beth started singing to Carly Simon’s tune, “Katie’s so vain/she probably thinks this song’s about her hair.”

The bar, Moonshine, turned out to actually be worth the walk (though I’m not sure you could convince me to do it again). There was an empty couch for us to sit on along one wall with the couch across from us occupied by young men with side-parted hair, one of them in a complete seersucker suit. The jukebox played Bloc Party and then Cat Power and then Devo and then HEART. There was plenty of Big Buck Hunter and House of the Dead


Christos, the Joyous German Murder Machine

a thick dark wood table for playing board games on


Seen here: Jenga, with Truth or Dare challenges written on each piece by previous Moonshine patrons

and . . . shoes nailed to the wall?


Please note Beth’s enormous cleavage.

What more could you want?

Mermaid Parade 2008

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 8, 2008 – 1:01 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, it's fun to be fat, living in new york is neat, restaurant ramblings
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Most people see the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade as an opportunity for frivolity in the sand, a chance to bare it all in the sun, the one time they can feel free to be themselves. I, on the other hand, see it as a chance to eat a hell of a lot of hot dogs and judge other girls’ spare tires.

And so I present to you . . .

The Last People on Earth You’d Want to See Naked
are Always the First to Take Off Their Clothes

I took these pictures in the span of about five minutes, because that’s how long we cared to watch the parade before deciding that we NEEDED Nathan’s hot dogs. The stand on the boardwalk had less of a line and more of a glob of people standing around it, the idea being that it was more efficient to push and shove your way to front any chance you got than to actually wait your turn like decent, rational human beings. Luckily, halfway through our 45-minute wait, I heard my name being said behind me with a question mark, and I turned around to see Leah, who was in a couple of my creative writing workshops at THE Ohio State University and could always be counted on for stories about maybe liking girls when the rest of the class was writing crap about trying yoga for the first time. We chatted about her MFA in creative writing and the fact that she’s actually using it to work for a food and travel magazine (swoon!) and how badly I want to go to Columbia for my Masters and my great boyfriend and her great girlfriend and so on and so on.

When my friends Sonya and Adam got to the order counter finally, I let these elderly ladies who had been sort of edging their way in front of me squeeze in behind them. Sonya turned back around to stand with me, and one of the ladies said to her, “You go ahead.” I said, “Oh, she’s with him,” and the other lady said, “Trust me, we know. We’ve been listening to you for the last half-hour. They’re together, your boyfriend’s on vacation in California, that girl has her Masters degree from Chicago, and you want your Masters degree from Columbia. Well, we live right by Columbia, and we could’ve had a kosher meal up there. For half the price.” Sonya and I laughed, but we secretly thought they were totally creepy.

An hour after first feeling the pangs of hunger, we found a grassy knoll on which to lunch and went about our munching

and slurping

and gnawing like the rabid beasts we are.

My chili cheese fries came with a tiny fork, which was a real shame, because I was ready to plunge my entire head into those things until I saw that they evidently expected me to be civil about it. And the corndog? THE BEST ONE OF MY LIFE.

So, yeah, it was a great time. It’s just kind of funny that we went to Coney Island on the crowdest day of the year just to eat some hot dogs that are there year-round.