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Sonya can rent a car like the big girls now.

Posted by plumpdumpling on April 21, 2008 – 3:49 pm

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, par-tay

The greatest fun in living in a city where the majority of restaurants are tiny, unreplicable, and authentic is choosing to eat at a chain, which is exactly what we did for my friend Sonya’s quarter-century birthday the weekend before last. She’d been craving teppanyaki for weeks but hadn’t wanted to spend the money, and her birthday gave her the perfect opportunity to make her boyfriend Adam pick up the tab at Benihana. And we felt okay about it, you know, because the very first Benihana was in NYC. So shut up.

Kamran stocked up for the evening all baller-like,

and then we met Sonya, Adam, and Adam’s co-workers/couple-friends Dave and Sarah at the restaurant,

Look at Adam’s tongue hanging out!

where Kamran immediately filled me up with some crazy blue liquor so I’d quit talking about how much he hated the green pleated shirt Sonya and I had bought for me to wear especially for the occasion the night before. Sonya told us that in other parts of the country, the chefs–though obviously not Japanese–are forced to adopt Asian-sounding names just for show. Our chef for the evening was very not-Japanese and had the not-Japanese name Romeo, which very well could have been made up, too, but he used it to his advantage and cooked us up this very romantic rice heart:

He slid his spatula under the middle section and pushed it up and down to make the heart look like it was beating, which made all the girls’ hearts flutter. He flipped shrimp into the top of his cap and threatened to flip some at me when he could see how grossed out I was by seafood, but I totally ate the ones that he grilled for us out of guilt. Kamran and I each had a Rocky’s Choice, which was hibachi steak and chicken with soup, salad, vegetables and this garlic butter chicken rice that could have been a meal within itself. Sonya got a bowl of birthday ice cream on the house and offered it up to everyone, but the four of them were all, “Oh, no, we’re waaaay too full for that.” Kamran and I, on the other hand, were like, “Excuse me, waitress, but our meals are supposed to come with ice cream, and we want to be as fat as possible, so please bring it to us double-time.”

We decided to head downtown to get Sonya drunker, and while we waited for the subway, various naughty things involving Kamran’s super-sharp umbrella took place, including but not limited to what Sonya refers to as “the pimp picture”,

and this, which should probably never be mentioned again:

We got to The Back Room at 11, and after taking an unmarked set of stairs down to a tunnel, walking through an alley, and taking another flight of stairs up again, we finally made it inside the place, which is shticky with Victorian speakeasy charm.

The idea is that it’s still the 1920s and Prohibition is in full effect, so drinks are served in teacups and brown paper bags,

and the Asian folks aren’t in internment camps yet, so everyone’s merry (except Adam):

The plan was to get Dave wasted enough that he wouldn’t mind going dancing, because he’s not so into grinding up against strangers for reasons that DON’T MAKE ANY SENSE TO ME. But of course it was Sonya and me who got there first, as evidenced by this

and this

AND THIS,

which we took with the bouncer who was guarding the secret bookshelf-disguised door to the back room where owner Tim Robbins and all of his famous friends hang out. This guy in a prep school sweater kept shaking hands with the bouncer and slipping him folded bills in unknown denominations, but the bouncer kept denying him, and we kept making snide comments about him until our teacups were empty.

We got to Ruff Club (no, seriously, that’s what it’s called . . . !!!) at midnight, and it was their second anniversary, so there were loads of people standing in line in fishnets and white shoes. We took our place at the end, and then a kid behind us asked, “Do you guys know what this place is like?” I said, “It’s worth the wait.” Even though I’d never been there before. We stood for maybe ten minutes in the rain, which resulted in this super-homosexual picture of Kamran protecting Adam’s glorious hair:

Sonya and I had been shopping all week so we could compete with this and this and this, but after that ten minutes, the bouncers started separating girls and boys into two different lines so the girls could go in first, and we didn’t want to leave our boyfriends behind, so we ended up going to another unmarked bar. And despite the inclusion of songs by the likes of The Notorious B.I.G. and Sophie B. Hawkins, we danced and danced and danced until the sun came up. Or, you know, until, like, 2 a.m.

I am not the least bit Irish.

Posted by plumpdumpling on March 20, 2008 – 4:28 pm

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, holidays don't suck for me, par-tay

When you’re a Persian, a Korean, and a German, you naturally spend your St. Patrick’s Day eating . . .

JAPANESE BARBEQUE!!!

My co-worker Sonya met Kamran and me for dinner on Monday night at Yakitori Torys for what has become our new favorite thing: random meats, skewered and dunked in sweet sauce for grilling. We’ve been going to a place in the East Village called Oh! Taisho regularly now since Sonya introduced us to it, but after knocking out all of the chicken gizzards and french-fries-dipped-in-cod-roe and other such nonesense there, we thought we were ready to try some softened chicken bones at Torys. That’s right; softened, grilled chicken bones. No meat. Just bones. Delish.

The place was full, so we got to sit at this table in the middle of the room that had a frame built around it and curtains covering it from all sides. We started off with a bowl of shredded chicken with bitter melon and fish flakes, and once I got past the fact that I was eating dried fish when I don’t even eat wet fish, I really enjoyed the saltiness that it added to the chicken. And after biting into the bitter melon, Kamran and I ruminated on the fact that even as twentysomethings, we can experience a taste that’s brand new to us. They were already sold out of a lot of the limited dishes, so unfortunately there were no chicken knees to be had, but we filled up on skewers and skewers of kobe beef tongue and pork with scallions and chicken with plum sauce and shishito peppers. Even better than all of those, though, were the steamed vegetables with wasabi mayonnaise and green tea salt. And my figurative hat is off to any restaurant that can make me like steamed anything. Kamran picked up our $100 tab, naturally, ’cause that’s just how he rolls.

There was a whole lot of carryin’-on in the streets that Sonya wouldn’t let us go home without adding to, so we stepped into a bar called the Pig n Whistle on 3rd for an Irish Car Bomb drank in time to a cheesy pop song, with me shouting slurred commands in the background:

I particularly love hearing myself saying, “Lefth guh! Lefth guh!” at the beginning. And, uh, I’d only had about two sips of my drink at that point. But at least I didn’t hold a squishface at the end of the video like Sonya did, thinking I was taking a picture rather than a video.

Here, Kamran and Sonya show the curdled remnants of their bombing

and then Sonya . . . gives me cheekwings? attempts to make me drink her curds? I have no idea.

Sonya shows off her green

and I show off my tongue

yet despite these shenanigans, Kamran thinks we need one more.

And then we spend the rest of the night trying to decide who’s drunker.

I win the contest when he finds me on my back in his bed, giggling and kicking the air. Hooray for fake holidays!

But We’ve Got the Biggest Balls of Them All

Posted by plumpdumpling on February 4, 2008 – 1:55 pm

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, living in new york is neat, par-tay

A couple of Saturdays ago, my co-worker Sonya and her boyfriend, Adam, invited Kamran and me to our first night of bowling in New York. It was inside the super-sketchy port authority, so we were nearly-mugged and actually-raped approximately twenty times between the subway exit and the velvet ropes leading into the bowling alley, but there was a private lane and 176 ounces of beer awaiting us that made it well worth the pain and suffering.

Once we were inside, it wasn’t sketchy at all. There were people lounging around the round bar in the middle, and one whole side of the place had been made to look like a club with plush white seats and wispy white curtains hanging from the ceiling with little white lights all around. While we waited for our lane to become available, we stood near the racks of shoes with black and red size numbers on them, and Sonya gasped at a sign that read, “Black for men. Red for women,” thinking that it said, “For black men.” And then we made all sorts of segregation jokes.

We finally settled in our lane next to another double-date, and the two men in the party couldn’t stop looking at Sonya, which I enjoyed. Kamran and Adam jumped right into the game

but then got a little antsy when the beer took too long to arrive:

But when it did, it arrived IN A TOWER. And oh, the glory that ensued:

The greatest thing was that Sonya and Adam had absolutely no professional bowling form yet completely kicked our asses in the first two games. They’d grab some 15-pound balls, walk up to the line all calm-like, set the ball down with a gentle roll, and get strikes every time.

Meanwhile, I’d told Kamran at dinner beforehand that I have a bad habit of accidentally letting the ball go when my arm’s behind me and often end up flinging it back toward my resting opponents, and he’d suggested that I make a concerted effort to control that. So of course I did it on my very first turn.

Sonya and Adam were super-competitive and were cheering for each other’s every flub, but it was Kamran who proved the skilledest at drunken bowling and won the final game with the hearty score of 112. I think he was high on adrenaline from singlehandedly protecting the integrity of our beer tower from the grubby hands of a would-be thief. And by that, I mean that he told the guy, “Hey, uh, this is our beer,” and the guy backed off and said, “Oh, my bad.”

The tower was empty by 1:15, so we posed for some prom-esque pictures on the way out