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As a treat!

Jun 30, 2023

You might think you look silly, but you’ll have the most perfectly mixed drink while everyone else’s syrup is settling to the bottom

1. Noshing 😋

I took Beef to Falansai for his June Fancy Dinner™️. It’s a Vietnamese-Mexican restaurant in Bushwick run by chef Eric Tran. They offer a Dac Biet menu (Dac Biet means special in Vietnamese) that is comprised of surprise seasonal dishes, whatever the chefs feel like making on any given night. This sounded very exciting to me, but apparently not to anyone else I was dining with. Once they saw confit duck necks and Chinese sausage fried rice on the regular menu, they insisted that we order a la carte.

We ended up ordering nearly the entire menu after it was suggested that we order 7-8 dishes for a party of 4; we got the confit duck neck, dad’s fried rice, five spice lamb neck, blazed & glazed pork shoulder, green curry with trout, beef shiitake dumplings, & the tuna crunch no. 1. Everything we are was great, but the standouts for me were the trout curry & lamb. The green curry was incredibly creamy and coconutty; everyone but me also thought it was very spicy. I wish the lamb dish came out at the beginning of our meal rather than at the end because I would have absolutely gone to town on it. I love five spice and it was the perfect compliment to the shredded lamb, which was served with tortillas & various taco accoutrements.

Beef very much enjoyed the 2 servings of dad’s fried rice that he insisted we order. It comes with squishy, smoky mortadella & Chinese sausage cubes. As for the duck necks, they were delicious but not really worth the work required to eat them. I didn’t really consider what necks are actually made of and nibbling at the little bits of very tasty meat on each vertebrae was more work than my mouth wanted to do.

Find you a man who looks at you like Beef looks at this fried rice

2. Watching 👀

Last week I was cat sitting & the apartment didn’t have a tv, so I started watching Sex Education on my laptop and I am obsessed. I’ve watched seasons 1-2 & plan on watching 3 during next week’s cat sitting gig.

This show covers sex topics with an amazing amount of chill and clarity. The gist is that Gillian Anderson is a sex/relationship therapist & her son Otis uses the knowledge he’s grown up around to give the kids at his high school sex advice. The kids ask all the sorts of questions you’d expect - is my vagina weird, is it normal to not want to have sex, why do I cover my boyfriend’s head with a pillow every time he’s about to cum? Obviously Otis has no actual sex education knowledge (he starts the series as a virgin who can’t even masturbate), but he and the kids generally get all introspective and solve their little sex mysteries by the end of each episode. I love that this show normalizes all sorts of sexual identities, kinks, whatever, & I wish these topics were spoken about more openly when I was younger (or even now!).

Sometimes the show veers very Breakfast Club, but everyone still has goofy British accents so it’s very fun

This show also feels pretty effortlessly diverse; character journeys are uniquely tied to characters’ various racial, gender, & socioeconomic identities, but those aspects aren’t their singular identifiers. The school jock is Black, but he also has two moms, happily dates the uncool outcast girl, and experiences self-harm as a response to the stress put on him. He’s a fully fleshed out person who gets to experience a lot of personal growth. Yes, he eventually stops playing sports to be in the school play, but some stories are classic for a reason! Even Otis’ best friend, Eric, is never stuck as a boring side story. He’s openly gay and comes from a religious Ghanaian-Nigerian family. Immediately when we meet his stoic father we expect him to be critical of Eric’s sexuality because of how this dynamic is usually portrayed, but instead he’s simply worried for his son because of how others may react to his expression of his identity. I definitely identified way too strongly with the penis-alien comic artist Lily & the smart but “troubled” Maeve - did the showrunners read my Live Journal?

I do, however, need someone to explain UK geography to me. These kids are always walking everywhere and acting like their journeys are just quick jaunts down the block, but they’re transversing fucking bridges and forests and all of the houses seem so far apart! I can’t understand how anyone is able to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time and this stresses me out.

3. Exploring 🗺️

Shoutout to Wowza Hangouts for planning yet another amazing experience over the weekend! They pair up small groups of people in NYC based on common interests and plan fun experiences. I’ve seen exhibits at MoMA, gone to an open mic night at Fiction Bar, and played board games at Last Place on Earth (please play board games with me).

On Sunday I met up with a group of 3 strangers to have brunch at Pil Pil & then head over to The Met to see Van Gogh’s Cypresses. Pil Pil serves Spanish tapas and for brunch you’re able to choose a region of Spain and enjoy a plate of 3 tapas from there. I went with the Catalonia Region because I really wanted the Tosta de Huevos - thick egg toast topped with a strawberry-honey sauce. The food was really great & all in we paid $30 each, which is pretty affordable for a NY brunch!

After brunch we walked over to The Met and happened to meet up with a couple other Wowza groups that were there. I saw a few folks that I’d been paired up with before so we melded groups & made our way to the Van Gogh exhibit. The Met is truly a maze & I had to ask multiple museum guards to point me towards the exhibit (you also have to get on a virtual queue). The Van Gogh exhibit was pretty crowded & it wasn’t easy for lil me to see some of the more popular pieces. Overall, it was a really nice collection & there was still plenty of time to wander the met after seeing all of the Van Goghs. I made our group go up to the rooftop to see Lauren Halsey’s installation - it’s a very cool mashup of “Egyptian symbolism, 1960s utopian architecture, and contemporary visual expressions like tagging.” My group also indulged me as I spouted off all of the weird tidbits of knowledge I’d come across about The Met over the years - thanks guys!

I call this piece “Starry Night as seen from a 5ft tall human”

4. Learning 🧠

Here’s a fun little Met related story that I shared with my Wowza group. I learned this while taking a tour of the Met hosted by a former museum guard & it is probably my favorite tour that I’ve ever taken. This is the story of the still unsolved Valentine’s Day Heist at The Met.

On Friday, February 10th, 1979, The Met was filled with folks hoping to see the King Tut exhibit. It was an insanely popular collection and until 2018 it held the record for most visitors, nearly 1.4 million (the record was eventually broken by the Met’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination exhibit). What happened next is classic heist procedure - while the majority of the staff is focused on one high volume area of the museum, the thief strikes at the other end. During a changing of guard in the Cypriot gallery corridor, a small statue of a head of Hermes vanished. There haven’t been a whole lot of items stolen from The Met and recently I feel like we’ve heard more news about The Met housing items that were stolen from others. What’s unique about this story is what happened next.

Head of a Herm - pay close attention to the faint hearts carved above the eyes

The museum was locked down, everyone was searched, but the head wasn’t found. The FBI was even called in to assist the NYPD in finding the head. However, the cops proved useless (lol) and a few days later on February 14 there was a break in the case. An anonymous tip was called in to a security officer at Rockefeller Center - the caller said that the head could be found in locker No. 5514 at Grand Central Terminal. Again, classic heist movie stuff! I’m convinced that only thieves and international humans of mystery use the lockers at train stations.

The head was found in the locker, but the story still gets stranger! When the sculpture was still at The Met, it had one small heart carved above one eye. When the head was found, it now sported a second heart carved above the other eye. Is this some sort of Valentine’s Day conspiracy? Was the head stolen as a gift for someone’s sweetheart? We don’t know because the head had no fingerprints on it and the case has never been solved. Someone call Sean Connery, call Ant-Man, call Harriet the goddam spy!

The head is back at the museum now and lives pretty unremarkably around a bunch of other sculptures. The plaque next to it makes no mention of it’s odd history and I would never have known this story if I hadn’t taken that amazing tour. I absolutely love learning weird historical tidbits like this and I hope you enjoyed that story!

5. What’s Good 😎

If you’re interested in city infrastructure (who isn’t??) then I highly recommend subscribing to Urbababble. The author recently wrote an article for Vice about the new Grand Central LIRR station that addressed what I’d been thinking the whole time - what’s the point of this? What I didn’t know is that adding this new station has had a hugely negative effect on the train schedules going into Brooklyn’s Atlantic Terminal. When I commuted my last 2 years to Brooklyn College, I formed a special bond with this station while it was still being renovated and it’s a very important transit hub!
I’m admittedly an Alamo girl (I’m seeing the new Indiana Jones there tonight!), but I think I would love the theater experience at Nitehawk. They’re playing Jaws there for July 4, which is just a perfect goddam movie. Bryant Park has also begun hosting their outdoor movie nights. I’ve only been successful once in convincing someone to attend a park movie with me, but maybe this summer that will change. I’ve got my eyes on School of Rock 🤘
I’m usually not a fan of Milk Bar (their stuff is pure sugar), but they’re debuting a toasted marshmallow sundae for the summer and I 👏 love 👏 s’mores 👏 so I’m very interested. It’s topped with tiny marshmallows and marshmallow goo and I can’t wait to try it.
Grub Street posted an article about 33 places worth traveling for and it’s an interesting list! Right off the bat, I’d like to note that traveling to the Staten Island Ferry for a DQ blizzard is not worth it, and neither is paying $20+ for a sandwich at Mama’s Too. Little Vincent’s on Long Island is good, but also probably not worth the drive when we have excellent pizza in the city. I haven’t been to most of the other places on this list and while I’m skeptical, I’m also always down for an adventure.

Thank you for reading Big City, Little Friend. Sharing this with someone is free, unlike my $8 matcha.

I’ll be cat sitting/staycationing in Park Slope this weekend - send me all your recs for fun things to do & tasty things to eat!