A case for mini golf

which is not a game for ants

Aug 31, 2023

1. Noshing 😋

This month’s Fancy Beef Dinner™ took place at The Gugu Room in the Lower East Side. This place was previously a Filipino restaurant called Tsismis (which means chit-chat, so it was like a place to hang and gossip) and now it’s a fancier Filipino Japanese fusion place. They offer Kamayan menus, but you need a minimum of 6 people for that, so we just ate from their regular menu.

A lot of places have been serving up less traditional Filipino fusion food lately and most of them aren’t great. They tend to serve a watered down version of the classics - flavorless adobo with no vinegar, sisig just made from pork belly, halo halo that’s 90% ice with no flan (flan is the best part), and items that are purple just for the sake of being purple without any consideration for the flavor of ube. I love a good flavor mashup, but it has to make sense and respect some of what made the original cuisines unique. Shalom Japan in Brooklyn does a great job of this with Japanese/Jewish fusion.

Gugu Room certainly isn’t the worst offender of this trend, but I did find their menu to be a bit hit or miss. Their karaage was very good and the aioli had a really bright calamansi flavor to it that my mom and brother loved, probably the best example of Filipino/Japanese fusion that we had. The longanisa skewer was by far the best of the skewers with a snappy skin and excellent flavor. I’m a kare kare girl for life, but the rest of my group wasn’t into it so we got the chicken adobo, bone marrow salpicao, and yuzu adobo ribs.

Adobo is the national dish of the Philippines and while it’s true that everyone makes it a bit different, this version was mildly offensive to me even as a white person. It used the same chicken as the karaage but contained none of the flavors typically associated with adobo (vinegar, soy, garlic). It was a bit spicy, which can sometimes be the case with adobo, but isn’t typical. This dish could have been a good example of fusion if the right flavors were there, but I just felt like I was eating soggy fried chicken in brown sauce. Thank you, next.

Beef was excited to see our server torch the bone marrow and didn’t know you were actually supposed to eat it - he thought it was a big bone just for show

The salpicao and ribs on the other hand were pretty good. The steak flavor and texture was very reminiscent of Filipino tapa (which is my fave!) and the boys enjoyed scraping the bone marrow (not my fave). The ribs had a nice savory flavor with a hint of yuzu and were super tender. Neither really felt like a fusion of cuisines to me (salpicao=Filipino, ribs=Japanese), but each were delicious in their own right.

I tried to skip dessert so we could get fried ice cream at Sam’s, but mom insisted that they put a candle in some green tea tiramisu, so that happened. The tiramisu was actually really good, super light with a strong green tea flavor. We did still end up getting fried ice cream and a second dinner of Williamsburg Pizza (because the line to Scarr’s was insane).

I got banana pudding fried ice cream with reese's pieces and a second dinner of a single garlic knot

2. Watching 👀

Friendly reminder that the folks at SAG-AFTRA and the WGA are still on strike, so I’m just watching and talking about older stuff.

I’m honestly thrilled that so many of you reached out to say you either love Dead to Me or plan on watching it - give that show some love! After I binged all three seasons of that, I breezed through The Dropout - the miniseries about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. I’ve been a fan of Amanda Seyfried since her time on Veronica Mars and I’d heard that she was amazing in this role (she won mad awards!). My two main takeaways from this series were that 1) startup culture is weird and not always good and 2) I don’t think it’s worth being perpetually stressed out just for the sake of creating something/becoming rich.

I was vaguely aware of the whole Theranos thing because I was working at Slack when a lot of the news started coming out and one thing folks at startups love is talking about other startups. Silicon Valley culture is weird and almost incestuous in that everyone knows someone or knows someone who slept with someone and therefore has some sort of weird inside knowledge about what’s going on at other places. Usually that resulted in folks at my company asking me to get them crazy things because they’d heard another startup has them (Can we have a Peloton in the office? Can you buy keto protein muffins because I know Google stocks them?) There were more than a few actions or pieces of dialogue in this miniseries that were reminiscent of what I’d experienced IRL and it was weird seeing them played back at me after the fact. I was really existing in this strange world for years and it all felt so normal and cool at the time and I can understand how people get swept up in it.

If you’ve ever had to attend an awkward, cringey All Hands, you may be entitled to compensation

The series did an amazing job of creating drama because I was sweating just watching Elizabeth Holmes lie constantly. She was so obsessed with getting to the end product, that the present didn’t matter. Something that really stuck out to me early in the series was that Elizabeth said she wanted to be a billionaire when she grew up and she then rationalized that in order to do that she needed to invent something revolutionary (largely looking to her idol, Steve Jobs). She was mixing up cause and effect - first you invent the thing, then you make money, not the other way around. But I think this just speaks to the culture in Silicon Valley at the time; everyone wanted to be the next nig thing, but they were just basing that on the end product and not the journey. You could not pay me a billion dollars to be as stressed as Elizabeth Holmes seemed constantly for 10 years.

Amanda Seyfried really did an amazing job transforming into this character. Her mannerisms and her voice were so spot on, my girl committed. I really loved watching her, as the character, transform over time because we got to see that Elizabeth, the real person, made the decision to transform into this character that she would play publicly. It’s very meta when an actor is playing a person who played a character in real life and I love meta shit. But anyways, if you want to be really stressed out for about 8 hours and giggle whenever they mention Siemens, this is the show for you!

3. Exploring 🛼

I’ve been wanting to go to Putting Green in Williamsburg for so long and I finally went over the weekend! The mini golf course “is designed to showcase the problems and solutions for some of the most pressing climate change issues facing our planet” and it’s made entirely of recycled or repurposed materials. I confidently exclaimed this to my friends after we enjoyed a birthday lunch at Zaab Zaab and was able to convince a couple of them to join me and Lorenzo for a spirited game of mini golf! I don’t know why anyone would play regular golf when mini golf exists.

⛳️ 👎Regular golf: The holes are so far apart, you have to rent a vehicle to drive around, you have to carry lots of clubs, elitist.
⛳️ 🎉 Mini golf: You can see where the holes are, a game for the people, so many fun obstacles, your ball disappears at the end down a mysterious chute!

This course was fun, educational, and affordable - the trifecta! It only cost $10 to play 18 holes, which is basically free in Brooklyn. The downside is that there was a pretty long wait (it’s walk in only) and the course is in direct sunlight so bring sunglasses, wear sunscreen, be patient, bring water. Once you’ve made it past the wait though, the course is really cool!

This hole depicted NY after the water inevitably rises and drowns us all 🫠

Each hole had its own distinct design, often created in collaboration with community partners, artists, or school groups. I really enjoyed reading the little plaques at each hole that described different aspects of the climate crisis and admiring the design elements. The courses were also thoughtfully designed for playability and each was just challenging enough to require a little strategy, but not too much that they weren’t fun. Conversely, the Pixar Putt course that popped up Battery Park last year was so poorly designed that each hole was basically impossible to complete. The course was just an excuse to plop Pixar characters in the way of your putting with no thought whatsoever around how a player would navigate the course.

This was honestly a great way to spend my birthday weekend and I’m not even saying that because I won the game (although winning is great). There are lots of places to walk to afterwards if you want drinks, or snacks, or ice cream. We got Gentile Gelato, of course.

4. Learning 🧠

Earlier this week a 127 year old pipe burst under Times Square and flooded a big chunk of the subway system. I’m not here to talk about NY’s old ass infrastructure, but I do want to talk about our water - specifically our drinking water! Legend has it that NY’s drinking water is what makes our pizza and bagels so good (it likely contributes), but do you ever wonder where it comes from? Surely we’re not drinking water from the East River? (we’re not)

The water is clean, but I can't guarantee that the water fountains are clean

Fresh water came to NY for the first time in 1842 from Upstate NY via the Croton Aqueduct. This aqueduct was later updated in 1890 to carry a higher volume of water downstream and there are a bunch of remnants of this aqueduct in the city, mostly in the form of leftover stone walls. But like, where does this water from Upstate come from? A big ol’ lake? Well, sort of, but probably not in the way you’re thinking.

In order to create a reservoir large enough to service NYC, we drowned a bunch of towns in the Catskills. As the city grew after consolidating all 5 boroughs in 1898, an additional system was needed to bring more water downstream, so construction on the Catskill Aqueduct began in 1917. 2,000 people and 32 cemeteries were relocated as the land was seized by the city via eminent domain. The Ashokan Reservoir, the largest reservoir for New York City, was built on an area that used to be the site of 4 towns, now underwater. Apparently when the water levels are low you can still see some old building foundations down there.

So, why is our drinking water so good? The water coming in from Upstate NY is very high quality already (the areas around reservoirs are protected to limit outside pollution) and we actually don’t filter it at all. Instead, we treat the water using chlorine (kills germs/bacteria) and ultraviolet light (disinfects). NY drinking water does contain some other qualities that may contribute to our superior pizza and bagels: it has lower concentrations of calcium (an element that can cause a bitter taste) and magnesium, but higher levels of sodium and other natural minerals. Cooking is science and minerals are science so….science?

Anyways, New Yorkers are very proud of our drinking water. When Heidi visited from Oregon and remarked that our water tasted good, I felt so proud. In fact, we love our drinking water so much we have a monument to it that I’m sure you’ve all seen - Bethesda Fountain and the Angel of the Waters. There’s so much to say about this particular fountain, but in the context of drinking water - it was commissioned to commemorate the 1842 opening of the original Croton Aqueduct!

I visit her every time I go to the park and have pictures of her in every season!

5. What’s Good 😎

Morgenstern’s has been doing so many collabs lately and I sort of miss when they were just a really great ice cream shop. This weekend they’re doing a collab with R.E.M Beauty where you can get your foundation shade matched and try their special Ariana Grande flavor ice cream - sesame, cashew, coconut. That flavor does sound good, but give me my passionfruit sticky rice flavor back!
The Annual West Indian Day Parade is this Monday September 4! Folks wear gorgeous costumes, there are steel pan and calypso bands, and of course amazing Caribbean food. It’s one of many beautiful ways that groups in NY are able to celebrate their heritage and I was really bummed to hear this story about someone in Crown Heights complaining about the drummers practicing.
I love the Subwaytimenyc tiktok account and they recently completed a challenge to ride every subway line in one trip. This sounds like such a great time to me.
Bushwig is coming up on September 9 and features two days of amazing drag performances and my girl Svetlana Stoli will be there! My favorite way to attend an event is for free by volunteering and Bushwig is looking for volunteers. Maybe I’ll see ya there?
NYC Parks Instagram is killing it again with a fun video about the South Pole….of NY! Honestly, I feel like more and more I need to take a trip to Staten Island. Is that the last frontier?

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