How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could Chuck Norris?
All of it
Oh hi, it’s Wednesday! I’m experimenting with releasing the newsletter on different days of the week to see how it feels. I realize that my inbox gets absolutely slammed with newsletters I’m subscribed to on Thursdays and thought maybe yours was the same. I might even be so bold as to shift to a Tuesday schedule. Who knows. Do you have a designated newsletter reading day?
Also - thanks to everyone who reached out after last week’s newsletter! My therapist let me show her every single picture of my cat and tell her how beautiful he was, so that was quite healing. One friend even reached out and said that reading Big City, little friend “feels like catching up with an old friend” and when I tell you I hid in the back of the office and cried a little bit 🥹 I know we all live in different worlds and that can be especially true of folks living in NYC - each neighborhood is its own pocket of experiences and sometimes it’s hard to break out of your bubble. My hope for this newsletter is to share my experiences and facilitate all of our little bubbles overlapping (in the most consensual way possible).
When this hits your inbox, I’ll be attending my first of three weddings this season (😵!) I’m not much of a wedding person (I won’t regale you with my cynicism), but I’m very happy to be traveling for this first one to see a friend I haven’t seen in a couple of years. If any of you have spent time in Traverse City, Michigan, please tell me all of the things to see.
1. Noshing 😋
Last week was my Hyun-aversary - aka the 1 year anniversary since I brought Beef to Hyun and blew his mind, prompting him to request that I plan a monthly dinner series. Hyun is a Korean BBQ restaurant that serves all you can eat wagyu beef and is located right in the middle of K-Town. I’m not a bougie bitch, but this is probably one of my favorite places to go to treat myself and blow a bunch of money on some fancy meats. Read on for my tips on how to get the best experience for your money here (and not end up like Beef after his first time, throwing up on the LIRR on the way home).
You’re gonna have to make a reservation here a month or two ahead of time, so plan accordingly if you have a special event coming up. You get 90 minutes for your all you can eat reservation, so arrive on time! There are a bunch of different tables throughout the space and sometimes I’ve gotten lucky to be seated in one of their little rooms that are more private, but any table is honestly fine. The staff is super attentive and they cook all of the wagyu for you so you can’t fuck it up.
Once you choose the small or large omakase set (the small is quite enough, but do the large once to try all of the cuts) you’re served some side dishes that are absolutely essential for cutting through all of the fatty wagyu. The sesame scallion salad is my favorite and their kimchi is also delicious. Don’t sleep on the regular ass lookin salad though - you’re gonna need the lettuce and vinegar to coat your stomach so you can keep going. They offer additional sides and my first time I made the mistake of ordering some - they’re fine, but you’re here to get your money’s worth eating wagyu, so I say skip ‘em.
The staff will walk you through what each cut is and recommend what type of salt or sauce you should eat with each. After they’ve cooked everything on the first tray for you, you can choose additional cuts 3 at a time to get more of. Pro tip: take a picture of your first board of meat so you can just point to the ones you liked in the picture (I can never remember which is which). Pace yourself, eat the greens in between, and enjoy all of the yummy meats. If you’re feeling daring, you can even eat the forbidden toast that they sop up the meat juices with (to be clear, they don’t recommend that you do this but Beef and Lorenzo insisted on eating everything).
If you still have some room after eating meat for 90 minutes straight, try some Asian-inspired gelato at Sundaes Best. The line is usually long, but it moves quick. Top flavors I’ve tried so far are banana milk, matcha, and passion fruit.
2. Watching 👀
The strikes are still strikin! I read an interesting article about how Disney and other companies skirt around raising pay for tv showrunners and why so many good shows end after 2 seasons. And also - the United Auto Workers are on strike too!
I watched a movie from 1992 that was surprisingly racist, even for the early 90s. That movie was Sidekicks and it was both silly and slightly troubling. This gist of the movie was basically Chuck Norris being jealous of The Karate Kid and wanting in on the karate boom of the 90s, but Chuck Norris also completely not understanding what people enjoyed about The Karate Kid. In the movie, Young, asthmatic Barry daydreams about teaming up with Chuck Norris and going on karate adventures. This seems cute and innocent enough and they even got freakin Alan Silvestri to compose the score (he’s done Back to the Future, Avengers, big stuff)! But y’all, this movie was not it.
Remember when I said Barry daydreams about teaming up with Chuck Norris to do cool karate stuff? I meant to say that Barry is unable to tell fantasy from reality and regularly begins acting out his fantasies in the middle of class. His peers make fun of him, naturally, but his teacher just smiles and asks, “where were you this time Barry?” and then thinks that teaming him up with her uncle who owns a Chinese restaurant to actually learn karate is the answer. This seems both like an overstepping of her boundaries and an underwhelming response to a child having dangerous delusions. But let’s talk more about the “fantasies”:
They’re Asian fetishization and white savior complex, period. In each one, his Asian teacher is the damsel in distress, despite Barry knowing that she practices karate IRL. In one daydream, a guy is dressed up in very sterotypical “Asian-face” and it’s just in such bad taste. If black face is bad (and it is), then this shouldn’t be allowed either. And like, I understand that this is a kid daydreaming and kids are dumb, but he doesn’t learn any better by the end of the movie. In fact, Chuck Norris joins his karate team simply for the opportunity to beat the shit out of the opposing dojo leader (who is a jerk, but still). The final scene also really rubbed me the wrong way but I can only talk about so much negativity in one newsletter.
(Side note: the co-founder of Omsom shares great info about Asian fetishization.)
Every time I watch an older movie, I try to think about it in the context of its time. The 90s were a time of girls wearing chopsticks in their hair and “Oriental” dresses from Delias and adults claiming that MSG was the reason they were feeling shitty rather than considering that they just ate shitty food and haven’t exercised in a year. This movie was just another in a long line of movies and tv shows that pushed actors of Asian descent to the background and let white folks take the lead (see Kung Fu, most things Chuck Norris did, Aloha, Prince of Persia, The Last Airbender). I feel like it’s only recently that we’ve started talking about this form of whitewashing in media and maybe when the studios get their shit together they can start addressing this too.
3. Exploring 🛼
This week is Climate Week in NYC and I definitely recommend attending some events if you can! I helped out at a run near the High Line on a very rainy Monday and over the weekend I also worked at my company’s booth at Vegandale (sick plug for Bored Cow). Both events really got me thinking about how we interact with our environment and how good intentions and talk can only get you so far. I found Vegandale to be disappointing because the food was so expensive and the event grounds were absolutely littered with trash at the end - it felt like a glorified vegan Coachella that certainly did more damage to Randall’s Island than good. But I’m sure every vendor and attendee, me included, will tout their pro-environmental philosophies, despite trashing an island in NYC. I know the event staff obviously cleaned everything up, but for all of our aspirations of veganism being more sustainable, we sure sent a lot of crap to a landfill (sorry New Jersey).
Someone I spoke to at the run on the High Line today told me that AOC brought up a great point during the Climate Rally on Sunday: “We organize out of love!” This sounds like a throwaway line but I believe that so many of our planet’s issues (climate, housing, hunger, fair wages) could be solved if folks had more compassion for others and realized how everything is connected. If you pay people well, they can afford food, and they can afford housing, and they have money leftover to invest in climate-positive actions. In the same way, I hope that the outcome of the film industry strikes will have this same trickle down effect on other industries. But this brings me to today’s exploration: Old Tree on the High Line.
The design is something of a double entendre: the design is obviously a tree, but it also evokes human blood vessels. The design is meant to “invite viewers to consider the indivisible connection between human and plant life.” Sound familiar? The irony that this sculpture is situated on the High Line, right next to Hudson Yards, is not lost on me. Hudson Yards is a grossly capitalist complex that was in the news recently for displacing long time street vendors and just generally feels unneeded in a city that already has tons of luxury shopping and housing.
(Check out the Street Vendor Project - they’re helping street vendors in NY!)
The very existence of the High Line itself is an odd amalgamation of natural life vs human intervention. While the old train tracks are now a lovely park, they originally created tons of pollution and a stretch of the tracks was known as Death Avenue because there were so many accidents. So are we better off now that the tracks are a park, or would we have been better off not having them at all?
Despite my cynicism, I do believe that the High Line is a nice respite on the west side of the city. After the event, I walked from 14th st to 30th st in the rain and not a single soul was around. It was a very peaceful walk and I really do enjoy the elevated walkway when I’m in the area. I also passed a sign noting that there are free tours on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays! I’m actually attending a Wowza Hangout on the High Line this weekend and I’m looking forward to exploring the area more when my hands aren’t full of event supplies.
4. Learning 🧠
Ok I feel like my last couple sections were downers so let’s talk about something fun: food! Again! More specifically, foods that were invented at Chelsea Market, which is under a section of the High Line. Although Google now occupies much of Chelsea Market’s office space now, it was once occupied by none other than Nabisco from the 1890s - 1958 (which stands for NAtional BIscuit COmpany 🤯).
Most famously, Nabisco created the Oreo at Chelsea Market! They absolutely ripped off the Hydrox cookie and succeeded because no one wanted to eat a cookie called Hydrox. Apparently Sunshine (makers of Hydrox) named it such because there was a trend to have product names reflect “cleanliness” at the time. Obviously that didn’t work and Oreos became beloved by most humans. They’re also accidentally vegan, so that’s cool (but also then what is the cream??).
One of my favorite treats that I would always enjoy with my grandpa are Mallomars - also invented by Nabisco at Chelsea Market! Mallomars are like if Ina Garten asked you to make s’mores but said “store bought will do”. They’re little portable marshmallow and graham cracker blobs covered in chocolate and I’m always overjoyed when I see a box of them in the grocery store (they’re not always there). I also had no idea that mallomars were a fairly regional treat; apparently 70% of them are sold only in the Northeast US. Initially that was because shipping them further south meant they might melt. And because of that initial obstacle, they just never really caught on in the south.
Do you have mallomars where you live? Do you love mallomars or is it just me? Would you like to eat a mallomar and drink an egg cream right now, because I want to.
5. What’s Good 😎
Heart of Dinner is hosting some bag decorating workshops in September! They deliver fresh produce to elderly or homebound folks in Chinatown in beautifully decorated bags and I love forcing my coworkers to decorate bags with me every year.
There’s an NYC Film Photo Gathering this Saturday in Prospect Park! It’s like a meetup for film photo fanatics and will also include raffles, workshops, demos, and food.
By some miracle my houseplants are thriving and I might go to this Plant Swap on Sunday. I’ve never had plants plentiful and healthy enough to swap before in my life. I love clothing swaps, so why not plant swaps too?
There is just too much good stuff happening this weekend! The Annual Momo Crawl is scheduled for this Sunday in Queens. Momos are delicious giant juicy dumplings found in Tibetan and Nepali cuisine and they are delicious.
I’m a big matcha person and Matchaful is one of my favorite cafes. This Friday they’re giving out free plant-based yogurt parfaits when you buy a drink. The parfait has coconut yogurt, Matcha Granola, and an @oishii.berry Koyo Berry drizzle 🤤
Oh hey, are you looking for a job? Do you like history? The Center for Brooklyn History is hiring a Digital Collections and Access Coordinator. Suddenly I’m open to work?
