Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Playing with Curbed

December 11

Josh Stein is quite good at riding mechanical bulls.
At least from the perspective of a bunch of New Yorkers affiliated with curbed.com. Curbed (which also owns eater.com) had its holiday party last night at a Lower East Side place called Mason Dixon, which serves fried chicken and pulled pork and grits and mac & cheese, and plays country & western music and has a mechanical bull.
Josh Stein, who for a little while longer yet covers restaurants and nightlife at Gawker (he is leaving soon to follow his destiny to London), must have good balance and strong thighs, because he stayed on that bull for much longer than most of the other white collar New Yorkers who gave it a try.
Ever since I was a young kid in Denver and witnessed from a distance the cowboy-boot craze that swept New York in, I believe, the 1970s, I have been fascinated by the desire of the denizens of Gotham to partake — without, it seems to me, understanding the social implications — in working-class cultures from other parts of the country. I talked about this a little bit with Amy Smith, who works at the Oxygen network and is originally from a remote part of northeastern Oklahoma. She was wearing a skirt, but otherwise, she said, she’d be riding the mechanical bull. Fair enough; she says she’s related to Merle Haggard and has no reason to lie to me.
As a Denver Jew, I grew up too far from red-neck culture to be part of it, but close enough to know that I don’t want to be part of it. I don’t want to ride a mechanical bull.
Eater’s Ben Leventhal did, though — twice. He’s no Josh Stein, but he’s not bad at all.

Ben’s the guy in the picture. It didn’t occur to me to take out my camera until Josh was done (he was good, but you can only stay on a mechanical bull for so long).
It was a good party. I met Peter Meehan from The New York Times, which I hadn’t done before, so that was cool. We talked about insane mutual acquaintances, which is always fun. I munched on Buffalo wings with Kate Krader from Food & Wine, Jennifer Leuzzi and Robin Insley.
I had a good chat with Eater's Lockhart Steele. We talked about Chicago dining and observed that we both had the names of porn stars or romance novel characters.

Here’s a picture of what happened when partygoers got frisky with the menu board. Perhaps they were thinking of different meanings of the word “pork.”

ANNOUNCEMENT!


Hello everyone!

I've been receiving a number of texts, calls, emails everyday from different people who want to reserve a slot in The Artist Chef. I've been declining a lot lately because my schedule now is fully booked 'til January. I just want people to know that my service is during sundays only. I require you to book very early if you want a specific date. As in months in advance. Take for example last September. A lot of people called me to reserve for October and November and then they found out that it was fully booked already. They will say to call back again next time. So came November and December, I'm still fully booked and now 'til February. So I really advise to book really early because of the limited slots.

The cost of intimate dinner is P1,800 whole year round.
For the month of December and February P2,500 because of the special dinner and take home goodies for the couple.

Different menus to choose from will be sent via email once you get your final reservation. Until no payment is made, reservation will be invalid. I do not post my menus because I change it from time to time.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Banff.

Cool place, well a cold place actually, but a beautiful town surrounded by snowy mountains.

I'm blogging from bed at the moment, on a laptop borrowed from a cool Korean guy by the name of Jae-eun (his English name is Jey). He is our temporary roommate.

Anyway, I haven't taken too many photos since I've arrived in Banff - partly because I'm busy running around applying for jobs, partly because I don't carry around my camera with me in case I slip and fall (the roads are pretty slippery around here), but mainly because it's too cold for me to take my hands out of my pockets most of the time. But I'll definitely start taking more photos once I get used to everything.

Here's what I have so far:
Michael and Josh on our first day in Banff I believe.
View of the surroundings of our hostel.
A deer couple that Josh and I ran into while walking to town. I wanted to battle it but they were a little too timid and ran away.
Banff Town.
Banff Town #2.
Hostel's Storage hut.

We all bought our Big-3 Season passes today and we're finally getting some skiing action tomorrow!

Looking forward to hitting the slopes,

Jin.

p.s Since Golden is having some trouble uploading his videos, and with life in general, I've taken the liberty to take some videos myself, and here's one of Josh blowing some snow.