And so, with all this Italian dining going around, why not visit the most famous Italian restaurant in the country. Since Italians have a proclivity for dining on their own cuisine while abroad, I thought I’d snatch a couple of them and take them with me to the Olive Garden. When the food arrived, we took turns staring at each others’ plates. The “muffuletta olives” (not their real name—on the menu they’re called “Parmesan Olive Fritta”) were olive ascolane, stuffed fried olives, and they were quite good, actually. I had the carbonara, which at $26.99 is priced about the same, or higher, as the pasta dishes at some of the city’s best Italian restaurants. It didn’t taste like it, though. In fact, miraculously, despite the presence of parmesan cream, chicken and shrimp, it managed to be utterly tasteless. (Just for the sake of authenticity – not that authenticity is the Olive Garden’s M.O. – you’d never, ever find carbonara served with chicken and/or shrimp and the presence of cream is a culinary war crime.) Marco took a few bites of his “Tour of Italy” dish and said, “I’m ready to turn in my passport and stay home for a while.” Giovanna didn’t hate her salmon which was paired with bright green stalks of steamed broccoli, saying only that it would never have pesto spread over the top. And Sloane’s garlic-rosemary roasted chicken was rubbery.
Tag: nyc
Skyscraper Timelapse
this would be far more impressive if the whole construction had taken 5 weeks instead of 5 yearss.
La Villa Pizzeria
Brooklyn is the true homeland of pizza. It offers the broadest range of styles, fuels, and toppings, and in Brooklyn, one can still be astonished by a pizza, as I recently was at the rather grand-looking, but little known, La Villa Pizzeria in Park Slope, where I encountered a stuffed-crust pie from Abruzzo. It was a stuffed crust pie but not like the ones at Domino’s. When it arrived at the table, it was rectangular and had achieved a beautiful shade of brown on the top crust, with a bottom crust twice as thick, nicely charred underneath here and there. The pie was sealed on the sides, boxing the ingredients, and when cut into 10 square pieces, the cheese seductively oozed out.
MTA could 2x off-peak capacity for free
In New York, the frequency of a bus or subway service is regularly adjusted every 3 months to fine-tune crowding. Where Berlin has a fixed clockface timetable in which most trains run every 5 minutes all day, New York prefers to make small changes to the frequency of each service throughout the day based on crowding. The New York approach looks more efficient on paper, but is in fact the opposite. It leads to irregular frequencies whenever trains share tracks with other trains, and weakens the system by leading to long waits. But another problem that I learned about recently is that it is unusually inconvenient for labor, and makes the timetabling of trains too difficult. New York should timetable its trains differently. Berlin offers a good paradigm, but is not the only one. As far as reasonably practical, frequency should be on a fixed clockface timetable all day. This cannot be exactly 5 minutes in New York, because it needs more capacity at rush hour, but it should aim to run a fixed peak timetable and match off-peak service to peak service. It’s a large increase in service. Frequency-ridership spirals work in your favor here. Increases in service require small increases in expenditure, even assuming variable costs rise proportionately – but they in fact do not, since regularizing frequency around a consistent number and reducing the peak-to-base ratio make it possible to extract far more hours out of each train driver, as in Berlin. Net of the increase in revenue coming from better service, such a system is unlikely to cost more in public expenditure.
This remains true even assuming no pay cuts for drivers in exchange for better work conditions. Pay cuts are unlikely anyway, but improving the work conditions for workers, especially junior workers, does make it easy to hire more people as necessary. The greater efficiency of workers under consistent timetabling without constant fidgeting doesn’t translate to lower pay, but to much more service, in effect taking those 550 annual hours and turning them into 900 through much higher off-peak frequency. It may well reduce public expenditure: more service and thus greater revenue from passengers on the same labor force.
they’d have to stop constantly messing with the schedule, which is pure insanity.
Commerce by Sail
A Hudson River merchant ship is bringing goods to Red Hook again after 100 years. This summer, Merrett’s schooner returns for her first full season. The backbone of each run will be harvests from Hudson Valley Malt and Stone House Grain delivered to breweries and distilleries from Poughkeepsie to Brooklyn, including Wild East and Strong Rope in Gowanus, and Van Brunt Stillhouse in Red Hook––but future shipments will also include everything from pillows and maple syrup to yarn and salt.
Outdoor Dining arms race
What started as a haphazard collection of tables and chairs set up in blocked-off parking spaces has evolved into a seemingly non-negotiable extension of running a restaurant in NYC. There are local construction companies dedicated to building outdoor dining shelters. New restaurants are baking outdoor dining setups into their startup costs. For those who can afford it, the constant upgrading of outdoor dining — still only a temporary allowance in the city — hasn’t showed any signs of slowing down as indoor capacity restrictions have loosened. “It’s like the face of the restaurant now”
Post-Pandemic Covers
The New Yorker has long been known for their covers, which feature trenchant observations of society. Illustrator Tomer Hanuka, who teaches at SVA on the side, figured that would make a great assignment–and he was right
Tsuta Ramen
The first ramen shop in the world to receive a Michelin star is planning to open in NYC toward the end of the summer
MTA money laundering
In plain sight, the MTA is skirting its accessibility requirements and commitments — ones they already made in the past — and misappropriating already-committed funds.
Performative politics: 🚮
In much of San Francisco, you can’t walk 6m without seeing a multicolored sign declaring that Black lives matter, kindness is everything and no human being is illegal. Those signs sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes that would bring those values closer to reality. Poorer families — disproportionately nonwhite and immigrant — are pushed into long commutes, overcrowded housing and homelessness. There is a danger — not just in California, but everywhere — that politics becomes an aesthetic rather than a program. It’s a danger on the right, where Donald Trump modeled a presidency that cared more about retweets than bills. But it’s also a danger on the left, where the symbols of progressivism are often preferred to the sacrifices and risks those ideals demand. California, as the biggest state in the nation, and 1 where Democrats hold total control of the government, carries a special burden. If progressivism cannot work here, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?
this perfectly describes NYC too. most politics is this kind of tedious and harmful cosplay.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 