Tag: nyc

The Bellewether

It’s rare to find a truly secret space left in New York City but we recently had the opportunity to discover one, right in the middle of midtown Manhattan. Our friends at The Vanderbilt Republic, who run the inspiring programming at the Gowanus Loft, like the camera obscura installation in years past, are converting a raw space in midtown that was once an electrical repair company. The cavernous 800 m2 space is made possible by a combination of history and zoning – it actually spans 3 buildings, grandfathered in when skyscrapers were built on top. The once outdoor courtyards were closed in to fulfill a functional purpose in perpetuity, a state of impermanent operability – until now. The multi-room discovery is to be known as The Bellewether, a flexible performance and production space

Peak Pasta

To test out new shapes, chefs only need a few ingredients: flour, eggs, water, and an internet connection. “I think the advent of YouTube is when everything changed. You can just look up different shapes. Before then, you had to actually head to Italy to see the shapes, find the book, or work with someone who had actually worked there.”

Xiao chi

Stretching from 40th to 65th Streets on 8th Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn’s Chinatown is one of the best neighborhoods in New York to experience 2 unique styles of Chinese cuisine–Fujianese xiao chi and Cantonese dim sum. Because of these demographics, Brooklyn’s Chinatown has become a culinary destination for Southern Chinese cuisine, especially Fujianese xiao chi 小吃 (Little Snacks). Essentially, this covers anything that falls outside the Chinese definition of a full meal, in which rice is accompanied by several dishes of meat and vegetables. Comparable to Spanish tapas, xiao chi are small servings of dishes, most often noodles, dumplings and pastries meant to be eaten as snacks or a light lunch. This culinary category exists in every region of China. Cantonese dim sum, with its small servings of different dishes, is a type of xiao chi, although it’s considered more formal and often served in large restaurants with seafood-focused banquet dinners. Here are 5 restaurants in Sunset Park to sample this cuisine. Since the prices are affordable and the serving sizes are similar to tapas, try as many dishes and places as possible for the true xiao chi experience.

  • Lin Mini Café
  • Uncle Wang
  • San Qiang
  • Hong Kong Dim Sum
  • Park Asia

Tac ‘N Roll

One of the East Village’s greatest culinary sleepers is Tac ‘N Roll, a 3-year-old fusion cafe owned and operated by chef Eric Wong, who traveled the world while in the Marine Corps and blends international flavors he was exposed to during service. While I generally run in the other direction when a restaurant is labeled “fusion,” in this case the term fits and the result is splendid. Here’s the gimmick: pick corn tortillas or a paratha, sandwich roll, burrito, salad, nachos, or rice bowl, and then choose from among 6 principal sauced ingredients to fill them. Beef with chimichurri goes well in the double tortillas, sending the taco spinning in an Argentine direction, while the chicken tikka belongs in the flaky paratha, which tastes more like the parathas eaten in Singapore than those found in India. All receive lush garnishes. Finally, there’s a notable pureed soup made with kabocha squash, smoothies, and a few more snacks

A&A Bake & Doubles

Bed-Stuy Trinidadian mainstay A&A Bake & Doubles Roti just gained a spot in the James Beard canon. The foundation, which runs one of the country’s biggest restaurant awards, named the counter-service spot one of America’s Classics — an honor for regional institutions that have been around for more than 10 years.

Micromobility

NYC DOT data mines Uber and Lyft Trips

New York will start clawing in the same kind of data from the ride-hailing companies that have stormed its streets in recent years. If Uber, Lyft, Via, and Juno want to keep operating in the city, they’ll have to provide the TLC with even more finely detailed data than they do now: the date, time, and location of pickups and drop-offs (at least down to the intersection), the vehicle’s license number, the trip mileage, itemized trip fare, route (including whether the vehicle entered traffic-choked Midtown), and how much the driver was paid. The city intends to use all this data to learn more about what’s happening on the streets, and to plan. It will ponder how to beat traffic and improve road safety.

2019-02-05: Massive growth in bikeshare

The rate of the industry’s growth is no joke. The global explosion of shared bikes and scooters in the past few years amounts to the “the fastest technological adoption in history,” as the event’s website noted. And it’s just getting started. “Logarithmic is the way to go with everything” explained Micromobility Conference founder Horace Dediu. He pointed to charts showing the expected rise in adoption of shared electric scooters and their 1-to-3-wheeled brethren. “If you’re not measuring in logarithmic, you’re in the wrong business.” In the meantime, the mini-vehicle gold rush will likely keep beckoning new prospectors. 2 former employees of the traditional docked bikeshare operator Motivate, now both working at 2 new-mobility startups, reminisced about old times maintaining New York City’s hardy CitiBike fleet. They complained that all the sudden interest from software startups was leaving critical hardware overlooked. A former manager pointed to the apparently fragile wheel hubs on a competitor’s shared bike model. “We tried those. They’re just not going to last.”

2019-05-08: The segway was too early but was otherwise correct

This transformation is one that Dean Kamen trumpeted when introducing the Segway in 2001 — the Segway will “sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking” — but the Segway was too early and expensive and now e-scooters and e-bikes are actually set to deliver on that promise

2019-08-12: Tiny cars

Minimobility vehicles will use more energy and road space than scooters, but still much less than full sized cars and transit systems. Expect to see energy numbers perhaps 33%-50%, though it is possible to do even less. Minimobility vehicles will take 50-25% the space on roads of human driven sedans. Many are only 2.5m long and thus fit perpendicular in parallel parking spaces as motorcycles do. That’s cool, but even better is the ability of computer-driven cars to valet park, fitting 5 in the space used by 1 human driven sedan. (You can also fit 10s of small micromobility scooters in a sedan’s parking space.)

2019-08-24: Similarly in LA

Los Angeles will deploy a massive surveillance dragnet targeting the less than menacing threat posed by…bikes and scooters. That’s right, a city-wide, real-time tracking network, a veritable Orwellian surveillance state, targeting the same sort of scooters popular with middle schoolers. In a perplexing technical document posted by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to the open-source software development site GitHub, the city laid-out its vision for an unprecedented tracking system. Buried between technical jargon like “All MDS compatible provider APIs must expose a public GBFS feed…” is a terrifying vision of the future. Under these guidelines, every scooter and bike will need to report the exact GPS coordinates of each device with military precision every 5 seconds. Even worse, the devices will have to report this data in real time.

2022-12-14: More on tiny cars

Why do minicars offer so much societal upside? Let’s walk through the reasons.
To start, they pose far less danger than automobiles to pedestrians and cyclists, whose deaths have been soaring in the US. It’s easy to understand why: If forced to choose, you’d rather be hit by a 500kg golf cart puttering along at 30 kmh than a 3500kg Chevrolet Silverado going 70kmh.
Minicars are better for the planet, too, devouring much less energy and resources for propulsion and manufacture. Their batteries are a fraction of those underpinning electric SUVs and trucks. A Hummer EV’s battery weighs 1500kg, 30x the size of Nimbus’s battery pack. Smaller batteries require less lithium, cobalt and nickel — essential minerals whose shortages have hobbled electric vehicle manufacturing. Even a modest shift toward miniature EVs would free up precious material, catalyzing the transition from fossil fuels.
Minicars also expand mobility access, in two ways. Most obviously, their lower prices put them within reach of those who struggle to afford a full-sized car. But slower minicars, such as golf carts, offer another key advantage. Because most operators don’t need to pedal (or, in some states, possess a driver’s license), they offer mobility to those physically unable to drive a car or ride a bike. That’s an especially valuable capability in a country with soaring numbers of older people.

Jalsa

The city has plenty of Bangladesh restaurants, but few that represent for the food of West Bengal, India, just across the border. That’s one reason Jalsa Grill & Gravy was so welcome when it opened. Owner Nowshin Ali lived in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, “But I grew up in Uttar Pradesh, and had to learn several languages as I grew up, including Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, English, and Bengali”. The halal food at Jalsa features several West Bengal dishes from a menu of northern Indian fare.

One highlight was a chaat featuring slices of slender eggplant fried with a coating of spiced chickpea flour, dusted with shredded coconut, and arrayed on a hump of sweet and sour potatoes. It was irresistible. Cooked in the tandoor, the outsize lamb tikka kebabs were juicy and smoky, but the ghost chicken tikka was not as spicy as the name promised. Of the West Bengal dishes, there was a chingri malaikari (butter shrimp) with plenty of creamy pink gravy, accompanied by a dish of mustard-laced chickpeas. The dum biryani came with chicken and was pleasingly subtle. “That biryani’s from Lucknow, not as spicy as the one from Hyderabad.”