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Looking
north on Bayard in Chinatown.
2:00 PM. Photo: JH.
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New Yorkers
were blessed with another beautiful day yesterday with temperatures in the low 70s accompanied by soft gusts and
occasional breezes gently kissing our harried psyches.
JH and I made an excursion down to Chinatown, at the recommendation
of Steve Millington, the general manager of Michael’s,
who is, not surprisingly, a “foodie” of sorts. Steve
had taken our recommendation, and one Saturday with wife and
child, took the Water Taxi to visit Grimaldi’s pizza in
DUMBO. He reciprocated with a Vietnamese restaurant called
New Pasteur on Baxter Street (you take the 6 to Canal Street
and walk east to Baxter Street and down a couple of blocks).
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New
Pasteur on Baxter Street
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Vietnamese restaurants
are famously inexpensive or just downright cheap, compared to what
we’re used to paying anywhere (including
McDonald’s). The New Pasteur makes no bones about being
anything other than a restaurant that serves food. Good food.
It's tiny although two walls covered with mirrors give
it a little more light and illusion of space. The tables are
scrunched together so that you may be sitting next to someone
you’ve never seen before. There’s a guy who takes
the cash and waits tables with another guy. The menu is lengthy
as it often is with Asian menus, and, as often it is, most of
the time I don’t know what the hell I’m ordering
except for the rice and the beef and the shrimp and the chicken
and the lobster and the veggies. Which of course means I do know
what I’m ordering; I just don’t know what it comes
out like.
We ordered Summer Rolls, big bowls of a hot, sweet soup (Number
4) with noodles and beef, a curried chicken dish, a beef and
vegetables dish on a bed of noodles and a couple of bottles of
Chinese beer. JH knew what it was, I didn’t. It was a case
again of the eyes being bigger than the stomach. This is caused
by the very low prices (and the gluttony of the customer), and
frankly I couldn’t eat it all. But it was delicious. The
bill came to thirty-six bucks for the two of us and there was
enough to take home for another meal. |
Our
eyes were obviously too big for our stomachs, but the price
was right
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| Stuffed,
despite the lightness of the Vietnamese fare, we
took a tourist’s stroll through some of the streets
of Chinatown where I have not visited in decades! JH, however,
is a fairly regular patron of its cuisine emporiums, so he
knew the way around. From Chinatown we walked west in further
pursuit of another Millington recommendation; this time for
dessert. The Duane Park Patisserie. Located at the far end
of Duane Street just at the end of what is Duane Park, a
tiny triangular, fenced in area with some vegetation and
a few benches surrounded by old New York — buildings
that went up more than a hundred and sometimes even two hundred
years ago. The downtown is so refurbished and renovated,
pristine, quaint, historical, that it’s impossible
not to feel the pangs of wishing you could live there. For
there you are, right in Manhattan, in the thick of it yet
somehow removed from the zooming sleek hustle bustle of cosmopolitan
New York, in an atmosphere reeking of history, character
and imagination. |
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A tourist’s stroll through the streets
of Chinatown
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L.
to r.: Looking south on Bayard Street; A group of
schoolchildren out for a run.
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| Jacob Javits Federal Building |
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The Woolworth Building.
Right, top to bottom: The Louis J. Lefkowitz
State Office Building; On the corner of Staple and
Duane; A brother and sister horsing around on Duane
Street. |
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Meanwhile:
the Duane Park Patisserie is practically incognito — you
really have to look for it. A shop behind a very old storefront
painted green. Inside is a well-used bakery premises. There
was a table of kids and two mothers. Millington recommended
the cupcakes with cream inside. I’m not an everyday
dessert eater (unless I’m at a benefit dinner — and
even then I have to push away from the table), or even a
cupcake eater, but we were on “assignment” so
to speak. And so we ordered a cupcake each — all chocolate,
they are, and two small cappuccinos. $10.00 total.
The cupcakes are VERY chocolate-y. Deep, rich, dark, almost bitter chocolate,
with a sweet and creamy respite in the middle. Kind of like the intellectual’s
version of a Hostess Cupcake. Excellent, and for choco-holics (which I’m
not quite) probably the living end.
I also grabbed a bag of tiny brownie squares (with walnuts) for $3.50.
JH said I’d probably eat them all in a pig-out. I told him my habit
was to eat three at a time, with a cup of coffee at my desk and then put
them away. Late at night sort of thing (I can drink coffee before going
to sleep). I believed it when I said it. But when I got home in the late
afternoon, while on the phone, I had the little cellophane bag on my desk
and so while fidgeting, I opened the bag and popped one in.
I betcha can’t eat just one, as they say. I popped one, and then
another, and then another. They were bite-sized, soft and cakey, but moist,
with an occasional bit of walnut. I went through about ten of them (and
there were still some left) before I put them away for another day (tomorrow/today)
just to prove that I really do have self-restraint. |
The
infamous Duane Park Patisserie hand-baked crème-filled
cupcakes
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Another
satisfied customer and one in need of another cupcake
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| After
the Cupcake Affair, we walked from Duane Street back up to Canal
and over east to the subway. It was a leisurely walk just looking
around, soaking up the vibes on streets surrounded by beautiful
old buildings (many containing what are now multi-million dollar
apartment lofts) erected over the past two centuries. The area
doesn’t have a lot of auto traffic until you get to Canal
which is full of shops and bazaars and ricky-tick emporiums selling
everything cheap and tacky, and with, no doubt, for shoppers
(which I am not) bargains galore. It was a good trip, however,
a getting away from the Big Town while still right in the Big
Town. A taste of New York for everybody. |
Walking
east on Canal Street with a view of the Empire State Building
and a mural on the corner of Greene and Canal
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