Beneficent Fate

This is going to be another long post...

These last two days have been neat. Thursday the NY office has a TGIAF. A is for almost. It is much more a party than the TGIF in Mountain View. Some 40s, jello shots, ... Met some more Google people. Then I wandered a different way toward home and ended up eating at a chinese restaurant across the street from Empire State building. Called Hunan. Sounded good and the menu looked good and inexpensive. But I must've been hallucinating. The restaurant was more expensive than I remembered from the menu, didn't have a nice decor, and only had some white people in it, and tourists at that. The food of okay, Jing Jing quality. Then another brief bookstore trip, hung with my apartment-mate who left today. (I get a new one on Monday.)

In happier news, I searched and searched and am confident I know every pickup game in Manhattan (4/week, with one that is attempting to start for the first time this weekend, and 2 ones that sound good in brooklyn).

Friday I found a truly New York place for breakfast. Brooklyn Bagels. Very efficient. Sliced, smears, sandwiches on demand, fast, fast fast. Employees are terse. I had a good (sadly untoasted) sundried tomato bagel with butter. And what a wide selection of fresh fruit. (But fresh fruit is really easy to find in NYC in general!)

After the bagel, I stopped by a fairly large independent bookstore I got a recommendation for and bought some New York guides that I'd been eyeing at Barnes and Noble. Yay for supporting independent bookstores!

Google's lunch on Friday was pretty unexciting.

I hung around late on Friday (today) while reading some guidebooks. An engineer at google with style (Tom, who wears old-style swinger suit-like things) whom I just met happened to come by to ask an engineering question and ended up referring me to some mailing lists he knows (and one he runs) that list unusual/weird events in the NYC area.

Now, we are coming to the reason for the title of the post. I was reading one guidebook with the intention of going to a jazz club tonight. But I couldn't find any that was inexpensive, of a size that I could get into on a friday night, and a style that'd I'd comfortable with while wearing the jeans I'd worn today. So then I got settled on just finding a good place to eat. But I hadn't yet bought the eclectic gourmet guide that I wanted to get me restaurant recommendations. So then my plan became to stop by a nearby Barnes and Noble that was likely to be open, flip through it, and find some good place to eat. But when I made it to the B&N (a different one than before), I found it was just closing -- it had a different schedule than the one I had previously visited. So now I was without jazz and without food recommendations. I kept wandering north. Ran into Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Stunning. Then I kept walking, looking for decent food.

And loh, in a side street I spotted a lot more restaurants than usually appear on a side street. One said Brazilian and I thought, hmmm, sounds good. And so I walked down the street. And looked at the menu. And it looked good. Then I noticed the place next to it was also Brazilian/Portuguese. And I knew these were authentic because I heard people speaking Portuguese. And looked down the street, an Italian restaurant, Chinese, subway, McDonald's, pub, and two more Brazilian restaurants! So I looked at those too, and decided on one of the Brazilian restaurants (Via Brasil). Why? Because it sounded good: both food and aurally -- it had a good jazz trio (Bossa Nova style) playing inside. The decor had style. The wait staff was really attentive. I had an appetizer which was fish as in fish-and-chips but more tender, less batter, and served with a red pepper sauce. My entree was "a Stew made W. Dende Oil, Green Herbs, Onions, Tomatoes and Coconut Milk served W. Rice and Pirao ( Yucca Flour Puree)" with shrimp. It was good. It was served in three separate parts, the stew, the pirao, and the rice for me to mix for myself. The stew itself had a zing to it but when mixed it was relatively mild. Very reminiscent of jambalaya. I gave a 25% tip because the staff was so nice and I was so pleased with the jazz.

As I left that street I noticed it (51st) also had a street sign labeled "Little Brazil Street". Then I wandered through large stretches of broadway and times square on the way home. The lights.. the excitement.. the crowds.. My god the crowds. Like Las Vegas but more packed, higher class, and less tacky.

What's the point? Had I not chilled late at work, I wouldn't have found how to find the weird stuff happening in New York. Had I not stayed late and talked about this, I would've left earlier and hit Barnes and Noble before it closed. Had I hit Barnes and Noble before it closed, I would've turned around and found a recommended restaurant on the way home. Instead I walked in the opposite direction, found some beautiful sights, a great restaurant (and district), and got the jazz for which I was searching. Fate.

P.S. The Thai restaurant I tried at the beginning of my trip was "Regional Thai Taste Restaurant."