Monday: Food, Gramercy/Flatiron, Shrek 2, Food

(This refers to Monday, July 5th; written on Thursday, July 8th.)

Monday was to be devoted to exploring the Gramercy/Flatiron district. I started the day by examining my list of recommended restaurants in the area. The only restaurants were some sushi places, some Indian (which I intended to eat on Tuesday), and Ali Baba (the turkish place I ate at on Friday). Following Kitchen Confidential, I'm avoiding seafood in Mondays. So back to Ali Baba it was. (Yes, I took that picture.)

A quick cross-town bus later -it was too hot to hike that far- and I was there. And it was good. This time I had pide which, at a very rough level, is Turkish pizza. But no sauce and no cheese. Pieces looked kind of like this; the whole item somewhat like this. (I really should've swallowed my pride and taken a picture of my food before I ate it! That would have saved me much trouble finding pictures on the web.) The main differences between my pide and the ones in these pictures were that my pide was longer: it was cut in half along the shorter axis and each half was the length of my plate and my pide had tiny pieces of lamb and grilled vegetables inside. It was really good. The bread itself kind of reminded me of pizza bread but was actually more tasty. You'll notice that the food doesn't go near the edge, i.e. it doesn't really appear until the fold in the bread. So, there is a good inch and a half all the way around the pide that was just bread. In american pizzas I generally eat the crust but don't appreciate it much. In this I ate it all and liked it a lot, just as much as the part of the bread with items on it.

On the way to lunch, I noticed the third avenue had lots of good looking restaurants. Maybe I'll be back. Sadly, from my wandering on Friday evening I noticed this district isn't very happening/popular at night.

The Gramercy District is nice. The commercial part has a number of buildings with impressive towers, and the residential component has some very beautiful buildings. I took this nice shot of the empire statue building with a church in the foreground. It was taken close to Madison Square Park, which had not one but two weird sculptures. (If you read my post from Sunday, you'll see I'm in a weird sculpture period.) While examining the second trying to figure out what and why it was (and probably looking confused), a helpful passerby remarked, "The sculptor is the husband of the arts commissioner in the city." That explains a bit.

The Gridiron building is also in the district (obviously, given the alternate name of the district!). I wonder what kind of people go out of their way to get a room in the point.

There is an impressive courthouse nearby. My panorama looks odd because I rotated the camera too much, but you can tell from this picture of the top of the courthouse that it really is ornate.

Gramercy Park looks nice but is locked for everyone that doesn't live within a block.

Sometime during this wandering it started pouring. Thunderstorm and all. Luckily I was in a gallery at the time and by the time I noticed and then spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what to do next given the weather, it stopped. Only negative of it stopping was by 15 minutes later, it was again as roasting as it was beforehand.

Grabbed some apple cider at the farmer's market in Union Square. You know the apple cider is good when the place selling it sells a few different variations that depend on which apples they made it from...

Then I decided to do what I hear New Yorkers do when it is too hot out: go to an air-conditioned movie. Grabbing the first free paper I found -which happened to be The Onion! :)- I browsed the listings and decided to see Shrek 2 in a nearby theater. It was great. A well done fun enjoyable entertaining flick; I'd recommend it.

Dinner involved hunting around the east village. So many tempting indian restaurants, but I'm planning to go to curry hill later this week, so I found a (non-indian) place: Mancora, a Peruvian restaurant. During hunting, though, I was tempted again by sushi places. That is, until I saw one place that advertised 50% off all sashimi, and then I remembered Kitchen Confidential and why I was avoiding seafood. And tempted by an Israeli, Polish, and a number of Turkish restaurants, but decided I wasn't in the mood for any of those.

It turns out Mancora served mostly seafood! (Maybe I should go back on a non-Monday..) I ended up ordering a chicken dish that involved a number of stripes of chicken molded into three inch diameter cylinders and stuffed with mushrooms, spinach, and cheese. Good, but fairly dry. (I think that might be a consequence of how you have to cook it so the chicken ends up done but without overcooking the vegetables inside.) It came with a tasty pile of spinach mashed potatoes; I also ordered a pretty good Peruvian Pilsner-like beer Cusquena.

Update: today's pictures and more are online.