New York Sunday

Well we spent the rest of the weekend driving ourselves around New York City, we got tired of the whole taxi/shuttle business. It was an adventure of a different sort, related to parking tickets and a GPS that didn't know how to plot the way to the new Yankee Stadium.

Times Square in the daytime

We headed off in the morning to Manhattan Island again with a few destinations in mind. Gray's Papaya to break fast, the Carnegie Deli for lunch, a visit to Central Park, some shopping at B&H Electronics. (and of course, the Yankees game we'd gone to NY for in the first place)

The hot dogs in New York definitely taste a lot better than the hot dogs we get from the street vendors around here in Toronto. They remind me of smokies or bratwursts. Also they are not the jumbo things we get here, they actually are small enough to fit into a regular small hot dog bun. I'm told that getting a hot dog and a papaya juice is a classic new york meal. Gray's Papaya was the place we tried. They had a really tasty sauteed onion topping.

Gray's Papaya

Here's their juice selection - tasted pretty decent

These were really tasty hot dogs. They were so good, we went back for more a second day

We walked all over the area south of Central park, there was a lot of shopping and a lot of people. By the time we wound our way up to the Carnegie Deli, we had worked up a bit of an appetite. However we were not prepared at all for the serious amounts of mouthwatering deli that awaited us.

The Carnegie Deli - half the people in the photo are in line to go in

It took a while to get seating, but it was worth it

This was a serious hot pastrami sandwich.
This is also why there is no dinner restaurant commentary.

I ordered a hot pastrami sandwich, and it was absolutely mountainous. Every bite was melt-in-your-mouth greasy goodness. Neither E or I could finish our sandwiches, running out of steam on the last quarter. F didn't even try to start the 2nd half.

Ordering a plate of onion rings and potato latkes on top of the 3 sandwiches was a bit of a mistake, but we couldn't pass them up. They were both excellent though - the rings were freshly battered and fried, and the latkes have put every other latke I've ever had to shame. (though admittedly I haven't had too many latkes before)

Afterwards we walked around Central Park to work off some of our lunch. We saw the John Lennon memorial mosaic, which was pretty nice:

Women would sit at the memorial with a cheerful smile and pose for a picture (?!)

After walking around Central Park for a good while, we decided to head to the B&H Electronics store was. F decided to take the transit to get there earlier. E and I walked, to get some more sights in on the way down, while F did his shopping.

We had some really bad smoothies at a Jamba Juice while taking a small break. I had a peach and E had a mango, and both of them tasted like ground-up cheap pez candy slush, with no real juice at all. Don't go there. Especially since the stuff costs more than the 2-hotdog and juice combo at Gray's Papaya. Something blew up in their preparation area and flooded the store with water (water, not juice) while we were there. I figured it was karma for selling us these gross drinks, I had to throw mine out before I finished a quarter of it. They also didn't have a washroom for customers. What the heck, Jamba people?!

Seriously, I thought the smoothies here were disgusting

Anyways we eventually got down to the B&H Electronics. They have a really cool system for delivering stock from the different departments over to the checkout - there was a motorized conveyor belt system overhead delivering green bins.

At first E thought he was hearing toy remote-controlled cars

Did I mention they had a ton of everything there? It was incredible how much selection was available from TVs to professional mixing equipment, to astronomy telescopes. The only thing a little weird was the store hours - a huge electronics store that isn't open on Friday afternoon/evening or Saturday? I later heard that it was to observe the Jewish Sabbath though. I didn't know that religion played that much a role in running businesses these days.


After we wrapped up at the electronics store, we headed out to the Yankees game at the new stadium. It took a bit of trial and error since the GPS kept trying to direct us to the old stadium. While they are literally next door to each other, the available routes seems to have changed.

The inside of the new Yankee Stadium.

Almost every ad was: "Official so-and-so of the Yankees".
Official mustard, official bank, official hot dog, credit card, automotive buy-n-sell magazine, everything.

It was a pretty good game - The Red Sox were on top for a bit, and the Yankees took the lead in the end. Everyone was actually up out of their seats for the whole last inning and a half. Btw, we all got carded again for the beer we bought, each one of us at a separate area in the stadium.

Monday - we spent it driving back, basically. We stopped back in Manhattan to pick up some a custom order jersey for E, and I wanted another pastrami sandwich to bring back to Toronto. (it was that good and I wanted Kathy to try some, haha) Things were pretty uneventful, but we were happy that it was so, we were all pretty tired out from that crazy Sunday. We hit the highways - a couple of Timmies coffee breaks in between the driving, and we were back in Toronto.

Allen.

P.s. - Duty free alcohol is such a great deal. And they didn't card us either. :D

Free Stuff on your Birthday

My birthday is coming up and I was looking up places that offer free stuff around Toronto.

What-a-Bagel apparently will give you a dozen bagels free on your birthday.

Tucker's Marketplace offers a free buffet dinner on your birthday even if you go by yourself. I don't really understand the business reasons for doing that, but okay. Tucker's isn't that great of a buffet. (Frankie Tomatto's is a bit better, though they don't offer a free birthday meal any more)

Benihana's in the US will give you a free dinner (up to $30US) during your birthday month, if you sign up on their website. I used my spam-mail address. Its not in Toronto, but I'm going down to New York during my birthday month. :D

Baskin Robbins gives a free scoop of ice cream. There are separate US and Canadian mailing list sites, so be sure you're on the Canadian one.

Tony Roma's (2 of them, one near the Airport and the other in Mississauga) give a free dinner as well, up to 18.99, as well as a fried? onion loaf. It doesn't have to be on the birth day itself, it gives a leeway of about 2 weeks it seems. However, it asked me to specify which one, and I listed the Mississauga one for some reason - and the email coupon they sent specified Mississauga only. Doh.

Casey's seems to have a free entree up to $15.99. However there seems to be a lot of posting about how some do, and some don't, so I dont think I'll bother, I'm not too fond of Casey's food anyways.

Denny's is in the same case as Casey's - apparently some do and some don't. I actually like greasy spoons like Denny's, so I called the ones in Mississauga and Brampton. The Mississauga one says they offer a free meal for the birthday person, and the Brampton one says they offer a free dessert, if you buy 2 meals and 2 drinks.

Allen.

Copacabana!

D called up the other day and asked me if I wanted to try out this Brazillian BBQ restaurant in Toronto with some of the guys. Now I have some pretty good memories of the time I went to the Pampas in Las Vegas, so I said I'd go.

At a Brazillian BBQ, they bring skewers of all sorts of BBQ out to your table, and you tell the server if you want something or not. Then they carve pieces off the skewer for you right to your plate. Usually they have some sort of signalling system in place if you want a break from being offered all sorts of BBQed goodness. Eat till you are full, cause it is all you can eat.

I got there there a bit early for the reservation so I sat down at the bar and started on a Stella. It was a cool looking place, sort of the happening-spot type of place you'd find in a restaurant geared for people in their early 30s. The music was loud but not so loud that you can't talk to other people, cause K and T found me at the bar and we talked and joked about this and that until Don and a few others showed up.

Once everyone was there, we ordered some drinks and started on their salad & buffet. It wasn't really a huge selection but what they had was fresh. It wasn't really the main attraction after all. The rosemary bread was nice. The smoked salmon seemed like it was out for a while. There was a good creamy turkey stroganoff dish meant to go with rice. I enjoyed that, though I'm not sure how, er, Brazillian it is.

There was a bad spot where the willowy waiter taking care of our table's drinks spilled half a tray of drinks on a couple of people at our table. They were the easygoing sort though, and they just laughed it off. The manager came out and apologized for the incident. In the end we were given complimentary desserts, but we were way too full of bbq by then. So we passed on it.

Speaking of the barbecue, it came nice and full of flavour. Bacon wrapped filet mignon or turkey, rib eye steak, sirloin, prime rib. I think they need to have more pineapple coming around, that always was in demand and we didn't actually get any for the first 3/4ths of our meal. I had to ask for some lamb too cause all we saw was beef, but they were prompt in getting some lamb chops out right away so I have no complaints. I think they could have done with some sausages or something but I was quite satisfied with the food.

The bbq servers were a bit on the rough side, all spartan macho guys with tattoos and muscles. They didn't have a deferential, polite waiter approach to serving food - no "would you care for some prime rib" or "here you go sirs" here, they were all a laconic "This is Sirloin." (imagine Rambo saying it while spearing a skewer into your table top) or "Is there anything else you're looking for." It was kind of weird, but they were efficient.

I imagine that this would be a hard restaurant to rob, with all these tough guy servers stalking around the restaurant with skewers and carving knives.

Oh they had live music too. I'd read that they have dancing and capoiera performances sometimes, but on Sunday we were treated to jazzifed 80s pop. Not my thing, but people were enjoying it.

All in all it was enjoyable, but I'm not sure I'd go back. My share cost $55 for the food and drink, which is actually more than I paid in Vegas.

Allen.

The Chako Izakaya

This weekend Kathy and I went over to F's to see his newborn baby girl. Such a little sweetie. Sleeps like 22 hours a day according to F's wife, which was a huge difference from their first one. Anyways, after being there for a bit, we ended up going out for dinner.

I felt like something seafood, maybe at a Red Lobster or something, but having only thought of it in the car, we didn't check to see where the closest locations were - we decided to check out the Marlowe or the Alice Fazooli's in a restaurant area around Hwy 7 and 404. Turns out that the Marlowe was a bit more upscale than we felt like, and the Alice Fazooli's didn't have much of a seafood menu. (didn't Alice used to be a Italian seafood place?) Anyway, after hmming and hawing a while, we ended up at the Chako Restaurant Izakaya that was in the same area, the others looked like they wanted to try it out, and I figured I could get my seafood fix from grilling some salmon or something.

Chako is a Korean BBQ. Looked pretty nice and we'd passed by it a few times before and wondered if it was any good. We arrived pretty early, just shy of 6pm like a bunch of senior citizens, and were seated immediately. It was a nice table with 2 grills on it, which was nice cause there were 4 of us. We looked at the menus and there was quite a bit of stuff to look at. The waiter asked us what we wanted and had a little notepad out, but being sort of hungry and since it was all-you-can-eat, we just asked him to bring some of everything. Also we ordered some Sapporo beer. In the amount we wanted, it was being sold in 2, 3, or 4 litre sizes, and we figured 3L would be plenty to get us happy. He bowed and left, and someone came to light the grills.

A few minutes later, he came back with some of those Korean appetizer plates - some tofu, some kelp, kimchee etc. Then another waiter showed up with a plate of sushi and maki roll on it. Miso Soup too. Then somehow, everything appeared at once in a hubbub of serving staff and trays - little stackable black-and-red trays of meats and veggies. (well I guess we did say some of everything) So we set to grilling. It was pretty good stuff! The meats were well marinated and the vegetables nice and fresh. Course F and E didn't really want to have anything to do with the veggies so it fell to Kathy and I to finish off most of it. We were good with all of the dishes except for maybe this whitefish that seemed to have been defrosted from a frozen package and not fresh like the salmon.

They brought the beer over at some point too, I dont recall if it was before or after the food stampede. It came with these little juice glasses from Ikea. The beer came in a little wooden barrel - that was kind of cool. It had a tap on the front and the top was removable so we could see how much beer we had left... though after a few glasses, F kept telling us there were 3 glasses left, even though we must have gotten at least 12 more out of it.

We stared ordering more of some of the dishes as we grilled - there was an especially good lamb, and the bulgogi beef was nice and marblized. I think we ordered like 4 sets of short ribs as well. By the end of it we had eaten quite a bit. Not half as much as we did when we were in our teens, but we put in a pretty good show I thought. I know that on the last two little trays of beef, they started doing the usual Korean BBQ thing where they hint that you shouldn't eat any more by serving you semi-frozen unseasoned meat. It was a bit funny too, when we were at the end we figured we could do 1 tray of short rib and 1 tray of bulgogi - we stressed to the waiter that we just wanted these last 2... and he misinterpreted it as we wanted 2 of each, so we got double the portion we wanted. So we went from the 100% full we thought we'd end up at, to a solid 120% of food induced discomfort. I think E went way past that, he somehow managed to fit in 2 bowls of rice on top of everything else.

We ended up sticking around a bit longer cause we thought maybe some ice cream might help smooth things out. They also appeared to have some oriental style mango pudding, and we had a bit of a discussion on how "mango" flavour is never mango-like, sort of how "grape" flavour is not the same thing as grape. So we got some of one and some of the other - some mango ice cream, some mango pudding, and some green tea ice cream. The two mango desserts tasted completely different from each other and neither one tasted like mango. E said that the pudding was more of a lychee flavour, and the ice cream was more of the usual artifical mango flavor. I has some of the green tea ice cream which was pretty normal.

Oh if you are in their washrooms (a bunch of nice little individual rooms) make sure you don't turn on the faucet all the way - it's a fancy looking affair but designed in such a way that water will bounce right out of the sink and into your lap if you turn it too high.

So anyways we did have a good time, the food was of pretty good quality, and the service was REALLY good compared the the standard service at a chinese-korean restaurant. It was really good enough that I'm actually spending time writing about how I like it instead of how I don't like it. :D I would definitely consider eating there again. Btw, it looks like it's owned by the people who run the Destiny tea shop. (link)

We rounded off the night with a bit of Rock Band, which none of us had played for a while, so we were pretty rusty. I think I sang like 4 songs before my throat started giving out. Okay, maybe about 1/2 way through the 2nd song, I had a coughing fit and had to go down an octave, which was a bit on the low side. Dammit why are so many songs either too high or too low for me? Oh well, it was still fun. Before one of the songs I was playing guitar on, Kathy was poking a drum stick into my ear to bug me, so I played badly on on purpose. I meant to keep it near the fail mark of the 3rd life, but I sucked enough that I actually died, doh! Sorry E who was trying to sing Oasis.

Allen.