Hot Potato is a kiddie game played at birthday parties, back when kids were happy tossing a tuber. Younguns sit in a circle and quickly pass an object along. When Mom stops the record player, whoever’s left holding the potato is “out". The last kid, empty-handed, “wins”.
At Pastis, no one wins. I entered a half empty restaurant to order take-out. The server passed me to another server, who tossed me onto another, and yet another until I stood at the bar. A rattled bartender said he didn’t even know if he was serving take-out, and if so it’d probably take a long time. Said, I should talk to a manager.
Had I stumbled into Pastis on “opposite day”? It was Friday, come to think of it, and certainly the only explanation for why no server served, nor tender tended.
Either that, or the entire staff is high on crack cocaine.
Observe: empty-handed waiters charge like pit-bulls tied to a line, here to there, and back again. Bartenders fumble lemons, scattering and colliding like rugby players. No one looks in your eyes. Everyone sports a sweat mustache. Each and every ornery one forgot he has a job!
Reason to go pack to Pastis?
Mama’s got a Kg. of Colombian to unload.
Fast.
Artwork by Barry Silver
The best cuppa chai I ever sipped was in the village of the Blue God. Krishna’s Vrindavan.
The chai-wallah sat cross-legged in one box and made chai from the contents of another. With an economy of movement, neither bending nor leaning, he dipped a long handled spoon into the smaller box and flourished an arc of spice, tea dust, and sugar into a pot of half water half milk that rolled on the boil.
He offered the chai in single-serve clay cups. Use once, then toss on a pile that mounts until monsoon turns a heap of shard into a river of mud.
Vrindavan chai, each sip, a mouthful.
Fragrant, creamy, bold, and sweet.
I speak of true chai.
Krishna’s cup.
The nectar of a sky-hued God.
A hankering for that kind of chai is hard to appease. A girl has to lift-off and drop from the sky into the dawn of a faraway city hazy with insomnia and the smoke of burning trash. She must succumb to the chaos of lawless desperate roads with her pocket full of rupees.
Inshallah Lahore. 24 hours a day Lahore ladles out the city’s best chai. This here city. New York.
Follow the cabbies from the corner gas station at Lafayette and Houston into a cluttered storefront on Crosby. Join a sub-continental, inter-religious forum that congregates for milky chai, paper plates of mutton biryani, a toilet, and a bulletin board.
Do you want to sell your cab?
Lahore also stocks a large selection of rusk, a curiously German, dry-packaged good which is popular in Indian shops the world over.
Zwieback in German.
Lahore’s many condiments include South Indian pickle, a tight mass of bitter withered fruit and grit gathered in a pool of unctuous red oil.
Mitchell’s Pickle.
Lahore’s food is cheap, hot, Halal.
Their chai is cheap, hot, heaven sent.
Familiar faces.
To the fellows at Lahore,
Dhanyavad.
Shukriya.
Thank you.
Don’t accuse me.
I’ll confess.
My eating habits are unconventional.
I’m whole-food vegetarian since celebrated Angelica Kitchen occupied a hot jammed storefront one block east of Trash and Vaudeville on grimy Saint Marks Place.
As a chopstick clicking, glassy-eyed evangelical macro-neophyte, I rained a heavy-hand of sesame gomasio onto every mouthful of hijiki-laced Dragon Bowl. My innate palate for nature’s true flavors did not spring forth overnight.
I’ve followed the fundamentalist quest from one camp to the next. Swinging like a B-Movie Queen on a vine: raw food to cooked, ayurvedic to live, congee to kichari. All the while sprouting, soaking, juicing, judging.
The food-freak believes in manna.
Food as the path to knowledge.
Nirvana via the alimentary canal.
A quest for the one perfect food among the many.
Goji berry!
Jungle peanut?
Wheatgrass juice!
Early morning mid-stream sip of urine?
Gandhi drank his, the enthusiast promptly iterates. Suggesting that daily urine drinking is the foundation for peaceful revolution and democratic self-rule.
Moreover that he and Gandhi are woven of one cloth: DIY home spun, seasonally, and locally grown.
Artwork by Barry Silver
This nutritional nectar lifts the seeker to a pinnacle of knowledge. From these heights, often mistaking his sprouting jar for a papal dispensation, the seeker beatifically glows.
Or rather gloats.
In a superior sense-of-self, with license to judge all ordinary food eaters (um, err everyone, that is).
At that stratosphere, the whole nourish-thyself jag becomes just a little too precious.
Precious.
Yes, that’s how I felt about dining at Pure Food and Wine .
The garden is gorgeous. As is the staff.
If you arrive for dinner, having dashed the city from early morning, toiled a job (which you’ll be grateful you have when the bill arrives), your hunger may not be sated by these small-plate portions. Unless you arrive a self-satisfied raw-foodist.
In that case, enjoy! A sliver of papery turnip ruffled over a blobble of nut puree may actually look and taste like ravioli.
Methinks raw food living best enjoyed naked under a Hawaiian coconut palm, sucking sticky mango flesh off someone else’s fingers while reclining just outside the front flap of your yurt.
A name is after all, only that.
Dining in Pure’s garden with Popeye-gunned, first-husband The Impact Addict, how pure could a girl feel?
Purity is a state of mind.
Or not.