Comments on pink india ink: Babbo-ween.

found your blog via gridskipper. this is hilarious...

2007-11-05T15:25:00.000+01:00

found your blog via gridskipper. this is hilarious. and i love your writing style.

"City of Lost Hookers" = BEST. MOVIE. EVER.The boo...

2007-11-05T02:05:00.000+01:00

"City of Lost Hookers" = BEST. MOVIE. EVER.

The book version isn't bad either.

Hey! Yo! Everybody chill for a moment! Shaddap! Ju...

2007-11-04T18:12:00.000+01:00

Hey! Yo! Everybody chill for a moment! Shaddap! Just shaddap and listen, willyuh?!?!?!

I was only kidding – I said kidding. Kidding! – when I said I was concerned about what the dude who tossed his cookies at Babbo ate. Okay,it was a bad joke, but a joke.

In fact, I wanted to continue running with it Friday night, asking the greeter at Babbo if we could have a table away from the spot where somebody upchucked a couple of nights before. My beautiful girlfriend warned me that if so much as a suggestion of that smartass remark came out of my mouth, I was going to end up eating alone.

We followed Marsha the Market Maven's recomendation and ordered the traditional tasting menu with the paired wines.

Yes, it cost a hefty sum (that $250 doesn't include tax and tip, and in a restaurant as classy as Babbo you don't leave a piddling 15%.) But it'll be worth auctioning off the co-op to pay for it. (That's a joke, too. Please, please, nobody call the co-op board.)

We ate our way through eight courses. Six of them were I-died-and-went-to-heaven delicious and the other two were merely pretty damn fabulous. The wine pairings were often brilliant.

If I have one cavil, it's the brief they find necessary before each course, a lecture concerning why this food goes with that wine, yadda yadda, foody yadda. I kept wondering if I should take notes. I began to get the same nervous feeling I used to have in high school and my freshman year in college – that along with the bill they were going to spring a pop quiz on us.

Will I do it again soon? I can't do it very soon because you have to wait a month for a reservation. But you can bet Babbo is now one of my two top restaurant picks when I'm in the mood to splurge. (The other, which gets a lot less ballyhoo, is Au Trou Gascon in Paris. It's so hard to find the place that you might as well gather your own seasonal ingredients along the way, but it's another with a knockout tasting menu. And it's so blessedly quiet, you can actually carry on a conversation during dinner there. Just a hint.)

Okay, that's all the #*&!!@%! restaurant critic-ing I plan to do for a while. I'm going back to my own blog to dream up something nasty and political to post on Monday night or Tuesday.

Yours very crankily,
The New York Crank

I get pissed if I have a swif dinner and then get ...

2007-11-04T14:35:00.000+01:00

I get pissed if I have a swif dinner and then get so drunk that I toss the meal in the morning. I can't imagine my rage at losing $250 bucks of chow on the chow-provider's floor. Bummer.

oh, man. this reminds me of the time a girl passed...

2007-11-03T21:58:00.000+01:00

oh, man. this reminds me of the time a girl passed out drunk on me in the subway, and when i moved her to wake her up, she promptly threw up all over the floor. nice new york. nice.

If I had been that guy I would be so pissed. Most...

2007-11-02T23:48:00.000+01:00

If I had been that guy I would be so pissed.
Mostly at myself.
Because, damn, you're right- what a waste of a $250 meal.
Oh, and how gross for you.
My condolences.

but but...what did you eat at Babbo??? My husband...

2007-11-02T20:23:00.000+01:00

but but...what did you eat at Babbo??? My husband and I had the pasta tasting menu with wine pairing for his 40th birthday and it was exquisite. We'd love to go back some day, but there are so many other great places to explore in NY.

I'm absolutely certain nothing the guy ate at Babb...

2007-11-02T19:44:00.000+01:00

I'm absolutely certain nothing the guy ate at Babbo resulted in the Unfortunate Incident. Given his sleepy eyes, I would hazard it had more to do with how much he drank.

I HIGHLY recommend you go for the traditional tasting menu with wine pairings. We did that for our anniversary last year and were blown away. All of the food was fantastic, and we went over to Astor afterwards to check out a couple of the wines we particularly liked, but they were sadly above our price comfort zone. It's really incredible value for the money.

"...about the astonishing, vibrant orange color of...

2007-11-02T17:15:00.000+01:00

"...about the astonishing, vibrant orange color of the vomit..."

Please, please, please! And fast, fast, fast – tell me if you know what the barfing diner ordered.

The reason I ask is, my beautiful girlfriend and I finally scored – exactly a month ago – a reservation for dinner this evening.

True, I expect to pay $250 for a meal. Why not? If I save it up to go to Europe, it'll be worth 2 Euros by next summer the way the value of a dollar is plummeting.

True, we have to eat like old people using the Earlybird Special in Miami - 6:15 was the only time they had available.

So fine. I have to eat dinner 17 seconds after I finish lunch. Why not? Mr. Battali is honoring me by allowing me to be his customer. But please, please....

I don't want to have to barf on top of everything else. So if you know, please immediately tell me: what did the barfing diner eat that made him barf.

Yours Crankily,
The New York Crank

First - throwing up at Babbo= totally hilarious. ...

2007-11-02T15:01:00.000+01:00

First - throwing up at Babbo= totally hilarious. I'm so, so glad that wasn't you Kat.

Second, to Tim: unfortunately the slutty archetype has been taken way too far in the states (in New York anyway.) I went to buy a costume a couple of weeks ago, walked into Ricky's (the definitive NYC Halloween emporium), and wandered the racks for a solid half an hour looking for ANYTHING that wasn't embarrasingly slutty. The sales guy finally came up to me and asked if I needed help. When I told him I was looking for something that was maybe not so whorish, he looked at me, paused, and said "well... hmmm. I don't think we have anything like that." Seriously. There are the obvious choices like slutty nurses, and slutty cops, and slutty bunnies. But there are also slutty UPS girls, and slutty Hogwarts students, and slutty eskimos, and slutty princesses...you get the point. Go here: www.rickyshalloween.com, and you will see exactly what Kat is referring to. Sorry for your sake that it hasn't spread to Australia. :)

To provide some context to my ignorance, I live in...

2007-11-02T00:47:00.000+01:00

To provide some context to my ignorance, I live in Melbourne, where Halloween is slightly more popular than Thanksgiving (meaning a couple of people might actually participate instead of merely watching imported holiday-themed US sitcoms that are shown six months out of sync).

So, my question is: why is it a bad thing to dress up as a slutty archetype? If it seems like everyone else is doing it, then maybe a non-archetypical variety would be more suitable. But, for the love of all things men (and maybe 10% of the girls) don't just dismiss it out of hand!

Of course, it could be that, well, it's been done. Over here it certainly hasn't (hence my enthusiasm). All I got on the 31st was four pimply, brace-adorned slightly emo types wearing a little too much black to be trendy but not enough to be cool, chorusing "Trick or... um, treat?". I sent them away with a gingernut biscuit each because that's all we had in the cupboard.

We've got a public holiday here on Tuesday to celebrate a horse race. I wonder if the horses are pissed that they don't get the day off as well.