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Whorebivore: Meet Me In Hog Heaven

Walmsley Apricot — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

J&R’s Steak House

1320 Stony Brook Road

Stony Brook, NY

631-689-5920

I found myself driving around Long Island one night, in an area that could generously be called a wasteland, nothing but stores and parking lots as far as the eye can see. After much cursing at the local population’s inattention to speed limits and traffic laws, I discovered the strip mall, built in the style of a Swiss chalet, which houses J&R’s Steak House.

I sat in the middle of the main dining room, where the carpet looks like that of a cheap motel lobby, and where there’s a wall of Polaroid pictures bearing the weary faces of those who tried to climb the Everest that is the 76 oz. steak-eating challenge. All I could think about when I saw those photographs tacked to the wall was how they looked like a memorial.

I stared at the menu, which had no vegetarian entrées. Above the din of Long Island accents, I heard a snortle and turned around. I saw, squeezing between table and chair, a lone-dining pig sporting a plaid jacket and flashy wristwatch around his left trotter. The pink of his elongated face was mottled with brown spots. His jowls jiggled as he struggled to tuck a napkin into his collar.

The pig spotted me watching him. I rubbed my eyes and pressed my forefingers into my temples, rotating them in little circles and telling myself that if I didn’t believe it was there, it would go away.

I felt the table bump against me and heard a saltshaker crash to the floor. Please don’t sit down, I thought.

“Don’t mind me,” the pig said in voice that sounded like hominy grits being blown through a tin horn. “Figured I’d join you so the both of us don’t look like schlubs eating alone,”

“I’m on business,” I said.

“You get paid to eat at JR?” he said.

“Not much,” I said.

“I worked in showbiz 40 years. I collected a check for all sorts of stupidity. But nothing beats getting paid to eat.”

He asked me my name, and I told him. He volunteered his: Kaz.

When the waitress came I cobbled together a meal of salad, an appetizer and sides. Kaz ordered JR’s double rack of baby back ribs.

When the waitress left I asked him, “Don’t you feel funny eating pork?”

“I kept kosher for almost 20 years. But now I come all the way out here from Commack for a double slab. Pork’s the best meat on Earth. I know, I’m made of it.”

“Don’t you ever think it might be a relative?” I said.

“Listen kid, I grew up on a farm, and I seen dogs that eats their young before they can run away. That’s the world we live in, and I ain’t here to change it.”

“How did you get off the farm and into that cheap suit?”

“I was a piglet on a hog farm in Vermont. One day I seen ’em burying a knife into my uncle’s gut. Next thing I know they’re after me. I didn’t know they just wanted to cut off my nuts. I bit that schmuck’s tokhes and made a run for it all the way to the Catskills. I was about to plotz I was so hungry, and then I seen another farm. I snook into the barn so I could eat something. Man in a black hat walks in and I thought I was a goner. But he didn’t kill me,” he said. “The farm was Jewish and Jews don’t eat pigs.”

“A safe bet for you,” I said.

“He did a mitzvah and raised me. One day the comedian Jack E. Leonard comes to buy milk and sees me. He gives some money to the farm and takes me around the Borscht Belt as part of his act. When he went Hollywood, I went Hollywood. I wrote most of his jokes, you know?”

The food began arriving. Portions were ridiculous. An order of garlic bread ($2.99) was five foot-long split loaves stacked up like Lincoln Logs—each with a papular rash covering its crust from being fresh out of the oven. Bite into one and butter runs down your chin.

I had a large garden salad with feta for the low, low price of $2.99. The lettuce was fresh but soggy—passable in all. I cannot say the same for the spinach and artichoke dip with tortilla chips ($6.45). It was some sort of misguided fusion that combined the worst parts of a potluck-appetizer and movie theater nachos.

From the side dishes, I tried Don’s Rice Pilaf (Don apparently calls regular, old yellow rice “pilaf”); creamed spinach, which was more muck; a pile of limp sweet potato fries; and broccoli with “cheddar cheese sauce,” which was, perhaps predictably, steaming heads engulfed in a lava flow of what tasted like Velveeta.

Kaz sat there gobbling every strand of muscle fiber from each little rib bone. I don’t know where hog heaven is, but for this pig it seemed to involve barbecue.

“I went with Jack to a diner in Hollywood,” Kaz started again, gesticulating with a rib bone crammed in his cloven hoof. “He told me to eat on his dime, but he had to run and he would meet me at the hotel. I ordered something called a ‘Big Star Burger.’ It was out-of-this-world. Jack comes back five minutes later ’cause his meeting was cancelled. He says, ‘Kaz, are you fucking crazy, that’s bacon!’”

“I cried my eyes out. I had broken the law of the Torah and I was a cannibal now. But then I got to thinking on both counts, that’s the way God made us—to kill each other; to eat each other. God can’t be wrong, right? You don’t got no choice.”

Read more reviews of vegetarian eats at www.whorebivore.com

Whorebivore: When Rice Attacks

Walmsley Apricot — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Kenka

25 St. Mark’s Place (betw. 2nd & 3rd Aves.)

212-254-6363

It was two summers ago that I first passed through the sliding doors of Kenka, the intentionally bizarre izakaya on St. Marks Place that’s better suited for tripping on acid than dining.

So it should have come as no surprise that, after barely touching the North Korean spicy raw beef over rice—I skipped the cow penis, turkey testicles and fried grizzle—I found myself seeing tracers and not caring which kanji on the restroom doors stood for “men” because my stomach was jerking like a rodeo bull.

But maybe it wasn’t the food. Maybe it was the sing-songy Okinawan music blaring through the crackling rafter-mounted loudspeakers. Or maybe because the specials menu bore a samurai slicing a woman’s naked buttocks with a kitana blade, blood dripping from the saw lines. Or maybe it was payback from The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. (I should make clear, I did not knowingly ingest any mind-altering substances other than a few sips of Sapporo.)

Whatever the cause, I was sick as a dog drunk on chocolate milk. More disturbingly, I felt I had wandered into a particle collider and reality was ending.

Still red-eyed and shaking, I walked around the block until my dinner guests got the check, along with Kenka’s well-known meal-ending treat, a plastic pill-cup of fuchsia powder for pouring into the cotton-candy machine in front of the restaurant.

After months of changing my route to avoid St. Marks, I fulfilled my promise a couple weeks ago to return to Kenka, charged up like MacArthur landing in Manila.

If this was the vortex of hell, I would fight every demon.

I sat in the back, between a row of pachinko machines and a wall lined with 1970s porno posters from Japan.

The music sounded like the early experimentation with recording technology in Japan that gave us “The Chipmunks.”

Planning to order vegetarian, I didn’t have to worry about reengaging with the North Korean specialty.

I started instead with a small bowl of hijik ($3), chilled pan-fried black seaweed pieces that looked like baby bloodworms.

The strips were tossed with shredded carrot, white taro slices that could have passed for sashimi (the waiter assured me they weren’t) and little globs of tofu, all in a briny puddle.

From the specials, I tried the cheese spring rolls ($4.50), which were glistening fried wonton skins housing stretchy white cheese and oil reserves. To my American sensibilities, they paired nicely with beer, but I wondered if in Tokyo they would have seemed a novelty.

In Japan, okoge, the rice scraped from the bottom of the cooker, is considered a delicacy. I was impressed that Kenka managed grilled rice balls ($5) that were nuggets with exteriors completely made of the stuff. The outside of the ball was crisp and smoky, and it sealed steaming white grains inside. One of the ball’s surfaces was spread with sweetish miso paste that lent it a flavor similar to toast slicked with butter and jelly.

In the absence of a cosmic showdown, an out-of-body experience, a subatomic break with space time or vomiting during the course of the meal (I even survived a Japanese version of “When You’re Happy, and You Know It” that sounded like a eunuch chorus), I got back to pondering what set off the whirling feeling last time. It crossed my mind that maybe I had tasted the anger of the cow whose flanks was served over rice. I had buckled from the sickness that the animal felt at death.

I was increasingly sounding like El Yuyo, I knew, but it seemed a fair explanation. The cow had died simply for my palette’s pleasure. I can’t justify inflicting the pain and death that I hope to escape on another creature just for the flavor of its flesh. I could not do this anymore than I could have intercourse with a 9-year-old, dismissing my evil act by talking about tightness.

Is there a tactile sensation that’s worth another’s pain? No.

And as much as I can hear a dog yelp if I kick it, I know an animal feels pain. As much as I can watch a fish on a hook writhe, I know it wants to live.

I felt satisfied with this answer.

Read more reviews of vegetarian eats at www.whorebivore.com

Whorebivore: Diner Politics

Walmsley Apricot — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Empire Diner

210 10th Avenue (at 22nd St.)

212-243-2736

I thought my hallucinations had subsided after upping my protein intake during the last couple weeks through voluminous consumption of spiked nog. So I didn’t know what to make of it when, while seated in the Empire Diner, I saw the complete field of presidential candidates file in.

With the Iowa caucuses less than a week away I couldn’t imagine why they would come to New York to court the Whorebivore vote. Apparently, our movement has caught on at a faster pace than projected.

Sitting there sipping nutmeggy foam from a Martini glass, I looked on and considered the unlikely candidates primary voters are presented with in 2008. There’s a black guy named Hussein; an ex-first lady who has tried to shore up her image during an unpopular war by becoming red-eyed and scary; a millionaire Mormon; a twice-divorced Catholic New Yorker who has been photographed in drag; a trial lawyer who gets $400 haircuts while championing the working class; a Baptist Minister who plays slap bass; a man of Mexican heritage named Richardson; a former P.O.W. who would be three-quarters of a century old when he finishes his first term; and a thespian (though I guess, historically speaking, that’s not that strange). What a bunch.

Stranger still, I thought, that among all of this unlikely diversity, there is no room among the frontrunners for someone who belongs to a category that is only as slightly unusual as vegetarian? Sure, there’s Dennis Kucinich, but unless Shirley MacLaine can pull some interplanetary strings with the Lemurians, he doesn’t have a fish’s chance in Lake Erie.

What is it about the decision to not eat meat that the electorate finds about as tolerable as atheism? Does the thinking go that one who could not condone killing a chicken would not be able to press the button for war? At this point, is that so unappealing?

The candidates filled up the stools along the long black counter and ordered cups of coffee (Romney had Sprite).

Any good candidate has to be at home in a diner. Can you imagine what would happen if a candidate on the trail frowned at the offer of a blue plate special? It would be like screeching into a uni-directional microphone…or windsurfing…or riding in a tank with a too-big helmet . . . or stubble on the face and a suit the color of wet cement. These things matter when selecting the next leader of a primitive society like ours.

And so the candidates carefully studied the menu, each wanting to impress me with their vegetarianism, but also wanting to walk a careful balancing act, so as not to choose a meal that would cost them Iowa (tofu was out). For example, Joe Biden had the Lentilburger ($10.50) with American cheese. What could be more American than a fully pasteurized plasticky product made of all fat? I had the same. The “burger,” which filled up a halved pita bread, was more mushy than meaty. It was a little bland, too. But a side of creamy, white, horseradish-flavored sauce and sliced tomatoes helped.

Not one of the candidates dared to order the chips and guacamole ($5.50), which could have put them in the crosshairs of Lou Dobbs. It was a serviceable concoction of chunky avocado, spicy onion and cilantro. The warm round corn chips were crunchy and better than I expected.

I heard a lot of murmuring about an item on the menu simply listed as “Today’s Vegetable” ($4). Its very name sounded smart and progressive, such as: “Today’s vegetable is tired of old politics,” or “My wife can be the change agent that Today’s Vegetable has been waiting for.” But when it was rumored that the selection would be French-cut green beans, the candidates also wisely demurred.

Obama took a stand and ordered the mesclun greens ($6), but no sooner did he do so then a Clinton campaign worker made an aside about drug use to a “FOX News” reporter who was hovering about like a jackal. The salad looked to be a pretty straight-forward mix of leaves with garlicky vinaigrette on top.

McCain, ever the maverick, asked for the soup special to be served cold. When the waiter—whose black T-shirt said “Eat Me” on the back—declined to refrigerate the hot soup, McCain asked him if he had ever tasted his own blood—and if he would like to.

Meanwhile, Romney’s staff ordered the Piggy Platter ($19) and nudged it over toward Mike Huckabee in hopes that the former fatty would fall off the wagon and take the Lord’s name in vain.

I soon realized that the candidates were less interested in seeking my endorsement than using me for a quick photo opportunity in this most iconic of New York diners that has a double appeal because of its old-timey appearance and boystown location, something that would resonate with the average middle-American schlub (Joe Six Pack) and the Chelsea-style gay (Troy Six Pack Abs).

When it was announced that there was only one piece of apple pie remaining—and a Royal Rumble appeared imminent—I made an abrupt exit. I did not blame them, however, for fighting tooth and nail for that last slice, which may have meant winning the White House. After all, what candidate could survive politically a shot posted online of him or her biting into coconut custard?

Read more reviews of vegetarian eats at www.whorebivore.com

Whorebivore: Bring Your Own Balsamic

Walmsley Apricot — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Il Passatore

14 Bushwick Ave. (betw. Metropolitan Ave. & Devoe St.)

718-963-3100

I was seated at a long table at Il Passatore at a birthday party for a charming little package of a lady who was turning 28 but looked half that. The trattoria—with brick walls, pressed-tin-ceilings and no liquor license yet—was also tiny. In Italian country-style, however, the dinner portions were not and the room was a warm refuge from truly nasty weather outside.

Two gentlemen from Emilia-Romagna, a region abutting Tuscany, opened Passatore a little more than a month ago, and named it after a famous local scoundrel-cum-Robin Hood figure from the 1800s.

One wonders if, at the time when this bandit mounted the stage at the Teatro Verdi bearing arms and demanding the audiences’ valuables, he could have possibly conceived that this act and other mayhem would cause his mug to grace menus one day in a faraway land. It goes to show: It’s hard to know which deeds will bring one lasting fame.

As part of Passatore’s Northern Italian fare it offers two unusual-for-Brooklyn (but somewhat similar) primis using thin, tortilla-like bleached-flour flatbread. The Piadina Formaggio e Reculo ($6) was two layers of hot charcoal-heated flatbread sandwiching mixed fresh arugula and soft, white stracchino cheese. The Crescione al Pomodoro e Mozzarella ($7) uses the same type of flatbread but in this case the tomato and cheese is baked inside. For perhaps more familiar points of comparison, the difference between theses two dishes is that of the taco and the pupusa.

The piadina was enjoyable in its freshness and greenness but a bit dry, what with just dough, leaves and cheese. It could have worked nicely with a drizzle of balsamic reduction. The cresicione did not have that problem and it was a solid pizza replacement.

The Rucula con Pere e Parmigiano ($6) salad was an interesting countering of textures with its alternating pear and parmesan slices, but the creamy lemon dressing on top seemed an intruder. Again, I would have preferred balsamic (I could have had the most amazing meal at this place had they said BYO balsamic as they did with the wine).

The other people at my table raved about the Gnocchi Burro e Salvia ($8), which weren’t really gnocchi at all but were rather gnudi, or little flour dumplings—in this case, with spinach and ricotta—that don’t involve potato at all. They were light and soft and they sat in, but did not soak up, the butter and sage sauce.

The Lasagna Vegetariana ($8) came as a small square of red and white layers, and was refreshingly made with lots of vegetables including broccoli, carrots, asparagus and also a real béchamel instead of cheese. I hate it when lasagna becomes a highrise of starch and dairy, and the architect here showed a much subtler and finer composition of textures and flavors than that.

Seated across from me was the fellow Whorebivore whom we all call Papa Fagiole, and everyone’s favorite redhead, Kitty Jones (they just got engaged). He is an avid meateater who has cured his own bacon. She, on the other hand, has been a vegetarian for most her life.

And so their conversation confused us.

“Your chicken looks dry,” said Kitty.

“How do you know?” said Papa.

“They should have brined it first and baked it further from the flame,” she said.

“But you haven’t eaten meat in almost 20 years. You won’t even wash dishes that have touched the stuff,” said Papa.

“Doesn’t matter. I know dry chicken when I see it,” said Kitty.

Perhaps we humans naturally possess the ability to sense qualities in meat just from years of sucking our wounds and biting our lips and putting each others bodies into our mouths.

The exchange between Papa and Kitty also made me wonder what vegetarians think when they sniff that amazing come-hither aroma that is like a siren call of smells beckoning from the rotisserie racks of places like El Malecon on 175th and Broadway. Or what they think when they walk into someone’s home who has been warming pot roast and leeks in a slow cooker. Does it not make them hungry, too? Yes, I think, it does.

But why would it? And what implications does this seemingly natural appeal have for the morality of meateating?

Then again, how delicious is antifreeze? Enough to kill someone.

Whorebivore: Babes & Borscht

Walmsley Apricot — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Barney Greengrass

541 Amsterdam Avenue (at W. 86th St.)

212-724-4707

Recently it occurred to me that my hallucinations might be caused not by vegetarian protein deficiency but by late-stage syphilis. And so, on a white-gray afternoon, I walked into the Riverside STD Clinic located in a fortress of a building whose aesthetics as a beacon of public health compare favorably to its Soviet counterpart—but otherwise are soul-killing. The waiting room, where I sat five rows back, was the color of spoiled cream, and the floors were that flecked brown linoleum that is the wretched base of so many public grade schools across America. Like Christmas decorations in hell, someone had tacked a few bright plastic butterflies to the wall. I sat watching a ceiling-mounted television on which Whoopi Goldberg expounded on prophylactic sex.

Suddenly, a movement entered my field of vision—like an exotic bird swooping so fast that you’re left to wonder if it was real. Then it happened again: She turned and glanced three rows back at me while twirling her long, dark hair around two delicate forefingers like squid ink spaghetti.

Her opal eyes could pierce the atmosphere and blink communiqués to other planets. She was svelte, buxom and trouble: The kind of woman you would still stand near if your lap were dripping kerosene and she was holding a candle.

Then a nurse waved the heart-crusher into a small room and closed the door, leaving me to grieve what promised to be a week of excoriating self-abuse. I stood up before my number was called and was light-headed. I probably should get lunch, I thought. I didn’t know if the test would entail a piss cup or a horse syringe, but I figured I needed some sweetener in my blood before showing them I got less sugar than a shot of Angostura.

I walked down Amsterdam Avenue and swung open the door to Barney Greengrass, the Upper West Side’s “Sturgeon King.”

I stepped past the fishmonger display to the tables in the back room, where wallpaper juxtaposes yellowed scenes of New Orleans’ French Quarter in a diner that otherwise has more in common with a Woody Allen film.

The upholstered chairs were the color of butterscotch pudding. I sat down in one and ordered a glass of cold borscht ($3.75 for a medium), which resembled a frothy, pink beet milkshake more than soup. I followed it with red salmon caviar and sour cream ($14) and soon was exploding little, glassy, seawater-filled beeballs between molars.

Boot heels clicked against the floor like rollercoaster cranks, and I felt my stomach rise to my tonsils before looking up. She was wearing a fitted jacket of red silk and gold dragons and a Pharaoh’s Daughter’s smile.

The half of my brain still functioning recognized she was mouthing, “May I join you?” She was smart to not wait for an answer.

“What’s your name?” I managed.

“Esastia Havoline,” she said.

I asked if she cared for caviar.

“I’m vegetarian,” she replied

“Not even eggs?” I said.

“Not if they had to kill the chicken to get them. You know roe removal isn’t a surgical procedure, right? Since I’ve been with Albey, I couldn’t possibly be responsible.”

She ordered pumpernickel toast ($2.50) with a slice of preternaturally red tomato ($1 extra).

“Where else but Greengrass can you get a good tomato in December?” she asked.

I noticed how much time had passed since our medical visit and asked her, “Did you go to freshen up just now?”

“Albey needed a walk,” she said.

“That’s your K-9 or lover?” I asked.

“Both,” she said. “I was shooting a video in Oslo with a fellow who would be billed on the box, quite speciously, as a ‘10-inch depraved cheating husband’ and an elkhound. It was Albey who took my love.”

“The elkhound?” I asked.

“It was the most profound joining of my life,” she said. “To be made love to in a way society hasn’t prepared a man. We’re still together.”

“Then why the clinic?” I asked.

“Jealousy,” she said. “I lost my head when I saw him sniffing around a Dalmatian last week….Bitch.”

“You’re vegetarian because you sleep with dogs?” I asked.

“For some people,” she said, “animal-kind is separate from us and can be treated like so much meat. But it’s wrong to love an animal, they say.”

I let her continue.

“They think I’m debased. But would you say a woman is wrong to find pleasure with a dildo? Where in the natural hierarchy does our species exist so that we have evolved away from animals enough to countenance eating them but not sharing affection, physical joy? Either they are objects like pieces of plastic and you may do with them whatever you please, or else they are like us and cannot be cannibalized.”

“So any way you cut it, Miss Havoline, I can fuck the dog,” I said.

“You’re not his type,” she said.

I sipped my Pepto-colored borsht and thought how never before had I so wanted to own four legs.

Read more reviews of vegetarian eats at Whorebivore.com

Whorebivore: More Corn Smut Fun

Walmsley Apricot — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Itzocan Bistro

1575 Lexington Ave. (btwn. E. 100 & 101st St.)

212-423-0255

I emerged from the 6-train stop and walked down Lexington Avenue past a taco truck whose aromatic night-frying made the wet air an oniony broth. Once upon a time, I would have stopped off for scrambled pork brains folded inside a tortilla with cilantro, rajas and radishes, but not since I have embarked on my pursuit of vegetarian dining. Passing by, however, I thought about how I miss cesos—not just for their unforgettable chewy texture but because when I ate them I would deliciously ponder what it means to consume the neurons that once set in motion running, squealing, eating, mating and hiding, but that in my gut were just proteins catabolizing so that I may run, squeal, eat, mate and hide.

After passing a couple bodegas, I opened the door of Itzocan Bistro, a little spot decorated with a couple of Frida portraits, a brightly painted clay Tree of Knowledge that one of the owners made as a boy in Puebla and—unlike many of the area’s other Mexican restaurants—just one neon Mexican beer sign in the window.

Itzocan’s also has more vegetarian selections than most places nearby, but it will need to refine its menu listings more before I invite my militant vegetarian comrade, El Yuyo. Or else, blood will be spilled.

More ambitiously than Itzocan Cafe, an older sister restaurant in the East Village, the bistro melds French and Mexican sabores. Unlike some other fused cuisines, none of the dishes here land with a clank. Some even sing.

A mixed greens salad ($5) was enlivened by tangy vinaigrette with crushed guajillo peppers and crisp julienned jicama, which absorbed the spiciness and made for crunchy rewards among so many leaves.

The crepes ($14) rank high among the most successful fusings I’ve had in recent times. More like wanton wrappers than thin pancakes, they sheathed wild mushrooms sautéed with earthy and gently spicy poblano, crema fresca, corn kernels and black pepper. The two tubes lay across each other in a dark, rich and silty puddle of huitalacoche exudation.

For more corn smut fun, I tried huitalacoche soufflé ($9) from the list of daily specials. It looked like an upside-down Hostess cupcake with the middle sucked out. While enjoyable with saffron toast points, I was disappointed that it lacked a liquid center. To me, that’s what makes a soufflé.

And in the case of the Queso de Cabra ($7), something was missing. Lightly seasoned with epazote and jalapeño, this goat cheese flan could have used some sauce to do for it what dulce de leche does for the classic preparation, that is to provide wetness and diversity to what otherwise is just a weighty lump.

While not every item was perfect, the vegetarian fare was generally successful, except that the menu could be clearer and the staff more knowledgeable. For my second trip, I came on a busy Saturday night and sat at a table in a narrow corridor. My entrée was the tamalitos, which were more of a matzo ball soup than mini tamales. At the end of the meal I asked the waiter what ingredients were used and he began ticking them off: semolina, hoja santa, corn, zucchini, tomato, saffron…I was surprised, I said, that it could be so hearty without meat. He chuckled and said the kitchen did in fact use chicken stock. I wondered how there could be no mention of this when the menu listed other ingredients.

I immediately thought of Capitán Segundo Yuyo and what he would have done. I can see him smiling and nodding his head; carrying on with the waiter in Spanish, holding him in place with little jokes while beneath the table he removed from his holster his Izarra pistol and screwed the silencer on. I would wave Yuyo off, but a red splotch would appear on the waiter’s apron and begin to grow like a drip of ink fallen on a page.

“Mata-aves de Mierda,” El Yuyo would say with halts between syllables and the “r” in “mierda” rolled in a way that would seem to finger the wound.

But Yuyo’s balaclava was nowhere to be seen this night. And besides, it had been a pretty good meal and the chicken stock did not hurt the soup (the hen might disagree).

Now sated, I thought of mating.

Read more reviews of vegetarian eats at Whorebivore.com

Whorebivore: Breast Man

Walmsley Apricot — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Hooters of Manhattan

211 W. 56th St. (at 7th Ave.)

212-581-5656

Eating at Hooters can be something of a homecoming. After all, breasts and nutrition have been paired for us since our earliest days. (Dear Dr. Freud: Can I also presume to know why today I get so many of my calories from a bottle?) But it’s not a given that there would be passable vegetarian food in this not-suitable-for-vegans mammary mecca where, next to breasts, chicken wings are king. And so for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been heading to the shadows of Carnegie Hall to Hooters to investigate.

First off, one might think an establishment catering to unarty, unhip, ungrungy prurience wouldn’t work in this town. Well it does. Hooters’ corporate owners have engineered it to please every id-impulse they’ve identified, and for better or worse, they’ve done fair research: 35 TVs, beer by the pitcher, Christmas lights, T&A (of course), the smell of fried food and hot sauce warming the air and even above-average vegetarian offerings. So if New Yorkers will only ignore the silly logo and the “Support Our Troops” tableside advertisements guaranteeing GI Joe his 2008 Hooters Calendar by the holidays, then they can enjoy some surprisingly good vegetarian bar food here.

For example, the heaping plate of fried pickles ($4.99) was not oily a bit. Each slice of tangy cuke was protected by clusters of fried flour that provide excellent crunching. Few places do fried pickles—and fewer do them this well.

With both the pickles and the onion rings ($6.49), which are coated in a darker batter with more fluff and less texture, comes a creamy, horse-radishy dipping sauce that’s cool and zingy at once. Sure beats ketchup.

Cheese sticks ($7.29) are long, bread-crumbed and pretty standard, served with marinara that has been heavily snowed on by grated Parmesan—which added up to excessive cultured dairy for any one item.

In case you’re tempted, the Mexicurley Fries are not vegetarian (though the menu doesn’t say so much, that chili would be con carne). But frankly they look like a mess. (How can a small fry properly mount a whole slice of jalapeno?)

As an oversized toasted flour tortilla with mild white and orange cheeses inside, the Quesadilla ($9.99) was—not surprisingly—not very Mexican. But it was absolutely better than the average bar versions found in the city. It came with one cup each of sour cream, guacamole, salsa and jalapeños. All were mild but fresh.

Whereas hot wings may be comfort food to meat-eaters, for many vegetarians that spot is reserved for a well-made grilled cheese sandwich. Hooters’ Grilled Cheese Platter ($8.99) isn’t bad at all. The bread is an inch-thick and has an almost challah-like sweetness and lightness. It is well browned in butter and inside is the requisite gooey stuff. They even toss some curly fries around the plate. It’s certainly enough to keep a vegetarian satisfied between gulps of beer and sneak peaks of cleavage.

I have a media-type friend who’s worked in Midtown for the last five years and has made Saturdays Hooters night. He’s 6-foot-4, built like a string bean, and he talks like Carol Burnett playing Scarlet O’Hara. He’s such a mainstay on his stool that when he joined me at a table in the back recently, the bartender stomped over and yelled “Traitor!” in his ear.

For him, a good deal of the allure is the irony of a Hooters in Manhattan. (He rather shrewdly, I thought, pointed out the potential phenomenon if Hooters had moved Downtown where hipsters could co-opt the imagery and take the place over.)

But my friend also explained that ironic juxtaposition only gets you in the door once. When he first began his weekly forays into hetero headquarters, he used to often see an “old screamer” who also stuck out. From a quick chat with him, he knew this man had no interest in the women wearing little orange shorts that reveal the crease where buttock meets leg. This was the closest bar to his house and friendlier than most, and so he would stop in most every night.

That’s dining promiscuously, I thought (slightly different than vegetarians seeking eats in unexpected places, but commendable).

My friend told this story while pinching a “911” drumstick between forefinger and thumb. We neither shared his chicken wings nor his eyeing of the lad across the way. But we dipped our celery stalks in the same white dressing, and I felt a connection profoundly human and Whorebivorous.

Read more reviews of vegetarian eats at Whorebivore.com.

Whorebivore: Finding Fava and More

Walmsley Apricot — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Hadramout Restaurant

172 Atlantic Avenue (betwn. Clinton & Court Sts.) Brooklyn

718-852-3577

Weary from too little sleep and what I suspect is a developing protein deficiency, I lurch to where yellow cabs line Atlantic Avenue at 3 a.m. in Brooklyn. A door halfway below street level swings open. Men clenching Styrofoam cups ascend a few steps while someone holds the door for me, and I slip inside the warm den.

The walls are imitation stone archways framing oil-painted scenes of mountain, desert and oasis. Under low ceilings, hungry diners pull apart flat rounds of fresh bread and scoop up food from dishes in the middle of faux-marble tables.

I collapse into a chair in an empty corner and face the flat-screen tuned to “Al Jazeera.” Wearing a smile beneath his mustache, the waiter comes bearing a cup of sweet tea that tastes like cloves. I hope this will cure my head.

I’ve been here before and order without seeing the menu. While I wait for my food, I notice an old friend has joined me again, like so many recent, weary times. His dry-rotted army fatigues are rolled up to the elbows and the bottom of the black balaclava that is stretched over his head is flipped up above his chin so he can smoke his pipe.

“This reminds me of a place in Beirut I blew up in the ’80s,” grumbles Capitán Segundo Yuyo. He speaks from the center of a haze. “I found out they were frying their falafel in beef tallow.” More war stories from my militant vegetarian comrade.

“This restaurant is Yemeni,” I correct El Yuyo, as plates are laid on the table. For Semitic standards like humus ($4.95) and baba ghanoush ($4.95), Hadramout does fine (though better can be eaten at other regional restaurants down the block). Hadramout’s hard-to-find specialties, however, are peerless.

The mulikhia ($4.95) comes as a bowl filled with a swampy liquid saturated with minced, bright green jute leaves. It reminds me of the fresh-tasting gumbo vert that can be found in Louisiana during Lent.

The selta ($4.95) is a bubbling, brown vegetable stew served in a black mini-caldron, emitting the bitter aroma of fenugreek. This age-old recipe has a stiff, yellowish foam atop it—one that I would like to shove in the face of the avant-garde chefs who act like they invented the stuff.

Always careful in El Yuyo’s presence, I remember to order this dish vegetarian or else it would have come with little bits of meat and someone might be killed. As we eat together, he puffs in between chews. I wonder if Yuyo’s pipe-smoking will disturb the other patrons, but they don’t seem to notice.

His favorite dish is the foul (pronounced fool) moudammas ($5.95), which is a thick, spicy concoction of creamed fava beans that reminds me of Southwestern chili. For something beany but very different in texture, I have also ordered the fassoulia ($5.95), red kidney beans that are firm and nutty instead of creamed, and that come pan-fried with onions and hot peppers.

We eat everything on the table with fresh bread instead of silverware. These baked beauties are similar, in fact, to Grimaldi’s best pizza dough, and they’re nearly as large as a pie. They are soft and full of air pockets. When they arrive, stacked on a steel platter, they’re almost too hot to touch, but as they cool, they become crisp and crackly.

The foul seems to have quelled El Yuyo, until at a table directly across from us a plate of baked chicken appears.

“That bird’s family cries tonight, if they too have not already been butchered by the murdering machine,” he says through his teeth.

I wonder how Yuyo would react if I told him that I had eaten meat not so long ago.

“Yuyo, don’t judge when you are with me,” I scold. “It is not the way of the Whorebivore.”

“You are crazy in the extreme,” he snorts.

“Perhaps, Yuyo. But to be a Whorebivore is the opposite of extreme,” I say. “It is to try to be a vegetarian without becoming an other, and to not attribute otherness or feel anger toward those who choose meat. A Whorebivore seeks places where we can be seated together and share the most delicious nourishments.”

“You came to re-educate me with your sermons, Walmsley, or you came for the jute?”

“I’ll leave the declarations to you, Capitán SegundoYuyo. I’m here to dine promiscuously and to report back.”

The waiter brings another cup of tea and my head subsides.

Read more reviews of vegetarian eats at Whorebivore.com.

Whorebivore: Pass the Formaldehyde Reduction, Please

Walmsley Apricot — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Lever House Restaurant

390 Park Avenue (@54th St.)

212.888.2700

If you weren’t a vegetarian before seeing Damien Hirst’s “School: The Archeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge” at the Lever House, you may well be when you’re done. In the Park Avenue skyscraper’s lobby, the conceptual artist has suspended a cow carcass and sausage links in a formaldehyde-filled enclosure and floated dozens of dead sheep in fish tanks resting on autopsy tables. In the back of the exhibit, a shark is encircled by broken glass and pools of blood. It’s a great date place if you’re courting an art student or a sicko.

Happily on such occasions, Lever House Restaurant is right next door, so afterward you can avoid a fainting spell by rushing some sugar into your bloodstream. What’s more, the menu accommodates vegetarians—both sudden onset and longstanding—in creative ways. When you enter the restaurant, after Hirst’s installation you get the impression that you are heading from one Whitney Biennial piece to the next due to the fact that restaurant designer Marc Newson has fashioned his own conceptual art. He imagined the space as what an architect in the mid-20th century (the building’s origins) might have produced if he or she were gunning for futuristic pizzazz.

The result resembles an executive dining hall and lounge on the U.S.S. Enterprise. After walking through a 20-foot white tube with a waist-high light strip, visitors are zapped into a retro-futurism sound stage with taupe walls without corners or windows to the outside, where soft light radiates from honeycomb-shaped fixtures above. Despite the theme, the chef doesn’t play along with Jetsons-style food pills. Well, sort of.

A recent lunch at the bar included a seasonal appetizer—sucks for you, if you’ve missed it—a tapas-sized bowl containing a handful of glistening, radioactive green Padrón peppers that are slightly larger than stemmed gumdrops ($17). After they were tossed with sea salt and flash fried by the kitchen, the bartender squeezed them with lime before serving. Each encounter with a new specimen was suspense-filled. Most peppers were simply fresh and limey, with barnacle-like crusts of salt. But biting into the next one could be like eating a polonium pellet. Awooogahhh!

I followed up with another appetizer: a milky, cool and fresh-tasting half-fist of buffalo mozzarella in bed with a wet mix of olives and sun-dried tomatoes on an arugula cushion ($20). Instead of the mozzarella’s usual partner, fresh basil, it got basil fried to an oiled-parchment-like texture. The leaves were brittle, semi-translucent and beautiful, but I still would have preferred the more fragrant and meaningful-to-my-taste-buds fresh stuff.

After hitting Hirst on a different night with my student-of-art, slightly-sicko friend, I returned to the restaurant only to spot on the dinner menu a Colorado rack of lamb that I so hoped would be served in a formaldehyde reduction sauce. Disappointingly, no.

Instead, I tried the apple-fennel soup ($17), which was a baby’s puree that used young fennel plucked before maturity’s hormones doused it with much licorice-like flavor. Possibly because you could not serve this dish for $17 otherwise, the chef had squirted parsley oil in the middle and hid a couple gelatinous stewed golden raisins inside. I must admit, however, the soup was refreshing and rewarding—even for the price.

My date had the Fall Vegetable Plate ($32). It was three oblong nests of stringy spaghetti squash topped with a smattering of dark, firm, pebble-like fava beans, ratatouille, fresh watercress and lots of well-done, french-fried onions that gave the dish smokiness.

The spaghetti squash was too sweet to be the main component, and I wanted to trade it in for rice, polenta or some other starch. (I guessed that the chef would frown on such requests, so we didn’t ask.)

We also tried three sides ($10 each): broccoli raab that was wilted and mucky and somehow lacked its usual substantiality; sautéed “local spinach” that had a bizarre, yet pleasing, yellow cake-like baked quality to it and potato gratin.

It was kind of weird eating the last item, which I thought was one of the best. It was an upright perfect cylinder of profoundly creamy, densely stacked slices of potato that weren’t much thicker than a couple of credit cards. I thought it weird only because of the Star Trek environs that surrounded me while I enjoyed such mom-made goodness. The arty lady I was with, who hails from Indiana, said she liked it too.

That classics endure is reassuring. After all, there are going to be Midwesterners in space.

Whorebivore is a weekly column about vegetarian options at meat-lover locales. Post your own reviews at Whorebivore.com

Whorebivore: Fun With Cheese

Walmsley Apricot — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Perch

365 Fifth Avenue (betwn. 5th & 6th Sts.)B’klyn

718.788.2830

Should I ever raise a kid in New York and find myself faced with the dreaded “Where do babies come from?” question, instead of mincing tales of storks, tummies and cabbage patches, I’ll simply (and more believably) say to Walmsley Jr., “Park Slope.”

The mean streets Pete Hamill described in A Drinking Life have morphed into an upper-middle class hatchery for tykes with tolerant values. And just as boozers and junkies have given way to postpartum-Pilates moms, meat and potatoes have been replaced by vegetarian options in many places. Some good ones can be found at Perch.

During lunchtime, I stopped by and sat amid the café-cum-bar’s tightly regimented red, white and wood color scheme, in a front area beneath bulbous Japanese lanterns and an escaped balloon. I shared the space with toddlers and MILFFs (Moms I’d Like Funding From). Past the “Please fold your stroller” sign were a few people at the bar with midday wine and open MacBooks.

A cheery waitress took my order and brought a small mixing bowl filled with the Tart Apple & Cheddar Waldorf Salad ($8.50). Snow drifts of grated white cheese and shredded, tangy green apples and buttermilk dressing blanketed spinach, red and green lettuces, whole walnuts and halved red grapes. That this salad is not too much to handle is a well-thought out feat. The soft cheddar and crystalline apples combined for an interesting texture, and the sugary grapes matched the buttery and slightly bitter walnuts. At first I thought the sweetish dressing would do the salad in, but it was a nice complement, adding wholesomeness instead of heaviness because it was thin and mild, with no apparent ingredients other than buttermilk.

I followed this up with a cup of the Corn Chowder Soup special along with a half a Veggie Reuben for $10. The beige soup combined roasted kernels and chilies for excellent spice and flavor, and the Reuben used soft, smooth and fatty avocado slices in place of briny, stringy brisket. Also squeezed inside two slices of griddle-marked, cornmeal-rimmed bread were vinegary sauerkraut, gooey Gruyère and a snappy Russian dressing. I left believing that a “real” Reuben could not possibly be better.

At night the owners shift to a more lounge-like atmosphere, and along with lower lighting and louder music

(sometimes live), the menu expands. The Beer and Cheddar Cheese Fondue ($8) was cooked with Wolaver’s Organic, but the ale’s hops and flavor were hardly noticeable. Green apple slices and toasted cubes of wheaty, puffy rosemary bread worked well as accompaniment.

When a waitress asked me, “Isn’t fondue the most fun you’ve ever had?” I decided that any of the blue responses in my head wouldn’t stick so long as I was dredging my tiny fork through molten cheddar.

“Yes,” I said quietly.

Arranged in a cross shape that could add meaning to a Mel Gibson movie, were the rows of cut grill-pressed focaccia that came with the Hummus & Vegetable Ratatouille ($7). At the crux was a scoop of cumin-inflected hummus. Its cool, moist-earth texture was caulkier than the Atlantic Avenue stuff, which is usually creamier and dressed with olive oil. At the cross’ base sat a pile of ratatouille that was surprisingly dry and without much, if any, presence of tomato. There were pieces of zucchini, squash, red pepper, red onion and green and black olives. The olives seized the flavor and made it more of a salty, chunky caponata.

The Asparagus & Roasted Potato Quiche ($10) had abundant tender green shoots and hunks of skin-on red potatoes, and relatively little egg. It was topped with darkly baked cheese. The crust was floury, burnt around the edges and not sweet.

For those who like curries farang-style (not spicy a bit) the Vegetable Curry ($10) surprised me with its unusual elements: similar in texture to Thai varieties, but closer in spices to a very mild Indian one. The soupy, slightly limey, coconut-base was full of crunchy carrots, zucchini, yellow squash, asparagus and fresh basil. A tower of nutty long-grained rice rose from the center adorned with slices of green apple (a favorite item here).

The cook added welcome notes to the Mac & Cheese ($10) by stirring the elbow noodles with pleasantly dank bleu cheese and no noticeable cream, and then broiling them beneath a salty layer of simmering cheddar and Gruyère. The dish was hot enough to scar a finger for life, so watch out. Otherwise, Perch is safe for kids and vegetarians alike.

*Whorebivore is a weekly column about vegetarian options at meat-lover locales. Post your own reviews at Whorebivore.com.