New York

There's a place in New Jersey where you can have a New York milkshake with your sushi. Seriously. Baumgart's Café, name aside, is Asian with a quirky edge. I spent hours on their menu and I have to say that you can get anything. There's ice cream, of course, because they started as a soda fountain, but then the fun begins with sesame chicken, pastrami, gazpacho, duck crêpes, fries, salads, wraps, pot pies, an entire sushi menu, all your Chinese favorites, omelets, cappuccino, key lime pie, smoothies, egg creams and root beer floats. Those egg creams say we're not in Kansas. Where we are is across the Hudson in Edgewater.

We're zooming to dinner, as much as anyone gets to zoom which is not very much and certainly not in a New York minute. And not when your GPS lady freezes; I don't know why she freaked as soon as I crossed into New York. From Baumgart's patio, I stare longingly at the Upper West Side, the Empire State Building and all the snazzy real estate since the last time I was here. We love Manhattan even from afar but not too far.

The East Village is, was and always will be my hood in the big apple. Sure, I now stay on the Upper West Side and much to the dismay of my husband, I gravitate downtown. He will often say “downtown again?” My friend Peggy always lived on the Lower East Side and she was my friend-to-stay-with in New York. It was really seedy and exciting then, the 70’s. It’s been totally gentri-yuppie-fied in recent years. The Hells Angels owned the block – or maybe even blocks – around where Peg lived. And each day as I ventured out, one or another of them would ask me to fetch him something like matches perhaps from the corner store. So I did. Who wouldn’t? It was always more of a command – and I was to obey.

One hot summer night when Peggy and I were feeling playful and fearless, I actually hopped on the back of Mike the Bike’s Harley for a quick spin around Alphabet City. She was on the bike of another Hells Angel whose name I cannot recall; I only remember his toothless grin and his notoriety from the Altamont infamy of some years earlier. I am not the biggest adventurer – in fact, I’m not adventurous at all.

We went to the Lower East Side the other night to see what the young people are up to. Our son, Max, was playing a gig at the Bowery Ballroom with a great band called dinowalrus. They totally killed — awesome. Jill and I were the oldest people in the neighborhood by at least thirty years.

We didn’t make reservations for dinner before the show because we always assume we can get ourselves fed when it’s just the two of us — often at the bar. I did have a destination in mind, though — Xicala, a tapas/wine bar that looked online to be properly LES. It was raining, so we scurried from the Grand Street subway across Bowery to Elizabeth Street, where Xicala promised to be and it was closed. Locked shut. I later checked their website, which says they’re “undergoing a makeover.” Good luck, Xicala. See you next time.

We were now wandering aimlessly in the rain, looking to grab a quick bite before the show. It was definitely an any-port-in-a- storm situation. We saw little orange lights coming out of a dark front window and crossed Elizabeth Street to see what was up and it was a restaurant called Little Rascal that serves Turkish food. Yeah — Little Rascal — Turkish. It made no sense to me, either. But our interest was definitely piqued — and our appetites as we’re both partial to Turkish food.

We’d finally made it all the way to Park Slope, it was less than warm, and I’m pretty sure I had mascara on my forehead from frantically trying to fix my make-up on the subway.  You can imagine my dismay when the only boy I really wanted to see on my trip to New York wasn’t even home.  But we couldn’t just call him!  It would be much better if we ‘just happened to be in the neighborhood’.  “They can’t be far. Their car is here!” But how were we gonna kill an hour in the middle of residential nowhere in 20 degree weather?   That’s when we found it.  BAR TANO.  A little haven of happiness with pressed tin walls and a zinc bar.