SHORT TAKES #07
Seaweed desserts, savory pastries, non choco-chip cookies.
Compact appraisals of things I’ve recently watched and eaten. Read them all here.
In other news, I had so much fun going through my receipts to share with the selleb what I actually bought in Q1. Get on the waitlist for their app, too.
My latest savory pastry obsession are the pigs in a bed (stuy) from Welcome Home, a newish bakery from L'appartement 4F alum. The lattice croissaint is filled with sausage cooked with cayenne, and a hint of maple syrup. The best bits are the unassuming parts of the dough directly under the fennel-scented sausage that have been steamed into something soft like cheese or frangipane.
The chorizo-studded fougasse, a kind of French focaccia, from La Bicyclette has a similar texture. But this bread does indeed have cheese: crispy strands of parmesan and loads of it.
I did not expect the amba knot from Thea Bakery to be so brawny. It weaves lamb floss within its grooves—and pairs best with an equally robust drink or a sweet snack for counterbalance, at least for me, before noon.
IMO the best cinnamon buns are laminated and they come from L’Appartment 4F. The new West Village location is in full swing.
Without a doubt, one of the best lunch deals in town, and a worthy (only, really) spot to get your Chinese-Korean fix in Manhattan is Octo. You get jjangmyun (slippery noodles in, oniony black bean sauce) and tangsuyuk (sweet and sour pork) and little dumplings for less than $22.
I’m still on my sacrilegious coffee beat. The latest: Cambodian latte at Koffeteria in Houston comes with condensed milk and a pat of cultured butter, just enough to make it creamy. All the pastries are dreamy, too.
If you didn’t blanch at Melissa Clark’s pea guac recipe in the NYTimes a few years ago, then you might enjoy the pea sandwich at Radio Bakery. It’s heavy on the legumes—predominantly sweet, mashed but still chunky— and balanced by smattering of good feta, mint, and as always at Radio, a healthy glug of good olive oil. I am prioritizing this for my revisit to the Vanderbilt location. The line was tolerable!
Blessed be the day you encounter an out-of-the ordinary cookie. There will only be so much you can do to change up the formula, but sometimes small adjustments can speak volumes. My discoveries include…
The jam cookie from The Good Batch, half-shortbread, half sugar-cookie. A linzer gone rogue.
The blue corn cookie from Ursula. Dusted with hibiscus, shot through with lime, and the color of pale cement, it tastes like the (better) Fruit Loops dessert Christina Tosi never made. Deceptively fabulous.
The banana cookie from the Tin Building. Brown-butter batter, dotted with poppy seeds and inscribed with a caramelized oblong slice (not coin!) of the humble fruit.
It was my preferred sweet treat when I worked in Fidi, because yes, I did actually visit the Tin Building semi-regularly. It stocks fancy pantry goods that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere in nyc: Korean fried and battered burdock chips, Ayako family jam. Perhaps Jean Georges should rebrand the place as shoppy shop...
Chocolate soup dumplings—a concept that might initially provoke a grimace—are, in fact, exquisite. They’re the best thing you can get at Din Tai Fung. Forget the notion of soup: there’s very little of it in the standard xiao long bao, and (thankfully!!) none of it in the dessert. Instead, mochi gives a firming structure to chocolate ganache, which is encased in the flour wrapper. Make sure you shell out a few dollars extra for the salted cream for dipping. It absolutely makes the dish.
The beloved Taiwanese soup dumpling chain opened its first NY location at the subway level. The glass box entrance and grand staircase that leads to a cavernous dining room makes one forget they are in Time Square.
I unintentionally gatekept this one for too long: the aptly named Ben Affleck cocktail at Smithereens is something like a sophisticated spiked PSL or autumnal bourbon milk punch. In lieu of dairy there’s real gourds—juiced honeynut squash— and a splash of oat milk. The proverbial cherry on top: a dusting of freshly grated nutmeg.
My friend Logan is the genius behind the drink, and you can read about how’s it made in the East Village restaurant’s newsletter:
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In what might be the ultimate flex, Smithereens offers five desserts, none of which are chocolate-based. The most adventurous offering: crisp squares of candied seaweed layered with dollops of citron and licorice mousse into a makeshift mille-feuille. It unexpectedly hit the spot, and not once did my mind stray to temptation of getting a post-restaurant scoop of ice cream somewhere (clearly, I have am a glutton with a sweet treat addiction). If the idea of kelp for dessert freaks you out, remember the Japanese have been wrapping nori around rice crackers for centuries to delicious ends.
Here’s what else I’m looking forward to eating this month.
Bong Joon-ho trades trenchant political critique for simplistic humor in MICKEY 17, a brazenly goofy, soft-hearted piece of filmmaking. I go back and forth on how invested in class critique he truly is. His first movie clearly was. The latest is entertaining, if nothing else. Robert Pattison pulls double duty, yet his character, too much of an Everyman in a way, feels unremarkable. Mark Ruffalo’s face is frozen in the gesture of Trump and his technocrat character is obsessed with caloric efficiency like Musk. It all feels too close to home right now.
I saw this at the River Oakes Theater in Houston—an amazing independent theater where the off-beat programming runs counter to the plush environs. This is what we need more in this country.
Jason Reitman’s SATURDAY NIGHT is an unintentionally glib, casually self-important lazy piece of filmmaking that is not quite hagiography. The film all but requires foreknowledge and history of the show; it doesn’t ask but demands you know beforehand. A pious and questionable ode to Lorne Michaels, a man who certainly does not need any more accolades, Saturday Night inflates the myth surrounding him, yet the real person never emerges from the faux hubbub. There’s more than one successful impression of a Not Ready for Primetime Player, but the muted buzz of pre-performance jitters feels smugly hollow, especially since we all know the monumental success that followed.
An older man I used to work used to gripe that Michaels was a hack who simply lucked into a cadre of comedic talents who translated far better to the screen than he ever could. I’m starting to think he was on to something.
The artist Christian Marclay’s short film TELEPHONES (1995) is a seven-minute montage of people making phone calls in Hollywood movies. (I caught this as an installation piece at Houston’s Museum of Fine Art, but you can also watch it on Youtube.) It’s edited to create the illusion of a singular, ongoing conversation, and it made me more than just nostalgic for obsolete technology: I grew anxious thinking about what other social rituals and connections we’ve lost in our increasingly fragmented world…
Speaking of Marclay, here’s your reminder that THE CLOCK (2010) is on view at MOMA until May. And tomorrow, you can catch all 24-hours.
PLAY IT AS IT LAYS, Frank Perry’s adaptation of Joan Didion’s novel skillfully evokes an eerie quality of alienation by showing Hollywood as grotesque and somber, its landscape disorienting and foggy—perfectly in sync Maria’s nebulously crumbling relationship with her filmmaker-husband Carter. Cresting and falling to its own beat like its source material, the film is rife with discordant juxtapositions and an unnatural flow of time. The montages are harshly cut, but still lacerating: a sequence of close-ups of gloved hands, blood swirling down the drain, and something discarded in the trash when Maria (pronounced Mariah) has an abortion. Weld (who is mostly thought of as Lolita-ish or Frank’s paramour in my beloved Thief) is all interiors here, a plaintive forehead, open eyes. Anthony Perkins delivers a moving performance as her best friend, the bisexual film producer BZ. Their rapport is soft as a rabbit’s fur yet feels like quicksand—a plush blanket you can retreat into to shut out the world.
The juxtapositions in ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL yield absurd surreal humor. Rungano Nyoni’s second feature is an urgent, timely and gutting story of reckoning with unspoken traumas of an upper middle family in Zambia. The culture once matriarchal roots is now heavily influenced by patriarchal Christian values. Anyone who’s ever been subject to stale rituals or the chattering patterns of aunties and extended relatives is sure to see reflections of their own family dynamic.
I was scheduled to speak with Rungano for Vogue, but couldn’t due to flooding and poor internet connectivity where she was—fitting, considering what we see in the film. So instead I interviewed the film's breakthrough star, Susan Chardy. (yes, she’s married to French tennis star Jeremy Chardy.)
I watched LA DERIVE (1964) at Anthology as part of a series called Wandering Woman, which is one of my favorite cinematic subjects. Here it’s more of a figurative wandering of the mind for 20-something Jacqueline who bounces from man to man after being dumped by her troubadour boyfriend. It’s less a sexy brand of promiscuity and more an unproductive bopping around. Jacqueline is drawn to everything around her because of what I’ll crudely call an emotional ADHD. The whole town basically calls her a whore, but she takes the criticisms in stride. Her individualism—and Delsol's unwillingness to explore the roots of que sera sera tendencies or admonish her for them—was too much for people to handle when the film came came out. Subsequently she made no more.
If there’s something you think I should watch, let me know.
Cambodian Latte!! Take meee
Was hoping to hear your thoughts on Mickey 17! I really disliked the half hour or so 🫠