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kottke.org posts about nyc
The NY Times’ Randy Cohen is making
The NY Times’ Randy Cohen is making a literary map of Manhattan. Not a map of where authors hung out, but where their characters did.
NYPD: web sites are not eligible for working press credentials
NYPD: web sites are not eligible for working press credentials. Wait, doesn’t the NY Times have a web site?
Taste of Chinatown 2005, April 23 from 1-6pm
Taste of Chinatown 2005, April 23 from 1-6pm. Fifty restaurants are offering $1.00 tasting plates in Chinatown tomorrow afternoon. Delicious!
Woman goes into labor on the F train this morning
Woman goes into labor on the F train this morning. Aha! That’s why my train was so slow this morning.
Ask and ye shall receive: Google Maps
Ask and ye shall receive: Google Maps with the NYC subway stops on it. A little flaky in Safari, but works well in Firefox.
An update on the development of the High Line
An update on the development of the High Line. The latest designs will be on display at the MoMA.
Lauren Greenfield photo series documenting the beauty
Lauren Greenfield photo series documenting the beauty regimes of 6 New York women. “Some women spend $1700 monthly on beauty, more than many women pay for rent. Does spending more mean looking better?”
Nominees for the 2005 James Beard Awards announced (PDF file)
Nominees for the 2005 James Beard Awards announced (PDF file). Nominees include Steingarten, many Minneapolis journalists, Blue Hill at Stone Barnes, Per Se, Keller, Boulud, Danny Meyer, Dan Barber. All five best new restaurtant nominees are in NY.
Your moment of information design zen: the Shopsin’s menu
Two years ago, Calvin Trillin wrote an article for the New Yorker about Shopsin’s, an eccentric eatery in the West Village with about 9 billion menu items:
What does happen occasionally is that Kenny gets an idea for a dish and writes on the specials board — yes, there is a specials board — something like Indomalekian Sunrise Stew. (Kenny and his oldest son, Charlie, invented the country of Indomalekia along with its culinary traditions.) A couple of weeks later, someone finally orders Indomalekian Sunrise Stew and Kenny can’t remember what he had in mind when he thought it up. Fortunately, the customer doesn’t know, either, so Kenny just invents it again on the spot.
Shopsin’s has moved to another Village location since the article came out, but they’ve still got that big old menu. If you dare, feast your eyes on a tour de force of outsider information design, all 11 pages of the Shopsin’s General Store menu.
You want chicken fried eggs with a side of pancakes? Page 6. On page 1, there’s gotta be 100 soups alone, including Pistachio Red Chicken Curry. I lost count after 40 different kinds of pancakes on page 10. In amongst the kate, gregg, tamara, and sneaky pete sandwiches on page 2, you’ll find the northern sandwich: peanut butter & bacon on white toast. There appears to be nothing that’s not on the menu, although I looked pretty hard for foie gras and couldn’t find it. If they did have it, you could probably get it chicken fried with whipped cream on top.
On page 8, page 11, and the front of their Web site, you’ll find the restaurant rules:
- No cell phone use
- One meal per person minimum (everyone’s got to eat)
- No smoking
- Limit four people per group
On that last point, the menu has something additional to add (page 4):
Party of Five
you could put a chair at the end
or push the tables together
but dont bother
This banged-up little restaurant
where you would expect no rules at all
has a firm policy against seating
parties of five
And you know you are a party of five
It doesn’t matter if one of you
offers to leave or if
you say you could split into
a party of three and a party of two
or if the five of you come back tomorrow
in Richard Nixon masks and try to pretend
that you don’t know each other
It won’t work: You’re a party of five
even if you’re a beloved regular
Even if the place is empty
Even if you bring logic to bear
Even if you’re a tackle for the Chicago Bears
it won’t work
You’re a party of five
You will always be a party of five
Ahundred blocks from here
a hundred years from now
you will still be a party of five
and you will never savor the soup
or compare the coffee
or hear the wisdom of the cook
and the wit of the waitress or
get to hum the old -time tunes
among which you will find
no quintets— Robert Hershon
Love it, love it, love it, and I have to get my ass over there one of these days.
How to smell like a laundromat
Among the featured designs at the National Design Triennial was the Demeter Fragrance Library. The company, run by Christophers Brosius and Gable, puts out perfumes, lotions, soaps, candles, and body gels with scents like Creme Brulee, Wet Garden, Funeral Home, Dirt, and Sugar Cookie. According to this article in Happi, the New Zealand fragrance was developed for the Lord of the Rings movie and Demeter’s odd scents might have other uses:
Tomato, for example, was found to be an odor absorber. Some of the edible fragrances are said to help curb cravings. And though the company has yet to perform psychological tests, researchers said the Dirt fragrance made Alzheimer patients more lucid.
Perhaps I should tag along with Meg the next time she goes to Sephora. (Never thought I’d find myself saying that…)
National Design Triennial
With the cold weather officially here in NYC, there’s few better ways to spend a weekend afternoon than to sample one of the city’s many museums. Yesterday, Meg and I went to see the Design Triennial (catalog) at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. The curators did a nice job in highlighting good, solid, creative work, avoiding the temptation to include pieces that might have been highly creative but have yet to prove themselves useful in the world (this was a design *review* after all).
The Triennial runs until January 25, 2004; I recommend checking it out should you find yourself in NYC between now and then.
Jimmy Fallon and his fans
I was just at the Barnes and Noble on 48th & 5th. Jimmy Fallon and his sister were there signing copies of their new book, I Hate This Place: The Pessimist’s Guide to Life. As I browsed through a couple of magazines, I noticed three girls standing in the bargain books aisle. Well, everyone in the store noticed them standing there because one of them was crying and shrieking uncontrollably and her two friends were taking turns calming her down or revving her up.
“Oh my God! I can’t believe Jimmy Fallon kissed me!!”
“I know!!!”
[They all scream.]
“I’m never going to wash this cheek again.”
[Sobbing intensifies. The girl is alternating between trying to regain her composure and going completely bats with the crying. She’s having a hard time standing.]
This goes on for a minute or two. Then a woman, dressed to the nines and obviously a lifelong New York resident, annoyed that these silly girls are between her and whatever purchases she wants to make, pushes by them while loudly announcing to the rest of the store, “my God, I don’t understand what the big deal is, seeing some guy and then crying like a baby, yelling, and blocking the aisle. I hate this fucking store.”
Business Lessons From the Donut and Coffee Guy
“Next!” said the coffee & donut man (who I’ll refer to as “Ralph”) from his tiny silver shop-on-wheels, one of many that dot Manhattan on weekday mornings. I stepped up to the window, ordered a glazed donut (75 cents), and when he handed it to me, I handed a dollar bill back through the window. Ralph motioned to the pile of change scattered on the counter and hurried on to the next customer, yelling “Next!” over my shoulder. I put the bill down and grabbed a quarter from the pile.
Maybe this situation is typical of Manhattan coffee & donut carts (although two carts near where I work don’t do this), but this was the first business establishment I’ve ever been to that lets its customers make their own change. Intrigued, I walked a few steps away and turned around to watch the interaction between this business and its customers. For five minutes, everyone either threw down exact change or made their own change without any notice from Ralph; he was just too busy pouring coffee or retrieving crullers to pay any attention to the money situation.
If you were the CEO of a big business — say, a movie studio, music company, or multinational bank — you’d have been tearing your hair out at this scene. He lets his customers make their own change?!?!! How does he know they’re making the correct change? Or putting down any change at all? Or even stealing the change? Where’s the technology that prevents the change from being stolen while he’s not looking? Surely there’s a machine that could be invented to keep track of it. Bad, bad, bad! Unclean, unclean! Does not compute…
Hold on there, Mr. CEO, don’t go all HAL 9000 on us. Ralph probably does lose a little bit of change each day to theft & bad math, but more than makes up for it in other ways. The throughput of that tiny stand is amazing. For comparison’s sake, I staked out two nearby donut & coffee stands and their time spent per customer was almost double that of Ralph’s stand. So, Ralph’s doing roughly twice the business with the same resources. Let’s see Citibank do that.
It’s also apparent that Ralph trusts his customers, and that they both appreciate and return that sense of trust (I know I do). Trust is one of the most difficult “assets” for companies to acquire, but also one of the most valuable. Many companies take shortcuts in getting their customers to trust them, paying lip service to Trust™ in press releases and marketing brochures. Which works, temporarily and superficially, but when you get down to it, you can’t market trust…it needs to be earned. People trust you when you trust them.
When an environment of trust is created, good things start happening. Ralph can serve twice as many customers. People get their coffee in half the time. Due to this time savings, people become regulars. Regulars provide Ralph’s business with stability, a good reputation, and with customers who have an interest in making correct change (to keep the line moving and keep Ralph in business). Lots of customers who make correct change increase Ralph’s profit margin. Etc. Etc.
And what did Ralph have to pay for all this? A bit of change here and there.
Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum
When I was in Washington D.C. a few years ago, I was all jazzed up to visit the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution. Imagine my disappointment when I learned the Cooper Hewitt was in NYC, not in DC.
I finally got the chance to check it out today, and I was again disappointed. They didn’t have their permanent collection on display, only an exhibit on global hotels which wasn’t all that impressive. Maybe I missed something….
Jones Diner
Anil has some thoughts about Jones Diner, my favorite NY restaurant (having been to a total of about four), and points to a Village Voice article about its possible closure.
Meg and I saw a “don’t close us down” petition on the counter when we stopped in last week, but I didn’t know the story behind it until I read the article. I hope it doesn’t get shut down. Jones Diner is part of that neighborhood’s culture and history. Cities need places like that…they add diversity, character, culture, and history to the neighborhoods in which they are located.
Andrew Glassberg, one of the folks trying to build an upscale modern diner in place of Jones Diner, asserts “we are all about eggs and burgers [and we] want that classic diner feel”. He’s missing the point; it’s not just about the type of food or some carefully crafted & marketed “classic diner feel”, it’s a lot more than that. When we were there the other day, about five minutes after we had ordered, a man walked in with hellos to both men working behind the counter, obviously a regular. Four minutes after that, way before we got our food, the man dug into a turkey dinner which he hadn’t ordered, but which they knew he wanted anyway. That’s just a taste of what places like Jones Diner give you in the context of a neighborhood that a modern diner just can’t.
Frostbite in the frozen tundra
I got my first ever case of frostbite this morning, and let me tell you…it’s not a lot of fun. It happened when I was out in the frozen tundra this morning putting anti-freeze in Nichol’s car. In my rush to get the both of us to work in a timely fashion, I didn’t put on my gloves - even though it was about minus 10 degrees F this morning - and my thumb got all numb…and not in a good way either. It’s just now thawing out, four hours later…most of the feeling is back, and it hasn’t turned any funny colors.
Which is good.
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