Posts from the ‘City’ Category

Mar 5

I Get Baked

Baked in Red Hook is the dream coffee shop for anyone not fully recovered from the first season of Twin Peaks. With its hunting lodge atmosphere and sleek design, you feel like Audrey is going to stroll in any minute. Always busy despite its location in the lonely industrial stretch leading to the piers, it’s customers seem to materialize just outside it’s doors. The bakery offers grown up versions of the sweets you would have wanted all the time when you were a kid, if only you could have found someone to make them for you. Rows of chunky cookies, whoopie pies, malt ball covered cakes, and peppermint marshmallows to serve off little princess plates between cups of pretend tea to your (in my case imaginary) friends. Read more

Jan 22

Republican Ginger Snaps and Democratic Cupcakes

Like a few million others, I made my pilgrimage to Washington, DC this week to witness firsthand the presidential inauguration. In the days after the election, a lot of my friends talked of making the trip also, but once the excitement died down, most of them decided to stay home. Any other year or for any other president, I would have been one of them. The reason I didn’t is because of a conversation I had with an aunt who was fighting cancer. A lifelong republican and active McCain supporter, she knew I had volunteered for the campaign and was the first to call and congratulate me when Obama won. When I confessed that I had planned on attending but now wasn’t sure, she told me I simply HAD to go. Her HADTO made up my mind.

It took three hours through chaotic DC streets and an endless traffic tunnel to work our way to a spot where we could watch the ceremony on the JumboTrons posted along the Mall. It was during the next two hours of standing and waiting that the cold worked its way up through my legs and froze every cell in my body. Luckily, the day before I had visited my great aunt and uncle who live in DC. He’s a retired professor in his eighties and they’re both diehard conservatives. Over a gracious lunch, they questioned all of my political beliefs and most of my life choices then gave my sister and me a tin of ginger snaps and sent us on our way. When the cold set in the next day, I ripped into those ginger snaps like a starved wolverine. I’d be embarrassed about this, but I did share with my new inauguration friends and it really was so cold. Read more

Dec 29

3 Comments

A Palace Tour

I start every trip to Miami at Versailles Restaurant on Calle Ocho. Versailles lives up to its name with its mirrored walls, court in eternal debate, and heavily bejeweled matrons . The front entrance opens onto a long red carpet leading to the two, raucous dining rooms. There may be music playing at Versailles, but it’s impossible to hear over the sounds of politics, silverware, and full-blast air conditioning. Recognition is key, and upon entering everyone immediately scans the room for familiar faces. A quick table stop or two before being seated can whether you’re given the real menu or the tourist menu in English.

I rarely have Cuban food outside of Miami. Deceptively simple, it’s easy to get wrong. Today, I arrived with a checklist of things I’ve been dreaming of from the moment I booked my flight – tortilla de platanos, croquetas de yucca, ropa vieja, flan de queso. Nevertheless, once there, I ordered to please my waitress. Versailles boasts the boldest wait staff in the Miami and possibly the world. They’re like a female army in tight green, polyester leisure suits trained by hypercritical, but well-meaning Cuban grandmothers. One raised eyebrow or sharp comment, will prompt you to cut down a croqueta order and cancel the fries, yet they seem genuinely disappointed if you don’t clean your plate and order dessert. I had a media noche since it’s hard to find a cuban sandwich made with the traditional pan de agua outside of Miami. It was heavy on the ham but still delicious. The fried plantains were also fantastic, perfectly sweet without being oily. For dessert, I had the brazo gitano, a rolled cake with dulce de leche filling and chocolate frosting. My cake was a little dry, and I was soon begging my sister to share her flan with me. Finally, even though it’s just a macchiato, it tastes so much better when you can call it a cortadito and have it on a warm December day.

When I was little, I made no distinction between the plastic baroque of Versailles and the palaces of books and Disney movies. Even as an adult, it never disappoints. Like going through the looking glass, it becomes as small or big as you need it to be on that day, at that moment. I’ll visit Versailles several times on my trip as I work my way down my list. With each meal, I settle into it’s rhythms and sounds till it’s time to go home again.

Dec 13

3 Comments

I Want to Eat My Christmas Tree

I’m not actually going to do it although my dog has already tried. I debated the practicality of putting up a tree I can only enjoy for a couple of weeks before I return to Miami for Christmas. I decided to be sensible and forgo it until the sweet Vermont hippie who sells trees at the end of my block offered me a little Charlie Browner as fat as it was tall. It just had to come home with me.

It was few years before it occurred to me that I could put up my own tree. Growing up, I’d always thought home would be my mother’s house in Miami until I started my own family. Eventually I sent myself to school in New York and stayed there. Still, the original concept I had as a child lingered, like an idea that only has its own word in a dead language. With every passing year in my Cobble Hill apartment, it felt less temporary and more like home. I stopped saving Christmas for a few days in Miami.

I only let myself buy ornaments after December 26th each year so I have a mix of overlooked but still very pretty decorations, like orphans from central casting. The tree itself is so chubby that I had to bury a lot of the figures just inside the branches so they peek out. I love everything about this tree. I love the floating mandarin in the mushroom hat, I love the mouse in snow boots, I love the polish black and white glass balls, I love the dancer en pointe, I love the peacock…

My tree is sweet just to the point before it becomes saccharine. So naturally, I now want to eat it. But since that would hurt, I’m having people over to enjoy it with me instead. Before everyone goes there separate ways for Christmas, I decided to have a few friends over for a buche de noel. I’ve been dying to make one and it is the traditional time for it. Not being french, it’s not my rule to break.