Last Wednesday, sitting around a conference room table, going over a friend’s qualifiers presentation:

J: “Hey. Want to get beer tonight?”
Me: “Ok.”

And simple as that, 6pm, we’re strolling out of the UES to the painful transnat corpdom that is Midtown, heading towards the Ginger Man, a Manhattan beer powerhouse with 66 beers on tap and 120+ bottles,
and one of 12 listed bars in NY with Dogfish 60 on tap.

It’s a Wednesday, Midtown’s a wasteland, and it was 6pm. We didn’t expect there to be much of a crowd, but by the time we got there, it was completely packed! This is a huge bar with plenty of seating area, but alas, all seats (and standing room) was taken up by suits loosening their ties. After standing around awkwardly for a bit, waiting for the last member of our party to arrive, we finally procured a table, got our beers, got halfway through the first round, and then realized… the bar was practically empty. Somewhere in that one hour differential, the B&T crowd had finished pounding in that one last drink before catching the PATH back home.

This bar’s location was really a shame, considering the wonderful bounty of beer they had available.

I tried (ever my own or someone else’s glass… no I didn’t drink 4 beers there):

Stoudt’s Blonde Double MaiBock
y’know, i just wasn’t feeling this beer at all. i really wanted to, since double bocks sound like candy on a stick, but while this had alot of different flavours going for it, they didn’t… mix together at all. just ended up being a bit weird and incongruous

Franziskaner Hefe Weisse
typical hefeweizen with a bit more spice/kick than usual. pretty decent, but not too special for a hefe

Victory Storm King Stout
yummy, good stout.
didn’t stand out from other stouts, but had the same texture & nice malty taste of caramel & choco (not sweet). delicioso!

Dogfish Head 60 Minute
Wow. So unlike the Dogfish Head 120 minute, this actually still tastes recognizably like an IPA. However, its also the best IPA i’ve ever had. just the right balance of hops, acidity, flavour… i wouldn’t, however, compare this to the 120, just b/c the 120 really belongs in a dessert beer category, instead of the normal IPA.

One of the best things, however, about 36th st though, is its proximity to K-town. We jetted over there, grabbed some korean bbq & Hite korean beer (which is pretty amazingly mediocre, but hey, every country has their own macrolager), and it was an excellent night.

I’d definitely head over to the ginger man again sometime, just not between 5 to 7:30pm on a workday.

The Ginger Man
11 E. 36th St., New York, NY 10016
nr. Fifth Ave.
212-532-3740

Every one and their mom is having a rosé wine tasting this week. Its almost like the release of every year’s Beaujolais nouveau on exactly the third Thursday of November. Luckily for me though, I enjoy rosés far far more than I’ve ever taken to a Beaujolais nouveau (granted, I’ve only tried the cheapest kind).

So in honor of wine consumerism, a group of us headed down to our ecletic neighborhood wine store, Crush, to sample some wares in their annual War of the Rosés. There was a lively and energetic crowd, consisting mainly of young female Midtown drones come to drown out their petty sorrows with free wine (ok, I may have made the backdrop up, but forgive me a mite of jealousy for our salary differential). But our group did stand out a bit; instead of the collared shirt, black skirt and office pumps, I was sporting a bright red tshirt depicting squirrel violence, one of our group had a blue tubetop, the last one was wearing sneakers and brought a JanSport backpack. But hey, we’re used to it, dressing like students in the Upper East Side means you get used to shopkeepers looking either 1) suspiciously or 2) disdainfully at you.

One fact still remained though; none of us knew much about wine. We understood the concept behind roses. We knew they tend to be cheap, low quality wines, meant for being quaffed in copious quantities with a picnic basket full of food. Finally, we knew… or at least, thought, they were supposed to be light and fruity and all the other wonderful easy characteristics of a white zinfandel that didn’t just suck.

Well. We certainly didn’t get that.

Our first few glasses were disappointing; perhaps we were just expecting the wrong thing. Most of us enjoy dry wines, but… not in our roses. We moved on quickly to the next table, where upon my first sniff, I exclaimed.

“Buttered popcorn!”
“What? Are you crazy?”
“No! It’s hot buttered popcorn, theatre-style!”
“Huh… well I guess I can kind of see that.”

I quickly lost this good will though, after exclaiming “Buttered popcorn!!” for each of the next 3 wines.

“Dandan. Are you sure you’re not just hungry??”

We moved on, tried a few inoffensive, but unremarkable wines, none of which had that light fruitiness that we had come to associate with roses after years of acclimation. Spotting a couple bottles of sparkling rose in the corner, and remembering the wonders of the FRV 100 we had tried a couple weeks ago, we planted ourselves in front of the sparkly and readied ourselves for magnificence.

I took the first sniff, of the Strohmeier 2000 Schilcher Sekt Reserve we were served.

Hesitation. “Wasabi. Definitely. Wasabi.”

The other two girls stared at me like I had grown two heads, one of which was made out of green horseradish.

“No, seriously! Wasabi!”

They sniffed. Tasted. Mouths dropped open.

J: “This is… this is like an entire sushi meal in one.”
Me: “Isn’t it?! Isn’t it?! There’s that salty miso soup at the start, an intense buttery tuna belly in the middle, and then the long wasabi/soy sauce finish.”
A: “Crazy! You’re right! This is crazy!”

How could one sip of wine, hell, one sip of rose, taste of an entire sushi entree? I have no idea. There’s black magic in this. None of us could decide whether or not we actually loved it, but the novelty factor was so strong, it didn’t even matter. Hell, I could just skip dinner and drink a glass of this. It’s Violet Beauregarde from Charlie & the Chocolate Factory all over again!
Unfortunately, it was also the most expensive wine, knocking in at $26.99 with the discount for the day of wine tasting (normally $29.99). Even if a whole bottle would’ve ended up being too much weird wine, it would’ve been worth the cost just to videotape your friends faces as they try the wine. This is not your grandmother’s rose.

All in all, not a bad expenditure of a Thirsty Thursday hour. Even though we ended up not buying anything, the experience truly broadened our expansions in terms on roses (one friend couldn’t believe the geographical diversity represented by the wines that night — and here we thought roses only came from California).

Wines we tried at Crush
Jean-Paul “Big Boy” Brun’s 2007 Rosé d’Folie (Made from Gamay in Beaujolais)
“Cool Guy” Copain’s 2007 Le Printemps Rosé (Pinot Noir from California)
Gérard Boulay’s 2007 Sancerre “Sacrificer” Rosé (Pinot Noir from Sancerre)
“The Commander” Commanderie de Peyrassol 2007 Rosé (Syrah from Provence)
“The Ferocious” Fenouillet 2007 Rosé (Syrah from Rhone)
Lauverjat “Loverboy” 2007 Sancerre Rosé (Pinot Noir from Sancerre)
“Lean and mean” Lafond 2007 Tavel Rosé (Grenache from Provence)
Triennes “Go ahead and Try Me” 2007 Rosé (Cinsault from Provence)
Jules “Rules” 2007 Rosé (Grenache from Provence)
Palmina “You’re Mine-A” 2007 Botasea Rosé (Dolcetto and Nebbiolo from California)
Stringtown “Meantown” 2007 Rosé (Grenache from California)
“Strong arm” Strohmeier NV Schilcher Sekt (Sparkling Blauer Wildbacher from Austria)
“Vintage Strong arm” Strohmeier 2000 Schilcher Sekt (Sparkling Blauer Wildbacher
from Austria) (our favorite, and unfortunately, apparently only available from Crush while in the US).

As Neil informed you previously, wine tastings are made out of all sorts of win. What he neglected to talk about, however, is how much win you can find post-wine tastings, from the dregs of papers lurking around in your purse. Being the woman, and holder of all things that is material (though yes yes, thank you to the menfolk that hold the wallets when purses are not in use), I ended up with the papers indicating our favorite choices.

They’re not too illuminating if you’re actually interested in the wines, but fairly entertaining regardless.

We didn’t manage to try all the wines there (I was determined, but my compatriots are far more rational than I), but from the ones we did try, we went in numerical order, roughly. Thus, you can see, in paper form, with what amazing swiftness we managed to go from sobriety to inebriation.

I love the last page, where there are notes on 4 wines; consisting of “!!!!”, “whee”, “whoa!”,  and “DD likeys”.

Haha, but all in all, it was a lovely wine tasting, I’ve discovered that my eno-childhood contained far too many bursting Starbusts-type fruity explosions that most of these French wines tasted very boring & watery to my palate. Ah well, children always did like bright colors.

There were still a couple gems that stood out, of which one, the FRV 100 (try pronouncing it in French, it becomes effervescent), was actually affordable ($19.99/btl) and truly the star of the party. I’ve never had a rose like it, and I might never again (once I’ve opened the one bottle I bought). The others were in the $40-70 area, a range that I hope never to approach on a general consumption level.

Wine tastings rock so hard. For a really low buy-in, you can try a diverse assortment of wines, talk to people who actually know things about wine to pick up terminology (useful if you’re interested in calling wines something beyond “dry” and “sweet”), and get pleasantly drunk. Usually at like five in the afternoon. Oh, and usually there are hors d’oeuvres.

So when one of Dandan’s friends proposed doing exactly that at Cercle Rouge in Tribeca, we jumped. Like most wine tastings, this one had a (innocuous) gimmick: all the wines were organic and French (I seem to recall being told that there would be Italian wines too, but I don’t recall seeing any).

There were around 80 wines, with a pretty good distribution of regions whose names I really ought to recognize. I took notes (I always take notes at wine tastings so that I don’t look so much like a jackass who’s just there to get toasted), but they’re somewhere either in Dandan’s apartment or in the trash.

In summary: there was a lot of good wine, but I noticed a few trends: there were a lot more blends then I would have expected, there were several rosés that people were taking seriously and totally not just drinking because they were 19 (in fact, the sparkling FRV 100 Gamay was possibly the best wine we had), and, most telling of the difference between the French and the American palates, I found that a lot of the wines lacked any “punch.” There wasn’t a single wine I tried that offended me, but out of the few dozen I tasted there were only a few that were particularly distinct. Do I expect wine to taste too much like citric acid and Kool-Aid? Was I in the wrong mindset? Was I drunk? On all three counts, the answer might be “yes.”

Whatever the case, the vintners were enthusiastic and informative, the hors d’oeuvres were worth the $5 by themselves (steak tartare… mmm). After most of our modest party had hit their limit, the authors of this column squeezed in a bonus round or two, and then we all wandered down the street to the affiliated wine shop where we bought a few bottles of the better stuff. We hoofed it, mildy intoxicated at six in the evening, over to Chinatown where we devoured a platter of Vietnamese food and then rather a lot of espresso. I seem to recall that most of the wine we bought was consumed over Pictionary later that evening.

If that’s not a fine day, then I don’t know what is.

Rejoice, ye humble supplicants kneeling at the foot of the Beer Gods; our prayers have been answered!

Take MenuPages, add beer, you get BeerMenus.com, or a rather comprehensive listing of bars & restaurants and their respective beer menus, currently only available in New York (but of course). A quick browse through the site yielded many fruits; I finally know where I can find that delicious amazing nectar known as Dogfish 120 (and for only $7/bottle? I feel like that’s got to be some kind of typo… maybe a little bit of investigative journalism is at hand? Oh the depths I’d go to for the Truth and a bottle of Dogfish), and there’s apparently a free beer & … oysters? tasting on May 6th at Blind Tiger Ale House. Well sir, you’ve sold me twice - beer & oysters rank right up there with oxygen in my book.
On a more disappointing note, the uptown offerings seems to be fairly meager. A walk through my neighborhood shows 8 restaurants/bars. That’s at least 30x that existing up here. Conspicuously missing is the UES beer mecca of David Copperfield’s (if 30 taps & 100+ bottles doesn’t count, then nothing does).

Still, a solid/clean site that just launched 2 days ago — looking forward to seeing this site become a real go-to spot for beer in the city. In retrospect, it’s quite amazing that this particular Web 2.0 niche took so long before being filled…!

Having recently acquired a $5 gift card, I stepped into a Starbucks yesterday - for the first time in a while (yay for living in a city where the number of small independent coffee shops actually outnumber the chains). I was downtown, at Astor Place, and wanted to sit down to read for a bit. After nearly backing out after seeing the swarm of NYU students buzzing around the place, I decided the line was moving fast enough for me to pick up a caramel apple cider — pretty much the only drink I get there anymore, since I no longer have that sweet tooth for frappuccinos that my 15 year old self had and I don’t have a high opinion of their coffee, tea, or cappuccino. As I was idly looking at the menu overhead, I noticed the board looked… strange.

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As the New York Times reported today… apparently eggs are back! Pink ladies, flips, fizzes. What perfect timing — right after I started lamenting that the cream sherry flips and gin fizzes I’ve been enjoying at home would be impossible to find at bars!

 ”Suddenly, eggs are everywhere. Just a year ago, a bartender in the meatpacking district lamented that while she longed to add a flip to her cocktail list, she feared it would be impossible to sell a drink that listed eggs as an ingredient. (“I can’t leave it off, though,” she said. “What if someone’s allergic to eggs?”)

But what a difference a year makes. At Olana, a restaurant that opened on Madison Avenue in February, two of the restaurant’s seven signature cocktails feature eggs: the Pear Sidecar, in which egg whites meet pear brandy, and the Apricot Cobbler, a similar drink featuring apricot brandy. A recent addition to the cocktail list at A Voce, a flatiron district restaurant, is the Agrumi Fizz, in which a mix of gin, limoncello, orange liqueur, and egg whites gets topped with a float of Chianti.”

-   Let Rocky Balboa Drink the Yolk April 6, 2008, New York Times

Now, to the farmer’s market to find fresh eggs! Or maybe I should just skip that and go straight to Olana…

One of the jokes between Neil & I is that we’re the exact same person. It can be generally taken that if I enjoyed a particular food or drink, Neil would probably enjoy it also, and vice versa. In fact, watching us eat can be rather disturbing, as our plates tend to become communal property. Anyhow, this near-universal principle hit a roadblock at our recent wine tasting at Wagner Vineyards by Seneca Lake in upstate New York wine country. Admittedly, our tastes in wine haven’t been as similar as our tastes in beer (and I would argue that my taste is cocktails is quite a bit less cavity-licious than his), but we’ve never been at such a complete disagreement before.

After a couple ho-hum tastings of their reds offerings, we got into the better stuff — Rieslings, Gerwutztraimer, etc. Our first taste of their white wine was of a rather obscure grape, the Niagara grapes, crossed between Concord and white Cassady grapes and created in the same region its grown. A sniff yielded intense intense fruity scents, mainly of grape juice. It tasted exactly like it was scented. Amazing!!

Me:” WOW! This is… this is truly delicious! O_O”
Neil & other friend: “… This… this is really weird.” *spits it out*

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Think Coffee
248 Mercer St @ 3rd St. (map)
New York, NY 10012
(212) 228-6226

Gtalk last night
Y: do we have our date tomorrow?
Y: i read reviews for think coffee
Y: apparently, you have to go early so you can go and “pretend to work”
Y: i challenge you to a 7:30 date
Me: …
Me: you’re trying to kill me

And this is how I dragged my ass out of bed at 6:30AM and drank the best cappuccino I’ve ever had. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday, I re-entered the high heeled shark-infested waters known as the New York dating scene… to the great delight of more geriatric friends who love to live vicariously through me. The gent & I were meeting up at Union Square and winging it from there, and being a 21st century woman and all, I figured I should contribute some ideas for dinner & a bar afterwards. A New Yorker friend recommended a hidden bar, Angel Share, haphazardly located in the middle of a busy Japanese restaurant.First of all, let me say… this is not a bar for first dates. Or second dates even. Unless you’re 100% sure you’re madly in love with this guy/gal. This bar has romantic down to an art form, to the point where you’re going to want to take your pants off, regardless of how unattractive, uninteresting and repulsive your date might be. It’s insta-hook-up in bar form.

Three restaurants, 1 bartender with a chip on her shoulder, 1 run-in with a friend, and a flight of stairs later, we found ourselves inside a sushi place, standing outside a wooden door that could’ve easily passed for the entryway to a storage cabinet

“Are you sure it’s here?” my date asked. “I’ve been to this restaurant a couple times and never noticed a bar.”
“No no,” I insisted. “My friend said it was completely unmarked.”
I opened the door…

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