I’ve actually been busy for the past couple of weeks.  Unfortunately Matt S left and moved to Chicago.  He was a great personality in our group and it will be much quieter without him around.  I told him I will invite myself to Chicago in 6 months or so, once he’s learned all the restaurants.  I still haven’t been to Chicago.  It will be good to visit while knowing a local. Maybe a year would be better.  I don’t think I want to go in the middle of winter.
Right after his going away party, I was off to Montreal for work.  I flew up the Saturday before I actually had to be there so I could visit the city.  It was very cool.  Several french restaurants with people that spoke french, but could all understand english.  The last part made it a little easier to get around than when I was actually in France.  Also, of all places, Montreal had the best burger I’ve ever had!  I thought I would find that in NYC somewhere.  (I’m still looking).  While doing restaurant research, I found this excellent food review journal EatWellMontreal and I found many places to eat in my neighborhood. I was up late on Saturday and tried to find a place near by, and I went to M:brgr on his recommendation. I had the Kobe burger and poutine. I never had poutine before.  It is obviously very heavy, but I did like it.  The burger was just right.  The patty wasn’t too big or too loosly packed, which I normally don’t like in your normal “gourmet burger”  You can tell from the EatWellMontreal pictures that it isn’t a typical steakhouse burger.  They are definitely doing their own thing, and I liked it.
I have an uncle in Montreal and his passion is the family tree.  He has a program that has over 20,000 entries in it!  He has lived in Montreal for longer than I’ve been around and I supposedly visited when I was a kid, but I have no memory of it.  He showed me around the city, it was great.  Travelling is so much better when you know a local.  Even with the internet, you are still “driving” and you might be limiting your experience.  For example, if I didn’t have an uncle there, I would have probably just stuck with the restaurant and downtown exploration.  They took me to the different neighborhoods and the different points of the mountain (Montreal=Mount Royale, it’s actually a mountain!) and also showed me the huge basilica, which is a typical sight seeing stop that I had no idea about.  Good time, unfortunately stupid iPhoto lost all my iphone photos, so I had to pull an archive photo of myself for this post.
I’m back in the city, and I’m back on my mission to drink my 4 bottles of wine.  The last 2 nights I went out to dinner at places with a corkage.  I drank both bottles of 2001 Mouton.  There was a little variation between the 2 bottles.  I enjoyed the first one more, but maybe it’s just psychological.  First place was Po in West Village.  $50 tasting menu, and it was awesome.  I’m not typically a fan of gnocchi, but one of the courses was a potato gnocchi in a really spicy tomato sauce.  I am still thinking about it! I went with my cousin Grace and she was as crazy about the wine as I was.  This wine really had some depth.  I could totally tell there were several different things going on during just the smelling, tasting then after taste. I could actually smell like 5-10 different things in the wine at the same time.  Crazy good! (Translation for oenophiles: Very complex and expressive at all stages, nose, middle palate, texture and finish) After Po, I wanted to get to the other Mouton ASAP, so I went to Les Halles tonight and was able to get reservations even though it was Mother’s Day.  They even forgot to charge us the corkage, so we tipped really well.  It’s the good life!  2 Unico bottles to go…

Opened the freezer today while looking for a thermometer.  Guess it has been neglected a bit!  I don’t go to the grocery store and really only use the fridge for drinks every once in a while.  A different lifestyle than suburban-Shawn.
The Ziegfeld theatre has been showing old Bond movies the past two weeks.  I went to “Dr No” and “From Russia With Love” last weekend.  It was the first time I’ve been to the Ziegfeld, and it was great.  It’s a huge old-style theatre.  Maroon felt-covered walls and gold painted wood.  Happy!
I’ve decided to not keep around old bottles of wine any more.  Ideally, I’d like to keep about a case worth of mixed wine for special occasions.  I currently have 4 bottles of special-occasion wine that I’d actually drink.  The others are of “questionable provenance”and I don’t want to risk trying to drink them.  The problem is that any wine refrigerator of this size isn’t really made for long term storage.  At the size that I’m looking for, they are also extremely shabby.  They don’t seem to make a high quality wine refrigerator for under 30 or so bottles.  I used to have a 35 bottle refrigerator, but that was too big for the NYC apartment.  I’ve thought about it, and I think that is the trend I want to follow.  I think the idea of the storing a special-occasion wine is a suburban idea.  Special bottles, like these, take time to get a hold of.  And space isn’t that expensive, so it makes sense to stock up.  In NYC, on the other hand, space is at a premium and coincidentally, I can buy any wine I’d want just a few blocks from here.  If I wanted a Lafite or a d’Yquem Sauternes, Morrel has it.  At the moment, they even have an Unico.  (I carried 2 Unico’s from Spain when I visited a few years ago)  Now the only problem is, what do I do with the current store of special-occasion bottles? I was thinking of just drinking them over the next couple weeks.  (I just reclaimed them from Trevor R’s wine fridge after storing them there for quite a while)  I don’t know if I can convince myself to drink almost $2K worth of wine in such a short amount of time! I’ll be trying to convince myself over the next couple of days.  What are the alternatives?

It sounds familiar, but I didn’t remember.  Shannon and Ryan have their birthdays within a week of each other.  They both turned 30 this year, and they organized a party down in Houston.  I took a week and visited Houston.
First day was her actual birthday, so we did what she wanted.  She’s a big nerd, we visited Lucy since the exhibit happened to be in Houston.  Apparently the fact that the exhibit is touring the world is pretty controversial.  The Smithsonian isn’t accepting it out of protest, but Houston’ll take it!  We also saw the DaVinci exhibit which was also kinda neat.
I also wanted to get a culinary taste of Houston, because I don’t really remember trying to do that before.  All the places we went to were excellent.  Ryan and Shannon have good taste!  Ryan is a true foodie.  The places I remember were Breakfast Klub (Get the Wings and Waffle!), Strip House, Tortas El Angel (Best tortas this side of the border), and to top if off…. Feast.  Here is one person’s experience. Ever since seeing that Bourdain-London episode, where he had random neglected pig parts, I’ve been wanting to give this stuff a try.  As it turns out, Ryan bought a couple books from the St. John chef and had heard that a former collegue of the chef opened upshop in Houston.  My mom and Ryan got the Ox Tongue fritters and I had the pig cheek.  I liked the fritters more, but the cheek was along the lines of mexican barbacoa.  It went well with the cabbage, and it was definitely an experience!
The actual birthday bash was a great time.  They had enough food to feed everyone about five times over!  The main attractions were the 2-60qt. stock pots on burners continuously churning out crawfish/corn/potatoes.  The crawfish were driven over from Louisiana and were still very alive.  They were cleaned, salted and dropped in the seasoned boil. The 40-50 people there didn’t even make it through half of the crawfish! I have to say, my favorite part was the corn-on-the-cob, cooked in this spicy crawfish seasoning.  Then Ryan made gumbo on a 3rd turkey-fryer burner, which he was working on for a few days.  Real fish stock and a chocolate colored roux. THEN, just in case you didn’t like any of that Lousiana-style stuff, they bought enough barbecue, crudités, cheeses for everyone two or three times over.  They also had a beer keg, wine, sodas, etc.   Good times!

This should be titled “Nanoon does NYC, 2008″ but I had a clash with culture that I wanted to write about.
Shannon came to town briefly, so we had to squeeze a lot into a little.  We finally got her to Hell’s Kitchen, but she’s avoiding uncooked fish and alcohol <hint> so she couldn’t have the tuna tostadas!  There was still enough for her to eat and she was happy.
I also finally went to Les Halles.  I honestly wasn’t expecting much.  I never got the impression Anthony Bourdain became a TV Personality based on his cooking.  I always thought it was about his writing.  That being said, it is a successful NYC restaurant in a neighborhood with some decent competition.   They have the usual French staples, but it seemed that steak was their specialty since they had many different cuts.  I got a hangar steak with Bearnaise.  We also got an order or escargot as well as pork confit.  Ryan is Mr Confit, so we had to get that.  The escargot was amazing.  I’ve had escargot, but never really thought anything special.  This was something special.  The hangar steak was perfectly cooked and was so tender it reminded me of my first taste of Kobe beef (that was actually cooked properly)  The rest was fine (onion soup, wine, bread) but the escargot and steak is what really was special. Happy!
Shannon has been a Patrick Stewart fan ever since Star Trek and apparently Ryan is a big fan of Shakespeare.  The opening night of Patrick Stewart as MacBeth was last night, so how could we not be there?!  I’ve always made it a point of avoiding Shakespeare.  I decided a while ago that because my mind is visually based that this was inherently incompatible with literature that is artistic with the delivery, as opposed to using plain language and instead being artistic with the mental visual they produce.  Same reason why I don’t get poetry.  However, I like to test my pre-conceptions periodically and I like to see performers perform so I thought it’d be a shot.  While I didn’t have a revelation (I still don’t see what people see in Shakespeare) I do think it is in the realm of Shawn-possibility now. I’m starting to think many people are probably like me but just approach Shakespeare and classic literature differently.  I think I’ve always approached literature like a movie or a modern narrative and expected to create visual mental images from the delivery.  After this week, I’m thinking this approach is wrong.  Before I went, Ryan gave me the basic plot line, which was a great help.  I think I would have appreciated it even more if I read the Wikipedia entry beforehand.  During the show, they could have been speaking French for all I understood.  But I could tell when the plot lines were happening because of the “preparation”.  Afterwards, I read the Wikipedia entry, and every plot point reminded me of the specific scene, so there are memory association “anchoring”.  I can see that repeated reading/watching/studying would create familiarity of the work, and might even create enjoyment!   Definitely a different approach one might use for Harry Potter!

Keeping with the routine, still exercising and keeping moderate during the week.   I did have a day of excess yesterday though.  Some friends of mine were headed to the NYC Autoshow and I ended up tagging along.  On the way over, we stopped for a couple drinks.  I had my maximum 2 drinks and we continued on.  I didn’t feel my usual “I wanna go home” feeling after drinking two, so the auto show was fine.  I am so over cars now that not even the Aston Martins or Bentleys did anything for me.  Just seems that everything looks the same now.  The only thing I liked in there was the Dodge Challenger.  I’m not sure if it was a concept or a production car though.   The new GT-R from Nissan sounded pretty cool, but looks similar to all the other cars that were there.  Unfortunately, that’s the only car I took a picture in front of, because I didn’t  think of taking pictures until the end of the show!
After the show we went to Hell’s Kitchen and introduced Be to all the appetizers.  She liked some, but not others.  We definitely built it up too much for her, but whatever,  I had 2 tuna tostadas which is all I care about!   I had 2 Jack & Diet Coke’s and then the waitress recognized me through a common friend, and we ended up with free tequila shots!
Unfortunately, it did not end there…  We got back to my place, and I opened up some of the old  tequila bottles I brought back from Mexico, but never tasted.  They weren’t all that great even though I spent a bundle on them :(  I had about 2 shots and decided that was all for the night.  I was waking up at all odd hours, drinking water, feeling dehydrated.  Never got nauseus, but I didn’t want to wake up for a while today.  It was a good day, but not one to repeat!

I haven’t been getting out much in the past few months and I saw KC maybe once since Thanksgiving.  I suppose I was just feeling self-conscious, but I know that’s nothing to worry about with this girl.  We went to this excellent italian wine bar in my neighborhood that’s only been open for a little while.  Bocca di Bacco had great food, great wine and great atmosphere.  They have several wines by the glass from all over Italy, not just Tuscany and Piedmont.  The open bottles are kept in those refrigerated nitrogen preservation systems.  I bought a tank of nitrogen a while back and used to keep the bottles preserved like that in my apartment in MA.  The phases I go through!  We got a couple appetizers and I got the pumpkin ravioli with butter/sage sauce.  This dish sounds familiar, and it might be one of the trendy dishes, but I don’t care!  It was something else!
About this girl..  The photo is a horrible, low light iPhone capture.  I forgot my camera yet again!  I tried to adjust the levels to get rid of the artifacts, and it ended up OK.  You can still tell from the horrible photo that she’s totally hot!  So I caught myself over-thinking today, which, when it comes to emotions, I’ve been trying to limit (I am my own worst enemy!).  I evaluated my feelings and came up with some weird observations.  I’m totally in love with this girl!! BUT, not in that way.  We don’t go out too often, but when we do, it really is a special occasion.  The conversation is fun, the food is perfect, the wine is just right, everything is the best, and in the euphoria of the evening, I catch myself repeating to myself with a smile “This is HAPPY!” and find myself cataloging everything accurately in my head.  Yet… that is the extent of it.  I don’t have those inclinations one might get when out with a girl like this!  What is that?!  I then caught myself “thinking” and stopped in my tracks!  Moving on….

I finished the Master Cleanse after being on it for 31 days. Exactly the same amount of time as last year. I just starting feeling weak and ache-y and decided it was time to come off. I should have gotten off a week and a half earlier, because all the weight I was going to lose was lost back then. I guess 25 pounds is the maximum I can lose on that thing. It’s been a few days, and I’m still losing weight. We’ll see how long that lasts. I’ve been keeping the food intake pretty light, and I continued exercising. I started with weights today, and I’m going to be really hurting over the next few days. I think my psychology will be a bit different now. I remember when I was trying to quit smoking, I would always say “Next Sunday will be my last day” The addict in me would then “load up” over the last few days of the week. I normally smoked a pack in about 2-3 days, but those “last days” I was smoking a pack a day, justifying it in my mind that they would be my last. A couple rationalizations later, and the Monday got pushed back to “that Friday”, or the Monday after that. Pretty soon I was smoking a pack a day for a whole month! The same thing happened to me this past holiday season with food. “As soon as I get back from Thanksgiving, I’ll start my regiment”, “just after Christmas”, etc. I was eating like a complete idiot during that time! and I gained the 25 pounds that I just lost in only a few months!. So now I’m back where I started a year ago deciding I needed to lose weight and maybe I’ll try this “Master Cleanse” thing. It was an educational year, and I don’t think I’ll be doing that again. I guess I’ll try this crazy “eat less and exercise” thing!
I noticed, during my “culinarily debaucherous” holiday, that most of the food I was eating wasn’t even all that good. Just a rut I fell into because I got lazy and wanted delivery all the time. I had all these plans when I moved to NY to try different things and there are more than enough places around me to do that. I just have to get over my hang-up about eating alone. I went to Mee’s the other day and ate by myself. I had an audiobook running in one ear, and I just lose myself in it. I think that will be my thing for the more casual places. Today though, I wasn’t by myself. Risa and I had been talking about hitting up a quality Ramen place for a while. I checked out eGullet and found some of their recommendations for the best ramen in the city. A name that kept coming up is in the area, so we hit it. Menchanko Tei was totally different than anything I’ve had before. I didn’t really associate the food in there with what I normally think of Japanese food. The noodles were extremely fresh, they had to have been made that day. The broth was excellent. I got the “Hakata Ramen” (A picture is in the link) I am NOT a fan of ginger, but it was rather subtle in my dish, and was actually good. They shaved up the mushrooms and ginger so that they were the same shape as the noodles. Ever time you chopstick’ed a bite of noodles, there was always some mushroom and ginger tangled up in there. Crafty! I definitely want to go back and try some of the other menu items. Maybe hit the other place “Sapporo” that looked like it had more variation of Ramen. Quite a step up from the little Top Ramen packages I grew up with! I only had my iPhone with me, so this was the best picture I could get. I gotta carry around the camera more!

I finally got around to seeing Superbad. I can’t tell if my sense of humor is off, or I was just affected by all the hype. There were some funny parts, but I wasn’t falling over laughing like I was expecting to. A shame because I forgot to take Knocked Up off my Netflix list, and I have to watch that now. We’ll see what happens. Maybe my expectations are so low now I’ll actually like it.
1 year ago this month I was on the Master Cleanser. The rest of the year I sat around and ate as much as I could, and I gained even more weight than where I was originally. My mom is going to be mad at me, but I’m on it again. The idea is to learn from mistakes and keep fit afterwards. This will be the last time. I think I’ve discovered that, like alcohol, my capacity is not what “normal” people can eat. Not to mention the average portions in the US are ridiculous. I think I got used to eating like “normal” people and didn’t think anything of it. I got to the point where I was thinking it was strange that I just wanted to go home and lay down after every meal, where other people can actually do things after they ate! I have my portion plan now. With that, no soda, and exercising regularly, I think I have a chance. The portion control will be the toughest. I’ll be regularly leaving food on the plate when I declare I’m done This is extremely against the grain for me since I grew up with a filipino mother! The problem will be when the food is particularly good. When I’ve decided to stop in the past, I’ve gotten this urge to continue that scarily reminded me of when I was trying to quit smoking! Like smoking, I’ve had a number of false starts, but I think I’ve “hit bottom” with 225 lbs. Hopefully that was bottom!
Today was Bonus day at work. It’s also the day that raises and promotions get announced. I was hired as an AVP in the middle of May last year, so I wasn’t expecting a promotion or anything. I was also under the impression you couldn’t get a VP title without becoming a manager. The awesome news is that my coworker, who is not a manager, was promoted to VP. He totally deserves it, and it gives me hope. I was a little concerned that my career had plateaued and I would have to become a manager to move on. BNP has been treating me well, and I think I’ll stick around a while. My manager and coworkers are a riot. Good times!

In these post, I always claim I will post more often, then a few months go by. I was reading the autobiography of Eric Clapton and was wondering, “How the heck does he remember so many things from that long ago?” Not to mention the drug and alcohol induced haze he must have been in the whole time. Then I got to the part where he directly quotes his diary. He also talked about other people who all kept diaries. I remember the idea of keeping a diary was more popular when I was a kid in the 80s, but I don’t really see that anymore. The weblog is probably the modern diary, but they seem to be less personal. Probably because everyone can read it. Any way, I have it on my long-term goals to be less self-conscious, so perhaps I’ll try to make this into more of a diary. I’ll need information for my auto-biography in a couple decades!
Moving on… to bring us current, since November:
- I went to Brownsville for a 3 week vacation covering Thanksgiving. I didn’t make it to Austin this time, which was a mistake, because after the second week, I was hating it. I also started my decent. I told myself that I was going to let loose for the vacation, then when I got back, I’d exercise, be healthy, blah blah. It’s now February, and I just started exercising a few weeks ago. I’m losing weight now, but I reached my fattest in January topping out at 225 lbs. (It’s a diary now, more personal stuff!)
- I finally got out to Peter Luger’s. I wasn’t that happy with everything. I thought I had too high expectations, and they just didn’t live up to it. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was our fault. The waiter was being very clear about how they cooked it, and I kind of ignored him and ordered the undercooked porterhouse. It was a little blue, which is their “medium-rare”. From now on, I am going to specify “just past the point where the blue disappears”. I won’t use “medium-rare” anymore. Also, the next few days, I did find myself remembering the tenderness of the steak, and actually dreamt about it once. I now think that they quality of the meat was extraordinary, but I let the miscommunication cloud my opinion. I’d like to go back, but may be difficult to convince my friends. There are so many other steak places in NYC to get to.
- My G&G shoes were mentioned in the last post, and now I’ve had some time with them. They are my absolute favorite shoes ever! I was planning on getting a pair from 3 different companies for variety, but now I’m considering just sticking with G&G. These are my light brown shoes. I still need a dark brown derby and a black brouge’d cap-toe. The other companies I’m looking at are John Lobb Paris and Edward Green. I’ve done a lot of reading on shoes. Also on clothes in general, but I want to keep my clothing purchases to a minimum until I reach a decent weight. Shoes are one of the only things I can really buy at this point.

Other than that, my focus has really been on work and trying to exercise. I have been going everyday now and am starting to see some results. I’m on a good path. On the negative side, I haven’t been going out at all. Just work and exercise. Otherwise, I’m watching TV in my room. That’ll change soon.

As you can see, I went a little over board with all the apple purchases lately. I didn’t think I’d really need the wireless keyboard considering I got a wired one with the number pad. Yet, here I am, lying back on my bed, typing away. I’m a little far from the screen, so can’t really tell if I’m spelling everything correctly. I guess I’ll spell check later.

Yes, I was one of those that made fun of people that bought apple computers. Then, apple built OSX on top of UNIX. My first eyebrow went up. They moved to intel….. the other eyebrow went up. The hardware got prettier, and I was sold. I dig the whole minimalist metal look. It’s not all good though, I despise the mighty mouse. Big waste of money, don’t even bother. The wired one is OK, but the bluetooth version, for me, is extremely hard to control. It just doesn’t go where you want it to. I exchanged it to make sure it wasn’t defective. The problem didn’t go away. I’ve since gotten a Logitech wireless mouse, and all is well.

A few things have happened since the 4th of July, and I’ll get around to writing about them in detail eventually. My G&G shoes came in, I’m hanging out with my coworkers more, I got a monster Schott jacket (Cafe racer style), signed up to netflix finally, tried fried chicken and waffles, did a same-day Lombardi’s VS grimaldi’s pizza-off, got a work-laptop image to function in vmware,on my Mac, VPN and everything. The last was a month-long difficult ordeal!