Friday night the usual cast of our 211 crew were going to catch the opening night 10:15 showing of Borat at Kips Bay. A few of us decided to grab some dinner at Seoul Garden in K-town first. After a bit of a wait we were seated and Gar as usual did the ordering. I had the seafood tofu jigae and some kalbi. Not sure which tofu jigae Gar ordered, but he got his spicy and I got mine medium. Mine was not very deep red in color but had the heat intensity equivalent to what would be spicy at So Kong Dong (our usual place for soft tofu). Gar’s was deep red, and as you’d suspect, was off-the-charts hot and Gar was sweating like a baller. The barbecued kalbi was not as good as at So Kong Dong, but I actually thought the tofu jigae was better because of a richer more intense flavor, and I’m not just talking about the level of heat. The menu at Seoul Garden, as well as the physical space itself, was much larger than So Kong Dong as well.
After dinner, we walked over to the theater in the chilly night air. Not surprisingly when we got there it was a sold out show with the longest line to get into a theater I’ve ever seen. It literally went completely around the perimeter of the entire floor so that the end of the line was wrapped around to the beginning of the line. (Un)fortunately we were at that crossover point at the end of the line, so when they started letting people in, we did what any good New Yorker would, we just waited a bit and then cut the line. Kathy and Ricky got into the theater first and somehow managed to save us eight seats in a row without getting into a fistfight. The movie was very dumb, very offensive, but if you could get past that, it was also very funny. It definitely pushed the boundaries of all taste and included some scenes that were both hard to watch and stupidly hysterical.
After the movie we walked back to K-town for drinks at Third Floor. The room looked totally familiar and I think I vaguely remember Sterl having brought me there like a decade or more ago. I know I had been there a long time ago, and since it’s an Asian place, I just assume it was Sterl that dragged me there back in the day. We got a table in the back and ordered up some carafes of flavored soju. We had lychee, raspberry, blueberry, lychee againand maybe another flavor I don’t remember. Also had a tray of sliced fruit, all of which was really good, especially the pineapple. After the fourth carafe, we got the muchies and ordered a giant bowl of fried chicken. It was good but with a fluffier type of coating than regular fried chicken and pieces that were butchered in a way I had never seen before so that the body part of each piece was pretty much unrecognizable. There was much drunkeness around us as we kind of felt like the old fogies in the room. Everyone else looked like they were 20. There was a guy passed out at the corner table and then when they left the next group that sat there seemed to be spilling things left and right. Even better was the table on our other side where they were celebrating one girl’s birthday. At one point all the girls at the table were taking turns kissing each other and taking pictures of it. As Borat would say, “Happy times!” Then the inevitable happened as the birthday girl had to run off to the ladies room to get sick, presumably from the booze, not from kissing her girlfriends. One of the guys at their table was a dwarf named Albert who introduced himself to us as they were getting ready to leave. Apparently he works for Proctor and Gamble and we gave him props for every P&G product we could name. He was cool and chatted with us for a bit before he left with his drunken crew of aspiring lesbians.
Saturday was a pot luck dinner hosted by Gar and Esther. All I can say is, man, my friends can really cook!…and drink! All the food was so good and I ate a tremendous amount of kalbi, but I thought the biggest winner of the night was Kat’s green tea tiramisu. Soooo good. We went thru something like 16 bottles of wine, some premium sake, some Macallan 15-yr and of course some Heineken Light. We also played two 12-player poker tourneys and I busted out in the middle of both which gave me more opportunity to drink and nibble at the leftovers of Rog’s precision-cut salad (Rick asked Rog how long it took with an exacto knife to cut the salad like that). Somewhere in the course of the evening various stoopidly funny things happened, like Mikey doing strange pushups, Logan doing splits, and Roger trying yoga positions and trying to put his leg behind his head. Meanwhile our gracious host Gar was shall we say, slightly less physical, i.e. falling asleep upstairs and then coming downstairs and falling asleep on the sofa. All in all, it was a really fun night. As Borat would say, “Great Success!”
glad you enjoyed the tiramisu! when is the dinner party at your diggs??? i will bring goodies and awesome martinis!
211 crew = HCPP! “I LIKE!”