Lunch during my workdays had been getting pretty stale of late. I usually go to Kisco Kosher for awesome sandwiches (their corned beef and tongue kicks ass) and soup (their matzoh balls and their split pea soup are the best I’ve ever tasted). Other days I’ll eat junk like hot dogs from Nathans, fish and chips, the occasional McDonalds run and a few visits to Subway. Boring. But now there’s a new game in town- a crepe place in The Westchester. It’s set up kind of like a juice bar in the food court and has a menu extensive enough to keep me interested for weeks to come featuring both savory and traditional dessert style crepes. I tried the feta/tomato/olive/cilantro crepe and it was so delicious I immediately ordered a second one. It’s a pretty cool setup but they only have two griddles so I imagine that the lines will get rather long once word gets out about how good this place is.
Made another trip to Chikalicious and for probably my third time in a row, I decided on the featured panacotta of the day, this time a luxurious coconut variation adorned with a quenelle of basil sorbet. Part of the reason I always seem to order the panacotta is that it’s usually the one paired with the moscato d’asti. Since I still had some time to kill before poker that night, I ordered a second glass after my petit fours. That place makes me so happy; I’m forever indebted to K & R for introducing me to it.
Speaking of K, as if I couldn’t love her any more, she had apparently read my blog earlier in the week and when she showed up to poker she brought me some Heineken Light! Is she awesome or what? Then later that week Dawg came back to town and wanted to play poker, so we organized an impromptu game and he ended up buying Heiney Light too. This works so well I think I should start blogging about foie gras and caviar and see what happens. Man I have cool friends. 🙂
My best friend was back in town on Friday and we all went out to dinner at Tigerland on Avenue A. Kind of an Asian fusion type of restaurant where our whole party had a prix fixe menu. They only served beer and wine, but the food was pretty decent. Both of the curries were excellent and one of the fish dishes, I think it may have been tilapia, was really good too. The braised rib dish was less rich than I expected but delicious nonetheless. The one glaring failure was their dow mew (Asian pea shoots) which was really stringy and tough. All in all, most of the dishes were thoughtfully composed but the chef’s touch with salt was a bit heavy handed across the entire menu. Still a good meal though and it was cool just being able to shoot the shit with my best friend again, listening to him recount all the awesome meals he had just had with his wife down in St. Barts. He was telling me I should immediately hook up with a chick that loves to eat so that I can travel with her down to St. Barts and eat ourselves to ruin (Kuidaore!) before the low season ends. Excellent idea. Any takers? 😉
As for poker, Twoin has taken over the lead in R&L’s home game. Yes, we’re keeping a spreadsheet now to track and rank everyone’s play. Just like we used to do for MJ, although this spreadsheet seems much more complex. In any event, Twoin has been on a tear because his style is particularly well suited to the very loose play in this game. In particular, our gracious host R likes to build pots with marginal hands and Twoin sees enough flops with him to get paid off when R tries to make tricky moves on the turn or river. That’s a great way to play it.
In other poker news, I tried playing a WSOP qualifier this weekend and suffered another bad beat. It was one of those situations you’re just dying to get your money in the pot. You set things up perfectly, the cards cooperate in helping to set your trap and then in the end, things just don’t work out. I had built a decent chip stack and began a little bullying since the blinds had gone up sufficiently to make it worthwhile. I had been raising so relentlessly it had to be clear to the table that I was out of line and somebody needed to step up and keep me honest. I open raised for twice the big blind with pocket 5’s, a raise that should have looked like I was just trying to steal the blinds again with a marginal hand. Because of that, I got 4 callers. Then I hit the presto when the board came 58Q. I checked and it checked around to the last guy who raised. I called, wanting to see if I’d get any other callers behind me. They all folded and we got to the turn which was a blank. I put in a pot sized raise and got re-raised at which point I knew the guy had a hand good enough to call anything, so I moved all-in. He called and showed rockets. Perfect. Only two cards could save him. But since you know this is a bad beat story, you know what fell on the river. Beaten by a 22-1 shot again. Dammit!