Those of you who have been visiting so patiently, hoping for a trace of the prose promised before the weekend...you are good and patient souls, and I'm sorry to disappoint again. Here I am with a spanky new laptop, and all I can do is look at it, enraptured, murmuring "look at the pretty fonts!" in a voice much like Gir from Invader Zim. (If you're not familiar with Zim, or with Gir, trust me, it's a funny voice. Gir is my sweetheart.)
Tonight, I am headed out on an after-work adventure, so I'll have to save all of those juicy topics for another night. For now, though, dear friends, it's the same old story in the same old way: Elk Candy Company, an Upper East Side mainstay in the vein of Schaller and Weber and the late, much-missed Paprikas Weiss, closed its doors forever on Saturday, following a spike in their rent. You have heard it all from me before, so I won't say it now. I'll just ask you to take a moment to think of another sweet, singular piece of New York, now a piece of history.
(Did you notice how I did not rant about Elk losing its lease when the rent spiked to nearly triple what they are paying now? Or how I did not revisit my continuing rant about how all that is most unique in New York City is meeting a similar fate, or that while these businesses, which used to attract visitors from around the world, are disappearing, New Yorkers are lining up in the rain to shop at Trader Joe's? Or that I certainly did not confess to having what the diplomats call "a full and frank discussion" with two women in their 70's, who stood outside of Elk on its last day of business and complained about the price Elk was charging for a hand-molded, hollow chocolate Easter egg, halved and filled with a generous chocolate assortment -- essentially an edible box of chocolates? Yes, I kept it friendly. No, I didn't drop the f-bomb on my elders. No, I wasn't nearly as strident then as I am being now. Really.)
Oh, Margene, they weren’t even waiting in line. They were rubbernecking. They were hanging out, peeking in the window of a 73-year-old shop that had three hours of business left, and they were bitching. Again, if I were not the soul of civility that I am—ahem—I would have made some pointed comment about the world being made just a little bit safer for cheap-ass drugstore chocolate. But that would have been obnoxious, so I demurred. This is actually a standing rant of mine, the death of unique and beautiful things—not necessarily food-based, either—and I’m glad to see that I’m not a lone crank in the wilderness after all.
Onto pleasanter thangs. Dear anapestic, right here in my own town? Oh, heart, heart, heart.
Right now the best source I can think of is Chowhound.com; it’s a wild and unruly beast, and you have to dig a bit to find what you want, but the people who post to it are enthusiastic fressers, and they are generous with information. Ed Levine’s book New York Eats (More) is also full of heart, but it hasn’t been updated in a while, and the last edition was rife with editing errors (i.e. giving inaccurate subway directions, misnaming cross streets, etc.), so it’s a mixed blessing. If worst comes to worst, you can always go with the Zagat Marketplace, although I’m not a huge Zagat fan.
Regardless of where you get your information, might I recommend that you pay a visit to Kalustyan’s, on Lexington Ave. between E. 28th and E. 29th Streets. It’s a different sort of transcendence from Zabar’s, but it’s still pretty transcendent, what with their 40 varieties of rice and all.