Biting into the Big Apple

Basket of rolls at Balthazar

     If I told you that I ordered a croissant for brunch at a fancy French restaurant in New York City and it cost $4.80, well, you wouldn't think much of that, would you? Big city. Expensive.
      So why, when looking at the menu for Balthazar ahead of time, something my family does the way other people look at guidebooks to cities they plan to visit, did my gaze lock on the $24 basket of pastries, which I immediately dubbed the "Twenty-four Dollar Basket of Rolls." I had to order it. I like a good roll, and these had to be extraordinary. At that price, they'd better be.
      They were okay. Nothing that wouldn't have seemed out of place passed over the counter in a waxy bag at Panera. And to be honest, I glanced enviously at the basket of bread given free to diners on other side of us, people not cracked enough to order the pricey basket and thought: "Dumb."
      I realize that a percentage of readers consider the whole fine dining thing is dumb, a scam designed to separate people who have too much money and too little sense from a portion of that money. I hear ya. But the truth is, looking at our long weekend in New York City, while the peak aesthetic experiences had to be the "Vida Americana" show at the Whitney, and seeing Anais Mitchell's "Hadestown" at the Walter Kerr Theater, the swank eateries were right up there. They were a lot of fun, each with its own glory.
    The best thing about Balthazar was the room. It looked like Le Grand Zinc in Paris, or, even more so, a place I loved, back in the day, the old Un, Deux, Trois Cafe at 123 W. 44th Street. I'm glad I ate at Balthazar once, but wouldn't go back until I've eaten at every other restaurant there is.
      Uncle Boons, 7 Spring Street, seemed promising and unusual, just for being a One Michelin Star Thai restaurant. I didn't know those existed. Most memorable here was the elaborate, almost dramatic process required to get in. You can't make a reservation. That would be too easy. What you do—what we did—is show up shortly before the place opens at 5:30. Join the enormous line, stretching around the block. Wait half an hour which, in my dewy innocence, I thought meant we were waiting to get in to eat an early dinner. When I said as much, my older son explained, with a touch more asperity than I might have preferred, considering he was addressing the man paying for all this, that I hadn't been listening to the plan.  We were in line, not to eat, but to be given a time, which turned out to be .... three and a half hours hence. We then repaired to a different restaurant to eat some truly strange Georgian bread concoction involving cheese and a stirred egg in the center and tarragon-flavored soda. Then to the common area at my kid's dorm to play a fun labyrinth building game, which perked my spirits—it had been a long day.

Duck at Uncle Boons

    Suddenly, he got a text. Our table was ready, or about to be ready—an important distinction because once it was "ready" we had 10 minutes to park ourselves at the ready table or it went to the next group of would-be patrons—sparking a mad dash for a cab and frantic ride to Lower Manhattan to grab the table before our window of opportunity closed. While I paid the cabbie, the two boys ran into the restaurant and my wife and I followed. There was still a knot of people in the door, and when we tried to push past—"our table is ready"—my wife said, the woman in front of us snapped, over her shoulder, "Mine is ready too!" But a group left, and when the line squeezed to the right to let them up the stairs, we barreled down through the gap, and found the boys intensely studying the menu as if it were a treasure map.
     The next hour was a highlight. First, I was having dinner at 10 p.m. in New York City, which is life as I understand it. We ate "Heavenly Pig Ears" and sweetbread mee krob, blood sausage, yellowtail and gaeng supalot duck and pork jowl. Dessert was sticky rice and a coconut sundae that reinvented the form. Everything tasted fantastic. It was the sort of place you could only justify leaving by making a solemn vow to return.
     New York interior space is given to weird combinations: kitchens with bathtubs in them, living rooms with sleep platforms. abcV is Jean-Georges vegetarian restaurant inside ABC Carpet, whose prosaic name belies a sprawling pillow and silverware emporium for Manhattan's money set—I think I'll give them their due tomorrow. 
     A large, white room, filled with beautiful people. Friendly, attentive service. None of the pretension radiating off their mission statement:
      "Plant based, non GMO, sustainable, artisanal and organic whenever possible. Locally and globally from small & family farms. abcV is here to serve, inform and inspire a cultural shift towards plant based intelligence, through creativity and deliciousness...." 
    It goes on, but you get the point.
    Oh heck, why not? It's too good not to share in full: "Offering high vibration foods, embracing balance with beauty, wellness, wisdom & love to nurture our personal and planetary ecosystems."
    And liberals wonder why people hate us.

    Like many vegetarian restaurants, they have to be on their top game, and they were. I don't know if "wild blueberry bowl, jungle peanut butter, fresh and dried fruits" sounds good to you, but it did to me, and man, was it. As was the slow roasted beets, dijon, avocado puree, chili aoili and pickles.

Late afternoon snack at Katz's Deli

      I'll stop now. We ate, by my count, in 16 restaurants in four days, from the aforementioned Balthazar to Olympic Pita in the West Village. Two delis, Katz's and Russ & Daughters. We went back to Mizoun in Chelsea Market, whose grilled cauliflower disappointed, last time, so much that I was surprised to see us there again (I am, if you haven't noticed, a very go-along-to-get-along type of dad, trotting after my family as they rush wherever it is they're going, consulted only at moments that require me to take out my wallet). I was glad we returned, because the cauliflower and bag of green beans, salted and garlicked, were much better than last time. Plus now, having gone three times, I'm a regular.
      Talking about restaurants strikes me as running the risk of becoming dull quickly, and if this is, my apologies. Not to mention late, going up shortly after 7 a.m. Saturday, which is not my habit. But the truth is I worked yesterday dawn to dusk, writing Monday's column and diving into an exciting new project I hope to tell you about shortly. So I appreciate your indulgence. One thing I found eating out, is you tend to get what you pay for.

Trump lights a match under the New York Times

Man burning books, by Marco Dente (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Sue me!
     Haven’t I always reported the truth about Donald Trump?
     Years before he descended that escalator at Trump Tower, I was pointing in alarm at the loamy soil the GOP was preparing for him or somebody like him.
     “When I look at the Republicans, I am tempted to dismiss them as the Treason Party,” I wrote in the Sun-Times on July 4, 2012. “Seriously, were a band of traitors to concoct a series of positions deliberately designed to weaken America, they would be hard pressed to beat the current GOP dogma — hobble education, starve the government by slashing taxes to the rich, kneecap attempts to jumpstart the economy by fixating on debt, invite corporations to dominate political discourse, balkanize the population by demonizing minorities and immigrants and let favored religions dictate social policy.”
     Once Trump was in office, I tried to explain him in frank, unambiguous terms.
”He is a deeply un-American hate monger, in thrall to the Russians, who is working to undermine the country morally, economically, physically — yanking away health insurance from 24 million people, many of whom are so out to sea they voted for the man,” I wrote in 2017. “That every day he works to undermine the legitimacy of the media, the courts, the idea of truth itself. He’s a liar, a bully and fraud.”

     Those last three words—"liar, bully and fraud" I settled on as a shorthand, a synecdoche to stand in for a much longer list of character flaws. I'd use again and again, as a trope, like Homer's "wine dark sea," sometimes adding "and possible traitor," that "possible" a fig leaf formality, like referring to a man recording committing a crime, arrested with the knife in his hand, as the "alleged murderer."
     But did Donald Trump’s reelection campaign sue me for libel on Wednesday? No, they did not. They sued the New York Times — these Eastern elites, even in conflict they see only each other. As if the Times needs another distinction to go with its 127 Pulitzer Prizes. The Trump campaign claims it was wronged by an opinion piece suggesting the Russians hurt Hillary Clinton’s electoral chances so Trump would roll like a puppy at Putin’s feet.

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"The kindly genius of the spot"—The Garfield Park Conservatory

Ava Carney's sculptures, inspired by a Lorado Taft quote referring to "the kindly genius of the spot" will be on display at the Garfield Park Conservatory until March 8.

  
      So here's a riddle.
      When I woke up Wednesday morning, I had a full day scheduled, and no intention whatsoever of going to Garfield Park Conservatory.
      I walked the dog, drank a cup of coffee, ate half a bagel, read the paper, hopped on the Metra downtown, never once thinking of the 113-year-old West Side treasure, hidden from too many Chicagoans on the Near West Side, never mind planning to visit. I went to Northwestern Memorial Hospital to talk to a patient undergoing chemo, had lunch with my brother at the always-excellent Dearborn, then got on the Green line and headed to a Chicago Public High School to look at a mural for a future story, never once thinking: ferns, cacti, flowers.
      Yet I ended up at Garfield Park Conservatory, walking gloriously through its changing environments, from desert to rainforest. Any idea how? There is a clue in the previous description.
      That's right, the high school was the Al Raby High School, directly across the street from Garfield Park Conservatory. I finished my business there about 2:15 p.m. It had been over six years—since I did a story on repairs to the greenhouse after a hailstorm broke out 70 percent of the glass. And before that, I think I'd gone once: to see the installation of Dale Chihuly glassworks in 2002. Given that dismal track record, what kind of monster would not go in? It's free (Well, they ask for a donation, recommending $10 for adults, $5 for children. I didn't have $10, but I had $5, so gave them that, thinking they'd get at least five bucks worth of publicity here.
    I spent about an hour, slowly wandering the place. They had five sculptures from Ava Carney, who held the Chicago's Park District's 2019 Athletic Field Ceramics Residency. Though so subtly placed that I only noticed two, which is a good thing. 
    Ancient ferns strained toward the iron and glass ceiling, delicately-patterned ground cover spread before my feet, spiky cacti stood guard. 
    Then there was this pair of jiggly eyes that someone—I can't decide if it was another resident artist, or a passing wag with a pocket full of jiggly eyes—anthropomorphized this out-of-the-way bloom. I paused to admire it. Normally I would be opposed to decorating plants like that, on aesthetic, almost moral grounds—it's like putting clothing on animals. But in this case, it worked, so who am I to argue? It isn't as if the plant minds. Examining it, I wondered if the culprit—prankster? artist?—responsible was thorough enough to have put an eye on the other side of the plant, to complete the pair, but where none but the most vigorously inquisitive would see it. They had! I admired the thoroughness of that.
     The place was not crowded. Not deserted either. A mother and child. An older couple. A smattering of students. The Golden Hour Spring Flower Show is also going on, until May 10, with banks of colorful azalea, hydrangea, and calibrachoa, and some interesting string art displays.
    So quite the thing to stumble upon. It was a great place to sit on a bench, and just gaze. The Garfield Park Conservatory is very conveniently located to downtown: the Green line stops a few steps away. My next visit will be intentional. 

Tiptoeing through the moral minefield of the young

  

     Sympathizing with yourself, or with those exactly like you, is not the laudable exercise of virtue that some seem to imagine it being, but ordinary selfishness disguised as morality. The trick is to have compassion for those different than yourself. 

     That’s much harder.
     None of this was in mind last week when an old pal showed up at the newspaper shepherding two dozen Canadian college students: bright, attentive multi-cultural kids bristling with enthusiasm.
     At first.
     Then I spoke.
     In my defense, I had asked my friend: What should I talk about?
     “Just be you,” he replied. Bad advice.
     This being Chicago, I figured, start with corruption. Start with Ed Burke, the lion of the City Council, hauled away by the feds last year for trying to jam his hand too far up the goose that was a bit too slow laying the next golden egg.
     “The scandal is what’s legal,” I said. They nodded. Condemnation is good.
     But finding fault in others, like lavishing sympathy on yourself, is too easy. The media is also part of a compromised system, I continued, influenced by proximity and the need for access. 

     Everything was swimming along. Maybe a bit dull, because my pal offered an idea:
     “Tell them about Barack Obama calling you from Africa,” he said.
     Sure! He had called to complain about something I wrote. I eagerly told the story, blundering into the briar patch of race, gender, and class. I could see them souring, one by one. The more I tried to twist free, to extricate myself, the deeper I sank.       Afterward, a few wouldn’t pose with me for a group photo. As if I were radioactive.
     Later, I asked my friend what had bothered the students most.
     I had, he replied, described women who stood on Cicero Avenue and exchanged sex for money as “hookers.” And newborns scourged by cocaine as “crack babies.” Instead of, I assume, ”sex workers” and, geez, I don’t know, “babies with special needs due to in utero narcotic use” or some such thing.
     The famous “cancel culture” we’ve heard so much about. One strike and you’re out. Big among college youth, trying to fight bigotry by unconsciously imitating its methods.

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Happy National Pancake Day!

Metropolitan Museum of Art

    Today is National Pancake Day, according to the International House of Pancakes, which should know. 
     Although, rooting around online, I see that Sept. 25 is also International Pancake Day, through some alternate system. So two then, like regular Easter and Greek Easter.
     I like pancakes—no big confession there, most people do. Though pancakes can get you into trouble. Georgie V's, a breakfast spot in Northbrook, lets you substitute pancakes instead of toast, a practice I've fallen into to satisfy my pancakes jones without eating too many. Now it's almost automatic, to ask for pancakes instead of toast. But eating breakfast in New York the weekend before last, I asked a waiter who was obviously straining the limits of his competence if I could have pancakes instead of toast. He shrugged and brought, along with my omelet, a huge plate piled with three pancakes the size of garbage can lids. I sent them away. 
      Given the special day, I thought I would do a kind of trust drop into the vault, assuming, over the years, I'd written something about pancakes. Boy, did I ever. The original title was "Quicker than heating them."

     Krusteaz Microwave Mini-Pancakes are silver dollar-sized flapjacks, sold fully cooked but frozen to be prepared in toaster ovens.
     I never gave them much thought, beyond a certain care to position each carefully upon the metal toaster oven rack, as they have a tendency to tilt and slip between the bars, plunging into the crumby nether-region of the toaster oven, becoming ruined.
     Never gave them thought, until now, that is, when, in a moment, they change into a vastly significant emotional totem on par with Proust's madeleine and lime tea.    

     I'm sitting in the kitchen, taking my coffee and scanning the newspaper before my traditional bolt for the train. Ross, 9, enters stage left and invites me to whip him up a batch of fresh pancakes.
     "Not this morning," I say. "I've got to be at the train in 10 minutes."
     He shrugs and proceeds to the freezer. "OK," he says, removing a blue plastic bag of Krusteaz. "I'll eat these." He takes one from the bag. "I'll have the first one frozen."
     He begins to eat the frozen disc.
     "Stop!" I yell, leaping to my feet. "You can't do that!"
     I have reached the age of 44 years without the concept of eating frozen pancakes ever crossing my mind, and it seems like a gross violation of our middle class norms, akin to shooting heroin.
     "Mom lets us," he explains, having been joined by Kent, 7, who helps himself to the bag.
     My life is dissolving around me.
     "Honeeeeeeeeeey!" I call, in a reedy, adenoidal whine, bounding up the stairs to the bedroom. "Do you let the boys eat frozen pancakes?"
     "Just the one," she says, as if quantity is the issue. I open my mouth to reply, but how can I articulate what I am trying to do? What my life is all about? To fight with all my strength against the sucking hellmouth of exhausted lower middle class existence, of resisting the inclination to pack the kids off to school in sweatpants and stained T-shirts, a rim of jelly around their lips, of my wife shuffling around the house all day in her frayed pink bathrobe, dropping glowing ash onto the carpet while I sit on the front porch in my underwear drinking Fiesta Scotch out of a Flintstones glass.
     I can't muster a word; she delivers the coup de grace.
     "Don't you remember, Elaine used to do it."
     Elaine is the beautiful, poised, teenage daughter of our best friends, whose lives are so grounded in sophisticated good sense and rational living that I can never quite fathom why they spend time with a pack of flailing lunatics such as ourselves. Frankly, I sometimes worry that they do out of some kind of Christian mission—that their church encourages them to befriend dysfunctional families.
     Defeated, retortless, I wander downstairs, back into the kitchen. And here is the odd part. I feel happy—happier than I have in weeks of head-in-a-vise tension and pit-of-the-stomach anxiety, the tarantella of work and writing and phone calls and crap. I relax, smile, and let go of my dream. We are never going to be the type of people who drive new cars or wear thick expensive sweaters or live in a clean house. We are going to wade through piles of soiled laundry, kicking aside garbage, shouting at each other as we dig around in the cluttered freezer for our next mouthful of frozen pancake.
     And I'm OK with that.
     I notice a Krusteaz pancake on the floor and bend down to pick it up. I hold it to my nose, draw in its pleasing, chilly vanilla wafer smell, and nearly pop it into my mouth and begin chewing. Instead, I toss it into the sink.
     We do not eat off the floor. Not yet, anyway.

Closing shot

     Later, at the office, in the editorial board meeting, I recount my pancake adventure to a colleague, a bit of that solidarity-building I normally fail so miserably at. I finish and sit back, waiting for her reciprocal confession, for her to laughingly admit some similar domestic failing—letting her toddlers suck on bricks of frozen peas perhaps.
     Her response—though you see it coming, don't you?—shocks me.
     "I wouldn't let those in my house," she says, narrowing her eyes in disgust and shivering at the thought.
     Desperate to find some way to elevate my status after my unwise admission, I say, "For years, I wouldn't let my wife buy that bagged lettuce."
     "Of course not," my colleague snaps, shaming me into silence. "It's not as fresh."

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 22, 2004

The last thing you ever need to read about Rod Blagojevich

Whitney Museum

     If I must ....
     But really: Does Rod Blagojevich require explaining? Is it not abundantly clear? Do we have to belabor the obvious?
     When news broke last Tuesday that our nation’s No. 1 corrupt egomaniac, Donald Trump, had granted clemency to Illinois’ imprisoned corrupt egomaniac, Rod Blagojevich, I was talking to a group of college students who stopped by the paper — I have a column worked up about that discomfort, but it’ll have to wait, since the public is clamoring for more Rod.
     ”Nada on ... the sprung grey-haired guv?” challenged a regular reader, one of a number to inquire. “What gives?”
     What gives is the latest act of a sad and tawdry long-running tragi-farce, a dismal freak show starring the animate political corpse of our former governor who, in fine chicken-with-its-head-cut-off style, emerged from distant confinement to run in circles around the media spotlight, emitting horrid wet, sputtering semi-clucks out of its stump of a neck.
     We should turn away in revulsion. But reporters are jostling at the brimming trough for their interchangeable exclusives. Not to blame them. It’s in the blood. As I stood at the city desk, blinking at the news, my editor asked if I wanted to opine. I didn’t. Analyzing Blago is like doing color commentary for a coin toss. But the fire bell rings, the old engine horse stirs from its straw.
     Two minutes later I was back in my office, consulting Kipling to remind myself which self-serving bromides Blagojevich was sure to spout, when my boss ambled over and observed that my colleague Mark Brown was already on the job.

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Flashback 2003: Bernie Neistein, 87, former state senator

Bernie Neistein

     Two memories of the late State Sen. Bernie Neistein, who popped up in yesterday's post about Nate Perlstein. First we are sitting in big chairs the lobby of the Carlisle, a fancy Gold Coast condo. He has a cigar in his mouth but isn't smoking it, and is giving me the lowdown on politicians.

    "They're all crooked, all of 'em," he says, jabbing a thick finger in the air for emphasis. And then stops, a realization dawning, a smile breaking out in his jowly face. 

     "Except Paul Simon!" he adds.

     I loved that. The second, he's invited us to hear him play violin at the Loop synagogue. It didn't seem an invitation that one turned down, so Edie and I show up to hear him play. He plays, there are bagels and lox involved. That's it.

     This obit is a reminder that while Republicans might be refining corruption to an art form, they certainly did not invent it.

     What was state Sen. Bernie Neistein like? When a city worker who lived in Mr. Neistein's precinct, along with his wife and mother-in-law, all made the mistake one election of voting for a Republican, Mr. Neistein didn't just stop after having the man fired.
     "I bought the two-flat they were living in and watched as the guy and his wife and their kid and her mother were thrown out on the sidewalk," he told a reporter in 1999. "Later, I sold the building at a $500 loss. It was worth every penny."
     Mr. Neistein, 87, the last of the West Side Machine bosses, a man who grew wealthy doing exactly what the Democratic Machine wanted, died Friday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
     For the last several decades, he was a colorful, even beloved figure on the Chicago scene—a gravelly voiced, cigar-chomping, homburg hat-wearing old pol telling tales of political mud fights. He also was a professional-quality violinist and a contributor to several charities.
     His persona largely effaced his earlier reputation as absentee West Side slumlord who ran the 20th Ward as his "personal plantation."
     "He had the biggest heart of anyone I know and did more for more people than anyone I know," said his nephew Norman Berger. "I do know that until the moment he took his last breath, he was a loyal and committed Democrat and believed strongly in the principles of the Democratic Party."
     There were also allegations that Mr. Neistein was the mob's front man in Springfield, as he made a fortune buying up real estate in the path of the proposed Eisenhower Expressway and didn't care who knew it.
     But he never went to jail.
     The only official censure he ever got was in 1989, for giving a $10,000 loan to Judge Reginald Holzer. Holzer was sentenced to 18 years in prison for that and other convictions related to the Greylord probe. Mr. Neistein's law license was suspended for 30 months.
     "He did so much for so many people in making the city great that while people may have written articles criticizing him, that completely takes the focus off the greatness of this man," his nephew said.
     He was born Bernard S. Neistein on the West Side on Aug. 15, 1916. His father was a Russian-Jewish tailor.
     He graduated from Marshall High School in 1932 and received his law degree from DePaul University Law School in 1937. At age 20, he was the youngest DePaul Law graduate up to that time, his family said. World War II interrupted his career—he served for two and a half years in the U.S. Army in Europe and was known for smuggling kosher salami and sharing it with the troops, according to his nephew.
     He became a bailiff in Municipal Court in 1954, and two years later he ran for state representative in the 16th District and won. He later became a state senator for 16 years.
     In the early 1970s, political reformers challenged Mr. Neistein's lock on the West Side.
     "The 29th Ward, in the middle of the decaying West Side, has been the personal plantation of former state Sen. Bernard S. Neistein for 13 years," began a 1973 article in Chicago Today. "As Democratic committeeman, he has controlled both parties in the ward as well as jobs and votes."
     But his daughter Evaly Jerome described him as a "very gregarious man, very warm, funny, generous and loving father and grandfather."
     Survivors also include five grandchildren and two older sisters.
     Services will be at 10 a.m. today at the Weinstein Family Services, 111 Skokie Blvd., in Wilmette. Burial will follow in Waldheim Cemetery, 1400 Des Plaines Ave., Forest Park.
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 5, 2003