There are flies in paradise.

I can't get my heart to stay put. 

I'm very much here, in my garden (update to follow, bien sur), but theres a shadow part of me off revisiting things, six time zones away.  Because after the pleasures of Washington, D.C., you see, came a few truly big-city thrills: we took the train to New York City.

And I promise, New York City--for my purposes Manhattan--is an awful lot of fun with young-ish children.  You too, can bring your tykes, have a reasonably cultural experience, and not lose your mind.  Ladies and gentlemen, mothers and fathers, here are eight winning strategies:

1. Ride the Staten Island Ferry.  Yes, Virginia, some things in NYC are still free.  The kids have room to move, things to see--like a certain famous lady that was an outsized gift from France.  And, hey, the kids're on a big boat.  Each ride is a half-hour long, leaves from Battery Park (so the view of Lower Manhattan's top-notch).  Once you get to Staten Island, you walk off, and then get back on again.  Windbreakers are a pretty good idea.

2. Enjoy the view from the Empire State Building's 86th floor observatory.  Having been before, I didn't actually go up; my daughter took the panoramic photo.  Buy tickets ahead of time online (even day-of is fine), it'll reduce your time in queues.  Prepare your children for time in queues.  Bring pencil and paper to play tic-tac-toe while in queues.  But do it in spite of the queues, because it's just plain cool to be up that high--metaphorically and in fact: again, bring a windbreaker.

3. Go native, take a break. If the weather's fine, grab some picnic fixings and head to a nearby park, where the tots can let off some steam and won't have to look both ways before springing forward.  As of this printing, parks are still free.  And there's a lot more on offer than 'just' Central Park if you find that too far away or too full.  Some of them, like Fort Tryon Park (which contains the lovely Cloisters Museum) in upper Manhattan or Hudson River Park (midtown to lower), are a day's outing in and of themselves.  These are parks with some jaw-droppingly gorgeous views.

4. Alright, I am so not a zoo kind of girl, so it feels odd to suggest this, but spend some time at the zoo.  Not necessarily the well-regarded Bronx Zoo, but the (perhaps) more conveniently situated Central Park Zoo.  Stroll through the park to reach the zoo if you have the time. 

It's a small zoo (a plus for little ones and parents with limited patience), well-curated, with poetry and science sprinkled liberally throughout, and the animals still have room enough to hid away in their spaces. The polar bears and (reclusive) snow leopard were a particular hit, as were the exhibitionist seals... 

5. Go to the MOMA.  Yes, there is the Children's Museum of Manhattan and the Children's Museum of the Arts, but this is an art museum that will knock the socks off both the big and little people in your bunch.  At the MOMA, there are made-for-kids gallery talks.  There are workshops for four to eleven year olds that explore art techniques and ideas through hands-on practice.  Remember to register in advance. And don't skip a browsing kind of wander through the museum shop, where kids can see and touch sublime (sometimes sublimely funny) design objects.  Doing so was one of our highlights and prompted an interesting discussion about how objects are used and how they can be better designed...

6. Take them to an afternoon show. If you're ready and willing to splurge, a Broadway musical is a truly thrilling way to introduce them to live theater.

7. Take the subway.  If you've the time and they're not too tired yet, take that (subway) train to Coney Island.  Quick, before they tear down all the good old tat in the name of bland-ification. If you don't have the time, take that train to to the High Line instead.  Section Two's nearly ready to open...

8. Stay with family.  See, this makes everything else easy-peasy.  If you've neither friend nor family in Manhattan, consider an apartment rental (they come in different price brackets!) for a decidedly more cosy, relaxed experience.  Shopping at the local grocery, you'll get to pretend you're actually a local, and the kids can feel more grounded.

 

Just writing all those possibilities out makes me feel giddy, but the garden here in France is doing everything it can to seduce me.  Balmy breezes, saturated color, birds all a'twitter (and woodpeckers a'knocking), the bullfrogs in chorus, the works.

With every year, I'm loving roses more (and resenting them less for their high-maintenance aphid and disease magnet tendencies).  Aren't these ones lovely?  They're now blossoming in the garden of my 78 year old friend and fellow choir member, an unreconstructed bundle of sass, wit and wisdom.  She has a lovely little space she putters in every day, kept company by her donkey...I'll put up some pictures of my own roses in the coming days.

And--news flash--this just in at our place: strawberries.  In bloom.

And in fruit.  Sweet Jesus, are these good.  Little, and all the more succulent for it.

We're already eating garden salads.

And the tomatoes are under construction.

A certain kind of heaven, yes?  But there's always something, and in our case right now it's flies.  An unreasonable, crazy-making amount of the buggers.  Glomming onto any warm surface--window, car seat et al. They are everywhere, and it embarasses me.  It makes me do ugly desperate things, like hang sticky tape in my otherwise pleasant kitchen, where I stand around with friends and pretend I don't hear the periodic buzzing from stuck-fast flies.

Lacking a definitive solution, the most effective distraction technique/escape for me is to mull over recipes.  And I have just the one in mind for if you have unsolvable issues of your own, because while in Manhattan, we happened to have a most delicious Venezuelan meal while staying with family...

According to my brother-in-law, absolutely everybody knows how to make arepas in Venezuela.  He learned how from his grandmother. Photo caveat: Venezuelans normally only use HAN brand fine-ground white cornflour, but he had to use a blend of white and yellow, which resulted in somewhat denser cakes. He sliced the finished hot little corn cakes like a pita and stuffed them with shredded beef which had been slow-cooking much of the day, then blended with chopped red peppers, onions and super-secret spices. So. Good. 

Almost makes me forget about the flies.

Venezuelan-style Arepas

 Makes six arepas, to be filled with shredded meats, scrambled eggs and cheese, black beans...

2 cups white, fine-ground corn flour (Harina PAN brand flour if possible)

2 cups of water

pinch of salt

Pour flour and pinch salt into a medium sized bowl and mix with hands. Add water and combine with your hands until mixture is thoroughly and evenly blended, adding more flour or water as necessary. The dough should form a ball easily, with no major cracks.

Take a small handful of dough and form a ball. Patting and turning it, like a kid busy with Playdough. The smooth, finished disk should be about one centimeter (half an inch) thick and about six to eight centimeters in diameter (3-4 inches).  Continue to make disks with the remaining dough until there is none left.

You can keep any leftover dough wrapped in plastic and refrigerated for three to four days.

Preheat oven 110C (225F). Heat  a teaspoon of oil in a heavy frying pan over medium heat. Place several arepas in the pan. For the desired crunchy crust, keep the heat at medium. Once browned, about five minutes, turn them over and cook the other side until browned as well.

Once arepas are nicely browned,  slide them into the oven, near the top, for about 15-20 minutes, depending on the oven. You'll know they're ready by tapping them with a knife: they should sound hollow.

Best when eaten right from the oven, the arepas should be sliced and filled with the toppings of your choice.

In between again, still thinking about food.

There are the beginnings of things and then there are the ends. 

Somewhere between yesterday and today we passed the peak of the fall colors.  More leaves are now on the ground than on the trees.   

I've spent an inordinate amount of time planning, pulling together, and celebrating the birthday of my ten-year-old.  And that, too, as of this weekend, has come to a close. 

For the record, it involved sparklers, an excess of handmade signage and balloons, bowls of popcorn and a borrowed film projector (to show Le Petit Nicolas). Oh, and a sleepover that included fourteen spirited tireless best friends.

 

And yet, and yet, New York is still very much on my mind.  To be more accurate, NY food is on my mind, in all its variegated glory. 

Culinary possibilities in New York can seem nearly infinite. If you should find yourself in, say, SoHo, you can also easily find yourself in front of a thickly-sliced, well-pickled and delightfully basil-y Vietnamese papaya salad, simply by ducking into Bun (143 Grand at Lafayette).      

Then there are special Vietnamese banh mi (baguette sandwiches) sprinkled here and there across Manhattan.  While you won't find the selection or quality available in, say, Southern California (with its far larger Vietnamese population), my sandwich, crammed with pickled carrot and fresh herbs and greens, still pleased me.

Having gotten a bit of Vietnamese, it was time for some serious slurping.  Time for Japanese udon soup.  To explain my passion for Japanese--and other foods non-French: outside of Paris, Japanese restaurants are (still) relatively few and far between in France, especially, of course, in the countryside. 

New York's East Village, however, is filled with noodle shops and other Japanese restaurants.  In fact Japanese can be found in the financial district and any number of other areas, but the East Village seems to have far more than its fair share. With New York University right there, you'll find an awful lot of Japanese students wolfing down heart-warming soup goodness right beside you.

 

Now that I'm looking at this photo of udon soup bubbling away in a cast-iron bowl (taken at Udon West), I realize you can't even see the thick, chewy namesake noodles for all those toppings.  Sorry about that.  I was too focused on eating.  Other udon places you could try: simple but good at Onya, the first outpost of an Osaka udon chain, and upscale, wide-ranging Seo, which also offers soba (buckwheat) and ramen (thin wheat) noodles. (An authentic noodle bar is likely to have zero atmosphere, but it really doesn't matter, as the hearty soups are hot--and inexpensive--bliss.)  Please note that each of these photo collages can be clicked on, to be viewed in far greater detail.

After a good bowl of soup, you can walk all day.  Which I did, managing to take in a large chunk of Chinatown in the process.  There were all those intriguing ingredients to explore, like dried sea cucumber...but since sea cucumber takes a really long time to hydrate then prepare, etc., etc., I settled on a bit of dragon beard candy, made before my eyes by two neatly uniformed people beside a food cart.  If you haven't had it, here's more of a photo description. 

The snack essentially consists of very fine strands of cotton candy (far less sweet than the Western version) expertly spun by hand and wound around a crunchy, peanutty center.  You bite into one of these, there's a bit of give, and then they shatter in your mouth with a powdery pop.  As long as there's good weather, you should be able to find Yao, his food cart and his candy, which he sells 6 for $3.

While out wandering, there's that schizophrenic moment when you falsely imagine yourself deep in Chinatown, and all of a sudden you bump up against Little Italy.  In New York, the two countries are just a street-width apart.  But boy, does the scenery change.  Seeing all those top-shelf ingredients, the avid cook in me was desperately wishing for more lenient airline weight restrictions and a fatter pocketbook.  I got to do some more longing at the brand-new complex that is Eataly, on Fifth Avenue.  (4,600 square meters, or 50,000 square feet!  In Manhattan!)

Eataly features several restaurants, a year-round rooftop beer garden and microbrewery, a cooking school-- and you can buy all things good and Italian, from designer cookware to fresh crimini.  Expensive (quelle surprise), but pristine, authentic ingredients. It is built on the same premise as the slow-food promoting original in Torino...only it's in Manhattan, and backed by three high-profile Italian American restaurateurs.  When I went, it was chock-full of Italian Italians, as there was an Italian wine fair filling the space.  I stuck to my (very fine) espresso.

For the somewhat less well-heeled (or those allergic to chic-ish spots), there are always the ubiquitous food carts and trucks, which turn out often quite delicious fare, whether artisanal ice cream, or Malaysian, or Korean, or Latin.

For those who adore South American cuisines but would rather sit down, there's Empanada Mama, in Hell's Kitchen, just a block or two over from the Theater district.  So GOOD, I made a collage of their dishes (I'm still working on the empanada altar).   The empanadas are absolutely crammed with rich, flavorful fillings.  My favorites were the Reggaeton (Caribbean style roast pork with sofrito yellow rice and peas), Cuban (falling-apart tender slow-roasted pork) and Spicy Chicken, but as there are over forty different kinds of empanadas, plus a full menu including meal salads and family-style dishes, there's something for everyone.  I just never got past those fantastic fried empanadas (they have baked ones, and corn flour ones too, which I liked less), plaintain chips and tostones.  While the dumplings may look puny, after two or three of them and some plaintain chips, I promise you're stuffed.  Empanada Mama is also easy on the wallet: an empanada costs just $2.52.  They are open 24 hours a day, there's takeout and they deliver.  Plus they have loads of funky cocktails. 

 

I preferred to savor my Cosmopolitan at Birdland, an intimate (and famous) jazz club named after Charlie Parker. Relocated to Midtown Manhattan, on the edge of the Theater District, the club serves food and very fine musical fare.  The night we went, there was Afro-Latin jazz on offer, with a fun Calypso drum.  Very nice, very fusion.  And to my slightly cocktail-addled mind, so very New York.

The low and the High of it.

New York is the kind of place where people express themselves in superlatives. All or nothing. In Manhattan's Nolita neighborhood: “The Best Tiramisu In The World,” declares the sign. Tallest, biggest, best. You can be reborn. Shed your previous life, previous definitions, previous loan. It’s all about the here and now, and really making it. It’s the immigrant experience, writ large.



The sheer range of restaurants flabbergasts me each time I visit. The reinventing continues in many if not most of the city’s kitchens. Viagra empanadas, or smoked salmon roll with Idaho potato flakes, anyone? I actually tasted the former, which are, unsurprisingly, a lot tamer than they sound.



The urge to modify is not new. The (kosher) bagel dog which was developed (way back) in 1943 comes to mind. Still on the dog front, some claim Brooklyn's Coney Island to be the birthplace of the now-ubiquitous American hotdog, tucked in its white bread roll (and yes, frankfurters and wieners already had their homes in Frankfurt and Vienna).

 

Incidentally, "Coney Island dogs", with their beanfree, beef-heart chili topping, have nothing whatsoever to do with the original oceanfront Coney Island. They’re from Michigan.



As of this summer, you can once again have a hot dog at a newly opened Coney Island Luna Park. But it isn’t the Luna Park of 1903, which by 1907 had 1.3 million little electric lights, live elephant rides and a whole mess of other madcap, escapist possibilities. This was way back when it was feasible to be 22 acres in size in NYC, and this while cheek to jowl by two other pioneering parks, Dreamland and Steeplechase. Coney Island was quite simply the birthplace of the American amusement park, and as such an epicenter of a certain kind of pop culture.



Today, the blandification on offer by Mayor Bloomberg & co. translates (as of February) to the current Luna Park being owned by Central Amusement International (majority shareholder: Italian Zamperla which produced the brand-new rides and will manage the park). As of November 1st, the conglomerate has seen fit to evict 9 of the 11 long-standing, honky-tonk operations on the boardwalk. Every single one of the boardwalk places I saw and photographed last week (and which are shown here) will have to vacate their premises within the coming two weeks. They are yesterday.



The owners of Luna Park explained that it was looking to “extend its vision of a resurgent Coney Island.” It seems their vision involves a sports bar, sit-down restaurants, and retail.

Even the Cyclone is at risk. A legendary, clattery wood roller coaster inaugurated in 1927 and still in use today, its fate is also in the hands of Central Amusement International and Zamperla, who hold a ten-year lease on the land.

This process of cleaning up--and out--Coney Island reminded me uncomfortably of walking by the Victoria’s Secret, American Eagle Outfitter, Gap(s) et al. thronging the streets of SoHo. I was having trouble finding the galleries, as SoHo veers ever closer to being a tastefully sanitized outdoor mall. Ditto for Times Square, with its Ann Taylor Loft and Aeropostale clothing emporiums, Pop-Tarts World (where you can feast on Pop-Tarts sushi), the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company and so on. I don’t want to become overly nostalgic about 1970s city grit and seediness, but man, I just wish they wouldn’t keep throwing out authenticity with the bathwater.



At least Times Square has its Naked Cowboy, who knows how to keep it real. He sued Mars Inc. in 2008 for trademark infringement (because yes, folks, he owns the “international” trademark to being kinda naked and playing a guitar). They’d had the gall to have the blue M&M play a guitar, similarly cowboy-hatted and kinda undressed. In a cartoon. Mars settled for undisclosed terms. Now the Naked Cowboy’s suing the Naked Cowgirl, a bawdy busker who refuses to become a paying franchisee of his, which would cost her $5k per annum. The Naked Cowboy claims that continuing as she does, she may bring about “a potentially permanent devaluation on a real American Brand and Icon.”

This latest lawsuit may not have his full attention though, since, on October 6, he officially declared--fully dressed-- that he would be running for President of the United States in 2012. On the Tea Party ticket. All the presidential merchandise you could wish for is already available for sale at his official website, where you can find his DVDs, i-Tunes downloads, his self-published book, and the Naked Cowboy Workout Method. That last one’s free, actually. Oh, and he’s an ordained minister, so he can marry you, if you swing that way. That’s a lot less free.  All of this with the aim of becoming "the most celebrated entertainer in the world."

Do I sound a touch bitter about all this? Can I legitimately be a critic? I did, after all, go home with a pair of Gap jeans, and maybe a t-shirt or two…But sometimes changes just feel wrong, sometimes people go too far.



Other times, changes feel very right. In the plus column goes New York City’s High Line, which I truly love.



I love the concept (old, unused raised railway turned aerial park), I love the wild grasses they’ve encouraged to grow, and the sense of immediate, pure escape that comes over me when I walk it. I love that the existing railway was integrated into the new structure, and that the neighborhood through which it runs is clearly reinvigorated by its presence. I love that lovers of astronomy set their telescopes up there on certain propitious nights. The High Line is a poem in mid-air, where children come for Halloween fun and the fabulous stroll come summertime.  



And they haven’t even finished building it. Gives me something to look forward to.

More thoughts, views and tips on New York:

- My Endless New York, by Tony Judt

- 36 Hours in NYC, from the Travel Section, NYT
- The Secret Subway Stop, from Yahoo News
- New York, I Love You, the film (Natalie Portman, Andy Garcia, et al.)

- Three new books on NYC