Famous People #11: The party review diet
This week, New York Magazine’s iconic and often hotly debated Grub Street Diet column, which asks celebrities and celebrity chefs to document everything they ate in a week, asked a blogger to participate. It felt like a cruel twist of fate, as Lizzie and Kaitlyn would’ve loved to have been offered that slot, but no one in charge of New York Magazine’s iconic and often hotly debated Grub Street Diet column even asked us.
So we’re doing it here instead.
Kaitlyn: On Friday after work I took the wrong train to the wrong section of Nostrand Avenue and then walked for 15 minutes in the rain to King Tai, a cocktail bar in a squat little shed (?) with a purple neon sign. The environment in King Tai would be hard for me to describe, mostly because, once inside, I forgot how good all the jerk chicken on Nostrand had smelled and, instead of eating dinner, ate three oversized glasses of Malbec at something stupid like six dollars each. I was catching up with a former coworker! He was talking about heartbreak; I was texting a crush under the table, trying to come off as compassionate.
I said “I’m so, so sorry” and thought about bread.
Lizzie: I would’ve loved some bread on Friday night too. Instead, I went somewhere that Daniel Tosh would’ve loved to have been seen at in like 2012. I’m talking about the iconic and hotly debated (jk) New York City restaurant Mission Chinese. Before our reservation, Matt and I stopped in everyone’s favorite birthday bar when they first move here: 169 Bar. It was about 8pm and the bar was four rows of people deep. We stood about as close to the bar as we could get (10 feet back) and tried to make eye contact with the bartender with hair down to his nipples who was deeply engrossed in a conversation.
After ten minutes, with no drinks or eye contact, we left.
Kaitlyn: After red wine dinner, I bought two pieces of cheese pizza from the place across from my apartment. My roommate says it’s a drug front, based on the fact that it has irregular hours (from what I can tell: 24 hours on Friday and Saturday, 3 PM to 6 PM on Tuesday. Maybe like 30 to 40 minutes on Thursday). But for context, she also says that about the gelato spot that keeps closing and re-opening as a slightly different gelato spot. She also says that about the jewelry store. I say it about the “skateboards flowers dry goods” store and that’s because: Um!
I ate the pizza in the living room and then I ate like 450 jelly beans. My roommate said “Stop!” because her cat crawled into the pizza bag to eat some cheese.
Lizzie: Mission Chinese Food is like a 2003 club that happens to also sell Sichuan fusion. If you feel like eating matcha chili chicken noodles while listening to Missy Elliot bangers at full volume under a blacklight, then you’ll probably love MCF. It was shut down by the New York City Health Dept in 2013. We started off with the chicken wings, which came covered in a crumbling mountain of dried chili peppers, and were so spicy that they impeded our ability to really taste anything else after that. When we ordered them, the waiter said, “They’re really spicy, is that okay?” and the only answer to that question is “yes,” because you already made the decision and how do you measure one person’s idea of “very spicy” against your own? My lips hurt for hours. Despite the pain, we also ordered the Green Tea Noodles and the Thrice Cooked Bacon and Rice Cakes because Ashley recommended them, and the Crunchy Red Cabbage Salad for a vegetable. The salad was delicious, the noodles tasted a bit dusty, and the bacon/rice cakes were also very good but very spicy.
Our waiter kind of ignored us after we got our food, so even though we were considering getting another drink and dessert, we left to go to an old standby, Butter & Scotch, where I got a slice of key lime pie and Matt got a milkshake.
Oh, also I broke the faucet off the sink in the basement bathroom in Mission Chinese. Don’t tell anyone! There’s a paper sign above the sink that just says “Caution: Hot Water”, and the water comes out boiling, so you can only dart your hands in and out of the stream while shrieking. Would Daniel Tosh put up with this?? Anyway the faucet broke off and I hightailed it outta there.
Kaitlyn: You know the part in Lena Dunham’s memoir that’s just like, 40 pages of lists of foods she ate at one point, possibly in college? Anyway, on Saturday it was nice outside. Everyone couldn’t stop tweeting about it, and everyone enjoyed the Kacey Musgraves album the exact same amount. I ate an oatmeal raisin Clif bar, bodega banana, coffee I threw away after two sips, coffee from a different place, two apple-cinnamon rice cakes, vanilla-cinnamon Siggi’s with honey, two handfuls of blueberries, Blue Point lager, iced coffee with coconut syrup, plain coffee from my house, Malbec, different red wine I forget, pasta with eggplant, mushrooms, jar sauce. I didn't cook a single thing myself. I called a piece of rigatoni a “noodle” and got yelled at. Tequila-soda at a bar for old people, where I won three rounds of a card game and lost three rounds of a different one. The end! Through it all, I never let go of my obligation, as a young, upwardly-mobile resident of Brooklyn’s historic Crown Heights, to talk incessantly about the hour I had spent at the gym that morning.
We stored the extra pasta in cereal bowls with seran wrap over them, which didn’t seem like the right thing to do, but, at the same time, what science-based reason did I have for not doing it?
Lizzie: Saturday I went to New Jersey to make wildly intricate Ukrainian Easter Eggs involving beeswax and fire at my parents’ house. Colin and my cousin Phil came over, and we ate lightly salted Wise potato chips and drank coffee while listening to Phil’s Spotify playlist. Later I made Matt and Colin taylor ham sandwiches (it’s a New Jersey thing) and I ate tuna and crackers because there weren’t enough rolls.
Back in Brooklyn that night, we went to a wine bar, where I drank two glasses of Rioja and we shared a meat, cheese, mustard, and olive plate. Then we went to Artichoke Pizza. I got a slice of pepperoni.
Kaitlyn: I forgot Sunday was Easter, and celebrated the unconditional love of Christ with a veggie omelette at Tom’s Diner on Washington. Not festive.
A boy who stores leftover pasta in cereal bowls asked if I wanted to wear my Sunday finest to breakfast at a diner and I said “I’m going to put back on the clothes I was wearing yesterday.” He said “You’re halfway there,” which I guess was supposed to be a subtle way of making me acknowledge that what I had really meant to say was “I’m going to wear the shirt and $3 mascara I slept in.”
When he left he muttered “good seeing ya” and was literally chewing a toothpick, hands in his pockets. He honestly knows how it looks, but what am I supposed to do? Care? Have a choice in the matter?
Lizzie: Usually at least one morning of the weekend, sometimes both mornings, Matt will cook breakfast while I do nothing. He made bacon and eggs and avocado and tater tots. A classic. I forget what happened the rest of the day, but we made zucchini lasagna for dinner, which is just like normal lasagna except you use zucchini instead of pasta. I’ve been eating it for lunch all week.
Kaitlyn: It was Easter. I ate like 450 jelly beans. I also ate the seran wrap pasta bowls, a bag of popcorn, a loganberry yogurt, several thousand peanut-butter-filled chocolate eggs, and an orange Vitamin Water. At some point, I walked to Lizzie’s new neighborhood and drank an iced latte with her. She screamed and cried because a bee landed on her jacket and wouldn’t leave and I had to forcibly move it with my straw. Then we looked in the window of a Greek restaurant we’re going to next week, talked about which of our friends behaved the worst at a picnic we hosted seven months ago, and parted ways.
We said “Happy Easter!” For Easter, I bought myself a bottle of conditioner that’s supposed to “heal and mend” me. I painted my nails silver and ate like 450 jelly beans.
Lizzie: Jelly beans suck!