A Commonplace Book

City Bakery is pretty well known for its hot chocolate all year round, but during February, in the coldest part of winter, they take their recipe beyond good and into the sublime. Depending on the day you might find your drink (a term I use loosely in deference to its sludge-like and irresistible thickness) will come enhanced with malt, rum, cayenne pepper, or some other in a myriad selection of unusual but well-suited additions.

My personal favorite way to enjoy this involves going on the coldest Saturday or Sunday morning you can bear. Get a small cup (don’t even try for the large) and walk home to your apartment. Having only finished half of the cup in the course of your walk, place the remaining in your refrigerator and wait. (A window sill should do just as well.) After a decent interval, pull the cup out and enjoy the best chocolate pudding you’ve ever had.

Between the hot chocolate on a cold walk and the cold chocolate in a warm apartment, there’s no better way to spend a weekend morning. The schedule, when it is released, can be found here.

Photo by *Reesie

Every team brings a different ethos to New York’s annual Running of the Idiots, AKA the Idiotarod. Some teams, like Colonel Angus, are there to race. Some teams, like the Golden Shower Girls, are there to cause havoc. And some teams, like Kostume Kult, are there to preen.

After a marathon cow-building and costume-designing session the night before, Kostume Kult’s SaKred Kow cart set off at a leisurely pace this past Saturday and took its time enjoying the ride from Chinatown to Red Hook. Clad in a range of oranges that could be described as an assault on the eyes at best, we forsook the race for first in favor of some more wholesome and less goop-covered activities.

Between protesting the local fast-food restaurants, recruiting a Hare Krishna devotee, and stopping at some bars, we managed to escape the worst of the food throwing and cart sabotaging. We also came in so far to the back of the pack, with a time of 3 hours and 36 minutes, that I’m not sure if we actually beat any other teams.

Although it would have been nice to win a prize beyond “Best Recruitment of New Members Along the Course,” I can’t fault the judges for giving “Best in Show” to Team Danger Zone. My instinct is to lump 80s nostalgia right in there with pirates and ninjas as lame and unoriginal (at least there was no Team Bayside High) but Team Danger Zone took it to another level with their costumes, cart, music, and sketches.

Fakework also deserves every bit of applause they get for the effort that obviously went into their Marie Antoinette cart, although they might simply have exploited my weakness for cake and thigh-highs.

And finally I think some credit should go to the Golden Shower Girls despite their having walked away the overwhelming favorite for this year’s “Most Despised” award. No matter how annoying and dangerous they might have been at the front of the pack, I didn’t have to deal with them in the back and they have my gratitude for spending the morning harassing Team We-Have-Neon-Wigs-And-Drank-Too-Much-This-Morning-And-Could-Not-Be-Any-More-Obnoxious-If-We-Tried.

The full set of photos I took is here and some selected favorites are below.

Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

I guess Burp Castle doesn’t have the breadth of selection that some bars like DBA might have, but its still hard to believe that Gridskipper managed to leave so fantastic a bar off their list of Belgian beer bars in New York.

• Free pomme frites on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday? Check.
• Regularly rotating selection of good and varied beers? Check.
• Bartenders dressed in monks robes? Check.
• Volume so loud you have to scream your conversations? Nope.

Check Scott Beale’s photoset here for more pictures of the best bar in the city.