Oy Vey!

BluthenthalDavid
Originally uploaded by becklerg.

I heard that the King's might not keep the first Jewish King, David Bluthenthal and I smell an Anti-Semitic conspiracy. How can we be the Chosen Team without him? They are making a grave mistake. All I can say to the King's management is- kush meer in toches! By the way, I got that expression from this great online Yiddish dictionary which says a funny greeting to you when you log on. Here it is: http://www.koshernosh.com/dictiona.htm
I recommend the greetings and curses page.

"Celebrity chef" Kurt Spataro- A broch tsu dayn lebn! I have eaten at two of your crappy restaurants lately and you owe me like 40 bucks! Spataro is Paragary's partner in crime and helps to design the menus at Centro, Paragarys, Bernardo, Esquire(dreck!), and Sammy Chu's. I ate at Sammy Chu's last night and I couldn't have asked for a more mediocre dining experience. I had heard about the cocktails, so I ordered one. It was called "Dr. Funk" so I tried to order it by gesturing towards it but the waiter forced me to say the name. This was a mixture of rum, fruit juice, and Pernod. I know, I know, it sounds disgusting, but I thought that they wouldn't put it on the menu if someone hadn't at least tried it first. I was wrong. I bet I'm the only person who has ever ordered it and it was nauseating. We decided to order family style and got "dry fried" green beans (I have never heard of this particular technique), crispy fried tofu (are you noticing a pattern here? The menu is tiny and 75% or the offerings are fried), and ginger clay-pot chicken. We had trouble ordering because, much like at the Esquire Grill, very few of the dishes sound appealing. It was a chore to pick three things that we wanted to try. The fried tofu came first, big chunks, lightly fried in a thin sweetish sauce with chopped peanuts. Eh. It was OK. The green beans were good, chewy and mainly flavored with soy sauce. The chicken came in another thin, sweetish sauce and the quality of the meat was not that high. Quite a bit of gristle and fat in that pot. It grossed me out a little bit. I have heard rumors that old' Sammy is struggling a bit and the dining room was mostly empty at 7:30 on a Thursday night. A weakness in the mighty Paragary Empire? By the way, Kurt Spataro is married to local celebrity personality Kitty O'Neal.

After the dinner we saw Ladder 49 while I suffered through painful gas, which I attribute to the practically raw tofu I ate, but perhaps I should attribute it to the wooden acting and painfully cliched plot. I suffered more secondhand embarassement watching this movie than I get during a typical Bush press conference, and that's saying a lot.