Jimmy’s Corner is a dive in the best sense of the word. This narrow, 40-year-old haunt feels like it’s been plucked from Times Square’s seedier past and plunked down on today’s 44th Street where, ignored by tourists, it quietly ministers to a cross-section of locals. History stares back at you from walls cluttered with autographed photos of boxers, and from the tables, covered with snapshots of random folks preserved in amberish laquer. The beers are cheap ($4 pints of Bud Light, Hennekin, or Sam Adams), sports flickers on the TV, and the jukebox cranks out one Stax soul gem after another. I haven’t heard anything that sucks, or was recorded before 1980, from that wonderful device. If you endure this neighborhood as part of your daily grind, and especially if the recent storm of layoffs that are seemingly hitting everyone has you feeling a bit low, Jimmy’s is a cheap, low-key refuge. It’s a good idea to limit your posse to one or two friends, it is quite small.

Jimmy’s Corner in Midtown Lunch. (This review has a good neighborhood lunch tip–at Margon (136 W 46th st.) you can get a decent Cuban sanwhich for $6 or a heaping platter of roast chicken, rice, beans, salad, and fried plantains for about $8. They’re open until 5pm weekdays).

Jimmy’s Corner, 140 W 44th St. between Sixth and Seventh Avenue

Marie Antoinette

This is my third year taking photos at this event, and I can say that without fail, pugs in costume are hilarious. Their butterball shape is perfect for dressing up, and their furrowed brows and bugged-out eyes give them a sweet, put-upon expression. Check out previous years’ devil-pug and Chinese pug to see what I mean. This adorably grotesque Marie Antoinette was my fave this year, for getting the spirit just right.

Snake Pup

This pup-being-swallowed-by-a-snake costume looks like it was sported by the same dog who was “Millipup” last year. I like when the owners get dressed up in a matching outfit: here’s a photo of the full Jungle explorer costume.

Card Shark

Every now and then, you’ll have an owner who builds a mobile diaroma around their pet’s persona. These guys came in virtually unseen through a side gate dragging an entire gambler’s den on a cart, complete with stereo system. The mini red velvet sofa is genius.

For more photos of this year’s event check out my Flickr.

Update 10/30/08: See more Halloween doggy pics from me and others featured on Gothamist.com and NYmag.com.

Damn you Dessert Truck.

Not only have you infiltrated my evening stomping grounds in the East Village, as well as my work-days in Midtown, but just as I was growing immune to the lure of your chocolate bread pudding you’ve unleashed something even more irresistible.

Like the creamiest of pie fillings topped with toasted marshmallows and crunchy sugar-roasted pecans, this pumpkin custard is the perfect autumn snack. It’s a good thing it’s jacket season too because soon I might need to camouflage my many, many indulgences in this treat.

I promise to shut up about Dessert Truck now.

Dessert Truck - Park Ave and 52nd St. Mon-Fri 12pm-4pm and on Third Ave and St. Mark’s every day 6pm-midnight

Fans of Magnolia Bakery’s famously sweet cupcakes, rejoice. Now you no longer need to schlep downtown for a dose of that toothache-inducing buttercream frosting. Magnolia has just opened an under-the-radar outpost (no signage yet?) on the corner of 49th street and 6th avenue–tourist central and spitting distance from about a million snackish office workers.

There’s a bit more selection here than I remember in the West Village location, and I’ll probably check out the promising-looking cheesecake, cookies, and various other treats when I’m craving something sweet. My peanut butter bar with heath candy bar crumbled on top ($2.50) was a delightful, if intense, post-lunch pick-me-up. But unsurprisingly, all the action here is around the cupcake window. I have to be honest: I never understood what made these cupcakes so damn special, besides the shout-out on Sex in the City, but at least here they are behind a pane of glass. In the downtown location, shoppers graze their coat-sleeves through frosting as they serve themselves in a kind of dog-eat-dog cupcake frenzy. Also, there wasn’t a line out the door in the 49th street spot–not yet, anyway. I think that is what bothered me about Magnolia in the West Village; not that people were eating those cupcakes, but that they would stand in a line wrapped around the block for half an hour in the freezing cold to eat those cupcakes. I was fooled once; I got in the line, thinking there might be something unbelievably delicious hidden under all that pastel frosting; there wasn’t. It was a cupcake, no more, no less. Needless to say, I haven’t recovered from my disappointment.

Magnolia Bakery 1240 Sixth Avenue, at 49th Street

Tasty Mexican street food is hard to come by in NYC, so this no-frlls tacqueria is worth the trek to Williamsburg. The tacos here, served on diminutive palm-sized tortillas, pack loads of flavor and at $2.50 apiece, are considerably cheaper than those you’d get at Mercadito in the East Village. (The tortillas also didn’t disintegrate while eating like my Mercadito tacos did, a good thing since at La Superior there was not a fork in sight). The carne asada taco was delicious by any standard, yet paled compared to the rajas taco–tender roasted poblano peppers drizzled in “Mexican” cream, and the chorizo toluqueno taco. The chorizo was like nothing I’ve tasted; a medley of spicy flavors that I devoured too quickly to contemplate. The flautas ($5.00) arrived hot and crisp from the deep-fryer, rolled around tender chicken and heaped with romaine and mild cheese, and the chips ($3.00) came with an assortment of sample-size salsas to satisfy any spice comfort-level. Two things you will NOT find here are dessert and alcohol. La Superior is BYOB but luckily there’s a deli right on the corner where you can pick up a few bottles of Pacifico or Bohemia. I can’t yet comment on the plates, which range from $8-$13, and include slow-cooked pork in banana leaves, grilled skirt steak and cheese with corn tortillas, and “torta ahogada”–sourdough bread stuffed with carnitas and beans, topped with hot arbol sauce. But you know a place is good when the waitstaff shows a clear passion for the food. When asked for a taco recommendation, one waiter said “that’s like asking me to choose between my children.”

La Superior in NYMag (3 stars)
La Superior 295 Berry St. at S. 2nd St. Williamsburg
Sun-Thurs 12:30pm-midnight, Fri-Sat 12:30pm-2:00am
cash only

Ninth Street Espresso 341 East 10th St. Near Avenue B

If you’re a beer-lover in NYC here’s one event you shouldn’t miss. Since most people in the US like their light, ice-cold, and bubbly lagers, cask ale, or “real ale,” is pretty uncommon outside of the city. Since the lifespan of a cask ale once tapped is only a few days, the idea of this event is genius: get a whole bunch of cask ales together, for a swarm of beer lovers to drink over three days, or until the casks are kicked. Strategically, the first night is the night to go, but you can still drink your fill tonight and tomorrow at Chelsea Brewing Company at Chelsea Piers. Hopefully I’ll even have some crappy Treo pictures to add once I get it working again.

The definition of Cask Ale or “Real Ale” by the Campaign for Real Ale is is: “Unfiltered, unpasteurized beer brewed only from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide.” Unlike keg beer, which is filtered, artificially-carbonated, served cold, and stored in a drum that forces beer out under gas pressure, cask ale contains living yeast that continues to ferment. Finings such as irish moss are added to drag the yeast down to the bottom so you don’t get a mouthful of yeastiness. It is best consumed within three days of the cask being tapped, although a stronger beer will last longer.

If you’re not wild about the idea of sipping a warm, flat pint of sediment-heavy ale, it’s actually better than it sounds. I tasted a few (natural) bubbles, and didn’t miss the excess. The beer is cool (though not cold), and I did taste more yeast, but I found it was easier to notice other flavors too, especially with a row of little glasses lined up for tasting. Of the two-page, 46-beer list, I picked the one cask that was never delivered to be excited about: The Blue Point Cherry Imperial Stout. But I was pleased with the Butternuts extra-special porkslap, a unique pale ale which had a nice maltiness as opposed to being overly hoppy. The Brooklyn ‘Black Ops’ imperial stout (10% ABV and aged in bourbon barrels) was rich, molasses-dark, and VERY strong. I probably over-reached a bit by ordering a pint of it (I noticed my server’s eyebrows did shoot up a bit when I asked for “a big one.”). Each beer is available in an 8 oz or 16 oz glass, and prices range from about $3.00-$4.50 for 8oz, and $6.00-$9.00 for 16oz. There’s no admission fee, though you need to purchase sheets of $20 “tokens.” Beer-friendly food such as bratwurst and knishes are also available. I drank up all my tokens before I got to try it, but the word on the street is the pulled pork is worthwhile.

The 2nd Manhattan Cask Ale Festival

NYTimes.com: “The Power in the Cask: Old Ways New Beer”

Friday September 19-Sunday September 21
Chelsea Brewing Company, Chelsea Piers
17th Street and West Side Highway

Today Dessert Truck posted this notification on Facebook: “Our daytime spot will be Park Ave between 51st and 53rd Sts. We’ll be somewhere along the two blocks. We’ll be serving our regular menu and will be open from 11:30AM - 4PM. In case we have any parking issues, please bear with us as we work out the kinks for daytime service. If you’re working in the area, do stop by, even just to say hi! Also, if you could let anyone else who works in the area know that we’ll be there, we would really appreciate it.”

If you work in midtown, then you may well know the sad predicament you find yourself in when the clock on your desktop strikes one, you can smell your coworker’s french fries through your cubicle walls, and you’re having trouble focusing on your css/spreadsheet/proposal/whatever through the hunger pains. You really don’t want to go to some packed, over-priced buffet-style mess hall, so you find yourself at Starbucks, washing a stale scone down with a caramelly beverage, feeling fat and unhappy. Well now you can feel fat and happy scarfing down a tasty $5 dessert cup from the truck. I came down kinda hard on Dessert Truck, because of the weird cake-batter texture of their chocolate bread pudding, but after I wrote about it they started adding a few chunks of bread onto the top of each cup, which kinda won me over. I think there is - or used to be - a decent Indian cart serving up $5 plates on 53rd St. near Park Avenue, so you can make a meal of it.

Check out the desserts served up at the truck.

The Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream truck sits in a sunbeam on a quiet cobblestoned street in Soho, like an upscale Mr. Softee waiting to be discovered by the hordes crossing Prince Street. Unlike a truck with an irksome jingle, however, Van Leeuwan quietly exudes class, from the gentle yellow color and elegant font used on the vehicle, to the flavors list, which ruminates on the high-quality ingredients used in its ice cream.

There’s some examples of this globe-trotting, gourmand-speak on the web site: hormone-free milk from cows that graze “in pastures in the foothills of the Adirondacks,” vanilla beans harvested from “organic bourbon and Tahitian vanilla orchids grown in Papua New Guinea,” pistachios grown “in the rugged lands of Bronte, in southern Italy.” I expected that the thoughtfulness employed to pick and present these ingredients would also produce a tastier-than-average ice cream. But while this is different from your average cone, it’s not exactly mind-blowing stuff.

If you’ve ever had homemade ice cream, that’s what it’s like–a bit icy in texture, and lacking in the upfront flavor and cloying sweetness. I thought that Van Leeuwan’s product tasted fresh and clean, but this was probably mostly a result of how it was presented. I sampled the Currants and Cream ($3.95 for a small) first, and ended up eating all the tart little frozen currants, leaving the uninteresting cream behind in a trash can. The subtle frozen heat in the Ginger flavor was intriguing, but quickly grew boring with only a few bursts of candied ginger in the mix. The winner of the three I tried was the Giandijia, a blend of hazlenut and Michel Cluizel chocolate. It had a subtle rich chocolate flavor, nicely balanced with earthy hazlenut, with a creamier texture than the other two.

While I’m a little confused by the paradox of an environmentally-friendly ice cream truck (how much gas does it take to fill that thing, let alone air-lift pistachios from Italy?), the use of some local, small-farm products and cups made from natural fibers is a nice touch. Plus the location alone, in the wilds of uber-luxurious Soho, makes it a refreshing pit-stop after an exhausting day of shopping. Be sure to get your  artisanal ice cream fix before the last lazy days of summer slip away. 

Van Leeuwen on Gourmet.com 

Van Leeuwen ice cream truck - Greene Street between Prince and Spring Street from 1pm-8pm; University Place between 11th and 12th St. 8-11pm.
Check their site for more locations.