Miss Edith's Adventure in New York: How I Watched Television And Ate Food God Never Intended Me To Eat

Yesterday Miss Edith and Notarius had an adventure: we went, accompanied by our darling neighbor A., the devoted vegan, and a friend of his, R., to Central Park’s Summerstage to hear Television play.

This was good, clean, fun. We were sorry sorry sorry that Richard Lloyd wasn’t able to perform with the band – he apparently is quite ill, and of course this is sad news and we hope he gets better soon – but the man who filled in for him did a fine job of stepping into large shoes. When we arrived in the city, a thunderstorm rumbled over us, and we all thought, “Shit.” But we trudged, determined, through the rain, convinced that it would pass and we’d be able to enjoy the concert. We were correct, and were walking or standing in the rain for a really finite amount of time – maybe a half hour or so. By the time Television took the stage, the sky was bright blue and everyone, soaked to the skin one and all, cheerfully stood in the park and dried off under the late afternoon sun.

I won’t compose a review of the show; I’ll just say that parts of it were divine and other parts were very disappointing. Television fans who read this blog are, I imagine, extremely few in number, and I don’t want to bore my general readership (such as it is). When the show ended, we all took a deep breath and said, “Well, ok. It was what it was. Now: on to dinner.”

A., being vegan, apparently goes through life carrying paperwork with lists of restaurants where he can eat comfortably, and suggested we all trek down to the Village to go to a particularly awesome place he knows. It’s a favorite among vegan and vegetarians, we were told, and known for its “buffalo wings” that, of course, aren’t buffalo wings at all. If you do a search online for this place, which is called Red Bamboo, you find a zillion people raving about it, how it’s just the best vegetarian food, the best vegan food, the best restaurant they’ve ever been to. I was more open-minded than you’d expect, reader, honestly, and I gamely read the menu and thought, “Gee, this stuff really does sound pretty awesome.”

Notarius and I both decided that since we were in a place that obviously specialized in trying to make non-meat taste like meat, we ought to dive in wholeheartedly and not chicken out (so to speak) by ordering vegetarian/vegan items we would eat normally anyway. So we forsook the delicious sounding Portobello mushroom sandwich and the pesto sandwich and ordered appetizers of “buffalo wings”; and then Notarius requested a “ginger chicken” stir fry and I got “Dante’s Cuisine,” which was meant to resemble braised beef.

[Before I go further, I want to let A. know -- if he's reading this -- that the following diatribe is not intended to offend or distress him, and that I am in fact completely grateful for having had this dining experience, and that I'm so pleased I had it with him. There is no sarcasm intended in this paragraph, either. Now: read on, and watch it get ugly...]

The buffalo chicken wings tasted all right – they were drowned in a sticky red sauce. The texture was, as Notarius said, akin to that of wet paper towels. The restaurant did a remarkable job of taking soy product and working it so that you ended up with a vaguely chicken-fiber-seeming mass surrounded by something that tore in your teeth much the way chicken skin does. However, Miss Edith is one of those cranks who genuinely doesn’t much like eating chicken skin, so this was merely off-putting; and the texture of the “meat” was entirely unpleasing. The accompanying celery stalks were a relief… but then again, Miss Edith always did like celery, so that’s not much of a statement.

It was when our entrees arrived that our hosts, A. and R., looked at us expectantly. I was unable to cut my medallions of “beef” with a fork – something you should surely be able to do with actual braised beef – and put an entire piece in my mouth. Apparently my face registered total horror. “Look at her face!” R said, laughing. I don’t blame him for laughing; I’m sure I looked as appalled as I felt. But this stuff was really ridiculous. It tasted nothing like beef. It had, like the chicken, been worked and processed and worked so that it looked sort of like chunks of beef – it sort of looked stringy, the way braised beef can – but it also looked like little ovoid medallions of sponge. And that is how it tasted. Medallions of sponge in a highly spiced savory brown sauce with mushrooms. It was, I repeat, ridiculous. There were nicely steamed vegetables and mashed potatoes on the side, and these were fine if unremarkable. Notarius felt his meal was nearly inedible, the poor boy, and told me later that the rice tasted like plastic.

We tried to be sporting about this culinary experiment, and pressed on to dessert. Informed that there was a stunning peanut butter cake, we ordered that, and it was perfectly nice – sweet, with layers of chocolate cake and peanut butter cake that made it, basically, a baked version of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup – but in the end it couldn’t make up for the disappointment of our entrees. Very sad.

Our waitress, Elaine, was a total sweetie, and naturally a very thin attractive woman – we were treated quite well, I think, as a party of four dominated by straight men, who all admired her – so as far as the nuts and bolts of service at the restaurant goes, I have no complaints. But god help me if I ever eat there again.

I’ve learned my lesson. From now on, confronted with a menu like that at Red Bamboo, Miss Edith will stick to the Portobello sandwich and call it a day.

This afternoon, we are going to Cape Cod, where we often find the food equally indigestible but from the opposite end of the spectrum. I expect that when we come home, we will be very happy to cook for ourselves. God knows our stomachs will need some TLC after the day before us and the days ahead…