Prequel

Quick roundup of the last week or so, because I am a good and faithful blogger, really I am.  And because a life unrecorded seems an awful lot like a life entirely spent at work.

• Had a laid-back Sunday night dinner at Noi Due with my fellow traveler, a kosher Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side.  It was good food, and a pretty standard level of pretension for the area.  (I was going to call it "unpretentious", but then I thought a bit more and realized my bar for pretension has risen dramatically in the last few years).  I thought it was pleasant enough, with a diverse clientele (some very Old World types, mixed in with young JCCers on girl dates, plus a couple of multigenerational families), and would have been happy to add it in to our (highly informal) rotation, but apparently - according to FT - the point is to not have a rotation, but instead to visit a different restaurant every time we go out (or, at least, many of the times we go out) in order to experience the diversity of the city.  I am all for diversity, at least in the abstract, but to me the excitement of living in New York is not going to a multitude of different, unusual places, but having a small assortment of these places which become familiar.  This is partly, I believe, due to our differing experiences with small towns (we have both lived in what we consider small towns - but his was five times bigger than mine.  so to him, it's exciting to have an infinite number of restaurants.  to me, it's exciting to have more than one restaurant.) and partly a dispositional difference.  
• Had brunch twice in the last few weeks at Arte Cafe, another Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side.  I concluded that, although I do not like Eggs Benedict or Crabcake Benedict (because of the tartaryness of the hollandaise), I do like Salmon Benedict.  But I like it much better at Josie's, where the sauce is vegan and (I assume therefore) less creamy.  Really, I could do without the sauce at all.
• Attended the ballet.  It was a trio of small ballets, which I prefer to the longer ballets, in part because there are more of them and in part because I have a short attention span and like the contrasts.  I probably had some deep thoughts about the ballet while I was attending, but I can't remember them at the moment.