Around eleven-thirty this morning, we met at the glorious Grand Central Terminal and took the Lexington Avenue Subway down to Canal Street, the main east-west artery of Manhattan's Chinatown. We had lunch at the venerable Wo Hop on Mott Street. Wo Hop is open 24 hours a day, and most of my visits to this basement hideaway have been in the wee hours of the morning, after a night of boozing, when the restaurant is packed with drunks, cops from the nearby precinct, and drunk cops from the nearby precinct. I can't remember the last time I set foot in the place during the daylight hours... if I ever have. Wo Hop was founded in 1938, and specializes in old-school Cantonese comfort food... and did not disappoint. We had a nice, leisurely lunch, washed down with plenty of hot tea and a guava-cordial I had made earlier this year. In the course of our conversation, I realized that I must MUST MUST buy a decent inflatable kayak like the one the Major showed me pictures of.
After our lunch, we stopped in the Mott St location of the Fay Da bakery to buy egg custard tarts. While we were being served, the family which sat next to us at Wo Hop came in and I quipped, "Hey, you folks look familiar." The husband jokingly said that they would follow us around all day, and I promptly dubbed them our 'bodyguards'. We rhapsodized for a while about early-morning post drinking-binge visits to Wo Hop, until we received our orders and amicably parted ways. The Major and I took the subway back to Grand Central, where we parted ways, because I had to be at work at 3PM. It wouldn't have been wise to be late, because I have two very demanding bosses:
Thankfully, the day shift left me a can of 'turkey and giblets' catfood... at least someone's getting a turkey dinner today.
Happy Thanksgiving, Fred and Ginger!!
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Sounds like a lot of fun, wow. I love the kind of Chinese food Chinese-Americans have historically prepared for people who are not Chinese-Americans. I also love custard tarts. I don’t know about inflatable kayaks, unless that’s a euphemism, but I’d be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I hope you had an amazing Thanksgiving!
ReplyDelete…you work for cats? As a cat whisperer? Please? Don’t tell me otherwise, I need something to hang on to.
By the way, it’s been a year and all, but I really wanted to thank you for recommending Lud-in-the-Mist to me. It was an incredibly weird and amazing book — paradigm-altering, in fact — and reading it changed the way I think about a lot of modern British fantasy. So that’s the second book I owe you, after A Face in the Frost. One day I’ll pay you back, you just wait.
Somehow Blogger stripped out all my HTML tags, weird!
ReplyDeletePreznit giv dem turkee, at least....
ReplyDeleteGood to hear from you, Emma. Your comments are always welcome here. I'm glad my recommendation of Lud-in-the-Mist was sound... I really need to write a review of it. Hope things get better going forward.
ReplyDeleteHey, zrm, can't leave out those giblets, perhaps the best part of the turkee.