The world’s only Greenlandic-Chinese restaurant

Note to self: when in Greenland, send out for Chinese food.

When you are in Greenland, don’t miss its loveliest town – Sisimiut.  And when in Sisimiut, don’t miss Greenland’s special restaurant – Misigisaq!  You will find Misigisaq Restaurant down in the atmospheric and historic port area (JM Jensenip Aqquserna), just where you disembark from your ship or where you enter town from the airport.

Misigisaq serves Greenlandic ingredients cooked in an authentic Chinese style – some of the best produce in the world cooked in the style of one of the world’s great cuisines.  

By using a big variety of Greenlandic ingredients, Misigisaq’s cooks have added a new dimension to Chinese cuisine:  Hot pots cooked on the table, popular in Beijing, in Sisimiut use Greenlandic lamb from Neqi (the national lamb supplier), which we cut into paper thin slices for fast cooking, with an option of adding caribou and musk ox meat. The Davis Strait Hotpot is a fondue packed with local seafood.  The traditional rejuvenating Chinese herb, Heavenly Grass (a distant relative of the other type of hemp), is added to caribou in a clay pot. The Chinese vegetable suancai is cooked with cod to give a spicy flavour, as in Sichuan cooking. Fragrant and Spicy Snow Crabs is a dish based on cuisine in central China.

Julia Child R.I.P.

juliachild_primordialI can’t add anything more to what everyone else is saying (her Snopes page is hilarious), but one of my earliest recollections of her was a science film she did where she talked about how life on earth formed from the early amino acid chemicals and made “primordial soup” in her kitchen.

The Exploratorium has part of it streaming online. Scroll down to “Life’s Ingredients” and watch the webcast.- it’s about six minutes in.

Indian Superman

OK, the list of rip off films is getting ridiculous now. We’ve had Turkish Star Wars, Soviet Star Trek, North Korean Godzilla, etc. What’s next? Behold Indian Superman! “You will believe a movie can suck.”

Shekhar takes the Kryptonian vibrator and, with the assistance of a heaping helping of stock footage, creates the Fortress of Solitude and transforms into Superman. He flies over India, courtesy of more stolen footage and some aerial shots of Bombay. We are also introduced to an odd fish-eyed lens effect that is used to signify Superman flying from time to time. It appears that the camera operator simply placed the camera on a tripod in the middle of Bombay, tilted it up towards the skyline, and spun around a few times. This is supposed to give the illusion of buildings whizzing by when the silhouette of a prone Supes is overlaid on it, but instead gives the incredibly real sensation that you are just on the verge of throwing up.

Little did I know that “something black in my lentils” is the Hindi idiomatic equivalent of “something fishy is going on.”

In praise of the Angry Diner

DATE: 6/2/04 SLUG: JAVA DESK: METRO A sign posted on the shuttered Brooklyn storefront of Josie's Java coffe shop at 462 Court Street, between 3rd and 4th Place in Carroll Gardens, informs customers of the death of the store's owner and long-time neighborhood persona Josephine "Josie" D'Esposito, who died Monday of heart failure at the age of 76. photo by Angela Jimenez for The New York Times photographer contact 917-586-0916
DATE: 6/2/04 SLUG: JAVA DESK: METRO A sign posted on the shuttered Brooklyn storefront of Josie’s Java coffe shop at 462 Court Street, between 3rd and 4th Place in Carroll Gardens, informs customers of the death of the store’s owner and long-time neighborhood persona Josephine “Josie” D’Esposito, who died Monday of heart failure at the age of 76. photo by Angela Jimenez for The New York Times photographer contact 917-586-0916

Jody (via kottke.org) links to Calvin Trillin’s article on Shopsin’s (and its cantankerous owner Kenny) in the Village and I realized that I completely forgot to link to a NY Times remembrance of Josie’s Java in Carroll Gardens.

Between the shoeshine man and Caputo’s, there is a dank, grim coffee shop where the customer is often wrong. The place is called Josie’s Java. It resembles a truck stop, and breakfast and lunch are served every day. Get dinner someplace else. In the evening, the door is covered by a grate painted to depict a full cup of coffee with an arm reaching up from inside the liquid, drowning or waving.

You do not pour cream into your coffee at Josie’s; you say when. She pours. She opened the place as a video shop two decades ago; that explains the free movies that sometimes come with coffee to reward good behavior. Once, in recognition of a 20-cent tip, she bestowed a copy of the Talking Heads concert film “Stop Making Sense.”

Josie’s may not have been the last angry diner, but there was only one Josephine D’Esposito. Wish I coulda met her.

Meanwhile, over at Shopsin’s (assuming your retinas can withstand the menu) Kenny is kicking ass, taking down names, and making soup from scratch to order:

One evening, when the place was nearly full, I saw a party of four come in the door; a couple of them may have been wearing neckties, which wouldn’t have been a plus in a restaurant whose waitress used to wear a T-shirt that said “Die Yuppie Scum.” Kenny took a quick glance from the kitchen and said, “No, we’re closed.” After a brief try at appealing the decision, the party left, and the waitress pulled the security gate partway down to discourage other latecomers.

“It’s only eight o’clock,” I said to Kenny.

“They were nothing but strangers,” he said.

“I think those are usually called customers,” I said. “They come here, you give them food, they give you money. It’s known as the restaurant business.”

Kenny shrugged. “Fuck ’em,” he said.

An attitude I greatly respect. Right now, I’m ready to just drive directly to Shopsin’s the minute I’m finally in NYC for good.

The Czech Rod Serling

hotelozoneThe American Cinenatheque is currently running their annual fantasy and science fiction festival right now, but I hadn’t really bothered to pay attention to it because the lead highlights were a run of Caroline Munro movies, a dubious new Tobe Hooper movie, and some current stuff that didn’t really stand out.

Buried in the schedule’s fine print though was this:

End Of August At The Hotel Ozone (Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon) 1966, 80 min. Dir. Jan Schmidt. Scr. By Pavel Jurácek. Decades after a nuclear holocaust and the world is devoid of men, leaving only an isolated band of feral young women on horseback roaming the forests of Europe – until they reach the last vestige of civilization, the Hotel Ozone. Superb, thought-provoking sci-fi, something like Andrei Tarkovsky directing Mad Max with an all-female cast, with memorable b&w cinematography by Jiri Macak.

Voyage To The End Of The Universe (Ikarie XB-1) 1963, 84 min. Dir. Jindrich Polak. Scr. By Pavel Jurácek and Jindrich Polak. Another Czech sci-fi rarity, this was briefly released in the U.S. in the early ‘60s by AIP and then promptly disappeared – until now. A crew of astronauts encounter a deadly plague during a cross-galaxy voyage, in this excellent precursor to both Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Another beautiful b&w film, with eye-popping ‘60s Euro pop-art design. Prints courtesy the Narodni Film Archive in Prague. [Both films in Czech with English subtitles.]

Pop-art Eastern European apocalypse movies are like my narrowcast target demographic so I have no idea how I’ve missed both of these until now, but both are must-sees when they hit your local film geek pusher. End Of August… plays out almost like a documentary – not much dialog and what there is of the plot is the typical struggle of civilization versus barbarism versus the disconnect people have because of that. Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is a later reference point. Perhaps even a gender-reversed Le Dernier Combat. Even more remarkable than the cast of unknowns is the dead village use to film in. It’s not a set, it’s an actual abandoned town that just barely held together by the overgrowth of vines holding the buildings up.

Voyage To The End Of The Universe is the absurdist 2001. A future communist utopia sends it’s first interstellar spacecraft (the Ikaria) to Alpha Centauri and along the way encounters a derelict spaceship of decadent capitalists (hilariously shown as an outer space gambling casino with roulette wheels and card tables and a swankily dressed crew), deals with crew ennui (apparently by elaborate dance routines), and pesky space radiation which may or may not be beneficial. Faster than you can say “1845 Franklin Expedition“, members of the crew pass out and/or go insane and the fun begins. So the script is kinda dippy, but the Panton-esque sets and the mostly electronic (slack-key guitar grafted onto the Forbidden Planet bleeps and bloops) soundtrack is just flat out amazing.

So who’s this guy Pavel Jurácek? Based on the two movies I’ve seen so far, he’s the Czech Rod Serling. Their favorite themes are similar – societal tedium and the breakdown of systems and people. Idealization of a home that’s unreachable (or may not even exist). Not much more about him on the web except that he unsurprising fled Czechoslovakia in 1967 when the Soviet Union invaded and only managed to make one more movie in 1970.

There’s another night of his movies at the Cinematheque, and I’m not missing it for anything. From the description of one:

Joseph Kilian (Postava K Podpirani), 1963, 38 min. Dirs. Jan Schmidt and Jurácek. This stunning, Kafka-esque short follows a man who sees a shop marked “Cat Rentals,” and rents a kitty for the day. But when he tries to return the animal, the shop has vanished. Terrified by the late fees he’ll incur, he searches desperately for the one official who can help him: Joseph Killian.

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JFK’s Terminal 5 to reopen

jfk_twaterminalVictory for everyone! JetBlue and the NY Port Authority have agreed to reopen the TWA terminal at JFK airport (one of my fave NYC buildings if not one of my faves period) while building a new terminal directly behind it. Hilariously, the NYT story asks: “but exactly how Terminal 5 will be used, besides as a small diversion for JetBlue passengers walking to and from their new terminal, has not been determined.”

Ummm, that’s enough diversion for me. Construction begins in 2005, but you can check out the building at the Terminal Five art event which conveniently opens just before I arrive in NYC for good.

[via Gothamist]