We Made a Blog

Oh, Goods, how you’ve let me down. It’s especially heartbreaking since things between us started out so beautifully. For weeks, I anticipated the day the windows of your chrome trailer would open. I even showed up early on a false report that they had. Dutifully, I waited and we finally had our first meeting.

I fell for your sausage, egg and cheese on a biscuit – and the beignets on the side, too. Then I had the fried green tomato sandwich and I couldn’t stop gushing about this magical, stationary food truck that had appeared two blocks away from my apartment. For about two months of Sundays, I would have my ritual tomato sandwich. Then a waitress suggested I try the oyster fritter sandwich. This is when things started to go sour.

That sandwich was actually quite good – not great, but solidly good. So, I thought, what about the rest of your menu? First up, the hot dog. It doesn’t matter how organic or closely grown a product is to where it’s being sold, taste is taste, and you either have it or you don’t. The dog did not. I might as well have been eating a veggie dog – a very expensive veggie dog, at that.

OK, so one negative. No reason to panic, but I was starting to see why so many said you were “overpriced” and “not very good.” But I stuck to what I liked about you and life went on wonderfully for us both. Then you committed an unforgivable sin, one of biblical proportion.

We’d never spent the afternoon together, so I hadn’t had your weekend special: fried chicken. Until last week. You’re selling chicken in the same town as Pies ‘n’ Thighs, so I figured you wouldn’t be messing around. I drooled in anticipation from order until delivery. What came after was a monumental disappointment.

There was the taste of par-boiled, then fried chicken that comes at the pre-hot sauce stage of buffalo wings. The chicken didn’t suffer the usual list of complaints, meat on the dry side, soft skin, etc. It was cooked ‘properly,’ it just didn’t taste like anything.  On top of it (literally) was a sauce whose beginnings seemed to be juice squeezed out of a plastic lemon. When I suggested to my friend that you don’t come close to matching Pies ‘n’ Thighs’ delights, he remarked, much more tellingly, that you don’t “stack up against KFC.” And he’s right – about taste and price (not that I’m endorsing fast food). For $10, I felt like you were flipping me the bird. And about the $10 octopus dish I was served: Thanks for the two pieces of octopus. The pound of chick peas and faro at the bottom was quite tasty, but I don’t think it’s enough to repair things between us.

We’re big fans of the HBO TV show “Bored to Death.” It takes place in Brooklyn (where one of us lives), follows a writer distracting themselves from the terrors of a second book (just like the other one of us) and has the perfect balance of quirk and snark.

Sunday night ()20 p.m. ET) sees the return of the show, with “Escape from the Dungeon.” If you can’t wait until then for a reunion, watch the trailer or retrace Jonathan, Ray and George’s steps from last season with the “Bored in Brooklyn” map.

The video is exactly what you’d expect and the music is better than what you’d expect.

OK Go: White Knuckles

Eat your words.

To me, the sukkah is always one of the welcoming signs of fall. A harvest-bedecked tent for the Jewish festival week of Sukkot, you see them set up in backyards, temple parking lots and adjacent to campus cafeterias. This weekend, you can also see them in Union Square Park from dawn on Sept. 19th to dusk on Sept. 20th at Sukkah City. To benefit Housing Works, 12 reimagined sukkah designs will be on display and auctioned off. The finalists were selected by judges that included Ron Arad and Maira Kalman, but the ultimate winner will be chosen by the public, who can vote for People’s Choice Sukkah of New York City on New York Magazine’s site. Its design should stand the test of time, even though the structure itself will only stand for the week.