Is that Babbo or booby??

It's been the longest week where work is concerned and we aren't going to dwell. Let me just say this for the record: Atlantic City will be fascinating... I'm not sure how much I can write about it but I'll do my best.

Also, for the record, I may need to password protect this site. I'll let you know before that happens.

And also for the record, I turned down a job with Cirque du Soleil last week. I may live to regret that...

So in other news, Bethany has been in town since Thursday night. I had to work on Friday and Saturday so she amused herself - I'll let her write about that and you can read about it if you go to her site next week sometime after she gets home (you know, maybe...). And note my cute earrings! You can buy them from my friend Kateri here.

But today - Sunday - we had the day off and the whole city to explore and WAY too much to see in the time we had. So we made up for it by eating our way from one part of the city to another. And what better place to start than where Chinatown meets Little Italy.

Our breakfast motto.

And we did it proud.

Yes, mom, that's pie and cake and cookies for breakfast (I didn't put sugar in my coffee, do I get points for that?). Even I felt a little bit bad about it - and certainly more than a little bit bad once I had finished my 5 pounds of breakfast sugar.

To readjust our blood sugar we walked around Chinatown.

Little Italy and Chinatown literally run up against eachother.

On one side of the street you see Chinese characters on the signs and on the other you see Vicente's Pizza Parlor.

On the Chinese side are frogs in a bucket awaiting execution. On the Italian side are women named Marcy selling us tiny t-shirts for Pippa that say "Little Italy" with a fuzzy rose underneath and commenting on all the "gorgeous foreign men" she gets to see on a regular basis.

Bet and I agree that if we lived in NYC - or "when" on my part - we would choose this neighborhood because it's fascinating and all the good eating is down here.

About an hour later, Bet needed something savory so we started looking at all the Vietnamese Bahn Mei places and talking about pork sandwiches, but then we stumbled on this place.

And the day really picked up . Bet saw the sign and decided that what her palate really needed to clear all that sugar was a piece of cheese. Well, it was a busy place but the brothers in charge weren't in any hurry. They happily greeted regulars and answered questions as if there was no rush.

We wandered over to where we could see the counter and wait our turn and had the incredible good fortune to stand next to two women who were regulars and were buying their weight in cheese. The first time Sal, the guy behind the counter, cut off samples for them he looked over at us and cut us some samples too. Well, we were off to the races! So Bet and I sampled just about everything in the shop as the women bought their cheese, asked questions about how to eat everything and got all kinds of advice.

By the time our turn came around, we sampled the few remaining cheeses we hadn't tried, got the low down on the shop itself - it's been around since 1910 and was originally owned by the brothers' great-grandfather. Now two brothers and their sister run the place and make all the cheese on site.

The sausage is local, but they don't make it there. (note the pressed tin ceiling!) So we bought several pounds of cheese - do I have access to a refrigerator?? no. Will I even be in my hotel room anytime soon?? no. Was it simply impossible not to purchase several pounds of cheese? Clearly, yes. So we walked out with our cheese (smoked mozarella, crucolo, aged provolone and dolce gongonzola) and bread and antipasti... and while carrying our cheese and bread and antipasti walked straight to the pizza parlor for lunch. It seemed very reasonable at the time.

Watched the guy make pizza as we ate his pizza - fresh mozarella, fresh ricotta, thick tomato sauce and super crispy wood-fired crust for $2.50 a slice! Delicious. I had a local Brooklyn lager and Bet drank wine and we talked about how great the cheese shop was. There's nothing better than eating great food while talking about other kinds of great food!

After lunch we hit Chinatown again and walked past 2 guys with bubble tea. "Bubble tea! that sounds fantastic!" so we tracked the place down and had some flavored milk tea (Bet had taro, which I think tastes like I'm sucking on a chalkboard eraser, and I had black sesame, which was delish) with big black tapioca beads in the bottom and a huge straw so you can slurp them up. At this point, believe it or not, we're talking about how full we are... Crazy, right??

So Bet suggests coffee - seriously. She wanted to go to this place in Greenwich Village, supposedly the best coffee in NYC. We take a train downtown so we can switch to the uptown train and then walk several dozen blocks - in the rain - and as we're walking through this residential neighborhood we walk past a door that says BABBO.

Bet stops and says "Babbo? Like Mario Batali's Babbo??" I say, "maybe..." we look at the menu and sure enough, it's Italian and the prices look right (expensive). So we look at eachother and say "maybe for dinner?" And Bet says "if we eat early enough, we can save the cheese for a late night snack!" Clearly we're related.

So we go to Joe's and have coffee and a snack and discuss whether we should go drop $300 on dinner. Somehow the fact that we weren't seeing a broadway show that night factored in (we're actually saving money!) and I think the sugar and cheese also factored in because we verified that Babbo was indeed Mario Batali's restaurant and that it was our dinner place for the night. We finished the coffee, decided we didn't time to go home and change out of our jeans and flip-flops so we'd have to see if they'd take us the way we were.

Here's the main thing I have to say about Babbo. They were incredibly gracious, they treated us like we had come in dressed in black tie and there was no snobbishness. As we walked in, the hostess looked at our bag of cheese and said "would you like us to check that?" Um...ok. So we checked our cheese. Really. I kind of hoped it was not warm in the coat check room, but it seemed unreasonable to ask Babbo to keep their rooms at a crisp 56 degrees in case their customers needed to check groceries...

And wow. Crazy good, that food. 8 courses, 5 different kinds of pasta and 3 desserts, each with a wine pairing. An amazing smoky red wine with the pasta bolognese was our favorite and the first pasta was black tagliatelle - made with squid ink - with roasted corn and budding chives. I am out of words to describe how good it was.

However, between the 5th and 6th courses, Bet looks out the window in the apartment across the street and then gets a weird look on her face and says " oh my gosh, the woman across the street is walking around in her bra - no scratch that, she just took it off. She's naked. There's a naked woman in the window!"

Apparently, the exhibitionist across the street takes her clothes off in front of her plate glass window in full view of every guest at Babbo approximately once or twice a week. No reason, just does it. The waiters all just shrugged when we asked about it. Yeah, she does it all the time. yeah, she knows there's a restaurant here. No, she doesn't seem to care.

Alright then. Welcome to NYC, where you get dinner and a show. So if you come to the city, you want the top floor dining room at Babbo to get the full view :)

I'll be sad to see Bet go on Tuesday. It was a delicious day.

And I now have a bunch of cheese chilling in front of my air conditioner. We almost forgot to get it from Babbo's coat check. Can you imagine??