Gut Instinct

This is love: Watching your sweetie-pie lose her guts and dignity into a shiny porcelain bowl. Sadly, I’ve never known love quite like this.

Oh, sweethearts, what are you thinking? If I can find this picture in .4 seconds, imagine what will happen if someone actually tries to hire one of y’all for a job? The Internet knows no shame.

When I squirmed from my mama’s belly, I was about as Jewish as a Christmas tree topped with honey-baked ham. Dad was a Yid, with grandparents driven from Russian shtetls. Mom was Catholic, right down to Easter-egg hunts and rapped-knuckles education. Since the mother’s religion dictates her child’s Hebrew-rating, I was a certified circumcised gentile.

We both converted. She learned to make potato latkes. I learned (then forgot) the Hebrew language, celebrated a bar mitzvah and honed my peculiar blend of Jewish neuroses and Catholic guilt, two great quirks that keep psychiatrists gainfully employed.

Food-wise I turned out fine. Like a good Heeb, I hanker for knishes, kugel and matzo-ball soup. However, my religiousness is diet only: I avoid synagogue and the mobile-home Mitzvah Tanks in favor of shacking with a shiksa, eating cheese steaks and totally blowing off Passover.

For eight days, Passover proscribes eating leavened bread. That means no pancakes, PB&Js or dumplings. Sweet jelly beans, I possess less restraint than Augustus Gloop lapping up Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. Instead of curtailing my unbearable bread urges, I embraced the illicit eats. My sacrilegious behavior started at Paris Sandwich (113 Mott St. betw. Canal & Hester Sts., 212-226-7221). This Chinatown bánh mì shop is classier than jammed-in-a-jewelry store Bánh Mì Saigon (138 Mott St., betw. Grand & Hester Sts.). Paris bakes its baguettes (including cinnamon and garlic-onion) and sweets, such as cream puffs and the heretical pork-roll cake. Color photos depicted a dozen sandwiches, including sardines, meatballs and fake chicken (all about $4). Indecision iced me over.

“What do you want?” the counter girl inquired.

“What’s good?” I asked.

“Whatever you want.”

“In that case, give me grilled pork.”

“Spicy?”

“Doubly.”

I despise permanence so much that I typically change my socks twice daily. Still, I’m seriously considering acquiring an indelible forehead tattoo reading, in blocky black script: i’m not ethnic but i like it spicy.
My cleaved-in-two sandwich was gobble-gobble good. The generous porcine bits were as shellacked as a Porsche’s factory-fresh paint job, while the pickled carrots and daikon radish softened the bread’s crusty crunch. Nonetheless, the sandwich was innocuous enough for an infant: not a single jalapeño pepper.

My carbohydrate rebellion continued days later when I biked to Radegast Hall & Biergarten (113 N. Third St. at Berry St., 718-963-3973, B’klyn). The sprawling suds emporium’s ceiling panels have opened, ushering in clouds, sun, sky—which is the limit for beer cost: $13 buys a liter of dark, wheaty Weihenstephaner Dunkel Weisse.

“But it’ll make you drunk and, as a by-product, happy,” my co-drinker said, clinking glasses large enough to lobotomize a man via blunt force.

“Yesh, yesh,” I mumbled, feeling wobbly and newborn weak. “I need food.”

I needed Endless Summer (N. Seventh St., at Bedford Ave.). ’Tis a taco truck co-owned by a member of hard-rockers Bad Wizard. Big whoop: Are the tacos Roosevelt Avenue amazing? I queued behind twentysomethings with ratty jeans and natty manners. “Hurry up and order, dude, ’cause I’m hungry,” one guy grumbled.

My 10-minute wait netted me a pork carnitas and a pollo taco ($2.50 apiece), served as lukewarm as a heat-lamp Whopper. My first drunken bite created cottonmouth: The fillings were kindling. I reached for a spoonful of green salsa, only to find dregs.

“Please?” I whispered to the truck girl, handing her the empty bowl.

The cilantro-y salsa was little salve as I choked down the faux-ican food. Finished, I marveled at Endless’ line, now stretching a dozen deep. Imagine the line’s length if the taco truck actually got its south-of-the-border act in order. As I pedaled home, my hunger returned. Its cure glowed bright, like a bad-idea beacon: White Castle, selling burgers pygmy in price and size.

“Four burgerzzzzz,” I ordered from a woman with a splendidly flamboyant Afro. Note to self: grow a Jew-fro next winter.

I exchanged $2.59 for four burgers the width and thickness of Post-It notes. They were sodden and oniony, but my alcohol-addled brain perceived, Yum. More. I shoved in one, two, three and then dropped four on the blackened-footprint floor. I looked around my Castle. The counter lady looked at me. Then I grabbed the ground burger and inserted it into my eating hole.

“Three-second rule,” I mumbled, gnashing my teeth on bun and meat like a rabid animal. Though gobbling bread’s a Passover sin, an even bigger crime is wasting a single crumb.

Thank bejesus, for our sakes, he kept on his white drawers.

To alleviate microbrewers’ catastrophic hops shortage, Boston Beer Company offers up its stash.

When microbrewer Dave Holmes tried recently to place an order for hops, the aromatic flowers that flavor beer, the response was heartbreaking.

“My supplier laughed at me,” says Holmes, owner of Fort Wayne, Indiana’s Warbird Brewing Company. “I said, ‘I’m hearing rumors about not getting hops. She said, ‘That’s right, you’re not getting hops.’ We didn’t know whether we’d be able to stay in business.”

Basically, beer contains four simple ingredients: water, barley malt, yeast, and hops. No hops? No beer (at least, no beer as most of us, know it). The shortage was caused by a perfect storm of misfortune: A fire destroyed a Yakima, Washington, hops warehouse, while drought and disease decimated crops in the U.S. and Europe.

Mega-brewers like Anheuser-Busch, who hold long-term hops contracts with farmers, are largely unaffected. Small microbreweries like Warbird, however, don’t typically hold contracts. They purchase the flowers as needed in the spot market (a commodities market in which goods are bought and sold for cash), meaning that microbreweries are vulnerable to fluctuations in availability.

“Hops that once cost $3 a pound now cost $30, but this isn’t about cost,” says Jim Koch, owner of Boston Beer Company, the makers of Samuel Adams. Since Koch’s contracts with farmers guaranteed his supply of hops, he helped alleviate short-term shortages by setting aside 20,000 pounds of aromatic East Kent Goldings and Tettnang Tettnanger hops for microbrewers to purchase at cost—$5.72 and $5.42 a pound respectively (plus $.75 a pound for shipping).

“I saw craft brewers who couldn’t make their beers, or couldn’t make the beers they wanted to. We felt like we needed to share,” says Koch, recalling his company’s beginnings as a microbrewery. The hops were raffled off in a lottery, with breweries allotted up to 528 pounds of hops apiece, in 88-pound batches. “We asked brewers not to request hops because they’d save money; buy them because you need them.” More than 350 microbreweries applied—nearly one-fourth of all microbreweries in the U.S. “I knew there would be demand, but I didn’t realize that level of need,” Koch says.

Thanks to Koch’s largesse, and a lucky draw, Holmes can continue crafting his popular Shanty Irish ale and shelve last-resort tactics: “We started researching how ancient Sumerians brewed beer with bark,” Holmes says, laughing.

To avoid future shortages, farmers are planting new hops vines (which take three years to mature). For the immediate future, brewers are crossing their fingers for a bountiful harvest. “I hope the hops on the vine are enjoying a very happy growing season,” Koch says.

There ain’t just Grape Crush in those cans, lemme tell you.

We live in a coddled, safe age. Years ago, this man would’ve been turned into a postage stamp by a woolly mammoth’s foot. Natural selection at work. Now, now we let these men drink Cuervo and wear hooker wigs. Sigh.

Trapped on a flight to San Fran with no food and a drunk, flirtatious neighbor

Every time I board a plane and belt in my jiggly belly, I’m convinced I’ll be killed.

Perhaps, I think, as the plane hastens down a runway, I’ll be charbroiled in a fiery explosion. Maybe I’ll be blown to ground-beef bits in a mid-air collision. Or the metal bird will crash into an ocean. My lungs will fill with water as I thrash spastically, deathly aware that I could’ve survived if only I listened to that stewardess’s safety speech.

I’m fatally resigned to my potential fatality. When turbulence bucks the plane like a rodeo bull, I don’t wail like a slasher-flick scream queen; instead, I grab my barf bag and thank heavens I cleared my porn cache off my home computer, preventing my parents from discovering a bookmark for Teenybopperclub.com.

Last week, I flew to San Francisco to visit several friends who’ve exchanged breakneck New York for bong-hitting California. Upon surviving takeoff, I reclined my seat and eagerly awaited Delta’s snack service. Seriously. The airline recently unveiled edibles like hummus and chicken salads devised by chef Todd English, formerly of Midtown’s lamentably named—and rapidly shuttered—English Is Italian.

It was 9 a.m. My belly grumbled for English’s croissant stuffed with turkey bacon, cheddar and apple slices ($6) or maybe a chicken parm on a ciabatta roll ($8).

“What do you have?” I asked a flight attendant. Her wide-load rump smacked my elbow whenever she shuffled past.

“Nothing.”

“We’re sold out.”

“But I’m hungry.” I pointed to my tummy. It was ready to revolt like some breakaway Baltic state.

“Well,” she said, rifling through her wheeled feeding trough, “we have Clif Mojo bars for $2.”

I resigned myself to chewing this stale rectangle of honey-roasted peanuts, pretzels, crunchy soy crisps and peanut butter. It was filling, but so is cardboard. Beside me, a Taiwanese businessman wearing wire-rim glasses also ordered the Mojo.

“Is this food?” he asked.

“Sort of.”

He bit. His brow wrinkled. “I need a drink,” he said, extending an index finger at the stewardess.

If he craved cocktails, he was riding the right plane: Cindy Crawford humper Rande Gerber created Delta’s new in-flight drinks, including cosmos, pomegranate martinis and the “mile-high” mojito. They’re priced to pound at an insanely reasonable $5 apiece. You know these are strange times when it’s cheaper to purchase a round-trip ticket and party in the friendly skies than hit a NYC nightclub.

My neighbor preferred Miller Lite.

“It makes me relaxed,” he explained.

“I hear you, my brother,” I said. I curtailed further conversation by withdrawing my laptop and stuffing my ears with headphones. I fingered away, filling the screen with pretentious adjectives like superlative, when my neighbor caressed my left elbow.

“You have very nice fingers,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said, examining my bitten-bloody nails and gnarled knuckles of a retired football player.

“I like watching you type,” he added, sipping his Miller Lite. He smiled.

“Thank…you,” I said, squirming like an earthworm. Was this a compliment? A come-on? A sexual kink? Would he slink to the bathroom, tipsy at 10 a.m., and enter the self-gratified mile-high club while envisioning my fluttering fingers? “I like typing,” I added, as flummoxed as a teenage girl receiving her first compliment from an older man.

He nodded and smiled, revealing incisors like yellow Chiclets, then he tilted his melon backward and drained his burp water in one great, greedy gulp. He ordered a second, which was also sucked down with a thirst contradicting the early hour. Perhaps my neighbor’s internal clock was calibrated to some far-off happy hour—a pleasant time of day to drink multiple beers and angle for a piece of ass.

My neighbor tapped my arm again. I tensed up, like when someone hugs me or says, “I love you.”

“I’m so sleepy,” he said, shutting his eyes and leaning forward. He passed out. The time was 10:34 a.m.

What remained of the flight passed in peanut-eating, magazine-thumbing silence, only broken by my neighbor’s infrequent snores. Finally, after five-plus hours airborne, the plane swooped into foggy San Francisco, smacking the runway with a heart-in-my-throat thud. I gathered my bags and sidestepped my still-dreaming neighbor, shuffling away to eat fried-pork tacos, guacamole-loaded burritos and other calorific West Coast wonders that will likely snuff me long before an airplane becomes my coffin.

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Oh, my lil’ chickadees, how I love the man’s expression in the middle: one part mockery, one part affection, one part piss drunk.

Ho, boy, I brought the ruckus to Forbes Traveler yet again. This time I penned a piece on America’s deluxe distilleries. Drink it up, chicken butts, drink it up.