Gut Instinct: Oh, What a Frieling!

It’s coffee! Fat rails of coffee, but coffee nonetheless.

Much like grooming my graying nose hair with electric clippers and sanding my callused feet, my father taught me to love the French press coffee maker. During my childhood’s blurry-eyed mornings, I’d watch as he dumped inky grounds into a clear glass carafe. Steaming water caused crushed coffee to swirl like gnats dancing the lambada, before the mesh plunger consigned them to Davy Jones’ Locker.

“It’s hard to go wrong making coffee like this,” he said once—probably wearing his THERE’S NO X IN ESPRESSO T-shirt—while pouring a cup of aromatic wisdom.

My first sip was like my first kiss: mysterious, exhilarating, exciting and followed by one thought—I need more. Smooches were slow to snowball, but coffee addiction came quickly. During high school, I got caffeine-high at late-night diners such as Denny’s and Waffle House, fluorescentlit way stations where a buck and two bits bought unlimited java. Back home I dabbled with drip, but press was best. The grounds soaked longer, dying water darker, creating fuller flavor. Sometimes father does know best.

While most kids departed to college with hot pots and ramen by the case, I brought two pounds of Seattle’s best and a glass Bodum. Several weeks into freshman year, after intensely studying at an underage bar specializing in 25-cent beer, I karate-kicked my door open. “Eeeeeeeee!” my dozing roommate screamed, in lockstep with glass smashing into glittering splinters.

Each Bodum replacement befell a unique, if ultimately identical fate. One carafe died thanks to the pointy, curious noses of my collegiate roommate Ted’s feral ferret. A friend’s off-kilter Roger Clemens imitation killed another. And a Bodum I absentmindedly left atop a flame exploded, almost turning my retinas to sushi. A smart cookie would’ve graduated to a plastic Mr. Coffee. But I’m a stubborn little yuppie ox, the grandson of a man who refused medical ministrations until cancer nearly devoured his vital signs.

My response to the broken presses was anger, then numb acceptance—the same coping mechanism I use as a fan of the sadsack Cincinnati Bengals.The breakage continued with vigor. Press No. 8 punched its eternal ticket when a cast-iron skillet slipped from its hook. No. 9 died by the soapy hands of a drunken, too-helpful houseguest. My patience was as frayed as a thrift-store T- shirt: How many times could I sweep broken glass in my underwear? Several weeks after No. 9’s demise, I cooked breakfast for my then-girlfriend, a shrewish Jewess who loved kitschy Japanese toys more than me. In the rush of flipping pancakes and sizzling eggs, I knocked my press into the hard, unforgiving sink. “Screw coffee!” I screamed, too pissed to conjure up witty anger.There was usually a long respite between breakages, letting me delude myself that each shattering was the last. Steam rose from the scattered, watery grounds. I flicked glass into the trash. I mopped the mess. And then I had a horrible thought, one I’m ashamed to admit: Would drinking tea really be so terrible? After breakfast my girlfriend ran errands, returning with a rare act of kindness.

She presented me with a rectangular box that ensured I’d never break another Bodum: Inside sat the Frieling stainlesssteel thermal French press. Stainless steel!

Impervious to ferrets, able to withstand cast-iron blows, it’s a culinary miracle. Its brewed results are tasty to boot: The carafe keeps the coffee warm and robust, allowing me to savor a hot cup without the sense of impending doom. Though that relationship ended as gracefully as Hiroshima (I was ditched for a swarthy Spanish teacher bunking in a Mexican mountain town), the Frieling has endured. When I’m flush, I fill it with dark-roasted coffee from Gorilla (97 5th Ave. at Park Pl., 718-230-3244; B’klyn); when broke, it’s beans from Middle-Eastern importer Sahadi’s (187 Atlantic Ave. betw. Clinton & Court Sts., 718-624-4550; B’klyn), which has incomparably low prices (about $5 a pound). And the heartless sweetheart has been replaced by one who, despite my insistence on patronizing strip-club steakhouses, loves me with all her heart. It’s a match made in mutual-addict heaven.

She’s also a gigantic caffeine junkie. She refuses to utter multisyllabic words until her vocal cords have been revved by hightest caffeine. After the alarm curtails our slumber, we sludge to the kitchen and feed our shared need. She boils water. I dump three mountains of grounds into the shiny Frieling. And then we make sweet, sweet coffee, allowing me to face the day with the wide eyes and jittery hands that’d make my father proud

Beer of the Week: Zotten

Lord, will this heat ever end? I think not. So why not spend the rest of the summer totally pie-eyed, drunk on this beauty? It’s Zotten, Weyerbacher’s Belgian-style pale ale. Mmm. Thirsty? Drink it up!

Gut Instinct: Pass the Celestial Butter

My friend Ben’s eyes roll heavenward and drool speckles his ChapSticked lips when he thinks of celestial butter.

“It’s a gift from the gods,” he says reverentially, like cavemen felt when they first made fire. Or wheels. Or wheels on fire.

“Them’s strong feelings about an engorged organ,” I reply.

“Foie gras,” Ben says as authoritatively as that Iranian president declaring victory, “is celestial butter.” Though I appreciate Ben’s ballerina-like leaps of verbal fancy, foie is not “celestial butter.” I’m no PETA activist decrying geese’s cruel treatment, as they gorge on grain and their livers swell like birthday balloons. (In fact, the gavage process would be a fine way to meet my maker: letting a farmer insert a feed tube down my esophagus, thus filling me with pork-and-chive pot stickers till I turn tasty and round.) My problem: Foie is too expensive to be tasty.

Skyscraping prices detrimentally impact my appetite. I find luxuries like truffles and caviar to be abhorrent indulgences, wrinkling my nose at their mere mention. Do tissue-thin black truffles turn the Waverly Inn’s infamous mac ’n’ cheese into an orgiastic pleasure, justifying the $50-plus price tag? Hell no. Let the swells waste their hard-earned sawbucks; I’ll content myself with jerky-chewy, caramelized roast pork at Wah Fung No. 1 Fast Food (77 Chrystie St. betw. Hester & Grand Sts., no phone), costing just $2.50. This is America; there’s no need to spend a hundred bucks to have a heart attack.

However, greater powers occasionally force me to ingest overpriced food I detest. “It’s my bachelor party,” Ben says, “and I want to go to Au Pied de Cochon.” And so our celebrants make the Montreal pilgrimage via plane, automobiles (just seven hours from NYC!) and, for me, an Amtrak train. To commemorate Ben’s connubial bliss, we secured elusive reservations at chef Martin Picard’s landmark eatery, Au Pied de Cochon (translation: “the pig’s foot”), a shrine to the seductive pleasures of foie gras and swine.

Inside the narrow, chilly restaurant (the air conditioning ably combats the woodburning oven) we peruse menus that read like exquisite forms of vegetarian torture.

Everything is touched by animal carcass, including fries crisped in duck fat and salads topped with crunchy squares of breaded pig bits. “Don’t let your eyes get bigger than your stomach,” I tell the assembled men, strapping on my hen-mother hat. “The food here is really, really rich.”

“Don’t let Josh bully you into not ordering what you want,” Ben snaps, clenching the menu like a weapon. There’s no sense in arguing with a man enmeshed in foie mania. The waitress glides over to recites specials. “The restaurant just bought a 266-pound tuna today,” she says, unspooling dishes—tartare, carpaccio—incorporating the creature. Swine, though, dominates the dinner order.

First comes the cochonnailles platter, a heap of homemade sausages, rillettes and other reconstituted pig parts that are both jiggly and scrumptious. The PDC salad is a plate of salad greens, walnuts, bacon-y chunks and a square croquette composed of pig-foot meat, fat and skin. “I doubt this counts for my recommended daily allotment of vegetables,” I say, spearing fried foot. The last wet rag of wilted lettuce is devoured, signaling the foie onslaught. The plogue a champlain constitutes a thick buckwheat pancake layered with thick-cut bacon, potatoes, eggs, maple syrup and foie slabs. It’s a superb mess, a farmer’s breakfast for an aristocrat. Less lovely is the pan-seared foie gras tout nu—in essence, naked liver. Ben has seconds. I barely finish my first.

Redemption, sweet fattening redemption, comes with the main courses. The au pied de cochon—omitting ordering the namesake would be tantamount to hitting Nathan’s and skipping frankfurters—is de-boned foot shards swimming in a gravy sea abutting a mashed-potato island. The duck fries are given a caloric booster by mayo plunges.

Nonetheless, the showstopper is the duck in a can—half a fowl, foie gras, balsamic demi-glaze and butter-braised cabbage that are canned and cooked. A tattooed server ceremoniously transports the can to our table. She opens it with a practiced flourish, letting the steaming union slowly escape onto bread and mashed taters, the can-shape mass disintegrating into a glorious heap. Though the glop recalls wet dog food, this does not belong in a plastic bowl. The duck is as soulful and complex as Marvin Gaye, as tender as a baby and as rich as Bloomberg. It’s fabulous and frightening, gout by the forkful.

“I thought you didn’t like foie,” Ben says, eyeing my meat-streaked plate. I swallow my pride and my reply, along with another chunk of canned pleasure.

Beer of the Week: Les Trois Mousquetaires’ Blanche

So I’ve returned from Montreal with a boatload of new beers in tow. This week’s column focuses on a thirst-quenching hefeweizen from Quebec, a beer that was aces for cutting through the sloggy summer heat. Thirsty? Drink it up!

Gut Instinct: What’s the Scores?

Mmm…meat by the pound.

“What are you doing Wednesday?” my girlfriend asks, eager to spend quality moments with me since work has made our schedules incompatible all summer.

“I’m…busy,” I say, deflecting the naked truth.

“Doing what?” she asks. This is how conversations work: brief exchanges of information.

“I’m going to eat steak at Scores.”

“Excuse me?”

“The strip club. They supposedly have really good steak.” I omit that Chelsea’s Scores (536 W. 28th St., betw. 10th & 11th Aves., 212-868-4900) was shuttered last year due to a tiny problem called prostitution.

New ownership renovated the topless club and installed Will Savarese (Le Cirque, La Crémaillère) as top toque. It’s a new day at the nudie parlor.

“And this is for work,” she says. Work is my catchall excuse. Drunk on Lucky 13’s dollar beer? Work. Sumo-gorged on Bamboo Pavilion’s feather-light fiery fish? Work. Refusing to wear pants? Work, work, work. Inspiration requires unexpected forms.

“Just keep your pants on,” she says, which I take as her blessing.

Wednesday comes. I’m running late. I slapdash out my door, forgetting my umbrella—a silly move given this sodden summer.When I depart the subway, the blue sky has turned corpse-gray. Thunder cracks.

Down come cats and dogs, soaking me to my striped socks. Maybe Mother Nature doesn’t want me to see bare breasts, I think, as I swim through the downpour.

“You got a little wet,” my pal José says by way of greeting. He’s shaking an umbrella like a wet pooch. I should strangle José, but it’s his first visit to New York since moving to Texas. A wife, a baby, you know the score. But neither is present tonight, giving José free reign. Within reason.

Minutes later, Aaron strolls up, also holding an umbrella. “My wife said I could look, but I can’t touch,” Aaron informs us. “She doesn’t want to have to cut anyone.”

“Seems fair,” I say, as we enter the pleasure palace. Scores slinks across 10,000 square feet, encompassing an LED-lit runway, multiple stages topped with sensuous strippers, gaudy light shows and private rooms aplenty.

We’re led to a raised platform housing Robert’s Restaurant. It’s the companion to the Penthouse Executive Club’s Robert’s Steak House, and they both peddle flesh of the highest caliber. “Concentrate, guys,” I say, pointing at the menu, sighing. Bringing married men to a strip club destroys attention spans like giving preschoolers candy. After tearing gazes from the surrounding flat-screens (featuring the strippers, dancing nearby), we come to a carnivorous consensus. We order. We sip drinks—a well-made Manhattan, a toofizzy old-fashioned, a potent gin-and-tonic. We watch. From our perch, it’s like watching a baseball game from a skybox. The dancers are mere window dressing for the main event—dinner.

Our rainbow heirloom-tomato salad is farm-fresh goodness, given creamy contrast by the mozzarella. The frisée salad is a textural toss of sweet pecans and pungent blue cheese, which dooms me to bad breath. Not that you want nice breath tonight, I envision my girlfriend saying, a voice I erase with whiskey.

“I love tomatoes,” José says, watching a woman contort on TV.

“I’m a steak man myself,” I say, as we receive a table-dwarfing platter of sliced rib-eye, centers as pink as rabbits’ noses.

The dry-aged steak is dense and rich, with a mineral tang so flavorful I need no béarnaise. The lamb chops match the steak’s juiciness, amped up with tangy Moroccan spices. And the fries are playful indulgences: matchstick taters sprinkled with an everything bagel’s classic toppings and then submerged in smoky paprika aioli. They’re equally fun to eat and ogle, a sentence that can cause no shortage of trouble in a strip club.

“Would you like some dessert?” the maître d’ asks. He opens a menu. A curvaceous blonde, poured into her shimmery dress, sits down. He smiles. I turn the color of beets, as do my now-awkward companions.

“Would you like a private tour?” she asks.

Um. Well. No. I’m as scared as the little lamb I just ate. A woman as tanned as leather sits on my chair. Her briefs sparkle, as does her filled-to-bursting top. She squishes against my shoulder. I inch into my chair’s far corner, making myself as small as I feel.

“Perhaps you need more to drink,” the blonde says. She’s right; four more cocktails, and all bets are off. It’s my curse. It’s every man’s curse. But now, we’ve just had a dinner as lovely as our relationships with our respective women. I mumble an excuse— “I’ve got work”—and we leave our baser desires behind.

“I was too full for a lap dance anyway,” José says, offering up a far manlier excuse.

Beer of the Week: Victory Wild Devil

Do you worship the Devil? Well, you might after reading about my latest Beer of the Week. Victory’s WildDevil is a tweak on their classic Hop Devil, given a funky character by a dose of Brett yeast. Uh, yum. Thirsty? Drink it up!

Gut Instinct: Holy Moses

Like every Jew worth his weight in gefilte fish and matzo balls, I put my full blind faith behind Moses.

“You have my personal fun guarantee,” proclaims the bearded Moses—Gates, that is. The miracle maker is a licensed tour guide, a fearless investigator of sewers and subway tunnels, a climber of bridges, an urban explorer of the rusty and the forgotten. His municipal mania even extends to trying to walk every NYC census tract—2,217 in total, including 783 in Brooklyn.

Moses knows New York. And today, a sticky, humid Saturday—are there other kinds come late July?—Moses shall share his city secrets on arts organization Flux Factory’s “Going Places, Doing Stuff” tour. Elementally, it’s an adult field trip, school bus included. About 40 thrill-seekers convene at Flux’s Long Island City headquarters, carrying water, snacks, whiskey and healthy curiosity. Itineraries are secret till departure, whereupon folks are whisked to, say, a crumbling Hudson River castle or Centralia, a Pennsylvania mining town devastated by a burning coal seam.

Flux’s voyages are so fun, you’ll kick yourself for missing the 9:30 a.m. departure.

“Hurry, hon!” I shout to my girlfriend, her eyes as lidded as Snoop Dogg’s on a smoky Friday night. She is not a creature to be denied caffeine.

“I am hurrying,” she says, pulling on a green tee. “Button your pants.” Barn door sealed, we boogie to the B48, then the B61 buses. Forty-five minutes later, the route, if I may utilize this word, terminates near an abortion clinic. “Can I rub your belly?” I ask my girlfriend, as we pass pro-lifers planted in lawn chairs.

They’re applying sunscreen as if it were a day at the beach. “Not funny,” she says, my wit falling as flat as days-old Diet Coke. “Maybe I should tell them we like our eggs scrambled, not fertilized,” I mumble, dreaming of my missing breakfast. With minutes to spare, we reach the vegetable-oil–powered bus—French fries faintly perfume the air—and squish in beside dreadlocked hippies, artists in patched pants and lesbians in love. Moses cues up a musical clue to our first stop: frenetic guitar riffs and rock, rock, Rockaway Beach.

“Watch out for the poison ivy,” Moses says, leading us through thick brush and poking branches to the Promised Land. It’s a rusty hatch, like the kind found on Lost, leading us to an underground nuclear-missile bunker. “It was New York’s last line of defense,” Moses says, pointing to a waterlogged launch platform that could kill commies with a fiery flourish. The nuclear apocalypse: so close to home! Back through the brush, back to the bus. “Listen up,” Moses says, playing a song with sitars.

“That’s Hindi!” someone shouts, the school bus bringing out everyone’s inner teacher’s pet. “Correct,” Moses says, as we steer toward Flushing’s Hindu Temple Society, North America’s largest such holy house.

Here, families and the devout make offerings to many-armed Ganesh statues and, like us, head downstairs to gorge at the underground Temple Canteen (45-57 Bowne St. betw. Holly & 45th Aves., Queens, 718- 460-8493).The fluorescent-lit mess hall welcomes all religious affiliations to tear into its crisp, paper-thin dosas—southern Indian crepes crammed with chutneys, curries and other meat-free marvels.

“It’s…all…vegetarian food!” my girlfriend says, happy as a kid on Halloween. Even sweeter? Nothing is more than $6. We overdose on squiggly idiappam rice noodles; savory, doughnut-like vadas swimming in yogurt; pastry-flaky potato samosas and two kinds of dosa: the fiery Hyderabadi, kicked up with green-chili chutney, and the four-alarm paneer. The buttery mess of spongy cottage cheese is such a tongue-scalder that I steal sips of my girlfriend’s cooling mango lassi. “Don’t drink it all,” she cautions, grabbing back her creamy concoction.

Full to bursting—and rubbing our bellies in a far more appropriate context—our gang waddles upstairs. I sneak to a bodega to buy a 24-ounce Bud Light Lime. It’s an artificially flavored abomination that, despite my avowed craft-beer love, I turn to during torpid summer afternoons. It’s my dirty little secret, like ordering General Tso’s chicken from bulletproof-window Chinese dive Ho Wong when I’m hungover. I sip my Lime (sleeved in a brown bag) while Moses reveals our next stop. He’s song-less, but his words remain music to my ears: “We’re going gambling at Belmont Park!” Belmont is a horse track, a classy alternative to the shabby Aqueduct. Kind of. Whereas the Aqueduct costs a buck, Belmont charges two. “And the track lets us bring in coolers of beer—which we have in back.”

The travelers roar with approval, before boning up on the differences between win, place and show. “Moses,” I tell my tour guide, grabbing a Tecate and entering Belmont to blow this column’s paycheck, “you have delivered on the fun.”

Beer of the Week: Flying Fish Exit 11

Lord, it’s too early in the morning to be thinking about beer, but here I am, telling you about my latest beer of the week: Flying Fish’s Exit 11. It’s a hoppy wheat beer, the sort you don’t need to doctor with a lemon. Mmm…tasty times. Drink it up!