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Section: Food

Southampton: No illegals but great seafood.

Monday, September 13, 2010 | Posted In Food • Recommendations

For this past Labor Day weekend we went out to visit friends in Southampton, NY.  Yes, the “Hamptons”.  I’d never been out there.  The weekend retreats from the city to either the country or the beach were never for  me.  I really don’t have any excuse.  Both the country and the beach are beautiful.  I’ve mostly enjoyed spending my money on local foodie events here in the city.  Getting out of town however is proving to be amazing.  Renting a Zipcar is easy and affordable even on a service industry paycheck and  you can quickly escape up to the Hudson valley almost year round to places like the Storm King Art Center (where I proposed to my fiancée last June).

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19th Century Pier Hosts Technology Conference

Monday, June 14, 2010 | Posted In Advertising • Food • Producing

Last week, Pier 94 hosted Creativity magazine’s CaT Conference.  Backed by AdAge, this is the second year the conference has been in NYC.  The pier, originially constructed in 1894 and serving the Cunard ship line for most of it’s life it is now a “premier event venue” [according to their website]

1961 NYT article

The event started out a little too early in the morning.  Someone had forgotten to tell the super to turn down the air conditioning because it was refrigerator cold inside.

You can see the entire schedule below.  The better events for me were in the morning culminating with a great lunch panel with Boulder Digital Works at CU.  They are spearheading a great hashtag campaign #10rules.  A on-going working list of one liners that everyone in the business should read.  I’ve posted the first 24 they handed out below.  May favorites today are #’s 1, 7, 16 and 19.

Creativity's CaT Conference 2010 Creativity's CaT Conference 2010 Creativity's CaT Conference 2010 Creativity's CaT Conference 2010

These open in
Flickr–it’s easier
to read.
Creativity's CaT Conference 2010

Alexander's collateral from CaT 6/10/10

The morning was one discussion after another that was engaging.  Thor Watson talking about building truly interactive machines that help a former graffiti artist, now paralyzed write again to environments for kids (and grown up kids).  Nick Law and Gerry Graf going at each other about story-telling. Just check out the schedule above and search for #crcat tweets to see the conversation.

Even though the room was freezing and the WiFi was terrible it was overall a great event.  Though the afternoon was slow, they had an excellent food and cookie spread.  Teressa Iezzi and the rest of the gang from Creativity/AdAge did a great job pulling it all together.  You could even get a real tattoo at the Pointroll booth by an artist from Daredevil/Funcity.  I’m not sure why.

Get a real tattoo courtesy of Pointroll

Cookie Spread

Food Spread

10 Things Not To Do: A Working List of Candidates

1. Want to make bad interactive work? Set up a separate group called “interactive”

2. You can’t preach it if you’ve never practiced it.

3. If you reorganization isn’t painful, your’re not pushing far enough.

4. Jettison hangers-on. Deconstruct teams to essential parts.

5. Don’t tackle everything at the same time.

6. Don’t hire a messiah.

7. Don’t keep ‘em separated.

8. Don’t think about the technology last.

9. You can’t make the new fit in old boxes.

10. Embrace marketing R&D. Some ideas won’t meet the brief.

11. Stop building tools. Start adapting to them.

12. Remove legacy. Force changes.

13. Don’t ask “what”. Ask “why”.

14. Advertising doesn’t alwasy have to be media based.

15. Less talk, more rock. Don’t just talk about ideas. Make them. Early prototyping is cricitcal.

16. Don’t leave mobile as an afterthought.

17. Presenting yourself in a torrent of techno-jargon isn’t a great way to make friends.

18. It’s not story versus utility. It’s about both. Find the right balance to meet your client’s business needs.

189. Interactive work that no one interacts with is a problem. Don’t confuse the user, provide a clear call-to-action.

20. Creative fricttion is healthy. But not every disagreement is ideological.

21. You can’t create advertising at the speed of culture when your organization operates at the speed of procurement.

22. Love architecture. Not concrete. Keep focus on the story, not just the underlying technology that delivers it.

23. Learn to organize around the minority.

24. Less egos. More chief common sense officers.
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Visiting Food Trucks on a Toxic Canal

Wednesday, June 2, 2010 | Posted In Food

Click to view flyer

I’m a fan of the growing food truck scene here in New York City. It started out first as a homegrown love for your classic street vendor carts [read my post from August]. It was a beautiful Memorial Day and thanks to reading the print version of Time Out NY, my girlfriend and I knew about the kickoff event for BKYLN Yard (formerly known simply as the Yard) called Parked [read the Grub Street article].

Find Your Local Food Trucks
There are a few good ways to track the food trucks here in NYC.  One is Tweat.it which gives you a map overlay of locations and there is Mobile Cravings which is broken down into 16 different cities.

When you see the area where the BKLYN Yard is located you wouldn’t  think that there would be a fun public space that hosts events summer long.  It was once the industrial hub of Brooklyn. The body of water on which it resides may look lovely but it will kill you.  This is infamous Gowanus Canal. Originally built in 1867 by widening the natural body of water and turning into an industrial commerical waterway.  The story does not get better over time.  They chose the cheapest design possible.  This design had no through-flow of water and thus the waste could not be pushed out. In April 2009, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed that the canal be listed as a Superfund cleanup site.  Meaning that it is toxic.

The Desert Truck and Pizzamoto

The Desert Truck does not roam the mean streets because they opened a store.

Despite the fact that the water will kill you the location is quaint [see photos below].  There was a good collection of trucks and even carts. I won’t lie, the presence of the carts was disturbing.  I thought it was a food truck party.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the carts.  Pizzamoto was there and I love that cart. They built a cart iron wood burning brick oven mounted on a small flatbed trailer [see photos at Yelp!]. This is something I would try to do.  Then it would burn to the ground and I’d rebuild it.  I’ve seen them at the outdoor Brooklyn Flea.  And Van Leeuwen ice cream took advantage of the situation by having a cart inside and then parking their truck outside.  But where was everyone else?  Not that the space was huge but this party leaned heavy on the desert side.  Not only did the Desert Truck make a rare appearance (it no longer roams the mean streets-they opened a store!) there but so was Wafels & Dinges, The Cinnamon Snail, Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pies and Robicelli’s Cupcakes.  There was some savory.  Rickshaw brought one of their dumpling trucks. There was NYC Cravings, a Taiwanese truck and you could wash it all down with a drink from The Green Pirate juice truck.

The area to the left is where the BKLYN Yard is

The event may have been leaning towards desert but that did not stop the hordes.  We showed up as the gate opened but within the hour the lines formed.  I grabbed a key lime pie on a stick (big fan!) and we were on our way back to take a look at that amazing bridge we walked over.  Wondering to myself, “how many people have walked over this today and have no idea how significant this bridge is?”.  It’s the Carroll St. Bridge.  Built in 1889 by the Brooklyn Department of City Works.  Back before the unification when Brooklyn was a still a separate city.  It’s one of two retractile bridges and one of only four left in the United States.  A retractile bridge does not raise up or pivot on a fixed point to opent the waterway.  Rather it slides on a rail and pulled by cables. It’s one of the oldest bridges in the entire cityYou can Google it to find a few websites with historical facts.  I’m an amateur City historian and a big fan of Forgotten NY.

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