[Sca-cooks] KFC & others

[A F Murphy]

Philip & Susan Troy wrote:

> Also sprach A F Murphy:
>
>>  Have you seen a Dosanko recently? They seem
>> to have vanished... Japanese noodle soup, other lunch fare.
>
>
> There was one on Fifth Avenue in the Thirties (I saw it recently, but
> not sure exactly when), and I know there's one in Flushing which
> actually has quite a busy sushi bar. This one is much more of a
> full-service Japanese restaurant than most Dosanko's.


The one on Fifth closed a couple of years ago, as did the one near Saks,
and the one that turned into Manhattan Chili, oh, maybe 8 years ago? I
know I took a friend there 6 years ago, and I was already pretty
familiar with it.

>   As I got older
> and roamed around the city more, of course, there was, and is, always
> Katz's ("Send a salami to your boy in the army!"), which is not what
> it was, but still not bad at all.

The first shows I designed in New York (I'm a costumer, in real life
*G*) were around the corner from Katz's. Ate there a lot. Again, good
cheap food. Pretty heavily meat, though, (salami, corned beef, pastrami,
hot dogs). I'd have been happier with a good Dairy place. The old Dairy
restaurants that were in the garment district when I used to work there
(20 years ago) have all closed, though, and, while I can still get good
falafel at Jerusalem II, I can't get a vegetable roast any more.

You may have noticed I know a lot about fast cheap food that isn't the
usual Fast Food chain! I had a survey call me once, and I wasn't in any
rush, so answered all the questions - the poor woman didn't know what to
do with me! At that point, I'd just come off a string of shows, and had
a day job, too, so all my meals had been grabbed en route to various
theatres, so, when she asked if I'd had any fast food lately, I said
yes, a lot! She thought she had the perfect person... until she asked
how often I'd eaten in -  and listed well known chains. Well, not at
all... I'd been eating mostly in a handful of independent pizza and
China Express joints. Did I ever eat in the others? Yes... What did I
eat in, say, McDonald's? Salad. Was the food greasy? Salad?!  Not if I
didn't put too much dressing on... and we went from there... Poor woman
couldn't cope with someone whose answers were not on the list of
possible reactions... Come to think of it, we're back full circle. A lot
of her questions centered around impressions of greasiness, and Kentucky
Fried Chicken, and a bit less than a year later, they dropped the full
name and started calling themselves just KFC... they seem to want us to
forget the stuff is fried!

>
> I remember as a cultural rite of passage the rise of the
> formica-table Chinese restaurant; previously they had always been
> dark, mysterious places with red velvet wallpaper and covered dishes.
> Part of my fixation with the romance of a good restaurant
> semi-replacing the romance of travel probably stems from this.

I used to eat at a place in Jersey City that looked like that. Food
tasted good, as long as you went in with no particular expectations *G*
If you saw the movie To Wong Foo, with Love  some of the opening scenes
were filmed there. I have to go back - it always looked like a Chinese
restaurant in a movie, and unlike any I had actually eaten in before...
 I'd go for the cool atmosphere, right down to waiters in red cotton
jackets.  It was fun.

>
>
> Adamantius
>
Anne