Minetta Tavern

Keith McNally and Minetta Tavern, complete with signature Keith McNally lighting (everyone looks beautiful)...

Is it time to use the secret reservations line?

All I need is my secret husband.

Steak must be eaten.

More roses

Abraham Darby redux

All in a day's weather. We did not receive our promised thunderstorms yesterday.

These miracle flowers came from the winter-dried stick of rose in its terra cotta pot.

I suppose it is obvious that I cannot get enough of them.

I want it to rain. Relentless good weather is depressing. Rain is an exhoneration. Good weather expects so much of you.

Halal Lamb in yoghurt

My Pakistani butcher on Atlantic Avenue is a different place from Los Paisanos on Smith. Bare bones as opposed to crown roast with frills. And the prices are very different, too. Here you find freshly slaughtered (so not not aged at all) lamb - as well as goat, which I've never investigated, veal and chicken. Not investigated, either. But all you see in the display case is lamb. Lamb. Lamb. Lamb. For a South African, the lambless American scene can be a bit of a shock. To us lamb is like potatoes. It goes with everything. And the price of lamb, when you find it, is more of a shock.

But a few years ago my friend Pierre Reveillez, a Frenchman who ran the wonderful little Le Kiosk on 1st and 1st before the city raised his rent, told me about the Halal butchery on Atlantic. He bought chops and merguez sausage here for a yearly party he threw at Le Kiosk for his customers and employees (the latter with whom he split his profits, incidentally).

Now I shop there once a month or so, sometimes more often, and have yet to see another Infidel doing the same. I like to buy lamb ribs, a staple in South African supermarkets, and impossible to find here. He thinks I'm odd, but cuts them up dutifully and off I go with a little black plastic bag for about $5.

Sometimes a whole lamb is wheeled in, in a red plastic shopping trolley. I notice that while I stand behind the counter, his Muslim customers stand beside him while he cuts up the meat.

So I bought a little leg of lamb, 3lbs or so for $15. I had him debone it (he cut the bones and their meat into nice little chunks for me - at some stage I'll cook dolmades over them) and took it home where I rubbed some creamy Greek yoghurt into it with three finely chopped garlic cloves and about 4 sprigs of terrace oregano, chopped. Salt. It sat for a few hours in the fridge, and then I put it under a blistering broiler for maybe 8-10 minutes a side. Then it rested. Like God.

Snow pea shoots are a nice toy in salads. But you have to eat them with your fingers.

I fried up some potato and fennel salad from the day before, and had rather a primitive dinner.

Gowanus Garden in Peril

Union Street beside the drawbridge, east side of the Gowanus Canal.

I'll say it again. This is my favourite garden in New York. Not one of my favourites, my favourite. I love it. I have taken spring pictures of it, and late summer pictures, and winter pictures. I have exported it to Cape Town and waxed lyrical about it.

It begs the questions: why?

I'd have to pick it to pieces to answer, and picked to pieces, rarities falter. My response is instinctive. Like love, when you know, you know.

So there's the canal. Context. In New York, for starters, with a drawbridge.

Then there's the wide concrete sidewalk on what is still a barren stretch of Union Street. Warehouses, low buildings, sun-baked, empty. Decrepit in a W.H. Auden way.

There are the old brick walls filled with graffiti...well, they used to be: they have been painted over in an unhumorous brown. That's the first loss.

There was the contradiction: cottage garden flowers like larkspurs, snapdragons and hollyhocks growing historied and tall against a canvas of urban vandalism. It was wonderful.

There are the eclectic perennials and the ten foot sunflowers. Lots of them.

So when I saw not only The Waterer there today, but his red-haired companion, I knew I'd struck gold. It was Kirstin, the Gowanus Garden Lady.

She told me how on Friday they had been informed that this Tuesday the city will be resurfacing the sidewalk, and that the part of the garden next to the road must go or be destroyed.

Just like that.

It gets complicated. Zoning laws, litigation issues, trip hazard, nice landlords, lack of ownership, fear of repercussions, Byzantine - as The Waterer put it - bureaucracy.

This little part of New York deserves a medal, a plaque, a prize, protective yellow police tape; Exceptional Status as an iconically urban garden, placing it beyond the reach of red tape. This garden IS New York. It is also living art. This is what the best of the city is: creative, beautiful opportunism.

On the one hand we have the Million Trees project, the Greenest Block in Brooklyn Contest and on the other we have, Oh, oops! This garden that graces the cesspool of the great, grey-green greasy Gowanus, in the way of our nice smooth heat-radiating trip-free concrete.

What to do?

Verdant Gowanus

With apologies to Kipling: the great, grey-green, greasy Gowanus Canal, all set about with Aspen trees...never looked so good.

I could almost have been in the Midwest.

A great new, timely blog in town, Brokelyn, turned me onto the opening day at the Brooklyn Yard. The lines for food were well in excess of half an hour long, so I skipped. But it sure was purdy. Only drawback - they allow dogs in. I just feel weird sitting on dog-visited grass.

Sit! Nice doggy! Now go home.

Look up!

Walking back from the Garment District, the site of a two level roof garden that will be planted - h.o.p.e.f.u.l.l.y - next month, I saw this iconically lovely place.