landspeednyc

Updates on Australian Meat Pies in NYC

I like Tuck Shop on First St. near First Ave. in the East Village- great hearty, homemade pies and rolls, and they're even veggie-friendly- so I was glad to see they've expanded to a mid-town location, as well.

I've never been to the competition, DUB pies NYC, which "is proud to be the first specialty bakery to bring the authentic New Zealand-Australian experience - the culturally iconic meat pie - to New York City," but 423 Smith writes about them here.

In other East Village restaurant news, unfortunately-named A Salt and Battery''s East Village location looks dead (or "closed for renovations," at the very least), but Caracas Arepa Bar has expanded to have a real dining room a few doors down from the original space, which is now "Caracas to go."

Closer to home- Greenpoint's Polish dance clubs face off

I've already written about the Franz Ferdinand-endorsed Polish donut shop in my 'hood. Now the Village Voice writes up Club Exit and Club Europa:

Neighborhood Nightlife
Love and Warsaw
Two thriving Greenpoint dance clubs vie for Polish nightlife supremacy

Think "rival Polish nightclubs" is another punchline? For more than a decade, two competing spots in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood have hosted pan-Slavic dance parties introducing young Poles and Polish Americans to the concept of clubbing. With rent hikes in nearby Williamsburg driving gentrification north, Club Europa and Club Exit now aspire to look a little more domestic while making a perhaps more unnatural effort: luring hipsters inside.

Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos meets "donuteatin' cops" in Greenpoint

A few years ago, Franz Ferdinand was supposed to play in Greenpoint (Warsaw was the alternate venue for a show at Volume, but I think Volume reopened in time for the show). Looks like Alex Kapranos still made it to Greenpoint. From his food column in the Guardian, he visits the Peter Pan bakery cafe, a 1/2 block from my apartment:

Soundbites

---

Donut delights    

Alex Kapranos
Friday, March 17, 2006

   "You dumb donuteatin' cop!" Officer Constantine cuffs Officer Kuchner playfully on the back of the head. Kuchner is flirting in Polish with the girl behind the counter of the Peter Pan Donut and Pastry Shop on Manhattan Boulevard, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She wears a green A-line dress with pastel-pink cuffs and collar. Heavy lashes flicker over her eyes. Constantine is tall. Cheekbones strike boldly from a proud handsome African- American face. He takes his cap off. A photo of his mother is under the cracked plastic label inside. It is shift change at the 94th precinct on Messerole around the corner.

I order an Old Fashioned and a coffee: $1.70. Officers Sanchez and Suarez show each other pictures of their kids. Heavy flashlights and dull metal pistols hang from their belts. The lashy waitress fills my cup. It is identical to eight million others in delis across the city: blue with a Grecian urn on the side and "We Are Happy To Serve You" written in Hellenic script. That's not always true. She likes my accent. I like hers more - Polish/Brooklyn vowels singing the unknown. Green plastic letters punctuated by shamrocks announce St Patrick's Day. To Insure [sic] Freshness All Our Products Are Baked On The Premises. Suffocating the ventilation grill, stringy dust hangs like a sheepskin rug from the lowered ceiling. A guy with a white moustache is complaining that he wanted a jelly donut, not a ring. Lashy points to the purple injection hole. A stunned jaw drops from a white moustache. "Hey ... Something new! Jelly in a ring!" He bites. "That's good. That is good!" He gives his wife a sugar-dusted moustache kiss. She grimaces, but her eyes are happy as she squeezes his arm.

Fifties cookbook Technicolors pulsate from the stacked glazes. Greens, yellows, pinks, hundreds and thousands like interference in the cathode rays. I bite off a chunk of Old Fashioned, suck coffee into my stuffed mouth. The dough is fluffy and sweet. The surface is crisp, crinkly and undusted. These cops aren't dumb. These are the best donuts in New York.

· The writer is the lead singer in Franz Ferdinand.

Philadelphia- the "Next Great City;" "Next Borough" status still debated

The Boston Globe has an AP article reporting that:

Magazine names Philly 'Next Great City'

...The nation's largest travel magazine [National Geographic Travel] delves beneath pop culture to reveal the historical, artistic and gastronomic layers of Philadelphia, a place it has christened America's "Next Great City."

"This is a city that has been greatly overlooked," said Keith Bellows, the magazine's editor-in-chief. "It's the last great opportunity for anyone who wants a terrific urban life in the Northeast."

Over a month after Jessica Pressler's talked-about NY Times piece, "Philadelphia Story: The Next Borough," it looks like Philadelphians are still talking about it. Inquirer columnist Al Heavens weighs in:

On the House | Philly's no borough, to New York or otherwise 

I don't think Philadelphia has much chance of becoming New York's sixth borough.

From what I hear, there are at least four boroughs in New York City that sometimes wish they could cut loose from Manhattan. What's more, since Hoboken and Jersey City have become so chic, there's already a sixth borough to be carved out of North Jersey. It's closer, and the language is similar.

Philadelphians don't like New Yorkers. I know that sounds like a generalization, but I think I have enough proof to substantiate the claim.

Travelocity and the New Yorker- best friends forever (or until 12/31)

From a press release at Yahoo news:

Travelocity and the New Yorker Team up on Custom Anthology to Give Travelers an Insiders' View of the Big Apple

'Around New York' Features a Collection of Articles and Cartoons from the New Yorker Archives

SOUTHLAKE, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 27, 2005--Planning a trip to the Big Apple? If so, you might want to take advantage of this: Travelocity and The New Yorker magazine have collaborated to create a special publication, exclusively for Travelocity customers booking a trip to New York City. This custom anthology offers interesting insights about the city ranging from where to pick up the perfect bagel to the Broadway show based on a Monty Python film.

The link to the promo at travelocity here

Uniqlo @ Vice, Muji @ MOMA

While the Muji at MOMA store has been around for a while (check out the "The Great MoMA/Muji Mismatch of 2004"), the Observer's Design special reports on the larger picture of Muji:

... Is there a design lover alive who hasn't found room in their home for something from Muji?

I doubt it. The Japanese retail company is 25 years old this year. The first European store opened as a concession round the back of Liberty on Carnaby Street, in 1991. Today there are 15 shops in the UK - mostly in London (the Oxford Street flagship has just been refurbished), but also in Birmingham, Nottingham and Manchester - with 10 more in France, Sweden, Ireland and Italy. Next stop is Germany, while the company's first US store is tentatively planned for New York next year (there's already a concession in MoMA's design shop, while Muji's famous wall-mounted CD player is in the permanent collection). Asia, meanwhile, has a handful of stores, but here in Japan it's a different ball game. Not counting the mini-kiosk versions in train stations, I've already notched up half a dozen branches, including the first, which opened in 1983 in trendy Aoyama and is still there in its tiny glory - all atmospheric reclaimed timber shelves and stock-filled crannies.

Mooney Suzuki sell out- over and over again

Read this last week, but only getting around to posting now. You don't hear as much about the Mooney Suzuki as you used to (or at least I don't), but you still hear them...

(via Yahoo news)

Ads make money for rock band Mooney Suzuki

NEW YORK (Billboard) - New York rock band the Mooney Suzuki can thank Madison Avenue and Hollywood for keeping its music alive when the going got tough.

Despite being a casualty of the Sony-BMG merger, the Mooney Suzuki's music remained front and center on large and small screens. Now, after months without a label to call home, the Mooney Suzuki has inked a worldwide deal with Richard Branson's V2 Records, home of the White Stripes.

The band's manager, Lisa Barbaris, said the Mooney Suzuki would not have survived were it not for creative executives at agencies and film and TV music supervisors. "The band would have had to break up," she said.

But by having its music placed in TV ads (Coors), TV shows ("The Osbournes") and films ("School of Rock"), it was able to keep going, Barbaris noted.

After making more than 10 "appearances" -- most recently in a TV spot for American Eagle -- the title track from the Mooney Suzuki's second and last Columbia Records album, "Alive & Amplified," will next be heard in an ad for, appropriately enough, Suzuki.

Airworld, pt. I: "A marketing reporter's journey into Airworld"

As reported here earlier, Advertising Age reporter Greg Lindsay is heading out for a three week journey into the world of airplanes/airports. From Adage.com:

A MARKETING REPORTER'S JOURNEY INTO AIRWORLD
Kicking Off a Three Week Daily Series

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- As I write this, I am cinching my luggage tight and preparing to head out for JFK International Airport on the first leg of an Advertising Age reporting trip that will take me and my readers across a globe-spanning swath of "Airworld."

My reports will appear here on AdAge.com during the next three weeks and in two large special reports in the weekly print edition of Advertising Age after that.

Inside Airworld
Airworld is the name we have given to the invisible country that begins on the other side of the x-ray machines and extends in all directions beyond the concourses as the air corridors through which our airplanes fly. Among other things, this closed system of terminals and shuttling aircraft is its own vast media and retail ecosystem. Taken as a whole, it is one of the largest coherent stand-alone marketing venues on earth.

Where in the world is Greg Lindsay?

I don't know the guy, but I do know that media man-about-town Greg Lindsay is about to become jetlagged man-about-the-world.

The former Gridskipper guest editor, Gothamist interviewee, Katie Couric bitchslapee, etc. and current Ad Age something or other, is about to embark on a RTW. Hopefully he'll take along his Kiehl's moisturizer, and ditch his Paul Smith suit pretty early on for something more comfortable. I wish him well, especially if he's doing the RTW in coach....

He's issued a public invitation to Flyertalkers to meet up with him along the way:

As part of my reporting, I plan to spend the next three weeks living in airports (my itinerary is below). I spend most of my days at a desk in my home office, and I figured I needed to hit the road if I ever really wanted even the tiniest taste of what life in the air was really like.

My rough itinerary:

9/9: JFK -> MCO
9/11: MCO -> LAX
9/13: LAX -> DEN
9/15: DEN -> ORD
9/17: ORD -> DTW
9/19: DTW -> ATL
9/21: ATL -> JFK
9/22: JFK -> LHR
9/24: LHR -> CDG
9/27: CDG -> SIN
9/29: SIN -> EWR

You can see a larger map (with distances) of his proposed path here using the super helpful Great Circle Mapper.  Since he's traveling over 26K miles, it's a distance great than that of the earth's circumference, but only 3 continents and no dip below the equator (yes, I know that the equator isn't the only great circle). Then again, he didn't call it a RTW; I did.

More on Uniqlo @ Vice- the official word

Uniqlo-usa has the official word: from hip NoLIta one month to malls in New Jersey the next. An excerpt:

With the UNIQLO@VICE store, we want to bring our comfortable, casual clothing directly to the knowledgeable shoppers of New York City, said Nobuo Domae, CEO of UNIQLO USA, Inc. People are now shopping for fall and back-to-school, and UNIQLO, with its versatility and low prices, fits perfectly with anyone’s style. After September, our customers can continue to get our high-quality products at nearby New Jersey shopping malls.

UNIQLO plans to hold special events at the pop-up store throughout the month in order to introduce more people to the brand, the product and the Japanese shopping experience. At the end of September, people all over New York will be talking about UNIQLO, said Domae. We will host a variety of in-store events geared to different groups and interests, including a special fashion week party.

UNIQLO and VICE share the philosophy that individuals should express their own personal styles rather than be characterized by a brand. Clothing should be used to complement style, not define it.

"UNIQLO's focus on the casual basics that our audience builds its look around is really tight. We know that UNIQLO will be a huge hit with our New York customers and will be incredibly successful in the U.S., said Ben Dietz, Director of Business Development for VICE. "The month-long transformation of our store exclusively for UNIQLO is going to create an entirely new shopping experience in New York. And we'll bring an emphasis on key pieces from UNIQLO's massive range that will translate the brand's appeal immediately to the VICE customer."