eating until I drop

My motto is doing everything to excess. Moderation is for wimps and people with self-control. When it comes to food, everything else flies out the window...this might explain three days of non-stop eating in NYC last weekend (honestly, who else can hit three bakeries, a gelato place, and a chocolate shop all within two hours right after brunch?).

On Friday evening, I rolled into NY on boltbus ready to get a head start on my food orgy for the weekend. At around 7PM, my friends and I went to K-town, where we always make a pit stop at least once. Korean BBQ's always the way to go, especially in a restaurant with three foot high pumes of smoke leaping from the grill in the middle of the table. Our destination was Shilla and four types of meat for our BBQ, the standard beef bulgogi and kalbi, and pork and chicken as well. Of course, I always get the seafood pancake to start and enjoy all of the little dishes (minus the kimchi). Maybe it's because I'm Asian, but the food is just so satisfying (not that pasta isn't excellent) and homey.

After ingesting a week's worth of meat, we headed down the street to Koryodang, a Korean bakery, where I purchased some tiramisu and a scrumptious mocha cake that turned out to be 90% frosting and 10% cake. We then went across the street to Red Mango, where I gulped down my tiramisu surreptitiously while everyone else munched on overrated ice cream. Red Mango and Pinkberry are so hot right now, they'd actually be doing well in this economy if they were publically traded. As for myself, I'm not a fan of the sour yogurt taste and have avoided it since childhood, where I tried it in a liquid milk form. I confess that I do have mixed feelings about Asian pastries. On the one hand, it's great to eat something that's so airy that it's barely there and lacking the cloying, nauseating sweetness that's the hallmark of industrial-grade frosting. However, it just doesn't quite seem like a real full-bodied cake. Nevertheless, I loved the tiramisu and its liberal dust of cocoa powder on top and was indifferent towards the unbalanced mocha cake.

Afterwards, we went to Times Square and to the Charmin/Duracell store. The idea of promoting something like toilet paper is very strange because it's a commodity (same with batteries). Moreover, we belong to a culture where bodily functions aren't really discussed in polite everyday converation. The Charmin store had around 20 toilet stalls and a comedian with several helpers directing people to each stall. People stood in line to go to one of these 'special bathrooms' (myself included) while he made remarks including "drop it while it's hot" and asked a young boy if he could handle going to the bathroom by himself. The duracell store had bikes/snowmobiles that you could petal in order to generate energy. My conclusion: some products just can't be placed, no matter how good the advertising. Also, since Charmin and Duracell are the top competitors in their generic markets (besides Scott's and Energizer), I'm not sure that they needed more advertising. Nonetheless, it was fun and we finished off the evening with some Godiva truffles and turkish delight.