I am going to call this woman and tell her i can do it for $500. Sounds like easy money.

Atkins-friendly grocery in the jet blue terminal at jfk. With sushi!

Goodbye treo. You have served me well. Well, not really. You break all the time. You have had four predecessors in the last two years. I love you when you are functioning, but you are, essentially, a piece of shit. It's true I will miss your qwerty keyboard, and this message took longer to type using T9 on a 12-key Nokia 6236i. But at least the Nokia should last more than a few months, and I won't have to constantly call Verizon to have it replaced. Farewell, old friend.

Revised list. Forgot some key items.

Dear bartenders:

I am no longer going to order a Sazerac from you unless it is on your drink menu. I apologize for ridiculing you (except for that jerk at the corner bar). I still believe that you should know how to make this seminal cocktail, but most of you don't, so I will stop torturing both of us. The "Sazerac" pictured here is from Schiller's -- it is in some kind of highball glass, on the rocks, without sugar, made with cheap bourbon (not rye) and watered down but not with soda water. Basically a Jack Daniels with water on the rocks in a tall glass. For like $12. Bartenders, I'm wasting your time, my money and my cocktail enjoyment. I shall trouble you no more. (I did have a nice Sidecar at the Big Bar later in the evening. Do you know how to make a Sidecar?)

Sincerely,

Chad

Royalton Hotel in Midtown. This is one of those Sazeracs where I dictated the recipe to the waitress. I guess the bartender didn't know the drink either, but he/she did a pretty good job. Too much Pernod and a marachino cherry, but what can I expect? A damn well made Sazerac, that's what! How do you get to be a bartender without learning this? And if you don't know it, don't you have a bar book somewhere back there? Also, note the martini glass -- I asked for it in an old fashioned glass but the waitress said they didn't have any fancy glasses like that. Then I ordered a Maker's Mark on the rocks and it came in an old fashioned glass. I guess I should have said "tumbler" or "whisky glass."

As promised, list amended to reflect further shortcomings (see comments on previous post).

A list taped to the refrigerator is really the only thing that ever motivates me to get shit done. I've been pretty lazy and not very healthy lately, so time for a new list. If you are aware of other major faults I need to correct, please advise and I will consider adding the appropriate remedy to my list.

Best Sazerac in bar yet. At Employees Only in the west village. Peychaud bitters, glasses coated in Absente (a perfectly servicable non-wormwood absinthe substitute), Wild Turkey, perfect amount of sugar properly muddled with the bitters, lemon twist, served straight up. The bartender actually coated the insides of the glasses with the Absente by tossing them up in the air so that they spun around several times at high velocity -- surely the best technique for coating a glass if you can manage it. I'm guessing you might have to go to New Orleans to get one this good. Oh yeah -- because the joint really is owned by the employees they've circumvented the worker-safety smoking ban in NYC and you can smoke at the bar. I've decided to swear off my social smoking, so this was a good send-off.

Artfully made but not very authentic Sazerac at Angel Share in East Village. I like this bar a lot and the bartenders have a very deliberate technique which is fun to watch. The big problem here was the use of Old Taylor bourbon instead of rye -- strange because the Old Overholt was right there. Maybe they're just confused about bourbons named after old guys? I can almost forgive the ice since it came in the form of a giant block that was like 2 inches on each side.

Sazeracs at Shiller's Liquor bar in LES suck. Valerie and I chose some "hip" bars for a Sazerac taste-test (see subsequent posts) and this was our first stop. This is also the first place I ever had one, but now that I know a little bit I was very disappointed. I didn't even take a photo. It was on the rocks with seltzer water, the latter being just about the best way to ruin this drink. The Pernod was simply dumped in at the end in wildly excessive amounts. They inexplicably had Peychaud bitters on hand because "one of the bartenders demanded it for making Sazeracs." Maybe that guy knows what he's doing. If so he should share the love.

Here is the latest gripping theme which will compel you to consume this blog with wanton disregard for other more productive activities in which you might foolishly engage yourself. It is called natto. It is a foodstuff eaten in Japan for breakfast. Natto is fermented (read: rotten) soybeans. The idea here is to consciously explore and document the accquiring of a new taste. I will eat natto for breakfast every day until I like it. There is no better candidate for this exercise than natto, since it tastes like... well... nothing I've ever had before, but not in a good way. I'm undertaking this experiment with Valerie, and if you want to follow along you can read more at thenattoproject.com. RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheNattoProject