Monday, June 30, 2008

New Amsterdam Market: HUGE Success!


What an amazing day! New York came out in droves to support the market, and Peck Slip rang with the crack of fresh sourdough and the slosh of pickles in their jars and cheese bubbling on hot grills and oysters gasping for breath, and people hawking, licking their fingers, and the ringing of cash, cash, kizz-aaash.

And, of course, the buzz of a shaver rolling over ice, the slurp of syrup sliding down the inside of a Dixie cup, and the clack a borrowed freezer makes when it opens and closes about 300 times.

By 2 pm, the people had spoken. We were sold out. I don’t know who found the bottle of bubbly, but by the time the rain came, it was drained. After about two seconds of packing up, we were off to the bar for as much beer as our massive stack of ones would buy. Thank you, New York!


Also, it seemed the press was as excited about us as our customers were! Check out these lovely reviews about us below:

New York Magazine:


Eatery:



Serious Eats (No review, but a pretty swank photo!):


What I Made For Dinner:


Until next time!

Saturday, June 28, 2008

New Amsterdam Market, Here We Come!


Much to my surprise, we’re ready, and in the past 48 hours—this is a conservative estimate, now—the five of us have only aged on average ten years apiece. We have our freezer, rented from a cool old-school Italian-ice-vendor freezer manufacturer in Queens, Worksman Cycles; we’ve rented a van, to carry the freezer; we laid chalkboard paint on plywood to make signs with; we ironed names onto our t-shirts; we have business cards and hats and dry ice and 75 pounds of wet ice and 300 pops and a few gallons of lemon-basil syrup and g*ddamn it we’re still alive.

Game time!!

Menu

Pops:
“Strawberries and Cream”

“Rhubarbalicious”

“Blue Velvet” (blueberries, yogurt and honey)


Shave Ice:
Lemon and Basil
Cherry and Cocoa (interesting)

Friday, June 27, 2008

Trials & Icy Tribulations

The People’s Pops hasn’t seen much action, but it’s time to mobilize if this is going to happen. In hotel rooms (I’ve been traveling all month) my two preliminary trials have yielded totally mediocre results: rock-hard pops, bland, with the julienned mint I’d added for flavor and aesthetics giving the effect of finding pieces of dental floss in your sorbet. It is now clear why gums and stabilizers enjoy such a privileged position in commercial pops. What are the chances there’s a stall at the ass end of the Greenmarket that’ll sell me some…?

OF COURSE, because luck is just soooo on our side, none of the fruits for sale at the end of June are ones any of us have experimented with (my friends Lucy and Ben and David and Joel have joined the effort at this point, and thank God, because now there’s five of us going insane instead of just me). We bought cherries, which Ben spent hours pitting, only to discover once we’d thrown them in the blender that we’d bruised their beautiful red into a bloody, muddy, ugly brown. Sieving blueberries of their seeds and skin, we now know, leaves you with basically nothing. And organic lemons at Whole Foods cost a f*cking dollar apiece.

What a sh*tshow.

Love, NJ