Reasons You’ll Love Living in the Suburbs: The Pressure is Off!

One of the great things about living in the suburbs is that the pressure is off.  What pressure?  That unrelentingly guilty feeling that you’re always missing out on something, that you should be going to more concerts and theater and museums and clubs, and bars, and hot new restaurants.  That nagging voice in your head saying that if you’re living in the city you should be taking advantage of living in the city:

What?  You’re going to stay home and watch The Voice? What’s wrong with you?  Artcat just posted that a series of Sara Swaty portraits exploring gender identity and the body is opening this weekend at the Leslie-Lohman Museum!  The 37th Annual Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival is in previews on Theater Row!  And you’re going to watch TV?  What a plebian! What a vulgarian!

Sometimes, living in Manhattan can be mentally exhausting.  There’s just TOO MUCH to do, too many choices, too many decisions to make, and you’ll never get to everything.  Even if you go out every night, you’ll never even scrape the surface of all the shows you should be seeing, art you should be appreciating, food you should be trying.  Think of it this way — New York City has 24,000 restaurants.  Even if you eliminate the half of them that are the various warring Ray’s Pizza chains, that’s still 12,000 places to eat.  365 days a year, 3 meals a day, it would take you almost 12 years to try them all.  That’s a lot of miso-glazed cod.

Another example: right now, at this moment, there are about 25 shows playing on Broadway, and almost 60 off-broadway.  That’s 85 shows.  Go see one a day, and you might get through them in three months, at which time about a third of those shows will have closed and been replaced.  And that’s not even counting off-off-broadway.

It’s a cultural treadmill, and the guilt trip never ends.  Just pick up a copy of the Times, and you’ll see pictures of society events you never have the time to go to, reviews of restaurants you’ll never try, profiles of bands you’ll never hear.  And, even worse, it seems like EVERYONE ELSE is somehow finding the time to get more out of the city than you ever will.  You finally get out to a club, only to be told that you REALLY should go there on Tuesday nights.  Tuesday nights?  People go out Tuesday nights?  Seriously?  What do they do all day?

That’s what’s nice about the suburbs.  Yes, like everyone says, there’s not a lot to do.  But in a lot of ways, that’s a blessing.  Fewer choices, fewer decisions, easier to focus.  Rather than trying to stay afloat in an unrelenting cultural stream, you have to actually seek out opportunities for interesting theater, art openings, new restaurants.  They’re out there – even in the suburbs, there are some good restaurants and galleries and concert halls. Not as many, of course, but that’s the point.  Because the choices are fewer and further between, you don’t have that pressure to ALWAYS BE DOING SOMETHING.

So you get to give yourself a break.  It’s not your fault.  You’re living in the boring old suburbs!  So what else are you going to do but sit on your couch, put your feet up, and guiltlessly watch some lowbrow reality tv?

The SUMA Life: Finding Dim Sum in the Suburbs

The whole idea of building a “SUMA life” in the suburbs is to try to find ways to recreate and fashion an urban experience in the suburban environment, in what is probably ultimately a failed attempt to retain some semblance of the life you lived before you exiled yourself.  It’s not easy.  But it’s not supposed to be easy.  The whole point of living in the city is that you can have experiences that you simply can’t replicate when you live in the suburbs.  But as with many things, there is heroism in the attempt.

With that in mind, we wanted to try to find a place to get dim sum — the “Chinese brunch” experience that you can get in like a dozen places in Chinatown and, I would guess, in other urban Chinatowns, and, I would also guess, in, you know, China.  My wife is a Chinese-American, so dim sum became a pretty regular staple of our weekends. Most weeks, we’d just order dim sum-like appetizers from our local Chinese place, but that’s not the same.  Dim sum isn’t about the food, it’s about the experience, which requires certain atmospherics:

  • First, you need a huge warehouse-like space with a ton of people sitting, often community-style, about big tables.  You can’t get real dim sum in some fancy upscale Asian fusion restaurant.
  • Second, you need the carts, those metal monstrosities being wheeled around with all the little plates on them.  You can’t get real dim sum by ordering from a menu. Flagging down a cart, getting a plate, and then having the waitstaff stamp your “card” with some totally incomprehensible mark that eventually determines how much you’ll pay is part of the fun.
  • Third, you need a lot of food that the white people like me won’t ever eat. It’s not real dim sum if you don’t see stuff like bird’s feet or pig’s knuckles (or bird knuckles and pig’s feet, I can’t remember which) that isn’t, in my opinion, actual food, but which real Chinese people like.  (Indeed, one of the things I’ve learned about marrying into a Chinese-American family is that the greatest delicacies are precisely the foods that are most inedible, something I have learned at many Chinese wedding banquets where the only thing I could eat was the plain lo mein noodles served at the end like a palate cleanser).
  • Fourth, you need actual Chinese people eating there.  You go to Chinatown, you can tell that you’re getting authentic dim sum because there are a lot of Chinese people there. I’m not racially profiling, or whatever, I’m just pointing out that you can take certain comforts in knowing that you’re not in some tourist trap, and that the food must be good, or at least authentic, if you see them there.

All that said, I didn’t have high hopes for finding dim sum in the suburbs.  I can’t even get good everyday Chinese food like vegetable lo mein in the suburbs, much less a lip-smacking plate of bird feet.  It’s not like I’m going to eat the bird feet, but I like knowing that it’s there.

Against all odds, though, we found a place.  A simple Google search turned up an actual Chinese restaurant in Westchester called Central Seafood that’s about 20 minutes away and had some reviews mentioning the dim sum.   So we went, and it was perfect — big rooms, round tables, lots of Chinese people, food I wouldn’t possibly ever eat.  Not quite the Manhattan experience, but with some advantages like, you know, parking, and cleaner rest rooms (don’t ever go to the bathroom in Chinatown.  Ever).

So we found a small piece of SUMA, a place to get our dim sum fix  once a month, with the bonus that it’s very close to a great dog run where we can take the dog.  Although, obviously, we won’t bring the dog to the restaurant, both for the health code issue and, you know, (stipulate to a Chinese people eating dog joke).

UPDATE: We have since found another place called Aberdeen in White Plains that we haven’t tried yet.

Our First Suburban New Year’s Eve: Home with Hives

I used to hate New Year’s Eve in the city.  So do most people who actually live in the city, because it’s like the worst night of the year to go out.  The big cliche, of course, is that it’s “Amateur Night,” precisely because everyone who doesn’t normally go out decides that it’s their night to hit the city’s bars, clubs, and restaurants. (Of course, to the true urban sophisticates, a group that never included me, every weekend night is sort of an “Amateur Night,” because professional partying urbanites go out on weeknights to do things like see a particular DJ, a taste I never actually acquired).

I don’t hate New Year’s Eve because it’s Amateur Night, I hate it because it’s an artificial experience:

  • Restaurants Suck.  None of the good restaurants put out their normal menu, instead offering a “Special New Year’s Eve Prefixe!” that has like three dishes, is twice the normal price, and requires you to either eat early and skeedaddle for the late service or eat late and be sitting in a stupid restaurant when the ball drops, so you can’t see Dick Clark, bless his heart, mumble through the countdown.
  • Clubs Suck.  All the clubs ratchet up their cover charge, require you to buy multiple bottles if you actually want to sit down, and justify the increased costs because they give you a noisemaker they got for 10 cents at Ricky’s.
  • Cabs Suck.  Forget trying to get a cab on New Year’s Eve anytime after 8PM and before 4AM. Not only is the demand too high, but it seems like a whole lot of them go “off duty” all night in an attempt to get desperate women in torturous heels to pay a blackmail off-meter price.
  • Traffic Sucks.  Even if you do get a cab, or have your own car, good luck getting around the city with the bottleneck created by the monstrous Times Square celebration, where people inexplicably line up for hours so they can stand in the cold and not drink so that they can witness a big ball drop for about 60 seconds.

The whole thing is a disaster.  That’s why virtually every New Year’s Eve for the past five years or so, we had our own party, usually a nice dinner party for close friends where we’d opt out of the whole city experience, have a great meal, talk to each other in ways that you can’t if you go to any ear-blistering club, watch Dick Clark at midnight, and go to bed by 2AM or so.  Always a great night, made better for me at least by the fact that I could spend the whole night without venturing outside my front door.

That said, of course, now that we’re suburanites, we had every intention of going into the city for New Year’s Eve, because, well, we’re now EXACTLY THE SORT OF PEOPLE WHO RUIN NEW YEAR’S EVE FOR THE CITY PEOPLE!  We were looking forward to being outer-borough amateurs running around the city and making asses of ourselves.  We were going to meet up with our city friends at some swank club, overpay for drinks all night, and collapse in a ridiculously expensive hotel room for the night. Essentially, we were eager to ruin it for the rest of you.

Sadly, the Gods punished us for our heresy.  New Year’s Eve day (is that the right way to say it?), my wife comes down with some sort of allergic reaction, gets these weird hives that she never had before, and can’t go out.  We tell our friends to take our hotel room, which may be the nicest thing we’ve ever done for anyone ever, and hang out on the couch all night.

So that was our first New Year’s Eve in the suburbs: home, alone, watching TV and in bed by 12:30.  Yeeeesh.  We’re becoming suburbanites faster than I thought…….

Date Night in Nyack

Last night was our first “date night” in the suburbs. We’re still living with my parents while we wait to close on our new place (that’s a whole different post), so we’re not yet really “living” here yet. More like an extended vacation. But we decided to go out Friday night to our new neighborhood in Nyack, one of the classic “rivertowns” in the Hudson Valley, on the Rockland County side. Right on the water near the entrance to the Tappan Zee Bridge. A great little town, lots of restaurants and bars and antique shops and stuff like that.

So we drove down, actually got a parking spot on the street, and went to LuShane’s for dinner. As is the new custom, we of course ran into someone I know from working in the area for the past eight years. My wife is a little concerned that we can’t go anywhere in our new neighborhood without running into someone who knows me (I grew up here, too,) my mom (lived here like 30 years and started a business here), and my dad (doctor at Nyack Hospital for years). We have sort of lost the anonymity of Manhattan, where we lived 15 years but never, ever, ran into anyone we knew in the neighborhood — even the other people who lived in the neighborhood with us.

Dinner was good.  Great little place (we’d been there before) with a lot of atmosphere: old-fashioned tile floors, copper bar, tin ceiling.  Appetizers were great (short ribs were fantastic), entrees were okay (her fish was cold, my pasta was a little bland).  A little pricey ($100 with tip, no alcohol), but great service and generally tasty.  Would go back.  We were going to get ice cream at Temptations, a cute ice cream shop on Main Street, afterwards, but it was hugely crowded. Indeed, the wait outside Temptations kind of reminded me why I like Nyack — it has a little bit of a feel of one of those Jersey short or Hamptons summer towns, with a small but vibrant town center that is filled with locals on weekends, even though it’s a year-round residence.

Afterwards, it was off to the Palisades Mall for a movie — big giant mall, big giant movie theater, classic suburban experience.  The one lowlight of the trip was finding out that the Fox Sports Grill has closed there, so I don’t know where I’m going to get my Sunday football ten-games-at-a-time fix this fall.  Working on it.

Return from Exile: Methdadone Weekend Review

So we move out of the city on Tuesday, take Wednesday off, and then we’re back on Thursday staying at the Soho Grand for my wife’s birthday weekend.

And it was interesting.  We got a room in a completely different section of the city, down  at the bottom of Soho near canal.  It was a great opportunity to see the city from a different perspective. I forgot how much I like Soho, where I haven’t really spent time in the past few years.  It’s a very “Manhattanish” neighborhood, if that makes any sense. (And I got to check out the new High Line Park in Chelsea on the far west side, yet another way Manhattan is taunting me as I move away.)

Sadly, you can take the couple of the Upper West Side, but you can’t take the Upper West Side out of the couple.  Between a doctor’s appointment, an event at the Met, her birthday dinner, some lingering work appointments, and a party at the rooftop of the Empire Hotel, we made no fewer than six cab rides from Soho to the west side above 42d street.  I’ve spent years and years in cabs going from my uncool uptown neighborhood to downtown parties and events, so I finally become a downtown person (for a weekend) and end up spending the whole weekend handing cabbies twenties and getting back change.  I want to thank my friend Mike for waiting 15 years to throw a party on the UWS, waiting it out until the first weekend I no longer lived there.

The weekend does show the way for a recovering Manhattanite to come to a soft landing. This was a splash out weekend, for her birthday, but it is entirely possible to find a reasonably (for Manhattan) priced room, cobble together a series of things to events (hopefully that don’t require cross-island cab rides) , and have a Manhattan weekend now and then to recharge those batteries. I think the problem a lot of Manhattan exiles have is that they promise they’ll come back to the city, but let themselves sink into a suburban stupor of easy evenings at the local restaurant and an early movie rather than a 45 minute trip over a bridge and to a $60 parking garage.  I know that’s what we went through in our trial exile in 2005 when we were doing renovations, so I hope that we keep this commitment to come into the city regularly to keep that part of ourselves connected.

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My first suburban accomplishments

So how is the adjustment to SUMA going? So far, I have eaten Chinese takeout from a storefront restaurant, shot a 87 (my best round ever) at my local country club, watched a Yankee win from a big overstuffed chair, drove to two different quickie marts to find a copy of the New York Times. More importantly, I’ve eaten three meals so far with my parents, hung out with my youngest brother, reprogrammed my mother’s car so she can get country music on her satellite radio, and slept 9 hours at one time. So far so good.

What I’m going to miss

I’m going to miss Manhattan.

I’m going to miss the Upper West Side.

I’m going to miss the owner of my local dry cleaner, Ms. Kim, who has been in that store just about every time I’ve gone there in the past 15 years.

I’m going to miss the ability to get stone drunk, crawl into a cab, and be able to get safely home so long as I can properly recite my address. (I’ve always thought of getting a temporary tattoo on my forearm with my address on it, so I could just thrust my arm into the front seat and show it to him on particularly tough nights).

I’m going to miss the first really nice day of Spring, when the horrific winter weather breaks and everyone bolts into Central Park. The best park day of the year, because everyone is just so happy to be out of their apartments. And the crowdest, much more crowded than any summer weekend, since so many of those fools choose to drive five hours on Friday night to sit in what is actually a suburban house all weekend reading Hamptons magazine trying to find a hot party to go to and fooling themselves into thinking that they’re having a great time.

I’m going to miss being a 15 minute cab ride from the best live theater in the hemisphere.

I’m going to miss my neighbor Cindy, who owns the building next door to me, a four-story townhome that she bought in the early 70s for what she now gets every two months for renting the top two floors out.

I’m going to miss my wife’s “Menu book,” room service from like 50 restaurants, arranged by cuisine type (seriously).

I’m going to miss the mushroom veggie burger at the UWS Shake Shack, and regret that Danny Meyer didn’t open the damn place five years ago.

I’m going to miss going from a hot platform to a cold subway car.

I’m going to miss taking that subway car to Yankee stadium, 25 minutes from my apartment by the D, if you catch the trains right.

I’m going to miss the joy of seeing a new storefront opening up in the neighborhood, and peering into the windows to see what’s coming.

I’m going to miss going into Gin Mill on Amsterdam on football sundays to see the same group of guys, one of whom is the most dedicated displaced Eagles fan I’ve ever met.

I’m going to miss not going to museums. I’d like to say I go to museums, but…not so much.

Last, I’m going to miss telling people that I live in Manhattan, and feeling that this fact alone entitles me to a certain level of respect.

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What I’ll miss most — room service

This is going to be hard.

Just got home after a loooong day. The wife is out with some friends, so I have the place to myself. Perhaps there was a time when I’d go out and play some pool, actually interact with other human beings. But, again, it was a long day with a bunch of extra “o’s”, so all I want to do is collapse on a sofa. And no way I’m going to cook anything.

Which brings me to room service. Maybe the best unsung feature of urban living. Actually better than room service in any hotel in the country. I’ve literally got a notebook full of menus (the wife is crazy like that), probably 50 restaurants in my area that deliver, just about any cuisine you want. 14 types of Chinese food. Sushi, Italian, Jewish deli, Malaysian food, French, Thai (although we’re strangely a little lean on Thai food on the upper west side the last few years, and the closing of the Vietnamese place on 81st and Amsterdam was a tragedy on par with the Watchman movie).

(Quick aside — call up Penang.  Get the roti telur, ask for an extra side of the curry sauce. It’s like $2.  Also get some coconut rice.  When you’re done eating the Roti Telur, pour the sauce over the rice. Eat the rice.  Email me and tell me how much you love me for turning you on to this.)

Tonight it was onion soup and fettucini with short ribs from Bistro Citron, which is also a dependable place for mussels provencale. $25 bucks, plus tip (you gotta tip the delivery guys well, with the life they lead), 25 minutes tops, and I’m eating. I will miss this.

I don’t know why suburban restaurants don’t focus on delivery, but my guess is that they’re bound into the idea that people in the suburbs cook their dinners. I don’t know about that. Seems a little “Leave it to Beaver” for me. I work in the suburbs in a workplace that is 85% women, and when I’m there at 6PM with a lot of them I don’t get the impression that they’re on the way home to cook up a casserole. I already have a job, but I encourage some young entrepreneur to start one of those services that connects restaurants about to go out of business with suburban families eating their fourth Chinese delivery meal of the week.

UPDATE: looked up some places online, like this one.  But my guess is that they service only selected areas.  Alas!

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I Love Manhattan, but I’m leaving….

I love living in Manhattan.

I love watching the evening news, and seeing that someone was run over by a car or stabbed or something, and being able to say, “hey, that’s like three blocks from my apartment!”

I love getting room service any time I want from my big book of delivery menus that my wife has actually collated, three-hole-punched, and put in a binder organized by ethnicity.

I love going to Central Park on Saturday mornings for some of the pickup softball games in the Great Lawn or the uptown ball fields.

I love the fact that my little neighborhood sandwich shop, Lenny’s, is now all over the city, and that other people get to share in the joy of a Thanksgiving turkey sandwich all year round.

I love pretending that I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art because I have a membership card that says I’m a supporter, even though I never go.

I love my local restaurants Calle Ocho and Barbao, run by people I like and respect, although I liked going to brunch at Calle Ocho more before everyone else found out about the free sangria.

I love going to the meatpacking district and remembering where the transvestite hookers used to hang out, and seeing people buying $1500 handbags there.

I love walking around my neighborhood on the upper west side, playing the game of “what used to be here.”  Like, the northeast corner at 82d and Columbus is a “corner of retail death,” one of many in the city.  It’s now a Mexican restaurant called Comida.  Before that, a semi-Southern-creole-could-never-quite-figure-it-out place called Madaeline Mae’s.  Before that, a faux Irish pub called TJ O’Briens.  Before that, the estimable and lamented Kitchen 82.  And before that, Corner (run by the Lenny’s folk until they realized they could do better just making more Lennys).  And, finally, before that, a local grocery called Casanas, which I still miss because they had these cheap homemade burritos that I’ve never been able to find anywhere else.

I love the fact that you can buy a nudie mag on pretty much every street corner, not that you would when so much more effective material is available now on the internet.  But they’re still there, and basic economics says that someone must still be buying them.

I love being able to decide spontaneously to drink one night, knowing I don’t have to drive home, and that I can get back to my apartment so long as I can remember my address and be able to speak it out loud.

I love it all, and yet, and yet…..I am leaving.

I’m moving out.  Selling the apartment that I bought in 1994, renovated and combined with another unit in 2004, and getting out.  No more Upper West Side.  No more delivery food. No more Central Park.

Why would I do this? It was time.  I’ve lived here for almost 20 years, soaking up as much Manhattan as I could.  But I work outside the city, and have for about six years.  A 45 minute commute, each way, every day.  That wears on you.  And, frankly, as much as I love Manattan, I wasn’t getting a lot out of it when I’m getting home at 8PM exhausted from my drive and long day.  And as much as I love my brownstone apartment, I’m tired of climbing stairs every day.  People joke about how it keeps me in shape to climb two flights to my living room.  It doesn’t.

But here’s my problem.  I grew up in the suburbs, I work in the suburbs, and I know the suburbs.  And I’m terrified about living in the suburbs.  I don’t see why my life should change, I don’t know why I shouldn’t be able to create some semblance of my city life in the suburbs, with interesting bars and good restaurants and fun things to do.  So I’m writing this blog to document my search for that life, that search for an urbanized existence in a suburban environment.

But some of the signs are not so good. My wife and I were exiled to the suburbs in 2004 when we were renovating our apartment, six months of Cheescake Factory Fridays and bars filled with guys wearing flannel and wierd sections of the New York Times that I never saw before.  We kept saying we’d come into the city, and we did.  Three or four times.  Not a good sign.

Can I really live there? Can I live without mixology and Malaysian delivery and a short subway ride to Yankee Stadium?  Can I find new friends and new places to hang out without becoming the suburban guy that I was as a kid.

I’m going to find out.

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