Osha Thai Kitchen, UES with Borbay

When Borbay spent six months on a Big Brother-style reality show he knew who he needed to impress. It wasn’t the other housemates or the unseen, unknown viewers or even the show’s executives. The focus of his charm offensive was the foot-soldiers: the producers on the ground, the cameraman and the rest of the crew.

Borbay realised early on that whether he came across as a fun-loving, whacky, extrovert or an arrogant peacock would all be down to the editing. So to make sure the crew portrayed him in the very best light, he spent a good deal of time carrying their cameras, helping out with shoots and generally ingratiating himself.

Back then in 2003, Borbay was still plain Jason Borbet, newly graduated, living in Boston and trying to figure out what to do next. Which as it would turn out, involved a move to New York, a brief spell in the city’s stand-up clubs and, following a chance introduction, a couple of well-paid years working as an ad exec in Trump Towers.

Since July though, Jason, now 29, has rebranded himself Borbay the professional artist. And that survival strategy he developed on The Roomies show has already helped ensure him a surprising degree of success in a precarious profession.

Today, the objects of Borbay’s charm offensive aren’t just the gallery owners and the collectors but store marketing directors, his contacts on Twitter and, for this September evening, a take-out reviews blogger.

Borbay lives with his girlfriend Erin in a tower on E93rd Street. I’m still new enough to New York to notice when a doorman calls ahead to announce me. It seems to suggest luxury – though probably away from the Brooklyn walk-ups where I spend most of my time this is just bog standard.

I’d come to share take-out with Borbay because @museumnerd – museum critic, first-class Twitterer and a new friend in the real world – suggested he was quite a character. Since then I’d visited his site, read about some of his ballsy antics, and seen a portrait of him in alpha male advertising pose and white dandy hat. So when he opened the door to me, neither the apartment – a bijou one bed – nor Borbay – also bijou, moustached and faultlessly polite and proper – were at all what I’d expected.

I’d arrived with a list of suggestions of take-out places we could try, rather fancying pizza. But Borbay and Erin said no, there were no good pizza take-outs near them, and besides they had an idea of their own.

Osha Thai Kitchen – a new Thai restaurant on 2nd Avenue between 88th and 89th Streets – hasn’t caught the attention of the professional reviewers. But on user review sites Yelp and Menu Pages it’s been getting rave write ups.

In the few months since Osha Thai Kitchen opened, Borbay has become quite a regular. Its cute interior with black wallpaper and ironic chandeliers along with its BOYB policy makes it feel more Williamsburg than Upper East Side, he says. Osha doesn’t have its own website, but it’s menu is available online on Menu Pages.

Borbay loves this place. In fact, he’s so enthusiastic, I’m fighting back the thought that maybe he owns a stake. Or perhaps he’s out to sell them a painting.

There are canvases all over the apartment – some hung, some stacked against the wall. Among them is one of the restaurant Elaine’s – that famed celebrity hangout on the Upper East Side.

Borbay was in the street outside Elaine’s working on this painting when he caught the attention of the marketing director of sports-restaurant-cum-games-arcade ESPN Zone. If Borbay would paint their building next, the marketing man said, they would promote it as part of their tenth anniversary celebrations.

Being willing to seize this sort of marketing opportunity, Borbay says, makes him an anomaly in the artworld. He makes no pretence of wanting to be a starving artist living in the ghetto and sneering at the successful. “Artists are flakes and idiots. I’m half artist, half advertising. I’ll hustle.”

There’s another painting here waiting to be shipped to a collector in Milan. It’s of the Guggenheim and one of the first he’s sold since leaving the day job. If you want to increase your chances of being noticed by a random passing art-lover, setting up your easel outside one of New York’s great galleries isn’t a bad strategy.

Borbay also understands the potential of the web to propel an unknown to public attention. He has a strong presence on Twitter (@borbay) which he uses to drive traffic to his blog where he documents his painting process with detailed photographs. His output – on canvas, online, in conversation – is prolific.

When you first start broadcasting your life on Twitter, it can feel a little like being on reality TV. I was poised to quiz Borbay on the origins of that particular chapter of his life story, when the food arrived, five minutes ahead of the 20 minutes we’d been told.

I can’t speak for Osha’s service since Borbay took charge both of ordering and receipt of delivery. But he insisted it was, as ever, impeccable. For the sake of full disclosure here, I should add that Borbay not only bought the wine but also paid for my take-out.

We’d ordered a starter of curry puffs ($5) which were delicate little bites of deep fried puff pastry filled with chicken, onion and potato with a cucumber dipping sauce – like a lighter, tastier somosa. Borbay was so keen on those curry puffs, we let him eat the last one. (Maybe it wasn’t a painting commission he was after from Osha but a supply of free curry puffs.)

My red chicken curry ($10) had a good balance of chicken to bamboo and bell pepper, in a delicately flavoured sauce with just enough punch. Take-out noodles can be both greasy and soggy but Ellen’s See Eiw with shrimp ($10), wide ribbon noodles, egg, broccoli with dark soy sauce was also a hit. And Borbay reported that his Chicken Pad Thai ($9) – his Thai restaurant yardstick dish – was as good as he’d ever had it: “I love how light it is and that you don’t feel you’re going to explode after.”

Borbay had brought out the Warhol Marilyn plates, but since we were crouching round the coffee table, it was easier to eat our food straight out of the thick round plastic tubs it came in. As far as practicality goes, those almost Tupperware-thick plastic boxes are great for keeping food warm, but environmentally pretty shocking. Maybe they should use proper Tupperware and offer a return fee.

While I was worrying about the environmental impact of the containers, Borbay confessed to having had a serious concern of his own. The night before, he’d told a friend that I was coming round, and that I’d “probably turn up with a bunch of food or something”.

“And then I was like, you know what, maybe we should order that together in case, I don’t know, you could turn up with some food and fucking poison us. And we’re sitting here talking and then we’re foaming out of the mouth and then we’re dead. I’ve seen it in the movies.”

The absurd idea that I might play the villain in some modern day hitchhike horror reminded me to ask Borbay about his own performance, in that reality show.

As he tells it, he was hanging around Boston after college thinking he might move to LA, when one day, drunk in the middle of the afternoon, he passed a sign outside the Rack bar announcing that auditions for a reality show were taking place that afternoon. Impulsively, he decided to put himself forward, grabbed a double Jack and Coke and said: “What’s up. Let’s do this thing.”

It won’t surprise anyone to learn that the show, which went out over the internet, was as much fiction as reality. Unlike Big Brother, the budget didn’t stretch to 24-hour filming, so when the crew did turn up, Borbay and his fellow house members had to act out the latest episode in the drama.

“The producers would say: “We don’t want to spend our whole day filming, so you Gay Guy, you’re going to get into a fight with Gangsta Rapper, and you Diva are going to be pissed off with them because it’s blowing up your spot on this, so lets film a scene and get it over with.””

By now we’ve got through a couple of bottles of wine and we’re all firm friends. Erin’s given me advice on my sleep problems and Borbay’s raved about the aromatherapy practice she’s just set up. He’s a rapid-fire talker with opinions on everything. For example, the history of sexual relations according to Borbay goes something like this.

“Society’s all fucked up. It used to be you got married at 15 and had a couple of kids at 15 and you farmed and shit and then you died. Then people started living older and after a while people’s penises fail and they’re sort of in this monotonous thing and then all of a sudden Viagra comes out and 65, 70, 75 year-old men are finding their erections again. And they’re going, I’m going to go out and enjoy this thing and even their wives are 25 now. Next thing we’ll be like this movie, Surrogates. And we’ll all be virgins in the vessel of a body….”

Borbay was in full flow now and could have kept chattering on this way for hours if I hadn’t decided it was getting late and time to head off. But before I left there was one more thing he wanted to show me.

Everyone in New York, I’m discovering, has a skeleton (or several) in their closet and Borbay took great pleasure in showing me his. It wasn’t a rotting corpse, but it did smell like one. In this squeezed apartment he shares with Erin, there’s one decent cupboard, full, not of her clothes, but his stinking hockey gear. I’m not sure how many women in this city would tolerate that. No doubt the Borbay charm offensive won him the wardrobe. Who knows where else it might take him.

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Osha Thai Kitchen

Address 1711 2nd Ave (between 88th St & 89th St) New York
Phone: (212) 427-3077
Menu: http://www.menupages.com/restaurants/osha-thai-kitchen/
Delivery range: 75th Street to 98th Street; 5th Avenue to East End Avenue
Times: Mon-Thurs. 11:00 am-11:00 pm; Fri-Sat 11:30 am- 11:30 pm; Sun 11:00 am-11:00 pm
Payment: Cash on delivery, or credit card by phone