There’s barely time for lunch at Makerbot Industries. Which explains why there’s no dining table or chairs in the Brooklyn robot factory and why, for my Indian take-out with Bre, we ate standing up.

When you’ve just launched a Star Trek-style replicator machine set to kick-start a second industrial revolution, lunch is bound to be the first casualty. And with word about the Makerbot spreading and new orders doubling by the month, for Bre and his two business partners, leisure time and sleep are also in short supply.

I’d come to be Nail Souping with Bre thanks to Earl Grey tea. Every month, several hundred members of New York’s tech community come together to learn about the newest applications and inventions. Back in June, Bre took to the stage at the NY Tech MeetUp to demonstrate the Makerbot: A self-assembly, open source 3-d printer that serves as a personal mini factory. It uses a biodegradable plastic substitute to create small objects you can either design yourself or download from a site called Thingiverse, a catalogue of things dreamt up by other Makerbot users.

I’ve been going to the Tech MeetUp since I first arrived in the city and just as fascinating as the presentations is the audience response. The solution of a particularly knotty problem draws gasps of admiration and spontaneous applause.

There’s nothing new about rapid prototyping machines and 3-D printers. They’ve been around for years. But when Bre mentioned the price of his gizmo, the audience was stunned. While a standard rapid prototyping machine costs 10s of 1,000s of dollars, the Makerbot will set you back just $750.

For me it was the simile the excitable Bre Pettis used to describe his machine that got my attention. And so I tweeted my own appreciation: “So that’s why I like geeks,” I wrote. “Makerbot man just called his replicator machine “hot, like Earl Grey tea””. Having just written a blog post about Americans’ sloppy attitude to our national drink, I knew that here was a man I could share refreshments with.

So for a while now I’ve wanted to visit Makerbot Industries, aka The BotCave. But as I know from following his updates on Twitter,  @bre is a busy man. There are bots to make and talks to give and conferences to attend across the country. It took us a few months to find a time and even then not an evening but a lunchtime slot.

The BotCave is not in some hidden location beneath the subway guarded by wolfhounds and laser alarms, but in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn on 3rd Avenue at Bergen Street. This is Bre’s true native habitat – his apartment is deeply boring, he’d told me, no more than a place to crash. At the far end of the ground-floor warehouse space are three desks for Bre (marketing and front man), Adam (head software boffin) and Zach (operations chief). On a low table is a cluster of bots for company use and to give demos to folks like me. When I arrived, newly-hired employee Marisel was putting together the latest batch at one of the two high workbenches that serves as the Makerbot production line, while the rest of the space was taken up with empty boxes waiting to be filled and shipped out.

Bre and his partners were amazed at how quickly the business took off and how busy they became so soon. They’ve sold 400 bots to date, mainly to designers, architects, school teachers and tinkerers but also “to people who just want to live in the future”. Their vision, like Bill Gates’ dream of a PC on every desk, is that one day there will be a Makerbot in every home. Or as Bre, who clearly has no time for cooking puts it: “Within five years you’ll have a Makerbot next to your microwave.”

For now though, their biggest challenge is scaling up the three man, two employee, five intern operation to keep up with demand. Each new batch they produce sells out within days, but they don’t can’t produce more than 100 a month.

Bre’s amiability wasn’t an act for his MeetUp presentation. He’s one of those geeks with social skills, making him the right choice for company front man. His wide-eyed excitement is as evident off stage as on. I’d only met him in person, briefly, just once before I turned up for lunch, but he welcomed me into the BotCave as if we were old friends.

In Star Trek, they don’t have to bother with take-out menus, delivery boys, or 30 minute waiting times. If the Makerbot was a replicator machine like the ones Captain Jean Luc Picard and the crew use, we wouldn’t have had to call out for lunch but simply said the words chicken tikka masala, and within seconds it would have materialised.

Sadly though, Makerbot uses only one source material, and though it’s derived from corn and biodegradable, by the time it’s been through the manufacturing process, far from edible. For domestic 3-D printers to ever produce food they would need access to a full range of raw materials. Though it’s not an impossible prospect, according to Bre we’re more likely to see machines that manufacture nutritional supplements in tablet form.

That said, the Makerbot has been known to make peanut butter and jelly toast  – a culinary adventure that took place a few weeks before at Yahoo’s Hack Day. Hacking, as I now know after sharing Nail Soup with geek anthropologist Biella Coleman, isn’t all about breaking into the Pentagon. Originally the word hack meant to adapt technology to uses not originally intended by its creators. Before long though, the media had seized on the idea that this was always for illegal or mischievous intent, so that now most people understand hacking as infiltrating other people’s systems or otherwise making trouble.

Today though, with ever increasing opportunities for hacking in the original sense as geeks breaks out of their ghetto, the benign meaning of the word is regaining ground. I’ve already heard Heston Blumenthal-style gastronomic experimentation referred to as “food hacking”, and suspect that like “curating” it will soon become omnipresent, escaping the technology pages to become a favourite with Luddite arts, lifestyle, and perhaps even, fashion writers.

Hacking also gives rise to mash-ups (another already widely appropriated term) – the throwing together of two technologies to serve a third, altogether different, purpose. Which is where the toast comes in.

The climax of Yahoo’s Hack Day at a hotel in Times Square was a 24 hour contest, in which teams of geeks competed to produce the best spontaneous hack. As the day’s panel discussions drew to a close, and the action switched to a suite of conference rooms on the top floor, I spotted Bre and his team setting up camp beside the other hopefuls hunkering down for an all-nighter.  I was off to a mysterious film screening and planned to be back later that night to check on their progress but my evening instead took an altogether different turn. (I’ve been sworn to secrecy about what happened that night but will write about it for Pink Iguana once my embargo lifts in January.)

Meanwhile, back in Times Square, Bre’s team set about modifying the Makerbot, replacing the plastic extruder with a syringe filled with jelly. They then hooked it up to an online weather forecaster, fed it with toast spread with peanut butter and watched while it drew weather symbols with the jelly: a cloud with the sun behind, falling rain, at one point even a tsunami warning. “We didn’t sleep for 40 hours,” Bre enthused. “ It was great.”

Unsurprisingly, Bre and the Makerbot won the contest. I wish I’d made it back to see it happen.

Though there were still some traces of jam left on one of the Makerbots at the BotCave, it had been far from idle since the toast experiment. In the days before our Nail Soup lunch, it had been busy reproducing objects for inclusion in a show about digital design, including miniature busts of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke.

A look at the finished product helps explain why the bot is so much cheaper than a conventional rapid prototyper. Objects do lack finesse, they’re a little rough round the edges, and because the Makerbot doesn’t have the support mechanism needed to prevent sagging with more difficult shapes, they can need some tidying up post-production. But Bre is unfazed: The problem will be resolved when they develop a version two next year. “We’re working on that. We’re going to have it. We’ll be all set soon.”

Bre had got the Makerbot building a mini goblet, and now it was hard at work, its nozzle back and forthing, squeezing out lines of plastic, layer on layer until a circular foot shape began to emerge. It was giving off a faint burning smell. “Ah, the smell of the future,” Bre said. But I was thinking more about the noise it was making. A whining singsong like a more repetitive version of early dial up. If they’d self-consciously manufactured that noise to complement their robot’s Heath Robinson aesthetic, I doubt they’d have come up with anything more expressive.

Bre had ordered us Indian food from Baluchi’s – workaday nosh for hungry people, fuel for the troops in the frontline of the techno revolution. When it arrived he laid out the plastic tubs of curry on the second of the two high benches and with no stools to sit at (“we normally just eat at our desks”) we stayed standing up, plates in hand.
“Ah, breakfast,” Bre said.
“We’re trying to add a bit of work-life balance so we don’t all burn out,” he added, racing through his curry.

Eating standing up is not something I do too often and lends itself to eating far to fast. So when Bre, itching to get back to doing useful stuff, said in his chirpy Sesame Street voice: “Lets go see what the Makerbot’s doing.” I was more than happy to follow if it meant I could sit down for a bit.

While we’d been away, the goblet had gone a little wrong so Bre set to sorting that out. When the Makerbot was back on track I asked him about his other start-up, the hackers collective, NYC Resistor.  Which was precisely the wrong question since it gave him the perfect cue to draw our lunch proceedings to a close.

“I’ve got to go there now actually if you want to come along,” he said. Which of course I did. But first he posed for a couple of quick photos, like a proper pro, before pulling on his woolly hat and making for the exit.

And so we left the BotCave and walked the ten blocks to Bridge Street. Away from the distractions of the Makerbot, I was able to get Bre’s life story. His delight in the making of things – his personal tagline is “I make things” – started long before Makerbot or Thingiverse. As a teacher in Seattle he showed his class of kids how to conjure up their own cool stuff, widening his audience when he became one of the first video bloggers. He still makes videos and has his own channel on YouTube. They’re fun to watch; he’s pretty theatrical. Next time the Doctor Who role opens up, I think I’ll lobby for Bre.

In 2006, he’d begun to make a bit of money in Seattle, so thought he’d take a month off at a time to visit different cities around the world. But for his first trip he chose New York and never left. At first he produced videos for Make Magazine later joining Etsy as new media producer. And then Zach asked him and Adam if they’d like to set up in business together producing the Makerbot, an idea Zach had been obsessing about. “And then while we made it we didn’t sleep for a while.”

Bre has a beautiful, idealistic vision. He sees the Makerbot leading a fundamental shift in our relationship to the things we produce, own and use. When we make our own objects at home – whether that’s a part for a broken light fitting or an engagement ring (yes, that design is on Thingiverse) – we’ll go to the store a lot less, cut out the supply chain, reduce transportation and scale back our environmental impact.

“We’re living in an interesting time. Makerbot lets you route around the entire commercial process. Instead of buying or shopping for something, you download a design and you’re done. Will it make us more responsible consumers? I hope so. Kids attitudes now are changing from, I need one, to, I’ll download one and make it better, or if it’s not been designed yet, I’ll design one.”

There was a definite whiff of that idealism at NYC Resistor. The minute we got there I wished I made stuff rather than wrote about it. Writers spaces are silent, humourless places for solitary working, whereas I’m guessing it would be a real laugh to hang out at Resistor. Its members meet there to learn from each other, work on collaborative projects and run workshops for the wider hacker community. It was here that the friendships between the Makerbot team were formed.

There was music playing and friendly nerds to chat to so I hung around while Bre sat down with fellow member Raphael to discuss his idea for a self-assembly digital watch. If anyone can do the impossible and make a cool digital watch it’s Bre. And then he had his woolly hat on again and we were off. He was going into Manhattan to be interviewed by the New York Times and I was going home, so as he got on the 2 train I went looking for Hoyt-Schermerhorn.

That evening, I hung out with my friend Janine. Janine is an artist, a stylist and another excited maker of things – like a six foot tall set of headphones, or a rainbow made of giant Christmas baubles. While we chatted, she was sticking bits of bark on a rubber tube to make a Pinocchio nose for a magazine shoot the following day.

Janine is also about as non-techy as it gets, but when I told her about the marvels of the Makerbot she was all ears. If she could print just some of the objects she needs, rather than chase around the shops for them, that $750 would quickly pay for itself.

I’ve promised to take Janine back with me to the BotCave. And since I owe Bre and the Bot Makers lunch, I think we’ll turn up with some really great take out. And some Earl Grey tea. And maybe we’ll even take them a picnic table and some chairs to sit on.

*

THE FOOD

Baluchi’s Park Slope
Address 310 5th Ave (between 2nd & 3rd Streets) Brooklyn, New York.
Phone: (718) 832 5555
Online orders: baluchis.com/orderonline or through delivery.com
Menu: baluchis.com
Delivery range: 15 block radius. $15 minimum order.
Times: 11.30 am to 10.00 pm Monday to Sunday (But closed 3-5 pm Monday to Friday)
Payment: Cash on delivery, or credit card over the phone or online

Bre used delivery.com to order our lunch from Baluchi’s, a chain, with 12 Indian restaurants in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens – the Soho branch in particular gets great write ups on Yelp. The northern Indian dishes they offer include Tandoori, creamy sauced curries, samosas and kebabs. But to cater to America tastes less accustomed to the spiciness of traditional Indian food, the heat has been turned right down, so that Adam’s vindaloo (despite the very hot warning on the menu) was pretty mild rather than fiery.

Chicken korma is the safe dish to order in Indian restaurants, the popular lady’s choice. But I didn’t mind conforming to the stereotype. There’s no single right way to make a korma, but a number of acceptable variations, and this one (at $11.95, rice included – prices vary between branches) was on the creamy side with almonds and a touch of sweetness. The sauce was OK, not the best I’ve had, but the chicken had barely picked up any of the flavour. The menu lists a number of sauces you can order on their own (at $6.95 each), which made me suspect the chicken and sauce might have been cooked separately. Admirably, Baluchi’s offers ample choice for vegetarians, including Bre’s baigan bhartha, an acceptable dish of roasted eggplant (aubergines) with onions and peas ($10.95).

But if the food was unexceptional, the portions were huge, all of it was hot and there was ample rice. This was workaday nosh for hungry people, fuel for the troops in the frontline of the techno revolution.

*

Images: New York toast photos from Bre Pettis’ Flickrstream; Baluchi’s store front by Akuban; Makerbot objects from Global Nerdy.

Now that geek is the new punk and messing about with computers is a route to cool not social death, there’s kudos to having been there since the start. Were you a brave pioneer while the rest of the world was still screaming freak? Or did you only release your inner geek once the stigma had safely passed?

Biella wasn’t a geek at school. She wasn’t into maths or Dungeons and Dragons and she didn’t own a computer until she was 20. But she was a nerd – the geek’s direct cousin – and she has the photo to prove it. Soon to be featured in a coffee table book of awkward family portraits, Biella’s favourite childhood shot shows her aged ten in goofball outfit: Pacman t-shirt, white sandals paired with white socks, slicked back hair. As she explains on her blog, growing up nerd in Puerto Rico, home to a disproportionate number of Miss World contestants, wasn’t the easiest path.

I first met Biella briefly back in early summer at a talk about online copyright. We’d been following each other on Twitter for a few months when she tweeted that photo. In contrast to her, I’d been big on maths and science at school without being a nerd. But I did have an equally eccentric dress sense. So for Biella’s amusement, I tweeted back my own 12 year old look: bowler hat, Peruvian jumper and pink plastic mac.

Odd outfits aren’t all we have in common. Gabriella Coleman, Biella to her friends, is an anthropologist on tenure track at NYU. Anthropology isn’t just a subject, but a prism through which to view the world, so though my own anthropological training ended after post-grad, it still frames my outlook. If I hadn’t left academia, I’m sure I would also have gravitated towards Biella’s specialism, digital anthropology. She studies the internet tribes: the phone phreakers, hackers, trolls and griefers and most particularly, the various groups that make up the open software movement.

There was no sign of either the goofball or the Pacman T-shirt when I turned up at Biella’s apartment. She’s housed by the university in a dedicated block on Washington Place between Mercer and Greene, where she lives with her boyfriend Micah.

It’s not the university’s best accommodation – the most senior faculty live it up in private, gated Washington Mews. But it would certainly do for me. A large, white, one-bed with a generous sitting room and modern kitchen, furnished in eclectic mix of old and new, a block and a half from Washington Square Park and (though I was far too polite to ask for an exact figure) no doubt cheap as chips.

Biella’s other foothold is in San Juan, Puerto Rico where, during the long university vacations, she helps care for her mother who has Alzheimers. Biella’s mother is half Venezualan, half Russian and her father is from the US. So Puerto Rico wasn’t an obvious place for her parents to settle. All the anthropologists I’ve known have had some early experience as an outsider, so I’m guessing for Biella it was this mixed cultural background as much as being school nerd.

A few months ago, I took the train upstate to Dover Planes to interview an amazing old man called John Johansen. Architect, limerick writer, school friend of JFK, and happy soul with a beautiful New England drawl reminiscent of Katherine Hepburn, Johansen was also one of a group of five influential modernists who settled in New Canaan, Connecticut just after the war (Marcel Breuer and Philip Johnson were among the others).

I tweeted that I was off to meet one of the Harvard Five, and instantly Biella messaged me in response. Was this Johansen one of the Harvard Five phone phreakers, she wanted to know. If so, she needed to talk to me urgently.

I’m sure Johansen, the world’s leading proponent of nanoarchitecture and still maverick at 93, would enjoy being mistaken for a phreaker. It was the late ’50s when a blind seven year old boy with perfect pitch, Joe Engressia, discovered that if he whistled down the phone at a frequency of exactly 2600 Hz (the fourth E above middle C ) he could make long distance calls for free. As word spread about this backdoor into the phone system, the phreakers were born, soon counting among their number Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. And so began a long lineage of hackers – benign and malicious – that continues to this day.

Biella arrived at this world accidentally. Her subject in grad school was medical anthropology, but in 1998 she got interested in the division opening up between those hackers advocating “free” software -– with its anti corporate overtones – and those calling for “open source”. “There was very little within anthropology being written about this stuff. And nothing when it came to this world. I saw it as a great opportunity.”

One of her current research topics is the spat between the hackers and the Scientologists. Hostilities between the two groups first emerged in the ‘90s, resurfacing again last year. When a video of Tom Cruise praising the religion was posted on YouTube, the church tried to remove all trace of it from the Internet. In response, a group of pranksters from the chatroom 4Chan calling themselves Anonymous, outraged at this assault on free speech, made their own video in which they declared war on Scientology.

Biella’s thesis is that the geeks’ hatred of Scientology is itself quasi-religious. “If you put Scientology in a cultural inversion machine you get hacking. They’re fun-house mirror images of each other. Scientology is a religion of science and technology and so they’re really into technology. But the way they treat it is the complete opposite of the ways geeks and hackers treat it.” For geeks, the use of technology as religious artefact – E-meters to audit people and free them of engrams, the idea of correct as opposed to incorrect technology, the Church’s claim to have the world’s only workable technology – pollutes the very idea of science and technology and is deeply offensive.

I’m fascinated by the individuals who make up the phreakers, Anonymous and the other internet tribes Biella studies. What are they like as people? Biella’s more interested in the groups and how they organise themselves: their membership requirements, their rules of engagement. But she did give me one vital piece of information when we started discussing how geeks have miraculously developed social skills. “Oh yes, the snowboarding, artist, Alpha geek”. That was new to me and sounded unrealistically attractive. Where could one be found? San Francisco apparently – instead of flying east to London the next morning I should have been heading west.

We’d agreed to make it an early evening since Biella routinely gets up at five or six to work and I was, atypically, doing the same next day to catch my flight. I’d been quizzing her for hours about this world she moves in, and was feeling guilty at forcing a self-confessed introvert to talk so much, when her boyfriend arrived home. Micah is systems administrator for radical tech collective Rise-Up, which provides technical resources for activist groups around the world suspicious of sharing data through mainstream media. Dismissive of Web 2.0 and the current social media craze, groups like Rise Up believe in using technology not to swap status updates and share party photos, but as a tool for political activism. You won’t see much written about them, Biella says, they won’t talk to the mainstream press.

As we said our goodbyes in the hallway, Micah suggested I come along to a conference that he and Biella are helping organise and  Biella threw out a few more suggestions of interesting underground techies I could approach for future Nail Soups. And instead of wishing I was moving to San Francisco, I was now looking forward to getting back to NYC. Who needs surfing Californian Alpha geeks when there’s a whole bunch of nerds right here quietly changing the world.

*

THE FOOD

Sacred Chow
Address 227 Sullivan St (between W3rd & Bleeker) New York
Phone: (212) 337-0863
Menu: sacredchow.com
Delivery range: Free delivery between 10th Street and Spring Street and between Bowery and Washington Street
Times: 11am until 9.45 pm (sometimes later on Fridays and Saturdays)
Payment: Cash on delivery, or credit card over the phone

A few years ago, Biella caught Lyme disease and while she was recovering cut out gluten – wheat, barely, rye, some oats, soy sauce. Feeling so much better for it, she concluded she must have always been allergic and decided to stick with the diet. So when we came to discussing dinner, she suggested trying raw food restaurant Quintessence which she’d spotted during a visit to the Russian spa on E10th Street. I was all for it, imagining raw would make for excellent take-out but we fell outside their delivery zone, and even though I ramped up the English charm, they wouldn’t make an exception.

Sacred Chow on Sullivan Street in the West Village was Biella’s second choice. It’s vegan, organic, kosher, using locally grown produce where possible and Fairtrade where not. On their website, which features a cartoon cow in lotus position, they also claim to follow “an ethical attitude to work and wages”.

The best dishes are small plates, tapas-style at $5.75 each or 3 for $15. Biella eats here often, so I asked her to pick a good selection. I let her choice of tofu through, despite a long-standing aversion, though I did stand my ground and veto the Brussels sprouts. How did Brussels sprouts inveigle their way into the edible vegetable category? We had no complaints about the service, though the English woman at the end of the phone did sound a little dour. Biella had been surprised they agreed to deliver – “it’s such a small operation” – but though I was prepared for a long wait, Sacred Chow defied our pessimism by delivering in good time.

We’d ordered five small dishes. The pumpkin risotto was delightful on flavour, but during the time it had sat on the back of a delivery bike had become soggy and sticky.  Since risotto is one of those dishes meant to be rushed to the table, this wasn’t the best choice for take-out. I was surprised to be won over by the tofu. This wasn’t superfluous chunks of gunk but lightly grilled with taste and texture.

We’d also ordered shitake mushrooms and broccoli in place of the Brussels sprouts I’d banned. The broccoli was steamed and gently curried and the mushrooms firm, though the sauce was a little too tart. The sunflower lentil paté, Biella’s favourite, was also good. But however accomplished this food was when it left Sacred Chow’s kitchen (within the vegan, gluten-free constraints) by the time it reached us in tin foil boxes, the hot dishes were no more than luke warm.

For her diet, Biella also tries to avoid sugar but I was in the mood for pudding. She insisted the scones were the best thing on the menu but scones are for summer afternoons with cream and jam and pots of tea, and not an after dinner sweet fix. So instead I’d ordered soya ice cream. Some things are just right the way they are and can’t be reinvented. Without the cream that makes ice cream ice cream this was a refreshing palate cleanser, nothing more.

*

Images: Sacred Chow cow via aglutenfreeguide.com; Anonymous protesting against Scientology via inquisitr.com; old fashioned phone via web.cs.wpi.edu

I was settling in for a fun evening with Kurt when he dropped the bombshell.

I didn’t mind so much finding out he was a billionaire. Though I would never have guessed it from the look of him or his East Village apartment. What worried me far more was that he’d also just told me he’d been an activist for George Bush.

So as Kurt trooped off to his study to get something to show me, I mentally checked the time. Even if we ordered immediately and the food was delivered promptly, I’d still have to listen to a good hour of right-wing bile before I could politely leave.

I was in the middle of plotting how to speed things up (or bail entirely) when Kurt came back with a book: Billionaires for Bush. How to Rule the World for Fun and Profit, which included, the front cover told me, A George W Bush Owner’s Manual.

For those who’ve never had to operate a “Dubya”, President of the United States, I can tell you that the owner’s manual includes some mightily useful hints.

“Turning your president on: Should the enclosed puppy, baseball game, apple pie, charming sorority wife, or pretzel stick fail to start the president, try any of the following: NASCAR, horses, the American flag, a freshly cut check.

“Turning your president off: Any of the following: political debate, compound sentences, nuanced arguments, polling places.”

Reading on, I learnt that the later 2000-2004 model had several significant improvements on the previous 1988-1992 model: a simpler vocabulary and worldview, fewer morals, less sensitivity to public opinion.

It functioned in various modes, which included the Ugly American Mode indicated by indifference to the United Nations and a heightened contempt for the non-English-speaking world. And it worked by remote control from a bunker or other undisclosed location. (This model was not meant to operate autonomously.)

OK, so now I’d got it. Aha. It was satire. And if I’d been in the US during the 2004 election, I would already have known that Billionaires for Bush was a bunch of leftie activists who dressed up as billionaires with names like Lucinda Regulations and De Prescot Windavit to protest against the Republicans and their president.

Serious stuff, given some of the disturbing facts about America under Bush. But also, according to Kurt – aka yachtsman Thurston Howell the Fourth – far too much fun. So much fun in fact, he’d had to give up activism completely after it took over his life.

“It’s like crack for me. I’d say I’m just going to go to a meeting. But the next minute I’d be in charge of this or that thing and then I’m taking up my whole day to go down to Wall Street dressed like a billionaire.

“It feels like you’re doing something good. You’re getting involved and it’s exciting. Meanwhile the rent’s due every month.”

With Obama’s healthcare hopes in the balance, Billionaires for Bush has now morphed into Billionaires for Wealthcare, and, eager as I am for any excuse to dress up, I was now thinking about how to get Kurt to break his fast and take me to the next rally.

Kurt is a writer, photographer and life coach. He also teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop and runs his own creative writing groups, publicised through social networking site MeetUp. Which is where I’d first come across him, in his profile picture sporting a cowboy hat and smoking a cigar.

Kurt also blogs as Tiny Pink Frog, and since I blog as Pink Iguana, it was inevitable that two rare, camp-coloured reptilian/amphibian types, possibly sharing a good deal of genetic material, would also come to share a Nail Soup take-out.

I’ve never spent much time in the American South, my knowledge of it largely drawn from William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and the Waltons, but I imagine it as a place a little out of time. So when Kurt told me he was originally from North Carolina, I wasn’t at all surprised.

His building on E15th between 1st and 2nd Avenues is all pre-war dark wood, and creaky ancient lift and the first thing I noticed when he showed me into his bed/sitting room was an old fashioned typewriter, which later in the evening, as I was ordering the food, Kurt started bashing away at. There’s an exercise he gives his writing students, he says, to hit the keys without thinking too much and see what ends up on the page.

The other room is Kurt’s study, dominated by a huge desk where he’s working on his second novel, and a wall of shelves behind, stuffed with retro titles in mid 20th century type on faded covers, including a whole section of ‘50s crime stories. On the opposite wall he’s stuck pages torn from a novel he’s studying, marked up with coloured pen to show the appearance of new characters and plot devices.

Kurt looks very at ease at this desk, posing for his portrait with feet up, pen in hand, like some hard-boiled hack, or private dick, while his stereo chucks out big band jazz. He’s tall and handsome with a wry sense of humour (meaning he laughs at my jokes) and clearly loves having his picture taken – a hangover from the Billionaires for Bush years, when cameras were constantly pointed at him, including that of the legendary Richard Avedon.

But while Kurt would be at home in a ‘50s Raymond Chandler tale, he also has a touch of the ‘60s hippy about him. There are wooden figurines and various other ethnic bits and bobs dotted about. And – what is it about Nail Soupers and skeletons? – a glass cabinet full of animal skulls he’s found on trips upstate in his campavan: a coyote, a beaver, a porcupine and one he reckoned was a cat but didn’t look anything like a cat to me and I told him so.

To complete the profile, he’s also spent time in India. And he’s vegetarian. So when it came to picking the food, after much dithering and deliberation we finally agreed to try Madras Mahal, a kosher vegetarian specialising in South Indian and Guajarat cuisine.

Madras Mahal is, appropriately, in Murray Hill, on Lexington Avenue between 27th and 28th, but since Kurt lives on the northern edge of the East Village, he falls within their delivery range. They told us 40 minutes but thankfully, since we’d already been nattering away for ages, delivered in 30.

For us English, Indian food is northern cuisine – korma, tikka masala, rogan josh – and for a carnivore like me it generally involves meat. So Madras Mahal’s menu was a departure. Kurt had wanted iddly, so we’d chosen them “in sambar bowl”. The lentil and rice cakes weren’t much more than an excuse for a decent hot bean sauce, more texture than taste. But Kurt insisted a vegetarian palate could appreciate the subtle starchy flavours where a meat-eater like me ran into trouble. Perhaps.

The chick pea and green pea balls, kachori, were also a bit disappointing. Each of the dishes had come with a tub of sauce but neither of us could remember what was supposed to go with what, so in an effort to give the kachori a fair chance I tried them with everything. The best accompaniment was a sweet fruit chutney which brought out the flavour but didn’t beat the dryness.

We’d ordered a lentil flour pancake, uttuppam, thinking it would travel well, but I wasn’t about to complain when they made a mistake with our order, and instead brought us a huge spicy potato, onion and cilantro filled crispy dosai crepe with a wonderful coconut dipping sauce. (They also brought plates and cutlery even though I’d asked them not to.)

The dosai and an excellent Guajurat curry, undhiyu, with yam, eggplant and snow peas more than made up for the minor let-down of the starters.

After we’d eaten our take-out, Kurt found some surprisingly nice digestive biscuits in the back of a cupboard and we got into a deep discussion about writing and money and ambition and religion and then he posed for portraits and I nosed about a bit more.

At which point I was all ready for Kurt to get out the chai tea and the incense and put on the Ravi Shanker and tell me about being in India, when he announced that he was taking off in the campavan next day and needed to get up early. And, in the nicest, well-mannered Southern way, chucked me out.

But not before he’d given me a couple of books from his clear-out pile waiting to go to the charity shop. And made me a little doggy bag with the remains of the curry and the coconut sauce I liked so much and the left over biscuits all wrapped up. And then he helped me button up my cape, and walked me barefoot (which is how he’d been since he answered the door when I first arrived) the 20 paces to the lift just in case I got lost.

When I got to the L subway platform at 1st Avenue and checked the board, the first thing I noticed was how bloody long it was until the next train to Brooklyn. The second thing I noticed was how late it was – well past midnight and fast approaching 1 am. And the third was the date. October 8: my birthday. I’d completely forgotten. So I’d started my first birthday in my new city eating biscuits with a barefoot billionaire. Not a bad way to get older. And, as George Dubya Bush might put it, being in New York, this great city of firsts, I knew this was just the first of many more firsts yet to come.

*

Madras Mahal

Address 104 Lexington Avenue (between 27th St & 28th St) New York
Phone: (212) 684-4010
Menu: http://www.menupages.com/restaurants/madras-mahal/menu
Delivery range: Free delivery within 10 blocks; $5 charge over 10 blocks. Limit 40/45 blocks.
Times: Sun-Thurs 12 noon-10 pm; Fri-Sat 12 noon- 10.30 pm (though this varies depending how busy they are)
Payment: Cash on delivery, or credit card over the phone

*

Other links: Madras recipes on Foodista

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.

*

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

What Papa Joe lacks in height he makes up for in celebrity. At least on Fire Island. The hundreds of tourists who meet him every summer may never learn his name, but a 2ft Hawaiin leprechaun with a handlebar moustache is hard to ignore.

Papa Joe does not work alone. He’s in service to Kenny Goodman, himself an island fixture. Kenny’s father worked at a travel agency and when the business closed he took home the office mascot. “And when my father closed, Papa Joe came home with me.”

Today, the grinning Hawaiin greets visitors to Kenny Goodman Gallery in Ocean Beach. Among the deck restaurants and tasteful nicky-nacky-noo shops of Fire Island’s largest community, Kenny’s store stands apart.

Out front, he’s built a sculpture garden of rusty objets trouvés and other beach detritus. Inside, the silver ankle bracelets and surf-board pendants in display cases compete for attention with the miscellaneous bits and bobs that decorate the shop.

Faded clippings from the local paper, family photos – three daughters, an ex-wife and former girlfriend, smiling, lovely – a string of shells hung from the ceiling, a plastic cowboy tall in the saddle, a Spiderman poster, a wooden carving declaring “LEARNING IS THE FUTURE”, and at the back, shelves of cans and tools and the other stuff of his jewellery production.

Kenny, I admit, does not use Twitter or Facebook – I doubt he’s heard of either. He doesn’t even have a computer, he tells me, though someone has built a website for him. I met Kenny not through online social media but the old-fashioned way while running an errand. But I am on Fire Island for the whole of August and Kenny, I felt sure, would make an excellent Nail Souper, and in any case, this is my blog and I can bend the rules if I want to.

Our take-out evening, we agreed, would happen in the shop. August being the height of the season, Kenny works late most nights to serve the tourists drifting between the town’s bars and restaurants or filling time before catching the ferry back to Long Island. This summer’s freakish rain kept visitors away, so businesses here are all now trying to make up their takings before the season closes.

In the minds of most New Yorkers, Fire Island is the two gay party towns towards its eastern edge. Cherry Grove – a gay retreat since the late 19th century – and neighbouring community The Pines – established after World War II  – earned international fame in the 60s and 70s. Fuelled by the comedian Johnny Carson, a misconception developed that all of Fire Island is gay. In fact, there are another 15 communities along the island’s 32m length, each with its own character, some catering more for families, others to straight singles.

It’s beautiful here: the island is just 1 mile wide, free from cars, populated by deer and dragonflies and 10ft grasses, the communities with their wooden beach houses set within national parkland including a sunken forest, a favourite with bird spotters.

Kenny is in Ocean Beach and to get there from where I’m staying at Kismet on the island’s western tip, I rode my bike as far as the melancholic-sounding Lonelyville, walking along the beach the rest of the way.

It was five-thirty when I arrived which was far too early to eat. So we sat around for a bit with Kenny’s girlfriend Linda and fellow island old-timer Harvey working on solving that knotty conundrum – how many ice-cream scoops you get from a three litre tub.

Harvey assumed that I, the writer of a take-out food blog, would know the answer and was surprised I couldn’t help. I suggested he look it up on Google but noone else thought that a good idea.

The experimental route was more popular: Harvey could just buy his own three litre tub and see what it gave up. Or he could ask an expert, who, as luck would have it, arrived in the form of the owner of Scoops ice cream bar cycling past on his way home. With the mystery solved, and at least by me, quickly forgotten, our group disbanded, leaving just Kenny and me and a fresh problem: dinner.

There are two types of restaurants in Ocean Beach – those with large decks and views across the bay and the rest fronting the street. But this being a holiday resort, only one type of price – inflated. At The Island Mermaid for example, which claims to be the island’s premier restaurant, a starter can set you back $15 and an entrée $35.

For this reason, locals like Kenny don’t tend to go to the restaurants. In a similar Italian or French resort there would probably be, if you could only find it, hidden on a side street behind a humdrum facade, a place that catered for the locals with simple home-cooked cuisine and sensible prices. But alas, Kenny said, there is no such place in Ocean Beach. He wasn’t even sure if any of the restaurants would deliver, so rather than call around we decided to shut up shop and exercise our feet.

We had a look at the Island Mermaid, but prices aside, they weren’t prepared to deliver. We considered CJ’s, which was offering a special on lobster – since I was missing out on lobster night back at my house in Kismet – and the other deck restaurants Maguire’s and The Hideaway were also options. But in the end we agreed on Michael’s Ristorante and Pizzeria.

It was shrimp and chicken night at Michael’s and the board outside offered a choice of gnocchi and chicken, orchiette (sic) and shrimp, chicken carbonara or whole wheat pasta primavera. Since the price was a staggering $24.95 for a simple pasta dish with bread and side salad we ordered just one to share and made our way back to the shop, where we set up an old stool for our dining table in the breeze from the ceiling fan.

For 40 years, Kenny told me, he lived a double life.

He was just out of college when he spent his first summer on Fire Island. Bored by the beach, he taught himself how to carve, beginning with mini totems in chalk and coloured crayon, later moving onto over-sized wooden masks. Over the years, his hobby became a business, a store front, and a way of life, earning him a place in the community and a fair amount of notoriety.

His other life was in New York City, teaching special needs children in the worst part of the South Bronx.

Only one of these has given him any sense of achievement. Among the generations of damaged children that passed through his classroom he may have altered the inevitable downward course of perhaps one or two, he says with disappointment. But here on Fire Island, where his 40 year presence has made him a local celebrity, he’s touched the lives of thousands.

As we talked, he broke off from time to time to chat to people passing through the shop: a group of girls who all left with the same star necklace, a mother and her teenage son who’d been coming to the shop since the boy was four or five, a group of middle aged women trying on ankle bracelets.

Alongside the jewelry, Kenny also sells copies of Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince: after his parents, the biggest influence in his life.

“It’s a definition of love: the uniqueness of the rose that turns out to be the foundation of love.” And it’s about the imagination, he says, the drawing the pilot makes for the Little Prince of a sheep inside a box like the trinkets Kenny sells in his shop and the reason it’s so popular with the tourists. “I’m selling the dream. These pendants don’t mean anything, they can be whatever you want them to be.”

It took less than the 20 minutes we were told for the food to arrive, but they’d forgotten the plates and cutlery and Kenny’s soda. While Kenny called Michael’s about the soda, I served our food onto some paper plates he’d found in a drawer at the back of the shop.

We’d chosen the orecchiette with shrimp. Their portions are huge so one was quite enough for both of us. The food itself though was disappointing. The dish was drowning in an ocean of white wine sauce so that while both pasta and broccoli were al dente and the shrimp decent enough they didn’t stand a chance against its glutinous blandness. The bread was so-so and the salad – billed as part of the $24.95 special – was an unimaginative mix of cos lettuce with some sliced tomatoes and other bits thrown on top including raw sliced mushrooms, always a mistake in a garden salad if that’s what this was trying to be.

The mosquitos had started to circle as we cleared the plates away, meaning dusk was falling, and with a 25 minute walk along the beach ahead of me and a bike with no lights, we both agreed I’d best be on my way. If I hurry, I thought as I left the shop and turned the corner onto the main street, I might just make it back to Kismet and my house in time for lobster night.

*

Michael’s Ristorante and Pizzeria

Address: 786 Evergreen Walk, Ocean Beach, Fire Island, New York
Phone: (631) 583 7858
Menu: www.michaels-ristorante.net
Times: Monday–Wednesday, 11:00 am–11:00 pm; Thursday–Sunday, 11:00 am–4:00 pm

I’d been at Zena and Clem’s a good four hours before I came across the human bones: Four arms hanging from the ceiling in their study and a skull in a filing cabinet.

Since this was the first evening in my take-out-with-strangers social networking experiment, perhaps I should have been concerned.

But Clem is an artist. And the bones, he assured me, were not those of the recently dead. And besides, by that time we’d already eaten together, shared life stories and generally put the world to rights, so I was fairly confident they weren’t about to put me in a pot and boil me.

Zena and Clem live in DUMBO, Brooklyn in a rather fabulous apartment that looks out over Manhattan Bridge. When I first moved to New York in March, I’d stayed in a posh pad in Chinatown on the Manhattan side of the bridge, so know well that view in reverse. It was before sunset when I arrived so I got to enjoy again the sight of the lights growing gradually brighter on the bridge as the sky faded to black. And when we sat down to eat, being kind and gracious hosts, Zena and Clem made sure I was placed to enjoy the view through their huge plate glass window.

DUMBO, for non-New Yorkers, stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Dumb name, even with the O on the end. Which apparently isn’t accidental. The story goes that it used to be Fulton’s Landing, but when the artists enjoying large, cheap warehouse space here in the late 70s saw the inevitable gentrification coming, they changed the name in a vain attempt to keep it at bay.

Gentrification is this city’s obsession. As Brooklyn Rail writer Matty Vaz puts it: “whereever weed-smoking on the porch white people go, the cocaine in the bathroom white people are right behind.” And Dumbo conforms to the rule. A decent studio here can now set you back over $2,000 a month.

For all that, there’s still not a lot here in the way of shops and facilities. There’s a couple of famous culinary stops, namely The River Café and Jacques Torres Chocolate. But its hidden secret, Zena tells me, is Five Front.

Five Front was originally set up by Patty Lowry with chef Paul Vicino following their earlier collaboration at 12th Street Bar and Grill in Park Slope. Two years ago Vicino, who describes his food as New American cuisine, bought Lowry out and now runs the restaurant himself.

We agreed that for the purpose of the new blog, it made more sense to try out the sort of restaurant food that doesn’t naturally lend itself to sitting on the back of a moped. Pizza, Sushi, pah, too easy.

Five Front’s menu was easy to find on line and apparently up-to-date. Starters began at $8 for panzanella, a crispy tomato bread salad with white anchovies and went up to $12 for a full portion of curried muscles. As well as a salad there was also another imaginative vegetarian option, a grilled vegetable timbale with a walnut coulis. I would have gone for the Chesapeake Bay jumbo lump crabcake myself, but starters don’t really work with delivery. Perhaps we should have asked them to make the trip twice, the restaurant is only a block and a half from Zena and Clem’s apartment, but it seemed a little cheeky.

I would have been happy with anything from the entrée menu, which included pan seared scallops ($20) and a grilled hanger steak ($23).  Zena chose the oven roasted salmon with red quinoa, hot house cucumber salad and preserved lemons ($21). I decided on the brick-pressed roasted french-cut chicken breast served over creamy polenta with haricot verts and pancetta ($19) which we also ordered for Clem who was still stuck at work.

It’s lucky we had a lot to talk about while we waited though, (and a good bottle of prosecco from my local offy) as the 20 minutes we were told spread well into 40. “Oh, it’s always like that,” Clem said when he arrived home late, but still managing to be there well before the food.

Clem and Zena both work in the film business, Clem to finance his art. Zena, half English, half Lebanese, moved here 12 years ago at the age of 25. “I was unbelievably naïve”, she says, soon learning the US wasn’t just England with an American accent. For her first four years she lived in a teeny, 90 square foot studio in the Lower East Side, while she built a career as a video editor. At one point she tried moving back to London, staying in a flat in Trellick Tower but only managed to last six months before escaping back to NYC.

An American friend I’d seen earlier in the day was telling me everyone who’s lived in New York any length of time is more than a little crazy (except those who can afford the doorman, beach-house lifestyle), but Zena must be made of stronger stuff. Clem is a newer arrival, moving here to marry Zena five years ago, the culmination of a long distance relationship.

Their passion for the city is infectious. “You absolutely must stay,” they told me several times. And their passion for each other palpable.

By the time the food arrived we were hungry. My chicken was faultlessly cooked and I suspect the polenta and beans would have balanced it perfectly if we’d eaten in. But as Clem put it, that 20 minutes between their kitchen and our table didn’t do a dish like this any favours. Particularly the polenta, which by the time we’d re-served it onto plates (which, our mistake, we’d forgotten to heat up) was less a smooth textured accompaniment than a rather unattractive mush.

Zena’s salmon wore the journey much better. The fish was delicate and the quinoa had just the right bite. She decided not to disturb the dish but to eat straight out of the round cardboard box it came in, which no doubt helped. But it also meant the stacking – cucumber on salmon on quinoa – “seemed slightly comical in the middle of the large container”, and the cucumber salad – strings of cucumber, carrot and ginger – reminded her of airplane food.

Which made me wonder two things. For a good restaurant like Five Front, would it be practical to offer an optional delivery on china with payment of a returnable deposit? And would it also be advisable to alter the menu slightly for delivery to factor in that 20 minute delay?

As we ate, Clem told us he’d been thinking in the taxi about Manhattan as a Tetris board, where each day all the buildings could be reassembled into a different position. The city is so intransigent, he explained, and your potential impact negligible, that the idea of be able to physically rebuild it all anew each day is a powerful fantasy.

We talked about tigers – they’ve a poster in the loo of dozens of tigers’ faces, each unmistakably distinctive – and how seeing each one as a unique individual gives you a different appreciation, a connectedness.

All being English, we also talked about class of course and how status translates here, a subject of endless fascination: how Americans (and they’re by no means unusual) think their society works and how it really functions.

And while it’s a truism that the English are more held back from social advancement by our class system, as we three discovered, none of us fit the profile. All of us being only second generation middle class. All of us having grandparents who’d overcome the odds to educate and advance themselves, including my granny who fled the slums of London to become a maths teacher and Clem’s grandfather who fought to become a surgeon. Zena had just recently learnt about her own family tree and seeing generations of “hawkers” and “brush drawers” within the tiny confines of Bermondsey, Lambeth and Southwark, felt humbled and grateful at her own good fortune.

At this point our thoughts turned to desert. We’d not ordered anything in, since none were listed on Five Front’s site, so Zena dug around in the freezer for a tub of ice-cream, which served us well enough.

And then I went for a snoop around.

Zena and Clem’s apartment is an anomaly since they rent it direct from the owner and as a result have a pretty good deal. Their open plan kitchen/sitting room is a huge space with room for a proper dinner party-scale dining table, some classic modern furniture, including a knocked-off Castiglione lamp and a Charles Pfister sofa, all sourced from ebay and Craigslist.

The bedroom also looks out over the bridge, they’ve a vast ensuite bathroom, and, a source of pride and pleasure for both, a walk-in closet. Unlike many apartments I’ve seen here, the space hasn’t been compromised by stingy developers skimping on the detailing.

And then I had a peak at their study, which was when I found the bones. Clem’s father had taught him anatomy with his grandfather’s bones, he said, which at first sounded extremely creepy, until I realized he didn’t mean his grandfather’s own skeleton but the one he’d kept in his surgery.

The original owners of Clem’s bones would have been African or Indian, he thought, before they eventually found their way into the teaching schools and car-boot sales of New York City. He showed me a sketch of the new piece he was planning – a glass case filled with earth and plants above which two arms clinched in an embrace will hang, and over which he’ll pour human blood. Blood being another common material in his work which, now I realized, included the moody abstract paintings all around the apartment.

Zena, who shares the study with Clem, is unnerved by the human skull he keeps in a drawer in the filing cabinet and left the room while he showed it to me. But she did agree to come back in to pose for their portrait.

Somehow, it was now already nearly 1am and time to go home. I thanked them for being my Nail Soup guinea pigs and we all agreed it had been a lot of fun.

“Would you like a 50 year old Jewish, Upper East Side chess board artist with big earings for your next one?” Zena asked. She sounded like a perfect take out companion, I said. “Ok, I’ll ask her.”

And as I left the lovely Zena and Clem to find a cab back to Williamsburg, I felt sure I’d be back. But maybe next time we’ll walk the block and a half to Five Front and find out what they have in the way of desert.

*

Five Front

Address: 5 Front St, Brooklyn, NY 11201-1389
Phone: (718) 625-5559
Menu:  www.fivefrontrestaurant.com
Times: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday until 11pm. Friday and Saturday until 12 midnight. Monday closed.
Delivery range: Free delivery between Jay Street and Henry Street.

The most frightening place I’ve ever bought a beer was the night market in Maputo: a warren of makeshift drinking dens accessed along pinched alleyways of wooden board laid precariously on bare mud. If ever there’s a competition to design a tourist mugging trap, the winner would look just like this.

I was in Mozambique to make a short film about street children. In the previous five days I’d seen 14 year old boys play with guns, been threatened for daring to film in public, driven miles in an open top truck to swim from the country’s best beach, danced to local music and visited Maputo’s stuffed elephant collection.

But it wasn’t until that night, drinking cheap beer at a plastic table under a bare light bulb, with a nervy architect convinced we were about to be murdered any minute, that the culture shock kicked in. Suddenly, I got it. I was in Africa and it was astonishing.

Five days: that’s how long it takes for your mind to catch up with your body when you travel. And when you move countries, the lag is more like two and a half months.

I was walking across Bryant Park when that moment struck. In the minutes before, I’d been drinking tea with Jeff Pulver. Jeff – geek, Facebook fanatic, Israeli TV star – was giving me advice on how to use social networks to help with my New York reboot.

I’m going to write in more depth about the surprisingly perceptive Jeff, about what he told me and what happened next. But to crudely summarise, it went like this: stop f-ing about and get on with it (my expletive).

Now, my life – when the sun is out, the work paying and the subway running smoothly – is unquestionably a roaring success. But in those introspective moments of creeping doubt that maybe some things might have gone a different, better way, my regret is always that I should have been a little bolder, spent less time skirting round the edges and more time pushing my way towards the centre.

I am English, which is some sort of excuse. But still, Jeff had my attention and the next day I did what he said I needed to do and threw myself in. I twittered (follow me – @zoeblackler) and Facebooked (/zoeblackler – yes I’ve got my URL) and began to make some real progress.

It wasn’t long though, before I realised that I had only dived into the learner pool and that, with my four month NYC anniversary approaching, I needed to get out, deflate my water wings and start doing lengths with the grown ups.

I called Tom: “I need to take it to the next level.”
“Sounds like we need a strategy meeting,” he said.

Dinner, a bottle of wine and a lemon tart later and we’d all but forgotten Item One on the agenda, until I started on my usual moan about how terrible the food is here. Eating out is fine. Eating out is the answer. But on those nights when I’m in, maybe working my way, finally, through the first series of the Wire on DVD (from Videology, the best video shop in the western world incidentally), I have problems. There’s nowhere to buy decent fruit and vegetables near my apartment and at Wholefoods in Manhattan you blow your weekly food budget on a punnet of strawberries and a bunch of basil.

“And the other night, I ordered Pizza from Fornino on Bedford. The first one was burnt, charcoal. So I complained and they sent me another. Only that one was completely underdone and inedible. Delivery guy was sweet though.”

Someone needed to do a really good take-out review column, we concluded. There are plenty of listings out there that summarise delivery details, based on reviews of the actual restaurants. But are there any that are written like a regular restaurant review column by the same person ordering take-out from across the city? We didn’t think so.

You’d want to score not just the quality of the food, but how hot or cold it is when it gets to you. In some places it’s just fine when you eat in, but atrocious when delivered. I’m thinking of your stone-cold hamburger, Schillers. And then there’s the packaging – is it recyclable? Is the presentation original? And the delivery – it’s still service you know, even if one waiter’s at the end of the phone and the other’s on a moped.

We liked this idea, but there was a flaw. For someone to do this properly, they’d need to live simultaneously in multiple places around the city. I couldn’t review a Harlem take-out from my place in Williamsburg, for example. 

But what I could do, I realised, was use my social networking experiment as a way to find collaborators, strangers who live all over New York. Nice folk with interesting stories who will welcome me into their homes for an evening, to share my take-out and tell me about themselves. I’ll find myself in all sorts of random places, get to nose around more New York apartments and make some new friends. And the reviews I write will be about the food of course, but also vignettes about the people I’ve met and the places I’ve visited.

My new blog is going to be called Nail Soup. It’s named after my favourite book when I was a child, a Scandinavian folk tale about a vagrant who convinces an old woman to give him hospitality for the evening. I’m starting it next week and I need volunteers, so if you’d like to take part in my experiment or have a friend in New York who might, find me on Twitter or Facebook or on email at zoeblackler@gmail.com.

Mangia! Mangia!