Month: July 2006

Saturday respite

Quiet office day today… just came from AJS place, enjoyed typical brunch with him, lots of sausages, 3 fried egss, brown rice and loads of bacon with mango, guava, orance juice to wash it all down.  Caught up with him as he was busy flying around.

Stopped by Taipei’s first McDonald’s on MinSheng E. Road for some ice tea and fried apple pie (yes, they are F-R-I-E-D here! :D) and now in my office for some quietness.  Peace and quiet listening to Ray Gelato

Need to catch up on my 360 degree profile responses and just general peace and my coaching homework.  Been reading The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins (HBS Press) and The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good managers into Great Leaders by John Zenger & Joseph Folkman (McGraw-Hill).  Part of my big responsibilities is the need to develop staff both for succession planning purposes and for nurturing talent.  This forms part of my POs. 

Heard about the heat over there which sounds real lousy, sorry about that, but that’s par for the course here.  Keep cool!

 

Thanks for the Gramercy Park posting FC.  One I never got to.  I really love Union Sq. Cafe though.

Gramercy Tavern

The heat broke today for restaurant week, and P and I tried out Top Chef’s Tom Colicchio’s restaurant Gramercy Tavern. We were in the Main Room, where you have the choice of a regular, veggie, or premium prix fixe. On the regular prix fixe, which is not part of restaurant week, you have the choice of a dozen appertizers, and a choice of 6 fish dishes and 6 meat dishes. P had sea scallops and the lamb dish, while I had fried oysters in a fava soup and the sirloin with marrow and spätzle. We had fresh lemonade and limeade, accompanied with a small pitcher of simple syrup for sweetener. There were two free micro appertizers, a bean dip on crouton, and a cube of watermelon with micro feta cubes and aged balsamic vinegar. Afterwards, we had a free micro dose of berry sorbet on a custard, that was included. We ordered for dessert was a blueberry panecotta with a dose of lavender honey ice cream with chinese-style micro egg cakes, while P had a dark chocolate confection. The other novelty was the chance to try real English mead – which had a wheat ale flavor with high notes of honey. Everything seemed not so big, but the waves of dishes caught up with us. It was a very remarkable meal with immpeccable service.

Friggin’ Hot

Hot. Hot. Hot. The news today had power outages on the 7th Avenue subway lines, power lines blowing up in Astoria, and parts of LaGuardia without power. Stayed cool by slurping a crazy sized Jamba Juice and watching Colma: The Musical again (sans technical difficulties) from a free ticket courtesy of P’s friend YKC. I think the second time around I appreciated the movie much better (seeing the first 15 minutes that actually explained Colma were probably a good idea).