Daniel Maurer Good morning, East Village.
As you can see above, Joey Pepperoni’s Pizza has opened at 222 First Avenue, between 13th and 14th Streets.
Is it possible that the steamiest establishment on 10th Street isn’t the Russian-Turkish baths? Renee Linnell, an investor in Body Evolutions, has filed what the Post calls a “blockbuster” lawsuit against the workout studio’s founder (and her former romantic partner) Billy Macagnoner, claiming that he drove away clients by “improperly abusing his position as a teacher and authorized Gyrotonic master trainer to seduce and sleep with both trainers and clients — serially and simultaneously.”
Curbed presents four alternatives to the SPURA plan that got the City Planning Commission’s stamp of approval this week. One proposal envisions ski slopes above big-box retailers.
Bowery Boogie notes a new Bowery-focused exhibit at the New Museum. The museum’s website describes it: “Drawing upon the New Museum’s Bowery Artist Tribute archive and the online archive of Marc H. Miller, 98bowery.com, this exhibition features original artwork, ephemera, and performance documentation by over fifteen artists who lived and worked on or near the Bowery in New York.”
Off the Grid recalls a day when the Theatre Unique was at 14th Street, where an NYU dorm now stands, and “for 10 cents, a person could spend the day seeing several Vaudeville acts and 10 reels of the latest movies, according to Warren G. Harris at the Cinema Treasures website.”
“The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side,” which debuted in 2007, will have a run at 9th Space starting August 28. A press release describes the Amoralists production: “An extraordinary gathering of young idealists live above a vegan restaurant in NYC. Billy, Dawn, Dear and Wyatt are an extended sexual family battling their fears and addictions in order to live their utopian dream.”
The Mosaic Man gets profiled by PSFK, which points out that he “has worked on creating the ‘Mosaic Trail’ for more than 25 years, quitting his full-time job as a carpenter in the late 1980′s to focus exclusively on the project.”
What does it look like when “the performative punk troupe known as Juggernut stop[s] by old-school club the Pyramid in the East Village, with their chaotic musings on topics from sciatica to bedbugs”? Paper has the answer.
ArtsBeat reviews “Hanafuda Denki (A Tale of Fantastic Traditional Playing Cards)”, a Fringe Fest offering that takes place at a Tokyo funeral home. “Performed with full-tilt commitment and unusual discipline by the Ryuzanji Company, the show, directed by Saori Aoki with little flourishes of the grotesque, has rowdy, propulsive energy that almost never flags.”
The site also reviews “Dogs,” which “has noble ambitions, to explore the aggressive masculinity that develops (or rather is deliberately instilled, just as one would train a dog to be vicious) in the world in which Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs coexist. Unfortunately the message becomes largely lost in a frequently incoherent production, and the proceedings are sometimes just baffling.”
The Times visits Ni Japanese Delicacies in the Essex Street Market. Owner Atsushi Numata “calls his shop a deli. That is bold in this neighborhood, in the shadow of the ancients, due south of Katz’s. But here pastrami on rye is swapped out for kabocha on brioche ($8.99), matzo ball soup for a broth of kelp and shio koji, fermented rice malt ($4.50).”
Serious Eats tries the appetizers at Wasan. The “exacting Japanese kitchen in the East Village” is “a great place for a reasonably priced meal of shared small plates.”
Serious Eats reports that Robert Paris, “a soft-spoken, cerebral, 58-year-old Umbrian who for eleven years (1997 to 2009) was the wine director and general manager at Il Buco,” is coming back to the restaurant as GM. “People come back to Il Buco for 18 years because there’s something inside that’s visceral. Roberto provides that visceral element,” says owner Donna Lennard.
Grub Street notes a budding oyster trend on the Lower East Side.
