Lupa's Broken, But You Can't Beet Beets
Turning the Beet Around
As imperial civilizations like ours wallow through their decadent Late Stages on their way toward extinction (Visogoths on the horizon, sacrificing their elderly, spit-roasting their dead horses), even Nature itself comes unhinged, and the apprehensive citizen, knowing that the bubble's stretched to its breaking point, witnesses strange prodigies. In a city that's reached such a surreal and abysmal level of overplumped luxury that being a "celebrity chef" is now considered legitimate work for a man, the rules of physics themselves have become addled, and the heavens are out of joint.
Neither the girl's mother nor any other of the people in the crowded car even noticed, so wrapped up were they in their grim paperbacks, their newsprint, the poky details of their workadays. (The mother, by the way, was engrossed in Florence Fabricant's first-rate "Food Notes" column in the Wednesday New York Times.)
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Russian Tea Room Chef Renaud Le Rasle announces a topnotch beet menu. This exciting innovation will feature five courses, and will represent an alternative to Le Rasle's customary a la carte offerings. The beet will be utilized in such a manner as to honor its flexibility, subtlety and pep?as well as, needless to say, that basic aspiring nobility that the root vegetable's long association with Slavic peasants (mules, pinworm, gourd-fucking, swollen gums) has, irksomely, tended to occlude. It's worth noting that the beet will even presume to take its rightful place in the dessert-making of the Tea Room's skilled new executive pastry chef?who, we're informed, is named Morgan Larsson.
Why beets? Funny. We were asking that same question.
"I was seeing beets used creatively all over town, with chefs taking advantage of their earthy sweetness and firm texture, and I began to think about how people associate beets with Russian food because of borsht," it's reported that Chef Le Rasle responded, in all candor, when the question was posed to him.
He continued: "I did a little research and found out how healthy beets are?loaded with antioxidants, no fat and few calories..."
Man! So beets are healthful as well as a tasty treat! You can't "beet" that!
The Russian Tea Room is located at 150 W. 57th St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.). Phone: 974-2111.
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First thing on our agenda this January when Soup to Nuts is inaugurated president is to round up all the celebrity chefs, stick 'em in a rocketship, blast 'em to the moon.
These guys can now get away with anything, even to the extent of foisting on the New York public a sucky dining experience like the one available at Lupa, which is of course the famous Mario Battali's "casual" and relatively cheap place on Thompson St., right north of Houston. What is this place all about? The food is, admittedly, excellent. But the establishment is so overwhelmingly clogged with white people that it's in fact difficult to use; it bustles so bustlingly, teems so with such a preponderance of moneyed and snickering humanity, that to exist within it is, much of the time, intolerable.
We mean this literally. Lupa, like a jailhouse, impinges upon the free and unfettered movement of the body. Sit at the bar and eat that pasta with the clams in it, and someone standing behind you, waiting for a table, whales up and elbows you in the spine. Eat at one of the (tiny) tables in the front room, and the aisle next to your table's clogged with patrons standing there jogging their balls, filtering back to their own tables like sweaty commuters through turnstiles, knocking your arm with their unimpeachable American hips as you raise your fork to your mouth. How crowded and overrun does a restaurant have to be before it just doesn't work, before it's broken? There's a beautiful apricot-lit ambience at Lupa sometimes?before, say, 7 p.m. After that it's unmanageable, a free-for-all, a mosh.
And the mob, like all close-packed mobs, is vicious. Guys rough you up on the way to the bathroom, gouge your eyes near the maitre d's stand. We got our wallet took. A violent hysteria can develop. I watched one middle-aged gentleman stagger back from the coatstand with his face broken: his nose busted up, his jaw beaten through even to the bone, the laceration of a whip-handle across his cheeks, his hair singed where they'd tried to set him on fire, the victim of a mob.
Someone had messed him up bad back there.
Lupa: 170 Thompson St. (betw. Bleecker & Houston Sts.), 982-5089.
Contributor: Andrey Slivka. E-mail tips and comments to [souptonuts@nypress.com](mailto:souptonuts@nypress.com) or fax to 244-9864.