Revisiting My First Trip to NYC, Ten Years Later
Plus: cold plunges, instant ramen in Project Hail Mary & Hoppers, RIP Chinato. (Kernels, March 2026)
Kernels is my monthly column in which I write about all the random stuff I’ve been up to: movies, cooking, eating, drinking, reading, and other -ings. It’s basically a diary so the editing is loose and nothing is meant to be taken too seriously. It is also very long. (Sorry!)
“2026 is the new 2016” was (is?) a big enough social media trend that it has its own Wikipedia article. This newfound nostalgia may befuddle those who associate that year as The One When Trump Won, but I think it applies specifically to those precious months before the election. Summer Sixteen, as Drake immortalized it, is one I do fondly remember because I reached some personal milestones. I graduated college, started my first big boy job, and lived on my own for the first time.
But one event was more life-changing than the rest. Ten years ago, I visited New York City for the very first time.
The trip came together pretty quickly. I wanted to do a graduation trip on the cheap and I had cousins living in Boston and New York. My other cousin Eric, then a freshman, was down to join me. (I finished college a quarter early so we went during his spring break.) Boston was fine. It was those five days in New York that really made an impact. Both of us live here now.
I recently dug up the journal I wrote during the trip1 and it was funny to read, in between me crashing out over a crush, how quickly I fell in love with this city:
Day One: “NYC reminds me of SF, only supersized and harder to drive in.”
Day Two: “The city has an intoxicating pull, with the promise and mystery of being in a sea of people and events.” (21-year-old me thought he was a poet or something?)
Day Three: “My desire to one day live here has grown more…. One is constantly on the cusp of being swallowed by New York.” (See above note.)
Day Five: “It’s now time to return to my boring old life. 🙁”
When I realized that March marked a decade since our trip, I proposed to Eric that we spend a day retracing part of our itinerary. Ten years older and twenty pounds heavier, I was curious to find out how much has changed and how much remains the same, for both this city and me.
NYC 16/26
It was a very warm, very bright Saturday, which was pretty ideal when our plan was basically “walk to a bunch of places.”
Eric and I began our day at Kevin’s old apartment in Park Slope, where we had stayed during our first trip. He’s lived in three different places since. Then we went to Bergen Bagel and ran back our first bagel orders: sausage egg and cheese on everything, toasted, yes salt pepper2. I had written in my old journal that it was “worth the $5 for sure.” A decade later, the same sandwich costs $8.49, and that’s cheaper than the going rate these days.
From there we trekked over to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade (still my favorite sightseeing spot in the entire city) and compared a photo we took ten years ago to how the view looks today: there’s a few new buildings in the Lower Manhattan skyline and Pier 17 is no longer under construction. One of the piers in Brooklyn Bridge Park was bare concrete; now there’s a big lawn with lots of trees. (At this point our buddy David joined us, and other friends came and went throughout the day.)
Then we went to Times Square, the heart and soul of the Big Apple, and on our way to The High Line we walked right by Rudy’s, which opened before any of us were alive, and not somewhere we went on our old trip. But Eric had somehow never been and we were there. I used to drink here pretty often when I first moved here, drawn in by the $3 pints, which are now $4, but the hot dogs are still free.
Besides the bagel, we didn’t feel particularly drawn to eating at the same places we did on our trip. Some of them have long since closed: Momofuku Ma Pêche, Gallito’s Kitchen, Barbonchino. Under the influence of Master of None3 we ate at Parm and it was a highlight of the trip. But since then it’s fallen off. Throughout the day we ate at a couple places that weren’t open ten years ago but have become new favorites: Los Mariscos in Chelsea Market (which opened later in 2016) and Mixteca/Tacos 1986 (opened last year).
It was funny, this tour wasn’t nearly as nostalgia-inducing as I thought it would be. What were once novel attractions have become familiar sights. They’re kind of just places now, and once we got into Greenwich Village I thought more about all the new memories I’ve made in the decade since that first visit.
Around this point, the day pretty quickly morphed away from rehashing an old itinerary that was planned by two people who were barely adults. We let intuition guide the way, encountered friends new and old, and complained about what was and shall never be again. In short, it was a typical day (and night) spent in New York. And as Eric pointed out, “what the city means to us is still the same” as it was ten years ago. We just happen to live here now.
It was more interesting to talk about what we didn’t do, knowing what we know now. We didn’t go to the usual touristy food spots: Katz’s, Joe’s, Russ and Daughters. We didn’t walk the Brooklyn Bridge, nor did we explore Chinatown or the Lower East Side or the East Village. We did see Washington Square Park. I have aged out of hanging out there but it’s nice to walk through and see the youths hanging out and skateboarding around the fountain.
At the time, Eric was 21 but one of his friends was an NYU student who knew which bars didn’t card and she took us to one of them. Headless Horseman, next to Union Square, was where Eric had his first drink in a bar. It has since closed. I remember it being a pretty chill place where I sipped on a Guinness and a cocktail. The cobblestone building itself was very distinctive. It felt like being in a 19th century alehouse.
The building is still there, and it’s still a bar, but it’s now called The High Note. I’m not sure if the bar changed or we did, but man this place really sucked. It was loud and super bro-ey and there weren’t any visible menus, so we asked what beers were on tap, to which the bartender replied “the taps aren’t in use” which is a little insane. So we just called for gin & tonics and they were… not good. We drank them as fast as we could and left.
After trying and failing to find a bar in the East Village where we could sit down and relax with our friends, we took a car to Bushwick for a nightcap at Orion Bar. Eric lives around the corner from there and it’s become his local. We downed a shot of soju and a can of Terra beer—to get us up to ten drinks consumed that day, in honor of ten years—then called it a night.
Music
For one last dose of 2016 nostalgia, see below for my most-listened to songs of that year. These are the songs that accompanied my drives between Sacramento and San Jose, the last of the college parties I hosted, and my late-night gaming sessions4. In the interest of radical transparency, the playlist is unabridged. Feel free to judge me.
When it comes to March of this year, it was a really good month for new releases! The long-awaited BTS album is mostly fine (Ryan Tedder is a pox on pop) but I really dug the new records from Underscores and Charlie Puth.
My favorite new album: “Tirakat,” by Charif Megarbane and Ali. It came my way thanks to NPR’s New Music Friday.
Here’s the description from Habibi Funk Records:
Tirakat brings together Jakarta-based trio Ali and Lebanese composer and multi-instrumentalist Charif Megarbane in a collaboration shaped by long-standing cultural exchange between Indonesia and the Arab world. Ali’s blend of 1970s Indonesian psychedelic funk, Melayu traditions, disco grooves and Arab melodic forms meets Charif’s long-running exploration of cross-regional sound, rooted in a shared musical vocabulary rather than genre.
Concerts
First shows of the year!
Tuesday March 3 – Mitski, Sex Week at The Shed w/ Giselle
I wasn’t sure what The Shed would be like as a concert venue but it was one of the nicest I’ve been to. It’s clean, there’s lots of bathrooms, and there’s good acoustics. Also rare: after the show ended they opened the emergency exit doors on the sides for easy egress. I really hate when venues like Brooklyn Steel make everyone funnel back out through the entrance where the fire doors open right out into the street.
Tuesday March 24 – Joyce Manor, Militarie Gun at Brooklyn Paramount w/ Karen
Brooklyn Paramount is also very nice, and very conveniently located. I hadn’t been to a proper rock show in a very long time and I missed the energy. There were like a dozen crowd-surfers who repeatedly got carried to the front of the stage. They’d be escorted back out into the pit, then in due time they would get right back up there.
It Turns Out I Love Cold Plunges
So I went to Othership, the culty, clubby sauna at the vanguard of New York’s trendy bathhouse scene. I admit I was skeptical of the whole affair—my ideal of wellness is two fingers of scotch—but the experience lowkey changed my life. (Winnie organized a big group outing for her birthday. Thank you, Winnie!)
The sauna part I can take or leave, but submerging my body in an ice-cold pool of water? Incredible. Most of my friends could barely last a minute, meanwhile Robin and I kept going back for five-minute sessions. The health benefits seem entirely made up and that’s fine. I just think it feels good and it makes me alert.
A key reason why I enjoyed this so much was that this wasn’t a guide class, but an open-format night at the sauna. I’m sure this has already been written about in The Cut or whatever but this was one of the few spaces where people were entirely offline. Not a phone in sight, and even clocks were scant. Just replacement-level house beats and sweaty people and a good time. (Not for nothing, they should host speed dating events in Othership, but I get the feeling that these hip saunas attract the worst kind of people. There were a lot of manbuns.)
Movies
The first movie I saw at home: Wuthering Heights (1939), which is somehow even more emo than the Emerald Fennell version. But the best Wuthering movie I saw last month was a Japanese adaptation from 1988.
The first movie I saw in a theater: Goat, a very heartfelt movie with silly animal puns and sight gags. Shame that the editing is paced for people with ADD.
The last movie I saw at home: Two Seasons, Two Strangers, for forthcoming New Directors/New Films coverage.
The last movie I saw in a theater: Amadeus (1984), first time viewing. F. Murray Abraham gave a surprise introduction. He was there to watch this and Scarface, which he’s also in and played earlier that day at the MoMA, and the staff asked if he’d want to share some words with the audience. Very cool!
Food & Film Pairing of the Month: Project Hail Mary, Hoppers, and Instant Ramen
As far as I’m concerned, Project Hail Mary was a Project Hell No. It’s 2016 nostalgia in movie form. The obvious antecedents—Arrival and Interstellar and Ad Astra and First Man—are not uniformly perfect, but they strove to offer more besides stunning images and science geekery. They were about something. This movie is as empty as deep space. (Not to mention the protagonist’s noxious characterization: a guy whose only flaw is that the world didn’t recognize his genius.)
But I really dug Hoppers. Disney/Pixar animation has been slumping but this was a positive step towards a rebound. The second act of this film is genuinely unhinged and weird in ways I don’t want to spoil. While the political/environmentalist message winds up neutered into a lukewarm lesson about bridging partisan divides, it’s built around a terrific human character. (Fun fact: Mabel is voiced by Piper Curda, who plays one of the kids in May December.) My one gripe: for a film set in Beaverton, Oregon, there is a conspicuous lack of Nike footwear.
The protagonists of Project Hail Mary and Hoppers both live off of instant ramen, though they eat it differently. We see Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling’s science teacher turned astronaut) slurp out of a Cup Noodle a handful of times, which I suppose is an efficient meal to have on a spaceship. Back on Earth, Mabel munches on an uncooked block of Top Ramen, a nod to her Japanese American heritage. Dry ramen was a very popular snack among us Asians when I was in fourth grade. We’d pour the seasoning packet into the bag, then break up the ramen into pieces and treat it like very crunchy chips.
I personally cannot remember the last time I ate Instant Ramen. I made Chapaguri with steak a bunch of times in 2019-2021, thanks to Parasite, but it has been years since I touched a canonical Cup Noodle.
Good Things I Read
Lost City: How the Soul of a City Vanished: Very Slowly, Then All at Once by Robert Simonson, The Mix with Robert Simonson
‘There’s a problem with the sauce’: Times Square taqueria’s salsa sparks lawsuit by Walter Wuthmann, Gothamist
How Gin, Wax and Heat Guns Make Onscreen Meals Look Delicious: The ‘Hamnet’ food stylist Olivia Somary reveals the tools of her trade by Adrea Piazza, The New York Times
Behind the scenes of Alysa Liu’s Olympic victory tour and her new level of fame by Marcus Thompson II, The Athletic
A visit to True/False Film Fest (and also back in time) by Delia Cai, Deez Links
Opening Up to Foie Gras by Alisha Miranda, Guts Magazine
A Brown Peoples’ Version of White Peoples’ Lives: The gleeful inauthenticity of South Asian Italian cuisine by Sharanya Deepak, Vittles
Theater
Saturday March 28 The Wild Party (NYCC Encores!)
Getting Betty Boop (Jasmine Amy Rogers) to headline this R-rated Roaring Twenties-set musical is a casting coup.
Dining In
Cooking for Friends
Saturday 2/28, Sunday 3/1, Sunday 3/8 - Annual Oscars Dinner
This wasn’t really “for friends” since it was a ticketed event and a good chunk of guests were friends of friends, but I’ll list it here, why not.
For that third dinner I actually had time to make a proper family meal, and I need to always ensure we have a full meal before every event I host, because we were in a much better mood on this day. I took the unused chicken parts (as well as duck and chicken livers) and marinated them in buttermilk overnight and then deep fried them all.
Monday 3/9
“Turducken” Pho (made from bones and poultry parts unused from the Oscars dinners)
Sunday 3/15 - Oscars Watch Party
I made black hummus and muhammara for Avatar: Fire and Ash and served a couple leftovers from the dinner parties: pão de queijo plus chips and salsa verde. And I ordered Domino’s.
Cooking for Myself
There were a lot of random meals scrounged together from leftovers and unused ingredients from those Oscars dinner parties and pho night. The fanciest thing I made was a lox chirashi, using Shalom Japan’s recipe published in the New York Times. It’s really good but my palate is not meant for meal prep: I had to eat this four days in a row and was tired of it after the second day.
After the Oscars were exorcised from my fridge, I cooked a couple bean stews. A recent shipment from the Rancho Gordo Bean Club included ceci neri (black garbanzos), which are fairly obscure. I’ve certainly never heard of them before. They boast a lot more fiber and iron than normal chickpeas, and take quite a bit longer to cook. I used some to make the black hummus for my Oscars watch party, and the rest I made into a stew with swiss chard that was quite delicious.
Dining Out
There were four times I had set plans to eat at a restaurant, all of which were during the last week of the month.
Cuerno w/ Caro
Steakhouses are not my usual genre of restaurant—we actually do have steak at home—but it turns out a Mexican spin is all I needed to enjoy it. This is the kind of place where you’ll balk at spending $12 on a taco until you eat it and think to yourself, not bad for a minor splurge. (Highlights: hamachi crudo, taco richi, arrachera [skirt steak]).
Bé Bếp Pop-up at Bar Americano w/ Eric, Diana, Aeron, Lance
Ever since Ha’s Dac Biet settled down into brick and mortar, chef Phoebe Tran’s Bé Bếp concept has become the best Vietnamese pop-up in the city; I think I’ve been to three of her events and they’ve always been the dining highlight of my month. A recent Wednesday in Greenpoint was no exception: I still think about the bánh tiêu, which came with an insanely sumptuous compound butter mixed with crab tomalley.
Grandma’s Home w/ a bunch of people (Winnie’s birthday)
An upscale Chinese restaurant in Flatiron that can accommodate a large group. It doesn’t hurt that it’s pretty good!
Chama Mama (Brooklyn Heights location) w/ David, Sam, James, Elle
Some time ago, I would dine at the original Manhattan location fairly regularly and it was nice to see they have expanded. Adjaruli khachapuri is uniquely suited for brunch.
Incidental meals have put me in a very Mexican time in my life: Taqueria Ramirez (still great after all these years), Yellow Rose (same), Son del North (a much-needed burrito after a couple cocktails)—including aforementioned Los Mariscos and Tacos 1986, this month proved to me that anyone who still says New York has bad Mexican food just has no idea what they are talking about.
And the other day I was doing some Chinatown grocery shopping and walked past the new L’Industrie location in Little Italy. There was no line so I had to buy a slice; I don’t make the rules. It’s actually kind of annoying that even after years of immense popularity, it remains one of the best pizzas in the city. (Here’s my occasional humblebrag that I’ve stumped for them ever since I first moved here, when it was still a bit of a secret. It didn’t really explode in popularity until post-COVID.)
In memoriam: Eric showed up for work on the last Friday of March, only to find out it would be his last shift. Lower East Side cocktail den Chinato is now closed thanks to certain shenanigans from the new owner.
On the last day of the month, the staff hosted a friends & family party to give the establishment a final sendoff. I thought the vibe would be funereal but it was more like a wake. “This was the sixth place that has closed on me,” remarked one grizzled bartender. “I feel like the Angel of Death.” Many drinks were served and memories were shared, but conversation quickly turned to future plans. It had only been a few days but folks already had other gigs lined up. Such is the transience of this industry.
RIP, Chinato. You were a good bar.
March Grog Log
Tracking my first alcoholic drink of the day.
Unico Yuzu vermouth & Soda at home
Nothing
Nothing
Bichi “Listán” 2023 (leftover/half-glass) at home
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing
Carnaval do Marcelo at home
Bojo do Luar Deu Bode at home
Nothing
Nothing
Like a Virgin at Chinato
Paper Planes Trains and Automobiles at Ruth
Nothing
Brooklyn Brewery IPA at home
Nothing
Nothing
Brooklyn Kura Lunar Shiboritate at home
Nothing
Rockaway Black Gold nitro stout at The Emerson
All American Shot and beer combo at Rudy’s
Lagunitas at Whiskey Trader
Shiner Bock at Yellow Rose
Floral Daiquiri at Rockwell Place
House Vermouth at Bar Americano (Be Bep pop up)
Lychee Colada at Spring
Matic Wines Šipon 2021 at Olo’s
Master Gao Baby Jasmine lager at Grandma’s House
Georgia 1991 at Chama Mama
Nothing
Karma and Friends at Chinato (Last night for friends & family)
Field Notes, grid-lined—how’s that for 2016 nostalgia?
It’s still my go-to, though I usually opt for whole wheat everything.
I could probably write a whole essay about how Aziz Ansari’s TV show influenced an entire micro-generation of aspiring New Yorkers.
Few people know that I am a recovering gamer. I built my own PC and everything.