I was early to an appointment at Hudson and Houston so I stopped for ice cream from the cart outside the Jacques Torres factory on King Street. I felt the indifferent clerk had spooned up a shallow serving and thought Jacques would be furious. I went into the shop and asked for him. I don't have a Ray Milland "Lost Weekend" relationship with the Torres branch on Amsterdam in my nabe, though I do drop by for gifts and chocolate bark for Steven and me once in a while. Last time I saw Jacques in his factory was the day he opened the original wonkaroo in Williamsburg, and Sootha Khun, the chef who won four stars for Le Cirque and quit restaurant kitchens a week later, was gift wrapping bunnies for his friend. They both wore hairnets.

    This time he took off the net before emerging from somewhere in the back. Kiss Kiss. "Give this lady a box of chocolates," he said, "And some cookies."

  "Oh Jacques," I protested. "No. No! Too much. Well, maybe just the cookies."

    He confided: "I'm French and so I didn't know anything about cookies. We make macarons. But I got a recipe from the chocolate chip box and I adjusted it...a little more butter, a little more chocolate." He is amazed that his shops sold 300,000 cookies last year.

    As I left I saw Torres closing in on the stingy ice cream clerk.

    The peanut butter cookie was a killer all right - six inches across, layered with extra dark chocolate, full of roasted peanuts and peanut butter. "We make it ourselves," he'd said. I had a chunk before dinner and a chunk after. Next morning I dropped some largish crumbles onto my Spartan breakfast, the usual kibbles and bits with no-fat yogurt.

    "Maybe you should do a peanut butter cookie granola," I tweeted Torres that morning. He tweeted back that he was already working on one and would send me a sample.

    I tweeted back, "How about throwing in some bits of candied apricot?" I am thinking too much about chocolate since I designed my own candy bars a few weeks ago. I'm afraid chocolate is like great sex. The more you have, the more you want. Surely both are good for your heart.       

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Conjugation

    I found this quote from Reverend William Ralph Inge in a piece I wrote in 1984 that I just posted in my Vintage department on Insatiable Critic. It's called "What's Hot and What's Not: The Young and the Listless." "The whole of Nature is a conjugation of the verb 'to eat'," he wrote. And, I added, "Nowhere is the verb so passionately conjugated as in New York City." My Vintage round-up is not quite so pithy but amusing to read for a view of how we were then.  Click here. 

     Suddenly I am remembering the porno-rich 70s, when this neighborhood was scarifying before love and disco dancing often brought me here at 3 a.m. I am standing on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 43rd Street, buffeted by the tourist hordes - if they weren't quite so wide, if they didn't walk four across as if life were a shopping mall. Looking for a restaurant. Looking for Qi Bangkok Eatery. Amazingly, it is right here, blinding bling wedged into the residual sleaze. You can't miss the exquisite Thai face in the photograph posted alongside the door. Is it a spa in Vegas? Is it a nail salon? Is it a joke? Well, whatever you think, you'll be excited to taste very good Thai food. Click here so you'll know what our chile-heads liked and what the more timid mouths preferred.