vip in the city

Don’t let’s start

They Might Be Giants, a.k.a., John Flansburgh and John Linnell, were scheduled to perform at the Borders at the Time Warner Center this Saturday afternoon to promote their newest children’s CD/DVD Here Come the 123s — follow-up to 2005’s Here Come the ABCs. It had been quite a while since I’d seen the Brooklyn duo live, and it seems that in the intervening years, they’ve become better known for their children’s projects and television theme song work.

Very well known, in the former case, if this afternoon’s crowds were any indication. It seemed that the entire stroller brigade population of the Upper West Side had convened on the bookstore at Columbus Circle, where dozens of toddlers were propped up on adult shoulders, their little faces peering above the stacks like rows of prairie dogs.

Later that night, CF’s birthday dinner at Ghenet — a “particularly vegetarian friendly” Ethiopian restaurant on Mulberry. The yellow banner outside touts it as the place “Where Angels Eat”; “ghenet” is an Amharic word meaning “paradise”. Turns out that CF and MT are something of Ethiopian food aficionados, having made the rounds at most of the Ethiopian restaurants in New York: Meskerem, Queen of Sheba, Awash… though as of that night, not yet Marcus Samuelsson‘s newly opened Merkato 55. Ghenet is their favorite of the bunch, though.

While the rest of the party dug into the meat dishes, we three split the vegetarian combo platter, which seemed to consist of a bit of every vegetarian dish offered at the restaurant. I counted at least eight scoops in all, served up on a palette of moist, tangy injera flatbread whose torn off pieces doubled as utensils. About half of the items were bean-based, the rest were combinations of potatoes, carrots, onions, cabbage, collard greens and beets, with variations on seasoning, textures and spiciness.

It had been a couple of years since I went out for Ethiopian, and in the midst of such tasty food, I made the amateur error of eating just to the point of satiety. Note: that spongy injera will, and did, grow to several times its original size in the stomach — an expansion that no amount of tej (Ethiopian honey wine) would tamp down, making for some moments of uncomfortable fullness later at Sweet & Vicious.

Tags: Borders, Columbus Circle, Ethiopian, Ghenet, Nolita, TMBG