last night, two of our good friends (who now live in oklahoma and boston) came in to town.

to celebrate, we did a food tour of the lower east side.

we started with the automat. here, food is in little heated lockers with glass doors. you can only use coins (they have a change machine... soooo useful for laundry, too), you put them in the side like in a vending machine and then the little door opens and you can grab your warm food. mike and dan were very excited about this. they both stood on the sidewalk, jumping up and down and yelling "automat! automat!" while all the cool lower east side people gawked. no, never mind. nothing fazes the lower east side people. they just continued walking.

anyway, we got a small shepherd's pie there just because we HAD to try it out.

next we went to an asian restaurant where we all ordered something different and then ate off each other's plates. this is much easier to do with chopsticks. highly recommended.

then, for desert, we ended up at a polish diner. we ordered blintzes (like crepes, but with cheese inside) and cheesecake and johnmark (who hadn't made it to the asian part of the meal) had a combination platter with similarly colored items doused in gravy. he claimed it was the best sauerkraut he had ever tasted.

of course, after all that we pretty much rolled ourselves home.

next time on the blog: how nobody eats anything for the next two days.