Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Flavored Syrup; Bad Brains tee-shirt; Spirited Away NA bottle shop.
I’m All Lost in … the three things I’m obsessing over THIS week.
#24. I’m posting a few days late; this covers March 22nd —March 28.
1) Here’s a dispatch from the cosmic realm:
Just a week after writing about Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Syrup in my dad’s obituary. I came across the famed Yiddish secret ingredient at Kalustyan’s, a midtown Manhattan specialty Indian spice and grocery market. I was tagging along with Erica, who makes a pilgrimage to this shop, at Lexington and 23rd, every time she’s in NYC.
As Erica diligently set out to load her basket with gourmet provisions, I wandered off on my own, randomly perusing the aisles and aisles of salts, seasonings, sweeteners, extracts, grains, sugars, herbs, beans, and flour meals.
Rounding a corner into the the second or third room (there are four, plus an upstairs), I was startled to come across a 22 oz. squeeze bottle of the sweet Brooklyn shtetl staple.
I immediately grabbed the cartoon red, yellow, and brown bottle, found Erica in the rice aisle, and tossed the chocolate syrup into her basket.
A few evenings later, back in Seattle on March 26 (what would have been Dad’s 94th birthday), and my first March 26th without him, I stowed a glass in the freezer and headed to Trader Joe’s to get some whole milk and soda water. These are the other two ingredients in Dad’s all-time favorite treat: the New York Chocolate Egg Cream soda.
I followed the classic recipe: No egg! Slather the bottom of the chilled glass with an inch of U-Bet chocolate syrup, add a quarter cup of cold milk, and then, marveling as they form separate black & white-cookie striations, fill the rest of the glass with icy seltzer as you stir and watch the soda-shop concoction fizz and froth over.
Tuesday @ 8:33pm, 3/26/24.
I tested a hippie version too, subbing in oat milk, but it didn’t taste nearly as good.
I’ll be lighting the traditional Yahrzeit candle every March 10 to mark Dad’s death, but I’ll also be drinking a delicious New York Egg Cream to celebrate his life every March 26th.
2) At some point during my trip East (3/14/24—3/25/24), I realized I’d only packed one tee shirt. Erica suggested we go to Uniqlo to buy some more, but as we were strolling through the Lower East Side, I told her there was no need for such formality; we were bound to come across a goofy gift shop with an assortment of teenage tees. On cue, we happened upon City Fun NYC Band Tee Heaven at 1st Ave between 3rd St. and 2nd St.
I got a lovely Hunky Dory-era David Bowie shirt, with appropriate 1972, hippie Sesame Street lettering, and a punk aesthetic Blondie shirt featuring one of the band’s 1977 gig posters (for a show in L.A.)
I also bought a ‘90s indie rock shirt for Erica: Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain album cover.
But the fantastic find was an explosive Bad Brains tee emblazoned with the legendary D.C. punk band’s eponymous and iconic first (1982) album cover: a sketch drawing of a lone lightning bolt striking the U.S. Capitol dome, set in blaring reggae colors.
I’m not trying to rewrite my own history of growing up in D.C.; I was no punk rock teen. I wore tennis shirts! However, I was a political (anti-Reagan) new wave kid channeling the Flying Lizards, Blondie, the first two B-52s albums, the Sex Pistols, the Jam, and the Clash as I wrote my own weirdo pop songs and tuned in D.C.’s left-of-the dial underground radio station, WHFS. Accordingly, I felt an affinity to D.C.’s notorious punk circuit, which was otherwise a bit too juvenile delinquent for my self-consciously quirky-kid interests.
However, I can make this fantastic claim: I went to a now storied May 1981 YMCA show (that got shut down by the police) featuring D.C.’s early harDCore trailblazers Minor Threat, Youth Brigade, SOA, and also, the reason I went to the gig in the first place, Assault & Battery (playing their great song—and soon to be new band name—Artificial Peace). This was around the same time I had scrawled “the Clash” on one of my white shirts.
So, while Bad Brains wasn’t actually my jam back in 1982, I do have a proud stake in the nostalgia for those creatively rambunctious days.
1982, the debut record for Bad Brains, D.C.’s African American punk rock legends.
My friend Lee has a great line: The best and worst thing about our parents’ generation is that the First Lady of the United States was named Lady Bird and nobody batted an eye. Bad Brains gives my generation a similar and kind of sadder oxymoron:
The best and worst thing about our generation is that Paul Hudson, the front-man for Bad Brains, the defining early 1980s youth-in-action punk band, felt compelled to rename himself H.R., which stood for Human Rights.
3) Via Erica again: Here’s another Manhattan find . Tacking to her NA expertise, we traipsed through the Lower East Side to the bountiful shelves at Spirited Away, the first non-alcholic bottle shop in the U.S. It’s located at 177 Mott St. (just north of Broome St.) and just a few blocks away from the hipster hotel we were staying at on Freeman Alley.
The easy going, well-informed, hippie-lady shopkeeper gave us graciously liberal samples and steered us toward all sorts of intriguing NA brands. Admittedly, I was thrown for a loop by her psychedelic dress.
Erica got a bottle of Wilfred’s rhubarb heavy spritz bitter orange & rosemary apertif.
I returned a few days later and the hippie proprietor threw herself into my search (D— X’s actually, texted from Seattle for “things that are licorice-forward or warming spice…and in the other spectrum, garden/grass/green fresh herbs”).
Invested in finding the perfect elixir, Spirited Away’s charismatic tout (scroll down to Alex) talked up Zero Zero’s Amarno (on the sweeter, licorice side), warned me off of one overrated pick (Seed Lip Garden 108), suggested the chicory, coriander, clove-forward Namari (matching the call for a grassy glass), and
Non-Alcholic potions on the stacked shelves at Spirited Away.
eventually nudged me toward a floral and spicy bottle of Melati, where cranberry-sour Chinese Goji berries meet hibiscus. I happily went with that, and she slipped it in a netted gift bag.
To put this in full-circle context, Erica and I went to the first NA bar in NYC/Brooklyn—the Getaway— back in October 2019. Five years on now, strolling into the latest zeitgeist development—a full-fledged bottle shop with a dizzying array of non-alcoholic choices stacked on the shelves—it was a buzz to revel in Spirited Away’s announcment that the 21st Century has begun.