a cab driver's shoe

On Google, type in
The New York Times, and hit "enter"
then type in, after the words "new york times":

restaurant review - the bowery

and you should get a review entitled "Pulino's Bar & Pizzeria," written by Sam Sifton, beginning with the words "Freud said cultural achievement and sensual pleasure pull in opposite directions."

I love reading stuff like this, don't know why.
prose like this -- "Now, there is Pulino's. You can sit at the bar there, drink Campari and read the newspaper,...feeling grand under a ceiling that soars above a checkerboard floor, surrounded by distressed mirrors, chicken-wire glass, towering walls...."

It's just fun.

He describes the chef's cooking as both "rustic" and "urban."
All right.

"Mr. Appleman [the chef at Pulino's] isn't interested in beauty. Unsightly on its face is steak, which he serves with anchovy butter, potatoes, rosemary and Parmesan. It looks like the heel of a cabdriver's shoe, with a pile of dodgy potatoes beside it that might be fries or some kind of baked error. But it makes for fantastic eating, with a sear on it perhaps an eighth of an inch thick, under which soft, rosey meat blooms to complement the starch.

There is splendor beneath its surface."

And, at the end of the review:
"Pulino's can be punishingly loud, particularly when the walls on the east side of the room are open to blatting trucks on the Bowery and everyone's shouting into the din. But it is beautiful, and the service has the practiced excellence of first-class air travel or Parisian bistros. The restaurant is a vision of Manhattan that, like all of Mr. McNally's projects, is at once entirely fake and entirely accurate."

Fake.
And accurate.

-30-