Curated Saturday: Downtown Socializing During Nemo

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Despite our week-long plans to spend a day’s adventure in Greenwich, CT (a plan hatched around a visit to the Brant Foundation Art Study Center to see what Nate Lowman intended with his “I wanted to be an artist but all I got was this lousy career“), we had to cancel our excursion in the last moments due to the Nor’easter that was Nemo. And despite expecting a snowed in Saturday, many of my local downtown establishments were open and bustling with activity.

Late-morning on Saturday we bundled up, left our steam-heated apartment, and tromped down the street to 235 Bowery to take in the first floor of “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star,” an informed and invigorating exhibition. We predicted a well-matched follow up to what we considered the best exhibition at the downtown museum in recent history, “Rosemarie Trockell: A Cosmos,” which closed last month. We recommend stopping in the lobby bookstore to pick up a copy of the exhibition catalogue with a brilliant and thoughtful essay by the exhibition’s co-curator Massimiliano Gioni.

After enhancing our appetite for art knowledge, we decided to head North along the Bowery for a stop at the mecca of art and design publishing: Dashwood Books at 33 Bond Street. And good thinking, as we were able to stock-pile some perfect-for-snowy-Saturday-evening-reading. A few of our favorite finds were an exhibition catalogue from Cindy Sherman’s 1987 Tokyo show published by Parco & Co., LTD, the new edition of Cy Twombly’s Oevre Photographique: 1951-2010, and one out of two special editions Richard Prince produced for Purple magazine’s 20th Anniversary, Bettie Kline.

Then we went down Lafayette, through the now melting snow-drifts, ending our snow-day at the iconic Balthazar. Despite having made reservations with the weekend manager, we still had to fight the tourist-wave of brunch diners for a coveted booth along the eastern wall of the restaurant. But once settled, we enjoyed decadent deserts and an exceptional cheese board along with the one-and-only aromatic experience of Balthazar’s Ginger Citrus tea. While the Profiteroles are always a good stand-by, we decided to branch out and try the refreshing Warm Vanilla Bread Pudding. The chocolaty profiteroles and the tart strawberry sorbet atop the pudding made for a complementary balance of flavors against the day’s selection of cheese: Tomme de Savoie, Camembert, St. Maure, and our favorite Fourme d’Ambert.