... but Looks Can Be Deceiving

The European-ness of Quebec City was a big reason I wanted to go there -- given that a trip to Paris doesn't seem to be in my immediate future. But after having lived in Paris for six months, I found Quebec City wanting.

Sure, it looks European, and speaks French. And there are truly great restaurants there, including Laurie Raphael, where we had a seven-course tasting menu that equaled that served in many top restaurants in New York. One dish -- a side dish at that, not even a course of its own -- presented root vegetables in a flower pot, with crumbled cookies serving as the "dirt":


But what Quebec City, or at least the old town, lacks is everything else you associate with eating in France. We found no cafes whatsoever, nor charcutiers, cheese stores or most other types of specialty food places.

Even the boulangerie (bread bakery) is in short supply. Our options for breakfast croissants near our hotel turned out to be limited to one, a place called Paillard. But at least it was a nice one:


And upon further inspection, it turned out to have a feature that no Parisian boulanger has:


Yes, that's right: in Quebec City you can actually get your fresh croissants and coffee in the same place. How un-French of them. But how welcome.

A Bit of Europe, One Hour and Seven Minutes from New York

Any travelogue about Quebec City has to begin with the most well-known fact concerning the place: it looks like a medieval town in Europe.

And so, while appearances can be deceiving (and I'll discuss that a bit in the next few posts), let's start there anyway:

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

A lot of people I know who summer in places like Fire Island Pines and Provincetown have heard vague things about Asbury Park and are, in a mild way, curious about it. This past weekend a group of 20 of us descended on the place to check it out. Here is my report. It can be summed up in a sentence: Asbury Park is the anti-Pines.

In a much more profound way than I could have imagined, the two places are diametric opposites. This is both good and bad, as I'll describe, but for both good and bad it's the central truth of the place.

If you've never been there, you've probably heard of it, at least as the faded, decaying seaside resort where Bruce Springsteen got his start (at the Stone Pony, which is still in business):


I visited once before, 14 years ago, for New Jersey Gay Pride. There was a parade up one of the main streets, past vacant lots and chain-link fences, toward an empty field near the ocean, much like the one shown here, where the Black Box woman sang "Everybody, Everybody" under a tent. There was one gay bar, with shabby plywood walls, a pool table and a neon beer sign. It was dreary beyond words.


A lot has changed since then -- the condos you see on the left side of this street are new, for one thing -- but Asbury is still, basically, dreary. It never was an atmospheric honky-tonk roller-coaster-and-salt-water-taffy place like Coney Island or Atlantic City, never mind places like Wildwood or Point Pleasant Beach that still make that formula work. Judging by the archeological evidence, it seems to have been a rather quiet middle-class place in its day, with a boardwalk but no real carnival midway. The boardwalk is bracketed by a partly ruined, partly restored convention center/auditorium to the north ...

... and a wholly ruined casino/carousel to the south:


The rest of the seafront is lined by a couple of restored hotels (the Berkeley, shown here, is at the north end near the convention center; the Empress, where we stayed and which I'll discuss further in a bit, is next to the casino) ...


... one or two modern buildings with upscale restaurants ...


... a couple of seemingly abandoned concrete shells ...


... and a bunch of sandwich and T-shirt shops set up in old shipping containers along the boardwalk.

There are many, many, many vacant lots in the oceanfront area, and a huge condo complex that seems to have been started and then abandoned before they got much past the first floor.

We stayed at the Empress Hotel, a '50s-modern, four-story structure at the south end of the beach that contains Asbury's main gay club and was recently purchased, restored and reopened by none other than Shep Pettibone, Madonna's producer in the '80s.


The architecture is mildly interesting if you like '50s modern; the lobby is comfortable; the rooms badly need to be updated. Out back is a large pool and deck, which got moderately busy with sunbathers during the day Saturday. A big second-floor deck with Astroturf gives a nice view down to the pool (notice the disco ball hanging over it) ...



... but if you turn even five degrees to the left, you get a much-less-nice view of the construction site behind it.



The 20 of us were arriving Friday in small groups, by car or train, and we were hoping that (like every other gay resort I've ever heard of) there was some sort of Tea where we could gather, mingle and meet the locals. No such luck. Even though drinks at the Empress's pool bar were only $3, no more than a handful of people were there by about 6p Friday. Because we had planned a group dinner that wasn't going to start until 9p, a few of us went looking for a snack, and more or less by accident stumbled into a wine bar across the street called the Watermark:


There, we started to see the good qualities of Asbury Park.

If the wonderful post-gay future we all claim to wish for ever arrives, it will have arrived first at the Watermark. This was the most diverse crowd I've ever seen: lesbian couples, twinky boys, bears, older straight country-club types, and Jersey Shore wanna-bes, all mingling happily and enjoying excellent, reasonably priced drinks and bar snacks (hummus, sliders, artichoke dip, etc.) on a beautiful rooftop, the ocean to our right, the town to our left.


I'm told that the Watermark just opened this year; it seems to be carving out a reputation as the place to go for happy hour in Asbury, and well it should.

We ended up, by now numbering 21, going to the restaurant an hour early just to see if they could take us. The restaurant was called Moonstruck; it's in a three-story 19th-century wooden house overlooking the body of water that separates Asbury Park and its neighbor to the south, Ocean Grove. Maybe 4 city blocks from the hotel. (It was a very nice house, but too dark for pictures.) One of us had called just that morning for a reservation. Not only could they seat us, an hour early, but we even got a private room (fortunately, as the rest of the place was pretty full). We must have been quite a handful, but the waiter (an older Irish-looking gentleman) was a great sport, and the owner came by to thank us for our patronage. The food (modern American) was terrific as well, though having left Manhattan and entered the United States of America, we did notice that we were now in the land of Big Food. One person's steak came on an oval platter that in my house is used to serve dinner for six.

We headed back to the hotel, and that was about it for the night. The hotel's nightclub, Paradise, was open but pretty much empty. There was a contest of six local drag queens, five of whom were terrible.

Saturday we hit what we were told was the gay beach, just south of the convention center (and, ironically, at the other end of town from the gay hotel). It wasn't impressive when we got there at noon; there were a few lesbians, and fewer gay men, but the crowd looked mostly straight. Over the next few hours it got gayer and gayer, and there were quite a few serendipitous bump-intos with local and New York friends who also happened to be in town for the day. But it's not a place to go if you're a beach lover. The sand is clean but coarse; the beach is interrupted every couple hundred feet by a ruined groin (you can see one in the picture above, as seen from the Watermark); it's crowded; and, this being New Jersey, you have to pay $5 per day just to use it. On beach quality, the Pines wins hands down.

Saturday night is definitely the night to go out to the Paradise. It's a nice club, actually, especially considering what you pay ($10 to get in, free to hotel guests; on Saturday nights the drink prices double to $6, still a bargain considering how heavy the pours are). There are three rooms; a dance floor larger than Splash's, with a bar of equal size off to the side; the smaller room (still at least as big as the Splash dance floor) with seats where the drag queens were the previous night; and the pool deck. On this night, with an unknown local DJ performing, all three spaces were about 2/3 full. They had Tony Moran the previous weekend and will have Ralphi Rosario on Labor Day. I'm told for such events they can draw up to 1,700 people, though that seems like an exaggeration.

It was fun. The music was good; the crowd was friendly in a low-key, non-cruisy way (though not, in terms of attractiveness, in the same league as the Pines); it's nice to be able to go outside for fresh air; the infrastructure is good (meaning, e.g., that the bars and bathrooms are of ample size to handle the crowd). Parts of it do feel a little hotel-ballroomy, but not enough to be a downer.

There is allegedly another gay(ish) bar in town, but we didn't try to find it after a FOAF we met at the pool that afternoon described it as a place where lesbians go to watch male strippers.

And that's really about all I have to say. Sunday was cloudy and showery and we didn't stay for the Paradise's weekly tea dance.

I do think Asbury has a lot of potential. But it also has a lot further to go to reach that potential than I had imagined. In theory, it could end up being something like an upscale Brighton Beach or Long Beach (New York, that is, not California), a place to own a condo by the sea in a walkable but urbanized town with good restaurants, shopping, beach-and-boardwalk, culture and a real mix of people. But right now, it seems more like a place for occasional weekend trips to a hotel than a place to own property and spend the season. Developments like the one containing the Watermark are promising but the downtown is still too much an urban disaster zone for my taste:


It could get there. But it will take 5 years and an economic recovery, minimum.

But while I'm not rushing to buy property in Asbury Park, I do plan to go back for more weekends. That much, it has already earned.

Something Else You Wouldn't See in New York

Seen outside Rules, one of London's classic old-time British restaurants:


It is, of course, illegal to serve game hunted in the wild in restaurants in the United States (or at least in New York, and most other parts of the country I'm familiar with). The venison, quail, pheasant and so forth that you get in American restaurants has all been raised on farms.

Me, I'll take the risk of biting into a shotgun pellet for the chance to eat truly wild game. But then, I'm not an American health department nanny.

The Best Gay Nightlife on the Planet?

As was the case in Sydney, a random group of my extended friends happened to all be visiting at the same time as I was. Unfortunately, we never quite ended up all being in the same place at the same time.

This was partly because Shaun (a friend from New York who now lives in London) and I decided to concentrate our efforts on bars, while Jim and Leif, visiting from San Francisco, preferred to focus on clubs; and partly because London offers a wider range of gay nightlife options than, I would guess, anywhere else on the planet right now. If the four of us had all been out on the town in New York instead of London, we probably couldn't have avoided bumping into each other.

Here's a quick rundown of the bars I went to, which will give you a sense of that variety. And don't forget that the whole Vauxhall scene, the most well known part of London's club world, is entirely in addition to this.

WEDNESDAY:

Compton's -- After my first day at work I was looking for a happy-hour scene a la Open Cafe in Paris. This was the closest thing I found to it, and it wasn't very close. An unpretty crowd in an unpretty old pub.

G.A.Y. -- This is the Soho (Old Compton Street) establishment of this name, not the club in the former Heaven space. It's two narrow, oblong floors with lots of screens showing music videos, packed (on a midweek night, mind you) with children. Very beautiful children, for the most part, but I swear the average age had to have been about 20. I don't think I've ever felt quite as out of place because of my age as I did there. But I stayed for an hour and a half because it was the only place showing any sign of life that night.

THURSDAY:

The Box -- Friends had recommended to me this restaurant-cum-bar on the Covent Garden side of Charing Cross Road, but when I stopped in it seemed to be more of a restaurant than a bar, with groups of friends sitting around at tables. Didn't seem like the kind of place for a visitor traveling solo, so I didn't stay.

The Duke of Wellington -- If you're looking for a gay traditional English pub, this is the place, much better than Compton's. Definitely a bear crowd (think: Cafe Cox/Paris or Gym Bar/New York) but packed at happy hour, and friendly. Also the only bar on my entire itinerary that served traditional English beer.

The Village -- Next door to the Duke of Wellington, this is an uninteresting black-box sort of bar, notable only for having a more diverse crowd than the Welly.

Barcode Soho -- A branch of the Vauxhall place, and to my taste much more enjoyable. Pretty empty when I arrived about 9:30, but started filling up about 45 minutes later. The DJ, Ben Jamin, was playing a lovely synthesis of classic '90s vocal house ("Sing It Back" and suchlike) with modern trance and electronica. No dancing, unfortunately, at least not officially. The place has a dance floor in the basement but it was not open. The music plus the cute and extremely friendly crowd meant I ended up staying longer and drinking more beer than I had planned, and closing the place at 2:30 in the morning.

FRIDAY:

For something completely different, Shaun took me out to the Shoreditch area of East London, which is the local equivalent of Williamsburg. We stopped first at the ...

George & Dragon -- an old pub that someone had clearly spent hours cluttering carefully with artfully artless arrangements of junk. Very mixed crowd here, no dancing or memorable music, so we stayed only long enough for one drink. Then walked a few blocks to ...

Joiner's Arms -- This is a larger space, bare white walls with a pool table (later removed to make a dance floor) and some butt-sprung couches around the edge. Looks more like a Brooklyn bar than a pub and feels like one too. Filled up with a hottish, youngish, extremely drunk crowd. Shaun said the place could get frisky but I didn't see it; on this night, at least, it was more about people out with their friends (although they were willing to talk/dance/drink with strangers as well). We're used to DJs like Susan Morabito or Abel who, each in their own way, pilot their parties smoothly into the sky like a 747 taking off on a well-paved runway. This was more like a bush plane in Africa, the propeller backfiring, the cargo door taped shut, that takes off from a grass field in a thunderstorm but finally does manage to limp into the air, and then climb more and more confidently. I didn't get the DJ's name, but one mix was the most creative I heard all weekend: it took the "Beach Ball" bass-and-drum riff, overlaid the piano and guitar hook from U2's "New Year's Day," and lay yet a third song I didn't recognize on top of that.

SATURDAY:

The Welly, again -- a bit less crowded than Thursday but a more diverse crowd.

Rupert Street (I think that was the name) -- midway between the Welly and Barcode, this is the local equivalent of G Bar or Vlada, the place for the young cuties to stand, model and cruise. This is definitely the sort of crowd I like, though I did notice a few more tweezed eyebrows and fashion victims than you might find in the States. Very cruisy but nothing really developed from that; but then, it was early (10'ish).

Barcode, again -- Shaun thought we should go back here to see the downstairs club. It's a low-ceilinged room, about the size of The World in Vancouver but squarer and with much better lights. Good music, standard London trance. Didn't get very crowded, which surprised Shaun. We had thought about finishing the night here, but the lack of people started us thinking about moving on, and then the thought was completed when I saw two or three guys stumbling around, dead drunk and barely on their feet. I'm pretty sure it was alcohol, not drugs, but the effect on my psyche was the same as seeing someone fall out. So we left and went to ...

XXL -- The one real club we attended all night, this is in the Southwark area (south end of London Bridge), not Vauxhall, but physically it's pretty much the same idea, a set of interconnected rooms built under the arches of a railway viaduct. (Why the 19th-century railway builders of London chose brick archwork, while those of New York chose tunnels or beaten-earth fills, and all the consequences that would flow from that choice a century later, is a subject unto itself.) It's mostly a bear event, and if you know me you know that my taste doesn't generally run in that direction, but I have to say that 10% of this crowd was astonishingly hot. The music was good, the scene was fun; I'm glad that I finished up my night there. I might even go back sometime.

The English Spring

I had never been to London in the springtime before this trip, and was totally surprised when, in a cab en route to a business appointment, we passed through St. James's Park outside Buckingham Palace to discover cherry and dogwood trees in bloom and daffodil fields ablaze. I went back the next day to take some pictures:



Elsewhere in the city, flowers also prevailed, including the Regent's Park area, where I was staying, and outside St. Paul's Cathedral:



Flowering-tree season is evanescent everywhere, so I thought I'd share these with you: even if you've been to London in the spring, you might have missed this.

It's also worth noting that while it was typically cold and damp in London -- on a weekend when it was 75 degrees in New York -- the cherry trees were in flower a week before those in Manhattan, and three weeks before the normal cherry-tree season in New York.

The Mother Country

One of the characteristic sights of Melbourne is the indoor shopping arcades that run through the downtown area:

I decided not to post about them because, dear readers, you were getting bored and I had more urgent things to write about. But on a recent business trip to London I saw exactly the same thing in the Piccadilly area, so I thought I'd take note of it:



My impression on the ground in London was that theirs were a little drabber and less elaborate than the ones in Melbourne, but from these photographs you can hardly tell which is in which city.

So when they say Melbourne is Australia's most European city, now it starts to make more sense ...