One of the best things about New York is that there never comes a time when you’ve run out of things to do, when you’ve done every activity the city has to offer. And when you do believe that you’ve done everything there is to do, you’ll find a hidden gem that you would never have found unless you had exhausted your usual locales and went out exploring for something new. Be it a store selling unique goods, a new neighborhood to wander through, or a new cuisine to taste, New York will never disappoint: something I was reminded of over winter break.
On a bleak, dreary, gray (read: slightly overcast) day in late December I got a call from a friend, Stanley, asking if I wanted to hang out. After rejecting my ideas of going to play hockey or seeing a movie it seemed as if we were at a standstill until he mentioned a Korean restaurant inf flushing with a signature dish which he recently heard of. In ten minutes I had picked him and two other friends up from his house, in thirty I had parked my car on 162nd street and we were walking down to Sik Gaek.
As we entered the restaurant we were greeted by a joyous shout from the staff: it was a Tuesday afternoon and we were one of three parties in the whole establishment. We ordered a dozen and a half oysters, a seafood pot for four, and the item which we had crossed Brooklyn for to eat, Sannakji. As we watched, a chef with a menacingly sized knife reached into a tank full of octopi and grabbed one. He quickly gave the cephalopod a rinse before dispatching it and dismembering it into small pieces. Those pieces were placed on a bed lettuce before being put on a plain white plate and served to us.
A curious fact about octopi and squid: their tentacles keep moving for several minutes after death due to a complex nervous system.
As the dish was placed on our table we all waited to see who would be the first to bite (pun intended). Stanley was not daunted: he picked up a piece of tentacle up with his chopsticks, dipped it in a dipping sauce, and put it in his mouth. With a look of shock on his face he exclaimed, “it’s clasping onto my tongue!” He stuck his tongue out, and to our amazement we saw that the tentacle was in fact stuck onto his tongue. After the initial shock, the rest of us tried the octopus as experienced the foreign feeling of our food fighting back. Compared to the appetizer, the rest of the meal was tame (although delicious) and we were soon on our way home. However, that experience showed me that no matter what, there is always something to do in New York.