Another One Bites the Dust

So it turns out Mary Ann's isn't actually closing -- it's just so filthy it was shut down by the Board of Health -- but 8th Avenue did lose yet another restaurant this week.

Nooch -- that modern-looking Thai place on the northwest corner of 8th and 16th Street -- has called it a day. Normally when a restaurant closes on 8th Avenue it is replaced by a Thai joint, so this creates an unusual -- dare I say existential -- dilemma. (I fully expected Viceroy to become yet another Spice.) The "thanks and goodbye" sign in the Nooch window says they were open for seven years, which sounds about right. The one -- and only -- time I ate there was in 2004.

BTW: We ate at the old Empire Diner last night -- now known as the Highliner and in the midst of a "soft" opening -- and boy was it heinous. Perhaps they were short-staffed, but after getting seated outside near the kitchen -- a mosquito's paradise -- it took the server a REALLY LONG time to even acknowledge us. The only thing worse than the service, unfortunately, was the food. The lobster roll -- which I didn't even know you could mess up -- was horrible, and Michael's meat loaf was like a panfried Jimmy Dean sausage. It's run by the same people who operate Live Bait and Coffee Shop (never been to the former, the latter has always been fine), but I'm not hopeful about where this is going at all.