Sprinkles On Top
Souen Restaurant
212-627-7150
For as long as I've known sexpert Annie Sprinkle, she's had a little cookie problem, which she says is finally over.
"No cookies or ice cream for two-and-a-half years now!" she swore.
We ate at Souen, a macrobiotic place she used to go to when she lived at 27th and Lex, before becoming a well-balanced San Francisco lesbian. Her new book, Dr Sprinkle's Spectacular Sex: Make Over Your Love Life (Penguin/Tarcher), had just come out, and she'd spent the day running a sidewalk sex-advice clinic in front of the Museum of Sex.
"I felt like I was returning triumphant with a book published by one of the biggest publishers in the world. I'd worked at every brothel in the neighborhood. One guy came to the sidewalk clinic who was the manager of Spartacus Spa, my first brothel, when I was 18. He was so naive he didn't know he was a pimp!"
I tried the seitan parmagiana ($13), which used beets to replicate marinara sauce. I'm not sure why tomatoes aren't macro, but I've found it's best not to ask these things. Annie got the wild salmon special ($18), which came with a light pesto, and I snacked gamely on pickled lotus root.
"It's good for your lungs. Willem DeRitter taught me about macro-he had asthma. It didn't seem to go away, but he said it helped-it's kind of sweet, but you can be confident there's no sugar!" she boasted.
A young man at the next table couldn't help but swivel his head as Annie, with full makeup, cleavage and a brand-new tattoo of the female reproductive system, pondered the state of her current orgasms, now that she'd been eating healthily.
"For spectacular sex, it's important to eat well," she testified.
"A lot of macro restaurants seem too serious about themselves. What I like about Souen is that it's kind of funky," Annie pointed out. It was so informal, the waitress propped a huge chalkboard with the day's specials on it in front of each small table.
"Prop Yourself Up!" I read on the book jacket of her advice book, which had an overall G-rated quality to it.
"I always liked being edgy, but after a while that got boring. I wanted a book that could appeal to people in the red and blue states," says Annie, who had her conservative sister-in-law read through it for possible offensive statements. If "what the hell" bothered her, it became "what the heck" in the rewrite, odd for a book by a lifelong star of explicit sex ventures, but then it's all gotten pretty weird lately.
So weird that I actually enjoyed the health dessert, bread pudding with strawberry rhubarb sauce and soy cream ($6.50). Sure, I was eating it in a filthy city, and I'd just had a hamburger the night before, but if the star of over a hundred porn films-who made her show-stopping debut into the world of performance art by showing her cervix to the public-can write a wholesome guide to improving your love life, then dammit, I can try shredded burdock with carrots (which tastes somewhat like the disappearing earth).