Yuan, on 2nd Ave.
Yuan, a new East Village restaurant specializing in Guilin-style rice noodle dishes, aspires to serve the “sophisticated Chinese food lover,” according to lettering on its glass storefront.
Currently in “soft launch,” the restaurant will officially open next Wednesday or Thursday, hot on the heels of 99 Favor Taste’s expansion to St. Marks Place.
A kirtan (collective chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra) at Washington Square Park.(© Kasper van Laarhoven)
If you’ve ever been to Union Square, you’ve seen them: They chant, drum; sometimes they even give you a free copy of their scripture. Hare Krishnas are often shrugged off as an urban oddity on par with clipboard people, but what lies behind those orange robes and endless mantras?
This Friday, June 16, Hare Krishna! The Mantra, the Movement and the Swami Who Started It will premiere at Village East Cinema. The documentary tells the story of Srila Prabhupada, a disheveled 70-year-old Hindu who boarded a freighter to the U.S. in August 1965 with little more than three self-translated religious texts and instructions from his guru to “offer spiritual wisdom to the people of the world.”
Wreckage (photo by Jaime Cone)
Police arrested five people in connection with the gas explosion that rocked Second Avenue last spring and brought down three buildings. The tragedy, which killed two men, seriously injured 13 people and obliterated hundreds of peoples’ homes, is said to have been caused by an illegal gas hookup guarded in a secret room in the basement of the building’s sushi restaurant, locked and inaccessible to restaurant workers or ConEd inspectors.