Funny Food

Bone Lick Park

75 Greenwich Ave. (betw. Bank St. & 7th Ave.)

212-647-9600

Cola's

148 8th Ave. (betw. 16th & 17th Sts.)

212-633-8020

L & L Hawaiian Barbecue

64 Fulton St. (betw. Gold & cliff sts.)

212-577-2087

At 3 a.m., if I'm not out laughing it up, I'm usually in my little bread box of a room with remote in hand, flippin' around. So I was really happy to see local comedian Liam McEneaney on The Best Week Ever, thinking fast.

"You just sit in front of construction paper and talk for two hours," explained Liam, who lasted about five months on the show. We were eating a pretty healthy Southern Italian meal at Cola's, Nick Accardi's place on 8th Avenue.

"It's always been regarded as a good date restaurant," Nick pointed out. It's true that our Artichoke Ravioli was only $15, and the Grilled Tuna with black olives, capers, and a touch of white wine sauce was $18. It's a small and airy restaurant; you'd never feel obligated in a place like that.

"It's a good place to trick women into thinking I have good taste," pointed out Liam, who has to eat on the healthy side after being an obese teen.

"When I was 18, I applied for a job as a booth mopper in a porn place. I was like 450 pounds, it was Christmas Eve, I was depressed, I was broke. They said I'd have to mop the ceiling once a week, and I would've, too, but they never called me back. I couldn't even get a job at White Castle back then. Do you know who doesn't get hired at White Castle? Nobody," said Liam, but of course we were far away from all that now, eatin' antipasto sotto Roma on the outskirts of Chelsea, home of the competent.

"I started doing stand up at 19 at Faceboys Open Mike-I followed a woman who pulled down her pants and scooped menstrual blood. What's funny is, nine years later people still talk about it!" said Liam, who's 28 now and tryin' to get by.

"There used to be a huge comedy rush-basically anyone who had a bar put up a mic and a stage, hired a comedian all week, and you could make a living. These old Boston comics told me that in the 80s, you could make $80,000 a week and never leave Boston, and of course, it all went up their nose."

Nick came over to explain how perfect our espresso was:

"You've gotta use hot milk, and see that cream on top? You should see black coffee through the cream," he urged. Accardi brought this necessary fanaticism to his new place, Bone Lick Park. Barbecue seems to bring out the zealots, so I went there with Jack Sprat, a musician from Texas who's tried BBQ all over the states: Soul Feathers in Tucson, Nick's in Arkansas, and Rendezvous in Memphis.

Bone Lick Park has a 12-foot-long pit, imported from Missoula, which uses hickory, apple and cherry wood. The baby back ribs ($11.95 for half a rack) was a pretty good deal.

"This is tender, it falls off the bone well," Jack endorsed. "At Virgil's, the ribs didn't fall off the bone, the chicken was dry, and the brisket wasn't really brisket. And this, this is a nice touch: Nobody has lima beans!"

"I'm glad you noticed that," said Nick, returning the flattery. "I opted for this instead of baked beans!"

"Some people don't like lima beans, but those people aren't worth talking to!" Jack replied.

Next, we daringly ordered the bayou fried oysters with garlic aioli ($7.95).

"You should only have oysters in months with an 'R' in them," Jack informed me. "So we're really taking a chance. This is good, though; it's deep fried. Usually these are corn-meal fried, and it comes off!"

I put their excellent house sauce on my pork chopped sandwich ($8.95), which came with a brioche-style roll Nick discovered at Peter Luger's, made by a Polish family in Brooklyn. And by now you can guess that key lime pie requires limes flown in from Key West, where a proprietor once suggested that I have my slice with coffee and a cigarette to get the full flavor. I was having a pretty nice time with Jack Sprat; for some reason I'd been encountering, uh, colorful personalities in the NYC BBQ world.

L & L Hawaiian Barbecue, a newish place on Fulton Street, has this cheap and authentic Hawaiian plate lunch, kahlua pork with lau lau ($8.49), fatty pork wrapped in a tea leaf.

"It's seasoned perfectly, not too salty. This is about as good as plate lunch gets-the Kine Grinds, which means the best!" testified the Hawaiian surfer I was with.

The local office workers are all there, eating up a storm, what with an order of Hawaiian Short Ribs, nice and tender, going for $4.99, and mac and rice at 70 cents a scoop, but my companion tried vaguely to convert me to Transcendental Mediation.

"I don't believe in a caring higher power; I think reality's like the ocean, just neutral," I shared, sampling the chicken katsu, breaded chicken with Katsu dipping sauce ($4.99).

"The ocean is safe" he lied.