Spaghetti Nero, black squid ink pasta with nubs of lobster and shrimp, was seasoned with pancetta, chilies and mint.
Fine Singapore noodles in a slightly spicy curry sauce were moist and dotted with nubs of roast pork, chicken, shrimp and vegetables.
The downer was fried rice with nubs of pork trotter, rendered sopping by a wilted cabbage-leaf wrap, a potentially clever joke (Catskills stuffed cabbage meets Chinatown) that fell flat.
Our favorite appetizer was the pulpo salad with nubs of tender octopus nestled among chunks of crunchy celery and splendid black and green olives (as well as whole cloves of garlic).
Cavatelli, a short, ribbed pasta, is well matched with crumbled sausage, cabbage and just a touch of truffle oil ($12.95), while thin taglierini comes with nubs of asparagus and peas, all wrapped in a swatch of prosciutto ($12.95).
But other pastas are a study in squandered potential: squid-ink linguine daubed with sea urchin, handsome but vapid; calamari mingling with its pasta look-alike, short tubes of paccheri, a delightful visual joke undermined by a soupy sauce; tagliatelle strewn with nubs of striped bass with the skin still on, a muddle barely salvaged by capers and pulverized bread crumbs.
What I seek are tacos in their purest primal form, the kind you might find on any corner of Mexico City: workmen's tacos, built on two warm, supple corn tortillas that fit in the palm of your hand, folded around long-cooked meat with nubs of char from a slap on a flat-top grill and minimally adorned with onion and cilantro.
Last month in Indianapolis, John Ban, 31, raised in Indiana by Korean parents, and Arnold Park, 28, a native of Seoul, began selling $2 tacos — corn tortillas piled with nubs of beef, chopped onions, cilantro leaves and red jalapeño salsa — late at night to club kids who visited their West Coast Tacos truck.
Finally, quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) demonstrated no significant change in E(Spl mβeta expression in wing discs expressing Vha44 with nub-GAL4 (supplementary material Fig. S7K).
Some wore "slave bracelets" made out of boot laces and walked with "Black Power canes", sticks with the nub carved into a clenched fist.
Hoffman made an impression on me then, as he continued to do in his later roles, as someone who was more than familiar with the forces of darkness in himself — to be specific, with the nub of chagrined self-loathing that impels many of his best moments on film and on stage.
