Driving-while-Drooling Road Trip Puzzle

Food-Road-SignIt’s Labor Day, everybody, your last chance for a summer road trip! And since (for me, at least), road trips go hand-in-hand with delicious local specialties, we’ve cooked up this little puzzle to test your knowledge of iconic dishes from specific cities. From the descriptions listed below, can you name the dish and the city with which it is most closely associated? Hint: if you’re in the continental U.S. right now, you could drive to any of these cities, though one would require a border crossing. A few of these are tricky, so if you manage to get ten out of twelve, consider yourself a road food champ.

  1. A crust pressed into a high-edged pan, filled with mozzarella cheese, chunky tomato sauce and toppings, and baked
  2. A French baguette stuffed with roast beef or fried seafood and dressed with lettuce, tomato, pickle and mayonnaise
  3. Shoestring fries topped with guacamole, sour cream, Cotija cheese and seared, chopped beef
  4. A particular kind of seafood, formed into a patty (often seasoned with Old Bay) and broiled, served with a lemon wedge and saltines
  5. A long roll (preferably an Amoroso roll) filled with thinly sliced beef and topped with provolone or Cheez Whiz
  6. An open-faced turkey and bacon sandwich, covered with Mornay cheese sauce and baked or broiled until brown
  7. Black-eyed peas mixed with diced vegetables in a vinegar-based sauce and usually served with tortilla chips
  8. French fries topped with fresh cheese curds and covered in brown gravy
  9. Buttered bread filled with roast pork, glazed ham, Swiss cheese and thinly sliced dill pickles, pressed and toasted in a plancha
  10. A cream-based soup prepared with potatoes, onion and a particular shellfish, but definitely no tomatoes
  11. Cubed red meat, deep-fried and served with toothpicks as utensils, with salt, hot sauce and crackers on the side
  12. A meat sauce spiced with cinnamon and allspice, served atop spaghetti and finished with finely shredded cheddar cheese, onions and kidney beans

Don’t scroll down or click Continue until you’re ready for the answers… Continue reading

Going the Distance

scarecrow

"Come, ye food pilgrims!" says this scarecrow at Nixtamal.

How far would you travel for the perfect meal? That’s not a purely academic question for most food enthusiasts I know. I’ve been contemplating the importance of the food pilgrimage ever since our friend Ben mentioned the fact that “there are about four restaurants in Queens that people in Brooklyn are willing to travel to.” He and his wife Jenny had just brought Jason and me to one of these places, Tortilleria Nixtamal, in Corona (more on their heavenly homemade tortillas in a moment). The weird thing was, Ben didn’t even need to say the names of the other places he had in mind for me to instantly fill in the blanks with the restaurants I believed he meant: Dosa Delight in Jackson Heights, Nan Xiang in Flushing, and anywhere that is liberal with the feta cheese in Astoria.

I’m not sure what makes these places travel-worthy. I can say with reasonable certainty that I’ve never had and never will have the best meal of my life at any of them. But while I’m probably willing to put more time into traveling for food than most (see: any End of the Line post on this blog), it’s a rare gem that I’ll submit to slogging to repeatedly, and Dosa Delight and Nan Xiang make that list without question.

Perhaps part of it is the travel itself, the hardship endured for the sake of taste. When Jason travels to Jersey City and Sapthagiri Restaurant, I can see his eyes get wider with longing for majjiga with every rumble of the PATH train. Majjiga is a curious beverage, a sort of spicy cilantro-flavored lassi. (Interestingly, the menu translates “majjiga” as “buttermilk.” It is definitely not buttermilk.) As much as Jason enjoys the taste of majjiga, I think he enjoys equally the experience of telling the proprietors of Sapthagiri how far he has traveled to drink it, for which he is often rewarded with slaps on the back and a big pitcher of the stuff on our table. Continue reading