Category Archives: Restaurants

36 Hours in Baltimore: Part I

Posted on by

Baltimore.  I love Baltimore.  It’s got that cozy, quasi-beat down feel I dig in East Coast Cities, a good smattering of galleries and museums, and an idiosyncratic funkiness that appreciates the weird.  While there for a birthday weekend earlier in the month, Shannon and I and my best friends, Rachel, Tim, and Reece went to the American Visionary Arts Museum, a place dedicated to self-trained artists, heavy on the work of mental patients, and able to encompass both this haunting applewood sculpture carved by a TB patient soon to commit suicide and a gift shop in which Reece could buy a whoopy cushion for his twin five-year-olds.

And since we like to eat—and since Tim in particular loves food more than most any other product of human civilization—restaurants factored heavily into the birthday plans.  Each establishment we patronized ended up, as if by magic, to be exactly what we needed at exactly the moments in which we patronized them.

Friday night, Rae and Tim were eager to take us to a spot called Ten Ten.  We were planning on going dancing later and Ten Ten boasts “handcrafted cocktails” that proved excellent primers for the club, as well as the reason that my memories of Ten Ten are limited primarily to them.

Pretty. Lethal.

Okay, that’s not totally accurate.  Tim’s lamb shank came on the bone and looked like both a Viking’s dinner and his mace.  And the Fried Brussels Sprouts with Chili Vinaigrette were superb.  As best as I can deduce now, they’d been steamed to the perfect shade of Late Spring Green and then pan fried briefly at very high heat, giving them those caramelized-charcoal spots that make for the best Brussels.

At the time, however, I’d had, as best as I can recall, two Electric Relaxations, composed of gin, Sloe Gin, honey, Pernod, and lime, as well as a nice glass of Talisker (identified by taste alone, I might add) before leaving the house, leading me to declare authoritatively to the table that after the steaming, the Brussels had probably been subjected to a blow torch ordinarily relegated to Crème brûlée. Continue reading →

Thrill of the Hunt: My Addiction to Menu Competition

Posted on by

I admit that I can be a tad on the competitive side. Once, when Jason and I were first dating, we got onto long parallel escalators in a PATH station. When I saw Jason start to trot a few steps forward on his escalator, I thought we were racing and jumped forward like a runner off the block. When I got to the bottom, flushed and slightly sweaty, and looked back up at Jason, he was scowling. “I was just trying to catch up to you enough that we could hold hands across the banister,” he said. “Also, I think you might have a problem.” I, of course, denied that enjoying a friendly escalator contest should be magnified to a DSM-IV kind of issue. And yet, a dinner last week made me reconsider the charge.

We were eating at a restaurant about which I had heard quite a lot in advance. It’s the sort of small-joint-makes-a-reputation-for-itself that I usually love, so the fact that I was disappointed in my meal was all the more crushing. But worse still was the fact that Jason’s choice of entrée was truly fantastic. I had to listen to him making happy sounds of enjoyment the entire meal while I pushed my gloppy sauce around on my plate. The reason we were there in the first place was that I was taking him out for his birthday, so I tried to reason that it was only fair that he liked his meal more. But the truth was glaring: he had won. I can’t help it; I love it when we’re eating out and we taste each other’s meals and Jason says something like, “Mmm, mine is good, but yours is great.” It makes me feel like I have accomplished something, however small. It makes me feel like I have managed to raise the act of ordering off a menu to an art worthy of competition. Maybe I do have a problem. Continue reading →

The Audacity of Restaurant-Closure Denial

Posted on by
wally's square root

Happier days: a photo of Wally's from their website

According to the stages of grief that Elizabeth Kübler-Ross outlined, I am still in the first stage: denial. I know this because when Jason told me that Wally’s Square Root Café had permanently closed, I asked him several times if he was sure and then, in my heart of hearts, decided that he must be wrong. I know this because I hopefully check their still-intact website and have several times dialed their phone number, even though it has clearly been disconnected. I know this because I can’t quite bring myself to walk by its shuttered storefront.

Wally’s was a diner near the Pratt campus in Clinton Hill. It was a little rough around the edges, with mismatched furniture and modern proverbs scrawled all over the walls and a slightly dazed-looking waitstaff and strange aging artifacts, like toy slot machines, sitting around.  But I, for one, found all of this rather charming, and the food was heavenly, making Wally’s one of those neighborhood ace-in-your-pocket places that you keep at the ready for guests or for a lazy Sunday morning. The pesto-laced Green Eggs and Ham was a wonder on a plate, and they could make it vegetarian in the blink of an eye. The potatoes were crisp little nuggets of pure joy. And the Dirty Mac—I can’t even describe it for fear that I might begin to weep. It might have just been a hole in the wall, but it was my hole in the wall.

There is a particular kind of restaurant grief that overtakes me in situations like these—situations in which not just an eating establishment but an entire series of unwritten future experiences are shut down forever. I know that things change and that neighborhoods evolve. I have been guilty of rolling my eyes when Jason speaks with a kind of nostalgia about the liquor stores and fleabag hotels that have all but disappeared from our neighborhood. But I would be lying if I really care about that at the moment. What I really care about is the lemon-ginger sweet tea at Wally’s and how I will never drink it again.

I can think, really, of only one semi-comparable experience: Continue reading →

Turkey Bones and the March of Time

Posted on by

McSorley’s Old Ale House, in the East Village, is not my favorite bar. The service is inevitably surly, the place is always in-your-face packed with tourists and frat boys, the smell is a bit on the musky side, and the weird little half-pints of beer only come in two varieties (brace yourself, Llalan), dark and light. They didn’t even let women in the front door until they were forced to do so in 1970. Basically, if the bar itself was a person, I probably wouldn’t like him much.

bones, pre-dusting

A photo of the bones, pre-dusting, from the New York Times

But I can’t help but hanker for an occasional trip to McSorley’s. Established (or at least allegedly established) in 1854, it’s one of the few places where you can still feel how old of a place Manhattan really is. If you could manage to elbow your way to a table and order up one of their cheese plates (The cheddar—so sharp! The onion—so raw! The mustard—so spicy!), you’d have a perfect vantage point of some weird artifacts of Old New York, like photos of long-gone drinking club members and antique fireman helmets and turkey wish bones hanging above the bar covered in decades of dust. You could eye those bones and, depending upon the story you chose to believe, think about the quirky bar owner who’d collected them or the WWI doughboys who never made it back from Europe to take them down. And, a little tipsy, you could have deep thoughts about death and decay and the long slog of time and wash it all down with a gulp of light. You could have, that is, until the health department stepped in last year. Continue reading →

Gourmet Gator Juice

Posted on by

tall glass o' gator juiceMarathon training, at long last, is tapering to an end, and despite my quest to find the ideal running food, the mere idea of packaged bars and goos and gummy things has seriously begun to turn my stomach. The one power product that I still looked forward to after a long run was Gatorade, but then one morning not so long ago, I watched someone drinking a bottle of it and thought, “No one should be drinking anything that is that shade of anti-freeze blue.” Suddenly, the fictitious flavors like “Rain Berry” and “Glacier Freeze” in the refrigerator case of my corner bodega seemed ominous rather than refreshing.

And then we went to The Grocery in Carroll Gardens. The Grocery is one of those restaurants that we don’t usually talk about on this blog, not because it is not delicious, but because it’s the kind of upscale grub that is already championed by publications like the New York Times, publications that have actual restaurant critics with actual expense accounts.

Anyway, we were treating ourselves to dinner in their lovely garden, and one of the co-owners, Charles Kiely, brought us a little scoop of hibiscus sorbet to finish our meal. When we raved about the yummy, tangy flavor, he told us that he developed it when he began to have qualms about what was really in Gatorade. “So I made hibiscus tea and put a bunch of salts and sugars in it,” he said. “We drink it all summer.”

That seemed like too good of an idea not to try it myself. Continue reading →

Going the Distance

Posted on by
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 →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Love Is Grand in Inwood

Posted on by

szechuan tofuWe aspire to honesty on this blog, dear readers, so I might as well reveal that I landed at the northern end of the A line, at 207th Street in Inwood, a touch hungover and in a mood that was verging on surly. Manhattan, with its gritted teeth and fake-it-‘til-you-make-it attitude, is usually a marvelous place for a hangover, so I was taken unawares by the blinding good cheer of Inwood. I wandered the streets in a daze, nursing a cup of coffee and trying to take it all in. Birds sang. Trees blew in the breeze. Even the streets themselves had a jaunty roll to them. Outside a mental health facility, the residents parked their wheelchairs and turned their palms and faces to the sun, slight smiles pulling at the corners of their lips. Was I still in New York?

On 207th, street vendors hawked their goods, but rather than the large established halal and pretzel carts of midtown, it looked like someone’s grandfather had wheeled his aging charcoal grill onto the sidewalk and decided to cook you a hot dog. One couple had piled a stolen shopping cart with plastic containers of fruit salad and was doing a brisk business.

There were plenty of restaurants here to choose from, most of them Mexican and Dominican, but I was drawn to a Chinese restaurant called Amy’s, where a man and woman about my age were poring over a menu hanging in the window. They paused every so often to happily embrace, almost sloshing coffee onto each other in their enthusiasm.

“Do you know this place?” I asked.

“No,” the woman answered, gracing me with a beatific smile. “But doesn’t it look amazing?” Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: New Haven Pizza Dream

Posted on by
ethan

Ethan meets Frank Pepe

Our friend Ethan Bernard is a man of conviction and of absolutes. So when a nutritionist told him that he needed to lay off the gluten, he decided to go cold turkey. And when he was planning his pre-fast gluten-filled blowout, he knew that no ordinary slice of pizza would pass muster. Instead, he boarded the Metro North with Jason and I in tow, bound for a city where the pizza was said to be not only unusual but also the best that many have ever tasted. We were headed for New Haven, Connecticut with someone who truly knew the meaning of lunch at the end of the line.

New Haven is best known, of course, as the home of Yale University, but to hear Ethan tell it, the pizza came in a very close second as a mark of distinction. He had first heard about it on a Food Network show and, researching it further, found that “New Haven-style” pizzerias were starting to spring up all over the map, in cities as far away as San Diego and Key West.

oven

That's one impressive pizza spatula.

All of which begs the question: what exactly is it? New Haven-style pizza is cooked in a coal fired oven to give it a crisp-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the inside texture. “The char is very important,” Ethan explained. But it’s more complicated than a simple crust distinction. The pizzas are sometimes called tomato pies, because the originals consisted of sauce and a light dusting of pecorino cheese, no mozzarella.

These days you can get your pie cheesed or uncheesed, so when we put in our order at Frank Pepe, the oldest of the New Haven pizza establishments, we opted to try both. (Note: Fans of Sally’s, the other longtime New Haven favorite, will undoubtedly criticize our choice of Pepe over Sal. Let me just say that these decisions are never easy.) Continue reading →

Garlic Green Bean: My Madeleine

Posted on by

It took an energetic campaign to get Jason and our friend John to submit to the Panda Buffet in New London, Connecticut. On the drive back to NYC from a friend’s wedding, we had just passed through Rhode Island without glimpsing a single viable dining option (State motto: “Taco Bell? Fat chance!”), and I was quickly moving through the nausea-and-headache stage of hunger to one of open weeping, when we spied the Panda Buffet tucked unobtrusively next to a mattress store. After some pleading on my part, I was perusing all five of its bizarre food bars in a kind of transported bliss. Even though I would have settled for anything above a Pet Smart at that point, I was secretly delighted that we ended up at a Chinese buffet. Salvation, thy name is fortune cookie.

I understand that a buffet is not most people’s idea of paradise. Dwell on the all-you-can-eat concept for too long, and it will seem a little grotesque to even the most expansive eaters. It should come as no surprise that it was a 1940s American hotelier, Herb MacDonald, who took the little Swedish sideboard of cold fish known as the smorgasbord and raised it to the gargantuan, fixed-price spectacle we know today.  Who among us hasn’t fallen for its gluttonously seductive charms? Once, as a child, I ate so much at a buffet that I got sick at my aunt’s house later, and I can still remember the panicky look on her face when I woke her in the middle of the night, a look that said, “Good lord, my sister’s youngest child has killed herself with crab legs.”

But I maintain that my main attraction to the All-You-Can-Eat buffet has less to do with sheer quantity and more to do with the spectrum of choice. Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Wrong Stop Edition

Posted on by

rockawayThis really was my fault. Having written a number of these posts, I think of myself as an expert at ridin’ the ol’ subway rails, and I thought that surely I could make it to the end of line that runs right past my apartment and head out to Rockaway Park Beach for a tiny last taste of summer. But wowed by the sight of Jamaica Bay out the train window and lulled by soft beachy names like Wavecrest and Edgemere, I didn’t notice that I was headed north in the Rockaways instead of south. And so I arrived at Mott Avenue, at what was decidedly the wrong stop.

Determined to make the proverbial lemonade out of the lemons of the MTA, I opted to stay where I was and explore the neighborhood I had landed in. I did, indeed, find some highlights: decaying Victorian mansions, a church called the Miracle Center (the boldness of which I respected), and a Little Caesar’s Pizza that mentally transported me straight back to fourth grade classroom parties. But aside from the Little Caesar’s, the culinary scene was looking somewhat bleak. I suppose I should have been asking the locals for advice, but frankly, most of them looked a little down on their luck and not really of a mind to be chit-chatting with me about lunch spots.

So I turned around and went back the only place that seemed like it was doing a brisk business in this neighborhood. In fact, Ralph’s Diner seemed as though it had as many patrons as all the other food establishments combined, and I had a hard time pushing in through the door past all the people lined up at the hot bar. Continue reading →