02.09.07
Posted in Brooklyn, Caribbean, Fruits and Veggies, Latino, Posts For Gothamist, There's A Beverage Here Man, Williamsburg at 5:46 am by Administrator
Mister Cutlets is somewhat of a role model for me . . . maybe even a father figure. We are both food writers. We are both lovers of meat puns (his book is called “Meat Me In Manhattan” and my last post was about a place with the motto “Let’s Meat At Sahara.“) We’ve both appointed ourselves absurd nicknames. And we both find it appropriate, even though neither one of us is a super hero as far as I can tell, to take on theme songs (”With the bacon and the lamb chops and the scrapple and the ham hocks, Mister Cutlets spend some time with me” written by Life In A Blender West versus “Pickles! Salami! Dumplings! Pastrami! Take a look, grab a bite, put it in your tummy!” written by Jack Dolgen of Sam Champion before, mind you, he ever heard that phenomenal Mister Cutlets theme song.)
So I take very seriously what Mister Cutlets writes. And a couple of weeks back, when blogging on Grub Street about the new Saveur 100, he declared that he was “shocked – shocked – to discover that just two entries cited the New York food scene.” These two entries, Mister Cutlets’ headline claimed, are “The 2% of the Saveur 100 That Matters.” One was about a Brookyn spot I’d never heard of. The other was about me.
Being 50% of the 2% of the Saveur 100 that mattered to Mister Cutlets was quite an honor for me. I was surprised to find that Mister Cutlets himself wrote one of the blurbs in the Saveur 100, and it was about a New Orleans oyster loaf, a good 1300 miles south and west of New York. Still, I felt like Michael Corleone must have when he shot McClusky and The Turk . . . kinda.
So I thought I’d better go taste the other half of the 2% that matters. Had I not, it would have been like never meeting my half brother. I was drawn to it by something greater than just my fat belly. I was following my heart across the East River.
Saveur describes it as a Dominican juice drink called Morir Sonando (To Die Dreaming) at Reben Lucheonette in Williamsburg. Fresh-squeezed orange juice, condensed milk, sugar, and vanilla syrup are all shaken with ice. The folks behind the counter seemed almost as proud as me when I showed them the magazine:
Even though I’d taken a thousand fares to Williamsburg and no one ever recommended Reben, I had a good feeling I was about to experience something great. I was right. The drink was absolutely delicious. And the guys behind the counter were as friendly as could be. I knew I’d found a new stop to take people on eating tours.
The Morir Sonando was refreshing and sweet. The flavor was so pleasing it made my shoulders slump and my eye lids droop shut when it hit my lips. I could clearly see why they call it To Die Dreaming.
The guys behind the counter didn’t speak much English, and my Spanish is spotty at best, but I did understand them saying “Top 100 in Brooklyn” as they looked at the magazine. I told them, “No, no solomente Brooklyn.” “Oh, todos de Nueva York?” one of them said excitedly. “Todo el mondo,” I corrected him.
Now they were thrilled. The counter man who seemed most interested in the whole thing informed me the drink was exactly as it had been for 45 years. Only the price had changed, and he showed me the original price hidden behind a construction paper cut out:
(I think that means it is actually less expensive now than it was 45 years ago if you adjust for inflation)
When I told them that I too was featured in the magazine, and that according to Mister Cutlets, we were the only ones that mattered, they got even more excited. And everyone crowded around to read my blurb with a genuine enthusiasm that struck me as almost childlike in its sincerity. I was touched.
I left Reben Luncheonette with a slight sense of euphoria as a result of the Morir Sonando. I also felt a sense of brotherhood with my new friends behind the counter. And hopefully, I made Mister Cutlets proud.
As published in Gothamist.com
Reben Luncheonette, Hevemeyer btwn Broadway and South 5th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
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05.06.06
Posted in Brooklyn, Dave's Faves, Meats, Seafood, Williamsburg at 5:11 am by Administrator
If you take cabs, I’m sure this has happened to you at least a couple of times. Your cabbie gets you where you are going, but the conversation is still going somewhere. So you idle at the curb, maybe talking a little faster, maybe even passing the money up front, but you don’t make a move for the door handle.
That has happened to me a few times as the customer, and many times, from the other point of view, as the cabbie. The other day, in South Williamsburg, I idled in front of a brownstone on Wythe Street for a good fifteen minutes while my fare poured her heart out. She had been living a lie.
I had first spotted her not too far away in North Williamsburg staggering out of a bar on Union Street and Richardson. I didn’t expect much from her. She looked like every other girl in Williamsburg right down to the mullet, the Duran Duran tee shirt she had obviously not bought before Simon got fat, the torn leg warmers, the oversized pink plastic belt, and the can of PBR in her hand. She was a classic hipster chick.
(The Williamsburg Bridge from the hipster side)
But she clearly had to get something off her chest. She danced around it for a while, and I wasn’t in the mood to fish for it. So after the bit of back and forth during which she repeatedly hinted at some secret dominating her life, we fell silent. I assumed it was the same old story I’d heard a million times from girls like that: she’d gotten hooked on oxycontin and couldn’t kick so it was ruining the one good relationship she’d ever been in OR she had slept with her gay friend’s boyfriend who actually isn’t gay and neither of them know how to tell the real gay one. I hear stuff like that all the time, so I wasn’t worried when she clammed up. But I could tell she was bursting at the seams.
“I’M A REPUBLICAN!!!” she blurted out. “I’m from Utah. I’m from Utah, and we’re all Republicans. ALL OF US. I mean . . . I love being Republican. I love George W. Bush.” She was talking very fast now. “I hate Ralf Nader, I hate the Democrats . . . I even hate other Republicans who don’t stand behind Bush. I’m a Republican. . . a Republican.” We were at a light, and I had been looking at her in my rearview. As I turned my gaze back to the street in front of me, I noticed in the mirror that my mouth had been hanging open. The light had been green for some time.
Usually, I’ve got something to tell people. Something to at least start to put things in perspective. Maybe even something to make people feel a little better. But I was speechless. I actually considered that she might be on some crazy drug, and I could be in physical danger.
She kept talking as we crossed into the south side of Williamsburg. I managed to ask, “Do your friends know?” This only served to agitate her to the point where I could barely understand her. And, no, her friends did not know.
She’d voted for Bush twice. She’d actually worked for the Bush campaign in 2000 and, like Alex P. Keaton, worshipped Richard Nixon. Her hobby was collecting Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich memorabilia. She was against abortion, against gay marriage, against immigration, against Arabs in general. Yet she was living in possibly the most liberal neighborhood on the planet.
As we sat in front of her building with the meter running, she began acting more and more like she was on the couch in her therapist’s office. She was on the verge of tears now. All I could say was, “Well . . . there’s always something,” quoting my hero Tepper from Calvin Trillin’s Tepper Isn’t Going Out. It seemed to work though. She calmed down and worked her problems down to their core: “Why should I be afraid of becoming an outcast just because I support our president? Why should I live in fear of letting all these liberal freaks around here ‘find me out’ for the Republican I am?”
She seemed empowered. Her facial expression relaxed, and she grabbed her purse to pay me. Even though the meter had been on, I still could have made way more money out there picking up and dropping off fares in the time I sat in front of her house. I expected a nice tip. I hadn’t considered that, as a Republican, she did not identify with the working man one bit. She gave the change plus a dollar.
Now I was the one who felt deflated. I asked her, “Is there any place in Williamsburg you go to get away from the other hipsters, I mean the real ones.” I didn’t care that I might have sounded offensive.
“Marlow and Sons is only a couple blocks away. I love their oysters.” She said it reminded her of her drunk mother’s summer house on Puget Sound. If I wasn’t going to get a monetary tip out of her, at least I got a tip on the food in the neighborhood.
I returned to Marlow and Sons today with a couple of my hipster friends. We had a feast. The oysters, some from Puget Sound, some from Blue Point Long Island, were delightfully briny. The west coasters were huge. (I visited the Hudson River Project and read that oysters from what is now New York Harbor used to grow to be gigantic, and the people of the Manhattan tribe would filet them and roast them like steak. So I should say these oysters were huge by today’s standards. They definitely required more chewing than the oysters I’m used to.)
(Left: the Puget Sound monsters, Right: the local Blue Point)
We also devoured a handsome plate of assorted meats (soppressata, coppa, saucisson, chorizo, and prosciutto), assorted cheeses (pleasant ridge reserve, majic mountain, taylor farms gouda, sprout creek, and the stinkiest hooligan I’ve ever smelled), and pate with cornichons. It all went together so well.
I was in heaven. Basic foods served without garnish or overpreparation. That’s good eating. And, tonight at least, aside from my friends, there wasn’t a hipster in sight.
Marlow and Sons, Broadway and Berry St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Read an article I wrote about a floating oyster bar off Cape Cod’s elbow in the “Published Food Writing” section of the Famous Fat Dave’s Five Borough Eating Tour website.
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04.27.06
Posted in Brooklyn, La Pizza, Manhattan, Williamsburg at 3:44 am by Administrator
I was so glad to find out last night that I am not the only one in New York City who has “WRITE AN ANGRY LETTER TO LOMBARDI’S PIZZA” on my to do list. I picked up a woman in Park Slope who told me she was going to Allen and Stanton. It was midnight, and she had to leave her friends at the bar so she could head home and go back to work. But first she wanted to stop for a slice to sober up. “Rosario’s?” I asked, judging from her destination. “Yeah, how’d you know?” she said. “Well I’d hope you aren’t going to Ray’s.”
(An L.E.S institution)
We comiserated with each other about how bad Ray’s is. She said she had warned a friend of hers last week not to go in, but the guy was desperately drunk so he bought a slice anyway, even though Rosario’s is only a block away. She said he didn’t even eat half of it before he threw it out. Pizza can get really bad. I’ve found that saying, “sex is like pizza: even if it’s not so great it’s still pretty good” to be untrue on both counts.
As we crossed the Manhattan Bridge we reminisced about the old Rosario’s with the great arches of paper cup stacks leaning out across the sidewalk on Houston, and we both mournfully remembered defiantly signing a petition a few years back to keep Ray’s out. But Ray’s did move in, and so Sal, by far the most beloved pizzaiolo of the Lower East Side, had to move his store off the main thoroughfare. He left his old ovens behind, and his pizza, though still great, suffered.
Joe’s of Carmine Street has not fared as well. It was always one of my favorites, and my fare declared it was her very favorite slice in the entire city. But since Joe’s moved from the corner of Bleeker Street to make room for Abitino’s Pizza (with the truly offensive motto of “The only pizza worth eating” and the even more offensive habit of blasting Fox News loud enough to hear it in Father Demo Square), Joe’s slice has dropped to just about one notch better than mediocre.
(The fresh mozz slice at Joe’s these days, still pretty good) But our blood really began boiling when the topic of Lombardi’s Coal Oven Pizza came up. I thought I was the only one who noticed that they no longer have a crust. For exactly a century (1905 to 2005), Lombardi’s, America’s first pizzeria, made their pies with puffy, chewy crust around the edges. Lifelong friends, tight-knit families, mothers and daughters would bicker over who’d get the piece with the big bubble.
(Me, my friend Nanda, and evidence of a crusty pie just a year ago)
I thought their expansion last year was good news, because I wouldn’t have to wait as long for a table anymore. But last time I went, I noticed there was no beautifully charred crust with which to grip my dream pizza. I asked the waiter, and he told me they now put the dough through a machine to make the pie rather than kneading it by hand. I responded with flabergasted and angry gestures and exclamations until the waiter told me, “hey buddy, all I do is drop the pizza on the table.” It’s an economy of scale I suppose.
I was infuriated. How dare they? Popular religions have been started in less than a century. I had loved my pepperoni and red onion pizza like a son, and now I’ve been stabbed in the back. My fare an I agreed to write our angry letters, and eat at the newly opened (in comparison with Lombardi’s) Una Pizza Napolitana on 12th Street. I’ve been to Napoli, and I ate more than a dozen pizzas during my three days there (you can order little snack size pies from street vendors between meals at the revered institiutions like Brandy’s). And I can tell you, Una Pizza Napolitana is the real deal, though it is exorbitantly expensive. Had I eaten it in Napoli, I would have thought it was in the top five. My fare made the point that the Lombardi’s crust betrayal might not hurt Lombardi’s this year, or next year, but soon and for the rest of its life. In another century or so, no one will even notice that Una Pizza Napolitana isn’t as old as Lombardi’s.
A couple hours later, I hopped out of the cab on Bedford Street and North 7th in Brooklyn not because I was hungry but because I was whistful. Anna Maria’s hasn’t changed a bit since I first tasted their heaping garlic pesto slice five years ago. The place is always packed with ridiculously drunken hipsters, and the pizza guys have always been fun-loving, hard-working Mexicans.
(One of the hardest working men in New York)
They do seem to close earlier than before, but that might be my overdeveloped sense of nostalgia acting up. Anna Maria’s is a unique New York slice. People might call it California style because of all the toppings, but no one in Santa Monica would be caught dead eating a slice that looks like this:
Anna Maria’s serves up nothing but heafty, tasty pizza. With my massive veggie slice still settling into my belly, I cruised around looking for one more fare to finish off my night. Someone out there must know where to find the perfect slice. Anna Maria’s, North 7th Street and Bedford, Williamsburg Brooklyn
Una Pizza Napolitana, East 12th Street btwn 1st and 2nd Ave, East Village, Manhattan
Lombardi’s Pizza, Spring btwn Mulberry and Mott, Little Italy, Manhattan
Joe’s, Carmine btwn Bleeker and 6th Ave, West Village, Manhattan
Rosario’s, corner of Stanton and Orchard, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Check out http://www.famousfatdave.com for a chuckle or to book an eating tour
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