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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05.04.06
Posted in Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens, Gravesend, Manhattan, Meats, Middle Eastern, Posts For Not For Tourists, Sandwiches, West Village at 6:04 pm by Administrator
I’ve bridged the cultural divide between East and West, and all it took was meat on a stick. In today’s Not For Tourists Guidebook “On Our Radar” section, read my article about four of the juiciest shawarma joints in town.
And then, if you still haven’t gotten in the mood shawarma, read an article I wrote for Attache Magazine about a Kurdish shawarma stand in Madrid that would make Saddam Hussein feel like a schmuck in the “Published Food Writing” section of the Famous Fat Dave Five Borough Eating Tour On The Wheels of Steel website. Long live Kurdistan.
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05.03.06
Posted in Brooklyn, Red Hook, Sweets at 6:35 am by Administrator
When I first starting driving a cab late in 2001, I never got fares to Red Hook. In fact, my instructor at the Master Cabbie Taxi Academy used to warn the class, “Baba, if you make a habit of taking fares to or from Red Hook, you are not going to live very long.”
For a time, it had the highest murder rate in all of New York City. I’d go on my own every once in a while for the heart-fluttering views of the Green Lady of the Harbor on nice days, or to hang out at the old Sonny’s bar. But the pack of wild dogs that roamed the desolate broken cobblestone streets and the matching red bandanas so many of the locals wore had the effect of detering frequent visits.
(Lady Liberty is staring directly at Red Hook)
Nowadays though, I get fares to Red Hook all the time. They went without a homocide for years, and gentrification is in full swing there. Because Red Hook has no subway station, people who don’t feel like waiting for the B61 bus often hail me at bus stops for a lift home (I say that the difference between being poor and not poor is dramatized most glaringly at bus stops where poor people always wait for the bus no matter how late it is, how cold it is, how tired they are, and people who are not poor indulge in giving up, leaving the poor people behind, and hailing a cab).
Yesterday, not only did I take my second fare to Red Hook in the last two days, I took the same guy twice. Surprisingly, in a city of millions, this was not the first time I’ve been hailed by the same person twice. I’ve had a couple people tell me that they remembered being in my cab before, though I didn’t remember them. But I picked this same guy up two days in a row. It was not completely random though. Both times I picked him up were at the same time of day on the same corner. Still, what are the chances?
He had lived in Red Hook his entire life. He told me about seeing gang wars, actual gun battles, in the streets on no less than thirteen occasions (I suppose you don’t lose track of how many of those you’ve seen). He told me that his own father, who also grew up in Red Hook, boasted that when he was a kid he’d derail the trolley on Van Brunt Street using chunks of scrap metal. It was a simpler time I guess, a time before video games when kids amused themselves by disrupting public transit?
Two days ago when I picked him up, we talked about the dying art of pickling. He is a chef at the Austrian restaurant Wallse (where I found him) on Washington Street, and he was lamenting the fact that Chicago has banned foie gras. He was proud of the foie gras terrine with plum compote he makes at his restaurant and worried that the day would come when the dish would no longer exist. I told him that I had worked as a pickle man for years at Guss Pickles on the lower east side and had similar fears about pickles in a neighborhood where the number of pickle stands has dwindled from 80 to 1 (and back up to 2 again) in less than a century.
I swung by Guss in the morning today to say hi to my old boss, so I happened to have a pint of sour kraut in my backpack. I happily handed it over to my fare after he spoke of his respect for the art of pickling. He was very excited, as I would expect an Austrian to be when you hand him a pint of kraut. He apologized for not having anything from Wallse to bestow upon me, but urged me to get a key lime pie around the corner from his house in Red Hook.
I found the spot he was talking about, but I was nervous to enter because of a number of signs clearly marking it private property. As soon as I stepped through the gate a security guard yelled over to me that I was not allowed. I pointed to the sign that said “Key Lime Pie,” and he said, “Oh, that, okay follow me.” He took me to a very well-marked door:
(I took this shot AFTER I bought my pie)
When I walked in, I found three middle aged men talking about fishing. Apparently someone had caught a large bass off Rogers Point in Red Hook just a couple days ago. I asked if I could buy a slice of pie, and the one behind the counter said “no.” I asked, “why” and he said, “you gotta buy a whole pie.” It was $14 for an 8-inch pie, but I figured I’d just spend the good tip and good karma I’d gottenfrom my repeat Red Hook fare.
I tried to get a shot of any of the men, but they all acted like they were Don Barzini and refused to allow me to take a picture. I asked them how they’d ended up making key lime pies (and key lime pies ONLY) in a Civil War-era warehouse on a pier at the waterfront in Red Hook, and one of them said, “Oh the pies are just a front. This is a clubhouse.” I didn’t know if he was screwing with me, but I said, “That explains why you guys don’t want your picture taken.”
The pie was delicious, and clearly not a front. I’ve tasted key lime pies that were made as tart as possible, like the baker confused tartness with tastiness the way some people think a curry is good just because it’s incredibly spicy. This one was not too tart at all, but it still had all the flavor of a great key lime pie. It was very gooey though, so if you demand structural integrity in your pie, this is not the pie for you. Maybe if I’d put it in the fridge overnight it would have firmed up, but I took it over to my brother’s house in Boreum Hill and we ate it within the hour.
(I don’t even want to show you the first slice)
Red Hook is just like Florida in that it is bounded by water on three sides. Now that the wild dogs have been tamed and the bullets have stopped flying, people might start making trips to Red Hook just for key lime pie.
Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pie, Pier 41, Red Hook, Brooklyn
Check out http://www.famousfatdave.com for a chuckle or to book an eating tour
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05.02.06
Posted in Boreum Hill, Brooklyn, Latino, On The Open Road at 7:09 am by Administrator
I was going to save my next Latino food post for Cinco De Mayo. But the Mexicans in this town, and a number of others, turned today’s May Day observances into their own holiday. . . literally. A bunch of them took the day off. I saw many Mexicans, along with communists, socialists, anarchists, anti-Bush-in-general-ists, and immigrants rights activists march for “EDUCATION NOT DEPORTATION.” And a yet-to-be tallied amount of Mexicans participated in a general boycott on buying anything.
(”We Are America,” AND we are Jesus)
The boycott apparently did not extend to buying taxi rides, because I took three fares of Mexicans from the Union Square protest. I think it is important to note here that I’ve found Mexicans to be amongst the very best tippers in New York City. And in the true spirit of May Day, I got particularly fat tips from my Mexican fares in a show of solidarity with their proletarian brethren. At least a few workers of the world united in my cab today.
(looks like the boycott didn’t apply to tiny American flags either)
My Spanish is pretty shakey, but I tried pumping my fares from south of the border for information on where to find a good burrito in New York. It is a subject on which my knowledge is sorely lacking. I’ve been searching for a really good burrito since returning from a west coast swing to visit my cousin Jeremy Weinstein, the best editor Hollywood has seen since Richard Chew (Star Wars, Risky Business, Real Genius, and Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds In Paradise).
Within an 18 hour span, I consumed three of the most amazing burritos my young, fleshy belly had ever experienced. For lunch, my hungry cousin Jeremy and I ventured into the heart of East L.A. for burrito’s the way Jesus Cristo intended: sitting in folding chairs on the sidewalk next to a taco truck.
They were more delicious than I had ever imagined burritos could be. The moment I took that first bite, the year was zero. I had to turn back the clock. Everything had to start over for me, because I had been born again into a world where burritos taste good enough to linger in East LA for an extended period.
(The moment of truth; it didn’t look like much, but it was)
I drove to San Diego and had another burrito for dinner, this one from a place called Saguaro’s that serves even better burritos 24 hours a day.
The Califonia burrito redefined, yet again, my concept of “burrito.” I now no longer call any burrito not served on the west coast ”burrito.” I refer to them as ”Mexiwraps” or “burritesques” depending on my mood.
(my second burrito in my second city of the day)
The next morning I had a breakfast burrito from La Posta that gave me an overwhelming sense of euphoria and a sunny disposition the rest of the day even though it was the dead of the June Gloom weather pattern in San Diego.
Since that trip, the closest I’ve come to recreating those burrito experiences here in NYC was when I bought a burrito in San Francisco’s Mission District on my way to the airport, and then ate it six hours later, not warm but still fresh, on the A train from JFK.
So I was eager to find a good New York burrito on a day when Mexicans were out in numbers. Unfortunately, the three fares I had seemed like they never really eat burritos. One of them suggested California Taqueria on Court Street in Brooklyn. I’ve eaten there before, and I do think it is a delicious “stuffed tortilla treat,” possibly my favorite in New York, but it doesn’t compare with those out in the golden state. I considered driving by and grabbing one, but I was afraid there would not be anyone there to work the counter.
California Taqueria, Court Street btwn Bergen and Congress, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn
Check out www.famousfatdave.com for a chuckle or to book an eating tour
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04.28.06
Posted in Brooklyn, Cannoli, Dave's Faves, Italian, On The Open Road, Sweets at 4:17 am by Administrator
Picture it: Sicily, 1650. The people of Palermo are celebrating Martedi Grasso, the Catholic celebration of Fat Tuesday. The streets are jammed with revelers indulging in sweets to enliven the merriment of the Carnevale. Cannoli are being exchanged like beads at the modern day New Orleans Mardi Gras. One Sicilian man, whose name is lost to history, is moved to poetry:
Beddi Cannola di Carnalivari
Megghiu vuccuni a la munnu ‘un ci nn’è:
Sú biniditti spisi li dinari;
Ogni cannolu è scettru d’orgni Re.
Arrivunu li donni a disistari;
Lu cannolu è la virga di Moisè
Cui nun ni mancia, si fazza ammazzari,
Cu li disprezza è un gran curnutu affè! |
Beautiful are the Cannoli of Carnevale,
No tastier morsel in the world:
Blessed is the money used to buy them;
Cannoli are the scepters of all Kings.
Women even desist [from pregnancy]
For the cannolo, which is Moses’s Staff:
He who won’t eat them should let himself be killed;
He who doesn’t like them is a cuckold, Olè! |
That is pride. The Sicilians, a proud people, take particular pride in their cannoli.
A few centuries later, in suburban Maryland, my new high school sweetheart is the daughter of a Sicilian immigrant. She is also a vegan. Her father, Tony, is overjoyed that his daughter’s new boyfriend would gladly eat anything and everything. He takes to cooking me spaghetti with clam sauce and rice balls filled with peas and ground beef while his daughter subsists on baked beans and tofutti cuties. Before long, Tony makes his ritualistic trip up I-95 to Vaccaro’s Italian Pastry Shop in Baltimore’s Little Italy. Upon his return I find Tony in the kitchen with a glowing expression on his face, a whopping spoonful of sweet ricotta in one hand, and a delicate fried wafer in the other. It is time for my cannoli education.
(The Albemarle Street location as seen on vaccaropastry.com)
Tony inserts the ricotta into the waiting shell before my eyes, sprinkles it with powdered sugar, and triumphantly serves me dessert at eleven in the morning. Before I swallow my first bite, I know I have found the first true love of my young life. The look of almost giddy anticipation on Tony’s face prompts me to speak with my mouth still full. “So good,” I moan, flakes of shell flying from my lips. A big slap on the back, a few more bites, and I am the son Tony never had.
Still, Tony feels a responsibility to teach me the true Sicilian way. He carefully explains to me exactly why my first cannolo tasted so good. The ricotta must always be stored in a cool, dry place. The shells must be made with Marsala wine. And the two must never, ever meet until just before the cannoli are to be enjoyed, lest the shells lose their crunch and the ricotta grows warm and runny.
My love of cannoli flourished, so Tony began making extra trips to Baltimore to be sure he was stocked up for my frequent visits. Much like the “cutter” in Breaking Away, I began thinking I was Italian, although every member of my family is of Eatern European Jewish descent. Tony soon dubbed me “The Cannoli Kid,” and I took to the moniker with a Sicilian’s pride.
Years passed and, while my relationship with Tony’s daughter did not withstand the test of time, my love affair with the cannoli was beginning to blossom. Mostlly as a result of my mounting indentity crisis, I found myself studying in Florence, Italy during my junior year of college. Once I arrived, I didn’t waste any time reaching my adopted motherland.
I skipped orientation week and took the overnight train to the toe of the boot. My new apartment in Florence had seemed alien and unwelcoming, but when I got off the ferry in the port town of Messina, I felt like I had come home. The people expressed that familiar sort of warmth I’d come to love back in Maryland. The distinctly Mediterranean weather agreed with my constitution, and the food was the best I’d ever eaten. Like Tony had done for me years earlier, I considered it my responsibility to introduce my classmates back in Florence to the glories of real Sicilian cannoli.
I made sure to eat cannoli with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the way I do with lobster when I am in Maine, or pickles on the Lower East Side. I followed my belly to the tiny hilltop town of Corleone. Yes, The Godfather was filmed there, and a cinematic pilgrimage was part of the reason for my visit. But more importantly, Corleone is located in the heart of Sicily’s sheep country. The people of Corleone, therefore, make superior ricotta for their connoli.
After wandering around the town for a few hours fielding an array of confused looks from the Corleonese, I met Eustachio in a piazza. We exchanged niceties in my broken Italian, and I asked something to the effect of, “Where could I find a tasty cannolo around here?” His eyes lit up.
(The piazza in which I met my destiny)
Eustachio whisked me across a couple cobblestoned blocks of Corleone, announcing to friends he passed the excitement that was about to ensue. By the time we reached the cool, dry basement of a poorly stocked grocery store that his uncle owned, I was surrounded by a least half a dozen eager Sicilian men. Eustachio did the honors of building my cannolo before my eyes, just as Tony taught me years earlier. I felt the anticipation in the air as I took my first bite. It was even better than the first time back in Tony’s kitchen. My knees actually went weak, and I shouted, “Que buono!” A joyous cheer went up all around me, and I was showered with brotherly shoulder smacks and bear hugs. I felt as though I had just gotten married.
Eustachio arranged for his uncle to supply me twenty shells and a gallon jar full of ricotta at an unnecessarily discounted price. He imposed the strict condition that I do everything possible to keep the ricotta cool during the sixteen hour journey back to Florence. He even drove me to the train station in Palermo with the air conditioning on full blast. The rest was up to me.
Back in Messina, I had to wait two hours for the train to be dismantled and loaded onto a ferry to the mainland. Under the blazing Mediterranean sun, I sprinted to a nearby focacceria. My Italian was not good enough to explain my situation, even though I had picked up the thick Sicilian accent nature had intended for me. The proprietor refused to even look at the contents of my wrinkled paper bag, and he seemed to think I was some American drug fiend who needed a place to hide his stash.
I started to grow desperate, pacing the floor, gesticulating wildly with my hands, and repeating “mingia,” the word for fuck in the Sicilian dialect. These were things the proud Sicilian standing before me could comprehend, so he finally inspected my mysterious bag. I understood him say something about “cannoli” and “why didn’t you say so” as he hurriedly shoved my jar in his soda case. The ricotta was saved, and when I returned to Florence, I bestowed the precious cannoli upon my classmates. I felt like Tony must have when he gave me the sacred gift.
Since I moved to New York, I’ve scoured the five boroughs for cannoli that rivaled the ones I first had back in Maryland or the ones I found everywhere in Sicily. But even institutions like Veniero’s Pastry Shop on 11th Street and Fortunato Brothers in Williamsburg refused to hand-pipe their ricotta. Sicilians had immigrated to New York City in large numbers more than a century ago. But no matter where I looked or who I consulted for advice, I could not find a cannolo that would satisfy Tony, Eustachio, or me. Had New York’s Sicilian population lost its sense of pride in the crown jewel of their ancestral cuisine?
Last week, I picked up an old man with warm, smiling eyes in my cab. I took him from Grand Central Station out to Cypress Avenue on the border between Brooklyn and Queens. As we passed a modest storefront at Stanhope Street, he spoke to me unsolicited in a familiar accent. “This place here has great cannoli.”
Within minutes of dropping him off in Ridgewood, I was seated on the sidewalk beneath the “Euro Cafe” awning. I ordered two cannoli from a woman with that same familiar accent. I watched her at the counter, squeezing cool ricotta into a fresh shell that smelled of Marsala wine. Before swallowing the first bite, my taste-buds transported me back to Tony’s kitchen, then to Corleone, and finally to Martedi Grasso.
Euro Cafe, Cypress Ave btwn Stanhope and Himrod, Brooklyn
Check out http://www.famousfatdave.com for a chuckle or to book an eating tour
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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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04.25.06
Posted in Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens, La Pizza, Meats, Middle Eastern, On The Open Road, Sandwiches at 3:36 am by Administrator
On a day when one of my favorite town’s in the world was bombed, I was in the mood for shawarma. I made a trip to the Middle East last year with an organization called Birthright Israel meant to send Jews from all over the world to their “homeland” for free. There at the Western Wall or the Dead Sea, we were supposed to find our true Jewish souls.
Things didn’t go exactly as planned. We dubbed our experience “Birthwrong Israel” after the trip degenerated into a debaucherous hash fest including one nice Jewish girl from New Jersey falling in love with a Palestinian and another getting caught on video in a menage a cinq with Israeli soldiers still strapped with their Uzis.
As for me, my Talmudic transgression began just after the official trip ended. Having noticed that the shawarma tasted progressively better the further south I travelled in the country, I left the group at Ben Gurion airport and made my way to the southern Israeli port of Eilat on my own. During my twenty four hour stint in that port town, I ate turkey shawarma at the same stand on three seperate occasions, and it tasted better each time. It was the best shawarma I’d had in Israel, so when I learned the stand was run by Israeli Arabs, I made up my mind to cross the border into Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.
After a few days wandering around on the beaches chatting with friendly Bedoin, I made my way to the serene tourist town of Dahab. It was snorkling heaven, scuba heaven, and, as expected, shawarma heaven. I spent two of the best weeks of my life there, spending my days in a scuba certifcation class, spending halcyon evenings chowing down on shawarma and gazing across the Red Sea at the Arabian desert’s craggy hills as they turned strawberry-red in the setting sun.
Before I got to the Sinai, massive bombings destroyed the Taba Hilton on the northern tip of the peninsula and a small resort north of Dahab, and since I left, more bombings devastated the famous resort of Sharm El Sheik on the southern tip of the peninsula. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when Lakshmi Singh informed me of the triple bombing in Dahab today as I discharged a passenger in East Harlem. I was surprised though. And so I felt like shawarma.
I’ve been told multiple times by my fares to eat at Zaytoon’s when I drop them off in Carroll Gardens. So today, when I heard the news, I took a break and headed down the FDR, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and onto Smith Street with my cab empty. The shawarma was therapeutic.
The friendly Palestinians at Zaytoon’s make their own pita in the window and their own hummus in the back. And their shawarma is sliced thick off spit, making Zaytoons’ cut the Katz Delicattesen of New York’s shawarma scene. Before the news from Dahab, I’d been in the mood for a slice, so I also ordered a sun-dried tomato “pitza.” I think mostly because the fresh-baked pita and breads are their forte, the pitza was good enough to make me forget about the Patsy’s of 118th Street slice on which I had planned.
The shawarma, even though I think it might be the best in the entire city, didn’t make me forget about Dahab.
Zaytoons, 283 Smith Street, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Check out http://www.famousfatdave.com for a chuckle or to book an eating tour
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