Category Archives: food

New York Bagels

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I see that over the weekend there was much consideration of the issue of New York and Bagels. Matthew Yglesias comments (“The Stuff that Matters,” ThinkProgress, 28 November 2008):

I’ve now lived in DC long enough that I forget how much I like real bagels. But then I come back to New York for Thanksgiving and the whole sad little fantasy universe I’ve constructed for myself in which DC’s bad bagels aren’t a big deal collapses.

Kevin Drum does a little wondering as well (“Bagels!,” MoJo, 28 November 2008)

It’s hard for me to remain on topic here because Washington, D.C. is such a miserable hole of a city. It would be hard to come up with a single factor in which New York was not vastly better of a city. The only reason that anyone tolerates D.C. is that it’s the political and intellectual capitol of the country.

That said, whenever I go to New York I have a list of things that I want to do and every time it includes bagels. This visit included bagels on two out of three mornings. My friend has been living three blocks from Tal Bagels so it has been pretty convenient, but on other visits I have commuted for bagels.

I’ve heard a number of the theories (the municipal water), but I’d have to say that I think it’s a gestalt. The bagels themselves are better: crunchier on the outside, chewier on the inside. But the schemers are better too (we brought back a tub of the olive cream cheese and another of the tofu, which rather than being some vegan concession has a flavor zestier and brighter than the cream cheeses). And most important is the ambiance. Woody places with a bunch of working-class artisans in black pants, white t-shirts, white aprons, and white paper hats, with a lot of hurry and attitude is different than the hired gun Ethiopians at Au-bon-Pan. A bagel shop is a stylized thing in New York. The cream cheeses are arrayed in gigantic bowls under glass, along with a host of other Jewish foods: smoked fish, knishs, couscous salads.

My favorite bagel places in New York are Ess-a-bagle (359 1st Avenue, Manhattan, New York 10010, official site here) and Tal Bagels (977 1st Avenue, Manhattan, New York 10022), both very Jewish, and The Bagel Store (247 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211), a Williamsburg hipster joint, but still unbelievably good.

Falafel Quest

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Pennsylvania working class aren’t the only bitter ones. Matthew Yglesias is bitter as well (“Bitters,” TheAtlantic.com, 13 April 2008):

I’m bitter about the way Meridian Hill Park and the street design in Adams Morgan makes it so difficult to get from my house to the Amsterdam Falafel Shop even though it’d be really close if I could fly.

I hear ya, brother! I live on 18th Street. Amsterdam Falafel is on 18th Street. Were it not for a gigantic gorge jutting out from Rock Creek Park between Irving and Harvard, it would be a straight shot. As it is, 18th doesn’t run through and I have to go a bunch of blocks east, then south, then jog a bunch of blocks back west again. As a result, I go to Amsterdam Falafel a lot less than I would like.

The First Casualties of Gentrification

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I suspect that the first real consequences of the gentrification of Columbia Heights are starting to hit Mount Pleasant. I was walking home tonight when I noticed that the Mount Pleasant Super Market was closed with the usual signs up in the windows. A peep through the grates revealed ransacked, bare shelves. My personal favorite grocery store, the Super Save Market has been locked up tight for probably two weeks now, but with no explanation and all the merchandise untouched — suggestive of a landlord locking them out rather than an orderly loosing of the lease.

I have to wonder when the International Progresso Market, Los Primos and the Samber Market are next. All three appear to be just barely hanging on.

The survivor will probably be BestWay which irritates the hell out of me. It’s the biggest of the grocery stores in the neighborhood, but also the most inadequate. First of all, they close way too early. Since the Super Save Market closed I have redirected to BestWay, but am already reminded why the Super Save Market was my favorite. About two thirds of the time that I head over to BestWay I find them closed. And they keep on ratcheting the hours down. It used to be that they closed at 9:00, but the floors were already mopped, the place stinking of whatever foul substance they put in their mop buckets and someone at the door trying to intimidate you from entering at 8:50. So they recently made the closing time 8:50. But everyone has adjusted accordingly. Now the place is mopped and you’re not welcome at 8:40. I frequently don’t even leave the office until 8:30. A grocery store that closes at 8:40 is a store at which I will never shop.

And then there is BestWay’s strange monomania regarding stock. BestWay is the one most like what most people think of when they think grocery store. Most of the stores in Mount Pleasant are weird hodgepodges of products heavily skewed toward the ethnicities of the neighborhood piled on improvised and mismatched shelves in a shop that doesn’t even approach ADA standards. There is a lot of minding your manners, jostling and backing down an isle only wide enough for one. BestWay is large, well stocked and has enough space for people to pass in the isles. But it’s only well-ish stocked. They have most things you would want and offer variety in nearly all product categories, but for some reason never vary the products according to the factors that matter. In the canned vegetable isle they devote a couple of feet on two shelves to tomatoes. That’s quite a lot of tomatoes — as would be expected as people eat a lot of tomatoes. But it’s all a couple of different brands of only 28 oz. cans of whole stewed tomatoes; no 14.5 oz. cans and no diced or sliced. Who makes anything with whole tomatoes? There are like five different brands of catsup — Heinz, Hunts, Del Monte, RichFood, Value Brand — but only in small bottles. But for some reason they carry vinegar in industrial quantities.

As this list may suggest, Mount Pleasant is an over-groceried neighborhood and maybe overdo for a shakeup. It’s a tiny nook of the city with multiple grocery stores in which the norm is huge residential tracts without a grocery store for miles.

I just hope Samber Market isn’t next. It has become my late night fallback now that Super Save Market is closed. It is run by an older Japanese couple and I go there because they are both so overwhelmingly pleasant. They are both very good looking, always dressed like they consider their job at the till to be very serious work, and seemingly happy to see me every time. The man holds up each item as he rings them up and gets a certain look of pride at each one — especially a bottle of wine — like he were serving the community and providing for his family with each sale. Often a boy, I presume their grandson, but maybe their son — they could go either way — is in the store roller-skating laps or climbing the taller shelves way too rambunctiously, but unimpeded by his grandparents.

They must sleep in the stock room on top of pallets of Top Ramen given the expense of living in D.C. Hopefully they’ll survive the winnowing. Hopefully this won’t end up another neighborhood without a grocery store.

Update, 27 January 2008: Yep, it’s confirmed. I walked past the Super Save Market on Friday night and there was a notice up from the D.C. Tenant Court saying that the tenant was in arrears $14,000. They had been making all sorts of upgrades to the store lately and I thought it was because they were finally making a bit of a success of themselves. I guess that it was actually some last ditch gamble to attract more business. The tragedy is that the fancy new shelves probably cost a month’s rent.

Friday Cat Blogging: Mogley Loves Bread

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18 October 2007, Mogli bellying up to the bread

It’s been a sleepless week of some rather arduous posts as well as a long time since the last Friday Cat Blogging. So here is a little Friday frivolousness.

Kitty is almost entirely indifferent to human food — eating it at least: if it stinks, he will try to bury it. The one exception, oddly enough, is bread. For some reason he is fanatical about the stuff. He pricks up when it goes out on the table and will launch round after round of attack on a baguette.

And it’s not some unknown factor: he wants to eat it. If I pinch off a bunch of buds of bread and lay them out for him, he eagerly chews them down as best a pure carnivore’s fangs will allow.

Here he is at last night’s dinner, bellying up to the bread basket like his claim to its content was legitimate and going to go down unharried.

Enthusiasts, Eccentrics and the Unamused

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Howard, Manny, "My Empire of Dirt," New York Magazine, 17 September 2007, pp. 22-29 & 107-108

From the Hell Is Other People Files comes this great cover story from last week’s New York Magazine about a man who decided to take the eat local movement to the next step and tried to eat only out of his own back yard … in Brooklyn. On the cover, the story is billed as “Green 1/55th of an Acre,” though inside the title is “My Empire of Dirt,” (Manny Howard, 17 September 2007, pp. 22-29 & 107-108). A significant subplot of the story is just how much this little venture pissed off his wife. Mr. Howard recounts the following story:

Then came the last straw. The following afternoon, Caleb and I constructed most of a high-rise chicken coop in a few hours. We decided on a vertical design filled with ramps so that it would take up a minimum of the garden’s square footage (another concession to our urban setting). We equipped it with wheels and tracks so the poop could be removed from under it and the coop rolled back into place. The work was going well. At about 5:30 p.m., Caleb scrubbed up and got on his bike in order to get home in time to tidy up and attend his bartending class. At 6:30, I was putting the finishing touches on the rig. Inspired by the coop design in Nick Park’s animated film Chicken Run, I was using the table saw to mill eight-inch plywood into strips to make footholds for the entrance ramp when the blade of the saw tagged my right pinkie, destroying the second knuckle. Parts of my finger were left on the saw and on the ground.

I pried my cell phone out of my work pants using my left hand and, holding my right hand above my head, called Josh, a childhood friend who is now a firefighter and, more to the point, lives around the corner. He ran over immediately and field-dressed the mangled wound while I stood there scared—not so much of the wound, which I figured was not going to kill me, but of Lisa, who probably would. I expected her to come through the door with the kids at any moment. After another long day at the office, this would be quite a scene for her to stumble into.

Deciding not to take me to an emergency room, where we’d get stuck at the end of a long queue, Josh located a hand surgeon named Danny Fong on Canal Street, and he agreed to see me and my pinkie immediately. But before we could get out the door, Lisa turned up with Heath and Jake. Before even a hello, I said, as casually as I could muster, “Hon, I’ve banged my finger and I need to go to the doctor.”

“How?” she asked. “How bad?”

“Not too bad,” I lied. Then I came clean: “With the table saw.”

She screamed in anguished frustration. She couldn’t just resent me for my silly folly; now that I’d maimed myself in the process, she had to feel sympathy too.

Behind every enthusiast or eccentric stands a spouse decidedly less than amused, doing their part to reign in these outliers of spirit. In some ways we all support one another, but in demanding support in return, we all collude in deadening each other.

Disparaging Comparisons Between Washington, D.C. and New York

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16 September 2007, the Financial District from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway

Every visit I make to New York is a painful reminder what a grim and slender existence one leads living in Washington, D.C. For some time now two large comparisons have been part of my usual refrain.

  • The people in New York are so much more interesting and varied than in D.C. In Washington, D.C. it seems as if there is one perfect model and everyone is judged according to how closely they can approximate that one right way to be. To be fashionable in D.C. is about conformity. In New York everyone is struggling to differentiate themselves and people are judged by how unique they are. Every aspect of personae and identity is part of the pallet (though beyond one’s creative control, most unusual or inscrutable combination of ethnic background is in play).

  • People talk about a New York minute: everything in New York is so fast paced. But when I’m in New York I feel like I may as well be in Paris. New Yorkers understand joie de vivre. They do it in enough ways that it would be difficult to catalog. People take time to enjoy themselves. Everywhere you go there are little cafés where people are having a leisurely meal and talking with a friend or watching the crowds pass. Kitchens are small so food is most commonly very basic, focusing on quality of ingredients rather than labor in preparation. People lavish a lot of attention on their animals and are almost universally excited about the pets of others. The city may be gigantic, but the neighborhoods are small and everywhere you go there are meetings, planned and accidental and people talking. Everyone has an avocation to which they are very devoted.

A few other observations about New York and D.C.:

  • New York is a city with a staggering number of restaurants. On Saturday night S. and I were out wandering and decided that we wanted some Italian food. We simply wandered, confident that in a short time we would stumble upon exactly what we wanted. And in a few blocks we came to a tiny Italian place with tile floors, dark walls, little tables, a cramped bar half-way back surrounded by about a dozen older male waiters in white shirts and black ties running in every direction. The food was unpretentious, but quality. There are probably so many restaurants like that in New York than one couldn’t locate them all without the aid of technology. In Washington, D.C. there are maybe three or four such restaurants and they may be a dying breed (I’m thinking Giovanni’s Trattu on Jefferson Place or Trattoria Italiano in Woodly Park). Probably just the number of new restaurants that open and old restaurants that go out of business in New York exceeds the total number or restaurants in the entire District of Columbia.

  • While I was away for the weekend, Matthew Yglesias made an exuberant post about a new place in town serving late night breakfast (“Late Night Late Night Breakfast Blogging,” 16 September 2007). This is indeed a very big deal in D.C. To date, just about the only place in the city where breakfast was available at any time other than breakfast time was The Dinner. In fact, just about the only place that anything was available late — or at least later than the post-last-call places on bar rows — was again, The Dinner. This is unbelievable in a major city. In New York, as is well known, the opening or closing of such a place is a nonevent, so common are such places. And in New York they all deliver with a $5.00 minimum order. In D.C. the standard minimum for delivery is $20.00.

  • Both New York and Washington, D.C. are noisy cities. I find that increasingly I like the noise of New York. It is the noise of life and work: delivery trucks dropping things off, garbage trucks taking things away, crowds of people. In Washington, D.C. the noise is that of the delusions of the national security state: police sirens, emergency vehicles rushing around from one nonevent to the next, convoys for VIPs.

  • It’s amusing the degree to which New Yorkers match their city. New York is crumbling and second hand. So are a surprising number of its residents.

  • For months now I have been wanting to get to Mark Israel’s Doughnut Plant. Their signature, the Tres Leche, is indeed one dope-ass doughnut! When I walked up, there was a “back in five minutes” sign up in the window and a small crowd gathered around outside waiting. The store is completely inauspicious, consisting of just a little counter and a window back to the kitchen and some storage overflow, but if you find yourself in the Lower East Side it is definitely worth a jaunt.

Popcorn Workers’ Lung

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This is potentially very bad news for K.:

Harris, Gardiner, “Doctor Links a Man’ Illness to a Microwave Popcorn Habit,” The New York Times, 5 September 2007

A fondness for microwave buttered popcorn may have led a 53-year-old Colorado man to develop a serious lung condition that until now has been found only in people working in popcorn plants.

Lung specialists and even a top industry official say the case, the first of its kind, raises serious concerns about the safety of microwave butter-flavored popcorn.

Apparently many brands of microwave popcorn use a chemical called diacetyl to create their buttery flavor and inhalation of diacetyl is strongly associated with an inflammatory lung disease called bronchiolitis obliterans or “popcorn workers’ lung” (I hear a neo-Dickensonian tale in there somewhere). This guy had consumed at least two bags of microwave popcorn a day for the last ten years and when doctors measured the levels of diacetyl in his house, they found them comparable to those in popcorn factories.

K.’s tastes are so bland that he may have saved himself by not bothering with the buttered brands, but on the offhand chance that you have, K., the FDA might want to get in touch with you.

A Root Extravaganza

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5 September 2007, crockpot root extravaganza

Something that has been on my list for the longest time is a crockpot. I have been fantasizing about being able to come home, chop up a bunch of vegetables, throw them in a pot, and put the pot in the refrigerator. Then, before leaving for work the next morning, put it on low, leave for ten or twelve hours and come home to hot, stewey goodness.

5 September 2007, crockpot Mediterranean stew with squash

Anyway, S. and I finally picked one up this weekend. Yesterday it was Mediterranean stew with yams, tonight it’s Mediterranean stew again, substitute squash for yams (pictured above). The best will be in a few days though. I’ve never eaten a turnip before and have been dieing to try one for months now, but been at a loss as to what to do with one (is it like a giant radish, or is it more like a potato?). Anyway, next up on the crockpot experiment schedule is root extravaganza: turnips, rutabagas, beets, parsnips, carrots, potatoes, leeks and onions. Throw ’em in a pot and cook em’ up, yum!

The model we bought even comes with a canvas tote bag so next time MoveOn hosts a meeting of the neighborhood activists or we volunteer at the retirement community we will be all ready to go. Now if only they would make a combo bag for both the crockpot and my yoga mat so that I could go strait from yoga class to whatever volunteer opportunity / activist get-together I had in store, it would be perfect.

Before I leave the subject of the crockpot, a word of defense regarding structure food versus smash food is in order. Structure food is all the stuff that you see on the cooking shows: a tremendous amount of energy is given over to fussing at how all the different little pieces and individual flavors are arranged and laid out in often elaborate designs on the plate. Then there’s smash food. Smash food is where everything is just jumbled together in one admixture of flavor. The quintessential smash foods are all lowbrow. Nachos, burritos, Italian food, breakfast foods are all perfect examples. For a greasy spoon breakfast you take your egg and hash browns and run them all together and use the toast like an extra utensil to fork it all down. Even eggs Florentine is smash food masquerading as structure food. I mean, come on, the poached egg yokes and the hollandaise sauce are calling out to be all stirred around and mopped up with the English muffin.

Foodie Fetishes

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Given that my last two posts might position me as something of a foodie, a skeptical step back might be in order.

For some people food is a truly important aspect of their lives. For people who garden and eat seasonal foods, I imagine their involvement with food is something akin to the cyclical ceremonial calendars of the religions. Only instead of serving to reify the connection to the sky gods of the major religions, the rituals of food serve to root people to the biorhythms of the Earth. And it probably occupies a similar psychological function, connecting a person to a larger story, cordoning off a ritual time separate from the monotony of the world (in this case the timeless homogeneity of the globalized food supply chain), demonstrating and reaffirming principles by which a community lives (e.g. vegetarians).

While this may be the case for a minority of us, for most foodies it’s the exact opposite: it’s just another commodity fetish.

Mmm … Avocados

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September 2007, Saveur, Avocado Love, Know Your Avocados, p. 84

The most recent Saveur has one of the most erotic fruits on the cover: the avocado (Nguyen, Andrea, “Like Butter,” no. 104, September 2007, pp. 76-87). Am I in doubt? Check out the cover art of the most recent Pearl Jam album.

As I have said before, I tend to obsess on foods. A while back it was guacamole. I was making it every few nights. At an earlier point I tried to search the stores for a packaged guacamole, but that is hopeless. Most of what goes under the label of guacamole is sour cream and onion dip died green, but even the best doesn’t even come close. It’s something that you simply must make yourself. Fortunately for me and my obsessions, while a late teenager my mother — who probably also has a tendency to obsess on foods — went through a phase where she was constantly making a very rustic guacamole, so improvising my own recipe was natural. I have recently achieved a bit of a party reputation for my guacamole — why, I don’t know: it’s about as simple a recipe as you can imagine. The only thing you need to know is how to combine the ingredients so that you don’t over-stir it and end up with too creamy and consistent a guacamole.

My Central and South America hopping brother told me that once while in Mexico he visited an avocado farm. The farm hound would patrol the fields for over-ripe avocados that had fallen from the trees and gobble them down. He reported that under his fur the dog’s skin was slightly green tinted and that he shit guacamole (the lesser known recipe). On the other hand, I have heard that avocados are poison to most domesticated animals, so I don’t know how to reconcile these two stories. On the precautionary principle, Kitty is rather vehemently shooed away from a bowl of the stuff.