new york glimpses: on the move

Chalk this one up as a victory for Portland: our food cart scene puts New York to shame. True, it's a city of 12 million people and probably 1 million food carts, but most vendors don't venture much beyond the hot nuts/soft pretzels/hot dogs triumvirate. Meanwhile, in our Portland neighborhood alone, there is a waffle taco cart, an ice cream and pancake cart, a grilled cheese bus, and a retro trailer slinging baked goods and juices. In every neighborhood, food carts circle their wagons on overgrown lots and in empty parking spaces, creating an impromptu culture of makeshift cafes. Now, that's not to say that New York doesn't have any good cart food - they do have their own awards ceremony, after all - just that they're a lot more mobile than their Portland brethren, making them harder to track down.

On our first day in town, we went with our friend Hannah down to the weekly vintage bazaar called the Brooklyn Flea. Yes, we did want to check out the mid-century baubles and funky thrift-store clothes, but we knew we wouldn't be lugging home a suitcase full of Fiestaware; we came for the food. After we returned from last year's adventure to Red Hook, we heard tell of some amazing Central American cooks grilling up food for the neighborhood's weekend ballgames. While we didn't venture to Red Hook again, the Red Hook Ball Field Vendors made the trip up to Fort Greene for the Flea. We zeroed in on their stand and ordered a bean-and-cheese pupusa, along with a sweet corn tamale. The pupusa was crisply grilled on the outside and was filled with a savory melted cheese that tasted delicious with the pickled cabbage and hot sauce mounded on top. The tamale was unlike any other we'd ever tried: it had no filling inside the soft, steamed masa, but tasted exactly like a meltingly sweet ear of mid-summer corn.


Keeping with the stuffed-and-filled theme, we queued up for two other flea market street vendors. First up was Elsa's Empanadas, where we quickly downed an order of spinach, cheese and raisin handpies. They were nice and flaky and the filling had the right balance of tangy and sweet. Tantalizingly, the Empanada stand was right next to Asia Dog, but A steered me away from a kimchi-garnished hot dog and over to dessert.

Salvatore Bklyn does handmade ricotta with hipster street cred. What caught our notice were their hand-stuffed cannoli. I have a real weakness for cannoli - we've even made them ourselves once, which entailed no small amount of deep-frying and pastry bags. Best to leave it to the experts. And these were certainly expert, with the right amount of outside crunch and a lightly sweetened, curd-y filling. The more I consider it, the more that I realize that stuffed foods are pretty much made for street carts. Well, those and foods-on-sticks. But as far as portable edibles go, it's hard to beat a cannolo.


From then on, our mobile eating stayed on a decidedly sweet note. Walking down Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg, A nearly shrieked when she saw a buttermilk-colored truck passing our dishes of small-batch ice cream. Van Leeuwen ice cream uses simple ingredients to craft simple flavors. With our friend Hannah, we ordered a peppermint-chocolate chip scoop and a dish of red currant and cream. Both flavors had a fresh creaminess, despite being custard-based, but the currant ice cream was particularly memorable for its balance between tangy fruit and sweet milk.


The next evening, after making dinner with our friends Catherine and Quincy, we were struck by two realizations: we hadn't bought dessert, and we were just a few blocks from Dessert Truck's late-night parking grounds. You might recall our nighttime sugar-fix from last-year's visit, but if not, I should fill you in: Dessert Truck sells haute cuisine desserts in paper cups for six bucks. It's a brilliant business plan. On this visit, A ordered a goat cheese cake, while I opted for the pavlova. Individually, the components of the pavlova (crisp meringue, red fruit gelee, creme fraiche) were spot-on, but for some reason, they just didn't quite jive. I'm sure some of it had to do with the difficulty of breaking a meringue with a plastic spoon. That said, A's cheesecake choice more than made up for mine: a few blackberries and a drizzle of rosemary-scented caramel were a great accompaniment to the rich cake. This is one we might have to work on re-creating at home.


After a few days of going without a mobile-food-fix, Hannah informed us of a weekly fixture just around the corner from her midtown workplace: the Treats Truck. Late one afternoon, we strolled up Lexington to where it was parked, only to be generously barraged by samples. Normally, I take a free taste (and I think most people are like me on this matter) and walk away thinking, "Sucker...you didn't trick me into buying anything!" But hell, the Treats Truck proprietess more than tricked us; she up-sold us two brownies, when we'd only meant to get a double-peanut-butter sandwich cookie. I have to hand it to her, though - she knows her product. The PB cookie was really good, but imagine downing an entire box of Girl Scout Tagalongs, and you'll begin to get a sense of its mouth-parching stickiness. We also enjoyed our Mexican chocolate brownie, which tasted more of Ibarra hot chocolate than the overly-infused chile concoctions everyone else seems to love. Of everything we ordered, though, the pecan butterscotch bar ranks among the most addictive desserts I've ever had; it was decadently sweet and sticky in that slightly under-baked way. With sweets this good, I suppose I could be okay with having to follow a moving target.

new york glimpses: written city

For an amateur type-geek, New York is a veritable specimen book of fantastically quirky found signage and lettering. There are literally entire city-blocks worth of hand-lettered signs, molded plastic type, painted announcements, and bizarrely expressive awnings. If it weren't for my overwhelming fear of looking like a tourist, I would have been walking the streets with my camera out, wildly snapping photos of every storefront we passed.

I did still manage to take a few pictures of some of the awesome vernacular type I saw on our trip, mostly in Coney Island. To be honest, that was my main impulse for heading down to the boardwalk; Coney is like a musty old collector's basement full of ephemera. The beachfront is a collision of arcade neon and hand-painted, hyperbolic side-show banners. And it sadly won't be around for much longer before it begins to look like an Atlantic City resort. I try to imagine if Coney ever looked classy, or if it always just felt like a bit of working class exoticism. Either way, it has a uniquely nostalgic feeling that I hope they can preserve.

On that note, here's a little photographic interlude between our food-fueled travel stories:



If this slideshow was a little heavy on design and a bit light on edibles, you can always see the rest of our photos here.

new york glimpses: easy-bake

As long as we're at the beginning, we might as well start with breakfast. Easily, one of the best aspects of staying with friends in the city was that we could get an early start to try a different bakery nearly every day. We've written about our wishy-washy indifference to brunch before, but baked goods we heartily support.

So as soon as we had a morning in the Lower East Side, we made a return pilgrimage to Doughnut Plant to see if it matched our sugar-coated memories from last year. Since their flavors rotate seasonally, we snagged two new creations - a creme brulée doughnut and a rose petal one - along with a classic "Blackout." Excellent doughnuts, terrible coffee. But, oh, how those pastries tasted! The creme brulée was a tall dome, glazed with a hard sugar crust and filled with a light, eggy custard. While it was good (though no comparison to it's namesake dessert), I preferred the rose petal doughnut and the heady perfume that came through in each bite of its glazed exterior. The verdict, however, relied upon the Blackout, which won us over to doughnuts when we first tried it last year. In every way, its dense, gooey, chocolate crumb held up to our memories. We spent a good 20 minutes reasoning out how they could possibly make a doughnut taste so much like flourless chocolate cake. We may never know.


As we left Doughnut Plant, I looked up at the neighboring storefront to see a sign for Kossar's Bialys. I remembered the name from Mimi Sheraton's poignant (downright sad if you're the type to cry over a food book) The Bialy Eaters, and knew that we had to stop in for a second breakfast. According to Sheraton, Kossar's is among the last places in America where you can find a decent bialy, so we selected two of their garlic versions (along with some more "nouvelle," though delicious, challah bagels). Kin to the bagel, bialys are a bit flatter and have a rougher crust and a shallow depression in the center. While bagels gain their glossy exterior from a pre-bake dip in boiling water, bialys are simply put in the oven, as-is. Nestled in its dimple, the Kossar's bialy had a smear of salty, poppy-seed studded garlic mince that made the roll absolutely addictive. With the experience of Kossar's under my belt, I can say that until now I have tasted some sorry bialy impostors.


Later in the week, we continued our search for early-morning, Yiddish baked goods; next on our list was Yonah Schimmel's Knishery. While A and I have commendable appetites, we very well may have met our match in the knish. I have to admit that prior to Schimmel's, I was as unfamiliar with a knish as most gentiles. Helpfully, Edible Manhattan just ran an article on the endangered knish - that lost icon of New York cuisine - which sheds some light on this overlooked pastry. A classic knish is composed of an imposing mound of seasoned, mashed potatoes, which is wrapped with a pastry band and baked to steaming perfection. It easily weighed a pound and even split between the two of us, that thing was a struggle to complete. That's not to say it wasn't a savory delight, particularly with a dab of deli mustard.


The further along we went in our breakfast escapades, the larger our pastry discoveries seemed to grow. On our last day in the city, our friends Macy and Annie took us to Carrot Top Pastries to witness some terrifyingly-large croissants (frisbee-sized!) and the squarest muffins I've ever seen. We smartly steered away from the croissants and ordered their signature carrot muffin, with heaping tops spilling over the lip of the muffin pan. Like a moist, lightly-spiced slab of carrot cake, the muffin was a meal unto itself and went great with some pretty decent diner coffee.


Finally, our stomachs led us to Momofuku Milk Bar later that afternoon. While not technically breakfast (I'm not sure you could confidently call any of Milk Bar's offerings the best start to your day), there were early-morning staples peppered throughout a menu of decadent sweets. A branch of the David Chang's coyly inventive Momofuku mini-empire, Milk Bar was set up to showcase the creations of pastry chef Christina Tosi, who was profiled as a bit of a sugar-coated evil genius by the New York Times. In a crowded, standing-room-only space, they serve up compost cookies, crack pie, candy-infused soft-serve, and their infamous cereal milk - the infused leftovers of a bowl of soggy cereal. If we weren't down to our last few hours on the trip (and their food weren't so damn filling), we could have easily committed ourselves to slowly working our way through their Wonka-esque array of surreal sweets.


As it was, we sampled the sour gummy soft-serve (which won that hilarious remark, "It really does taste like sour gummies!") and order a serving of chocolate mint ice cream, an English muffin sandwich, a loaf of green-curry banana bread (for the plane!) and something called, "The Volcano." The soft-serve was redolent of Thin Mints and incredibly satisfying. A's English muffin cradled a poached egg, bacon and meltingly sweet onions, while my "Volcano" seemed to include a little of everything. Bacon, braised onions, gruyere, cream, potatoes were held inside of what resembled a sourdough bread bowl. Think of it as a neo-knish, stuffed with scalloped potatoes. Of course, we enjoyed everything with the ubiquitous bottles of sriracha sauce at each counter. It's really no wonder we had such stomachaches for the flight home.

new york glimpses: city living

Well, we're back at home and (mostly) caught up. We're also (mostly) recovered from all of the eating and drinking we packed into our week in New York. It's been slow getting this first post up, but that is largely because this trip was so different from the last time we visited the city. Though it also might have something to do with how lethargic we've been with all of that extra food in our system.

When we went last year, we stayed with my uncles in Jersey, just outside of the city. Their home was lovely and they couldn't have been more gracious hosts, but when a few of our friends recently moved into the city proper, we knew we couldn't turn down the offer to crash on their hide-a-beds. Anyone who knows us has heard how we prefer incognito tourism on vacation, so spending all of our time in the city let us indulge our penchant for "playing local."

I'm sure that our perennially-patient NY friends will roll their eyes and sigh at this one, but we really did feel like our trip was much closer to day-to-day life (if you didn't work) than our usual tourist blitz. I mean, we actually saw other people, and largely tried to keep our full meals to only 3-per-day. We even visited a lot of local grocery stores, though I guess that's pretty typical of our travel M.O.

Eschewing sightseeing in favor of everyday living made our trip unique; it was genuinely interesting to take stock of how our friends live and to transpose our lifestyle onto New York, imagining how we might adapt to life there. We spent a lot of our trip discretely looking for local iterations of the most important parts of our life (farms, markets, cooking shops), as well as seeking out the amenities we lack in Portland (first-class museums, new ethnic foods). In the process, we also noticed the absence of certain things that characterize our experience of Portland - easy bicycling, for one. Yeah, A and I both might walk faster than the average Portlander, but there is something to be said for Stumptown's quiet, unassuming pace-of-life.

Happily, our friends Catherine and Quincy offered an encouraging example of New York living. They had homemade stock in the fridge, dried beans in the pantry, and compost beneath the sink. When they looked in their fridge, they likely just saw the humor of trying to live the life they do in a cramped, walk-up, East Village apartment, but we saw simplicity.

Oddly, when we look back on our trip, our rose-colored visions of a dream life in New York all center on getting back to essentials. Ever since early this year, A and I have both had simplicity on the mind and have (ineffectively) dreamed of paring down our possessions. Now that we're back, we'll turn to one another and wistfully muse on our "simple" life in New York. "We'd only bring the essentials," we say, "who needs all of this extra closet space? Imagine how much free time we'd have to read and relax if we could just start over without all of these obligations to friends and volunteer commitments..." Ha. I can't imagine that "simplicity" ranks very highly on many people's reasons for moving to New York. This puts us squarely in the "idealistic dork" category.


Regardless of our naivete, it was still fun to act out local life for a week. Of everything we saw (and ate) in the city, there were two particular breakfasts that probably best encapsulated all of the quotidian romance of our New-York-living fantasy. For A, it was our early morning visit to Saxelby Cheese in the Essex Street Market. Purchasing a pint of Amish farmstead yogurt just might have made the entire trip for her. I could see the gleam in her eye as she imagined her daily trip to the fromager for a plougman's lunch of cheese and bread.


Now, as for myself, I was taken with the same place that entranced me last year: Russ & Daughters Appetizers. Brimming with unique foods and buzzing with old-world knowledge and class, this place epitomizes New York food to me. Whenever I walk in, I dream of incrementally working my way through their cases of smoked fish. Think of it: me, a modern-day Calvin Trillin, noshing my way down Houston Street. I could easily live on their smoked sturgeon alone.

But taken together, these reveries are all part of that soft-focus idealism that comes with travel (like the allure of Cleveland in 30 Rock). There's always that moment when you want to pack it all up and start a new life in an adopted hometown. It wouldn't be a good trip without it.

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Instead of our usual day-by-day breakdown, for the rest of our posts on our trip, we'll be writing up themed impressions of our best finds in the city. Hopefully it ends up being a little more engaging than a slide-by-slide narration of the museums we visited. Or, I should say, the foods we sampled.

Right upon our return, we came across a broadcast of KCRW's Good Food, which toured New York, visiting many of our favorite places (and giving us a few ideas for our next trip). It's a consistently great radio show, and this episode, in particular, is worth a listen.

big ups

High fives to Navarre, one of the most deserving restaurants to ever receive the Oregonian's nod for 2009 Restaurant of the Year. When I think about the best meals I've ever eaten in Portland, Navarre pops up again-and-again. They're a slow-burn kind of place - the sort that sneaks up on you as a dawning realization that you're part of something really unique. And I think they like it that way: they're a little under-the-radar, definitely not-for-everyone, and very much an idiosyncratic reflection of very specific seasonal moments. The O writes:

"You come here to eat food from a serious chef who cooks like a Frenchman in a cabin, pickling and preserving, butchering meat, turning it into sausage and pâté, whipping up pies and jams and making it all work with the fresh supplies at hand."

John Taboada has created a restaurant that responds to local farms, roving cultural cues, and personal whims. Whenever I visit the restaurant, I always think of my cooking teacher who liked to tell stories of Taboada navigating the French markets and returning with the very best-of-the-season produce and an old French housewife's recommendation for cooking it. His place is intimate and entirely inviting. Whether we were enjoying brown butter razor clams or a slab of gateau d'epices, the food has always made us swoon.

All of the acclaim is well-warranted. The only downside is now we'll have even longer waits.