Category Archives: End of the Line

Lunch at the End of the Line: Cheese Making at the Edge of the Continent

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The ladies of the Qualicum Cheeseworks on Vancouver Island are gushers.

As the momma cows trudged out of the field into the barn, each udder, roughly the size of the plastic bladder inside a Costco box o’ wine, swung to and fro.  I’d been petting the new calves just a minute before, and they were charming, all nuzzle’y with dewy black eyes.  Their mommas were not.  They were massive and slobbery and their black eyes were more dull than dewy.

The crammed against each other at the base of a ramp, knew their routine, were probably eager for the relief of the milking room beyond the door at the top of the slope.  When the young man opened the door to that room—a 25’ X 25’ collection of gates and  hoses and foot-tall glass containers shaped like medicine capsules—ten mommas at a time eagerly waddled in, took their standard places at their individual feed troughs, and proceeded to thoroughly destroy the mix of oats, molasses, barley, and wheat that poured out of from chutes above. Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Canadian Coconut Crush Edition

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coconut shakeI have a problem with restaurant crushes. I’ll find someplace that I like, and then, just like crushes on boys in high school, I’ll be unable to think of little else for days and unwilling to consider any alternatives. Once I had (and—let’s face it—probably still have) a crush on my local Mexican favorite, Chavela’s, that was so intense that I feared I’d come down with some weird form of pica that involved tacos instead of rocks.

So it’s just as well, really, that Chau VeggiExpress exists on the other side of the continent, or I probably wouldn’t be able to resist eating there multiple times per week. On a recent trip to Vancouver, a city with a large Asian population, I developed a serious hankering for some pho, that delicious Vietnamese noodle soup. Pho, however, can be a little difficult to find in vegetarian form, so I poked around on Yelp and quickly came up with a review that claimed that the coconut shake at Chau was the best beverage the reviewer had ever tasted. She followed this assertion with the sentence, “Seriously,” which is one of the gravest statements a Yelper can make. So Jason and I decided to fortify ourselves there before embarking on the brutal bus/plane/train trip home.

canada kicks assAnh, a sweet woman in a “Canada Kicks Ass” t-shirt, explained the menu to us when we walked in, which included, among other things, three different kinds of noodle soup. Anh’s family has long owned restaurants in the Vancouver area, and they decided to make this one vegan to match their Buddhist lifestyle. They cook their own coconut cream for the storied coconut shake, which you can get virgin or with rum, and they also use it in their coconut curry. Continue reading →

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

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

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

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

“Do you know this place?” I asked.

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

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

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ethan

Ethan meets Frank Pepe

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

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

oven

That's one impressive pizza spatula.

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

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

Lunch at the End of the Line: Wrong Stop Edition

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

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

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

Lunch at the End of the Line: New York’s Key West

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buttery shrimp“Usually I’m not so talkative,” John told us gruffly. I’m not certain if he meant this as an apology or a warning. He was the proprietor of the Marine Supply Store on City Island, which was, essentially, a fabulous disarray of fishing equipment and knick-knacks in a ten by ten room, with a mountain of propellers, outboard motors, plastic Santa Clauses, ropes, buckets and other flotsam occupying the side yard. John had owned the place, on a little strip of land in the Long Island Sound, for over fifty years. After reeling through a list of every restaurant on the island and passing on some bits of information that seemed loaded with meaning that we couldn’t quite interpret (“Some people, they love the Crab Shanty. Some people, they don’t like the Crab Shanty.”), he ended by saying, “Look: they all pull out the fresh seafood. There’s not a place here that’s bad.”

end of the island

The end of the island

A few weeks ago, I had never heard of City Island. But this isle of tree-lined, waterside seclusion was definitely, definitely at the end of the line, a long 6 train trip from Brooklyn with a bonus bus jaunt at the end. Since it was, I’d heard, famous for its seafood and since I haven’t eaten much seafood in the decade-plus that I’ve been a vegetarian, I decided to bring along Jason as a more expert second opinion.

With all of the suggestions from John, we felt even more confused than when we’d first stepped off the bus, but we decided to press on to the very tip of the island, for a look at the water and two of the establishments that John had mentioned: Johnny’s Reef and Tony’s Pier. The names alone seemed to call for a showdown. Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Prowling the Financial District

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Zigolini's

The scene outside Zigolini's

Are chains really that bad? That’s what I was asking myself as the man at one of the Financier coffee shops gave me an angelic smile and extra complimentary cookies. Having already followed the subway to Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, I realized that I had been neglecting the lowly isle of Manhattan. There are, indeed, ends of subway lines there, like the J and Z station on Broad St. in the financial district. But I’d been avoiding it up to now, because I knew all too well the proliferation of higher-grade fast food joints in any area of Manhattan where lots of people work. Pret A Manger, Potbelly’s, Cosi, Dean and Deluca—it’s not hard to see why places like this thrive here. They’re tasty, fast, efficient, and the best of them seem wholesome enough not to kill you even if you eat it fairly frequently. But if it was going to be a real end of the line experience, Financier just wasn’t going to cut it. I wanted to see where the more discerning regulars went.

Maybe it was the overwhelmingly crowded and fast-paced atmosphere on Broad Street, maybe it was just my mood, but I found myself following a different protocol than usual—I started to spy on people. It was fun to lurk behind unsuspecting men like some sort of iced tea-swigging and restaurant-obsessed femme fatale. Here are some observations I made about the young businessmen in the financial district: Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Making Frankie and Albert Proud

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Sinatra's MugI’d heard Morris Park, near the end of the Eastchester-Dyre 5 line, was sometimes called the Little Italy of the Bronx. Given that, there were certain things I expected to find there (pizzerias, Italian bakeries, cigar shops with young Sinatra’s mug shot blown up and displayed prominently), and I was not disappointed. When I spoke to a couple of Morris Park natives, they gave me some tips about the longstanding neighborhood favorites like Patricia’s (a classy Italian joint famous for its Spaghetti à la Frank Sinatra), Emilio’s (a pizza place that they assured me was “cheap but really good”), and Hawaii Sea (an Asian fusion restaurant where one of them had worked as a busboy when he was sixteen).

What I hadn’t anticipated was that the entire eastern side of the neighborhood would feel like an urban university campus because it was home to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Students are notoriously good at ferreting out good and inexpensive lunch spots, so I did some asking around. A young man of imposing size and thoughtful sincerity told me that “everybody” went to the pizza place named Coals. Several others had mentioned the same place, and when I walked past, the fragrant promise of copious amounts of garlic coaxed me inside.

This, perhaps, is a good time to address the problem of pizza snobbery that is rampant in New York. Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Roller Coasters and Rotary Clubs

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painter

Touching up the boardwalk signs for the mermaids

Nathan’s was already selling many a hot dog when I stepped off the F train at Coney Island at 11:30 a.m. They did not, however, sell coffee, so I got some at the clam shack next door and asked the man at the cash register whether he was looking forward to the Mermaid Parade the following afternoon (the official kickoff of the summer season) or if he was dreading it. He smiled at me kindly. “Dread,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation.

Coney Island is one of those over-the-top places that seems as if it has been dressed like a movie set specifically for your benefit. It has the frenzied carnival feel of amusement parks everywhere, mixed with the anything-(and-anyone)-goes mentality of New York. I doubt if there are many places on Earth where can you see Buddhist monks strolling on the beach and Orthodox Jews waiting in line for the Wonder Wheel. But with all the tattoos and swimsuits, it’s easy to forget that this is a real neighborhood where real people live and eat. I wandered down off the boardwalk to look for some of them. Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: From Jamaica to You

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Tastee PatteeI really wasn’t sure what neighborhood lay at the end of the L line, but I figured that everyone would know about it soon enough. After all, the L is like the frontier train of creative cool—Williamsburg became the new Lower East Side, and then Bushwick became the new Williamsburg, so I was off to see what was probably already on it’s way to becoming the new Bushwick.

When I got off at the Canarsie stop and walked a few blocks down Rockaway Parkway, the busiest restaurant I saw was McDonald’s. My Woodlawn odyssey had given me new faith in my orienteering skills, though, so I decided to just wander around for a bit. I kept my eyes peeled for signs of trendiness. Art galleries? Expensive bars? Strange mustaches? Hasids? I saw none of these things.

100% Playground

All playground, all the time.

Salle du Royaume

Jesus est bon, oui?

Here are some of the things I did see: The mammoth Breukelen Houses projects, the offices of congressman Edolphus “Ed” Towns, a sort of elepahant’s graveyard for MTA paraphernalia, the 100% Playground, a place selling “human hair and African movies” and a Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall for Francophones.

Almost every restaurant I saw was a chain fast food place, but then I spied Tastee Pattees and realized that maybe it was time to introduce our readership to the phenomenon of the Jamaican patty shop. Continue reading →