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

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Shannon

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.

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 →

Garlic Green Bean: My Madeleine

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Shannon

It took an energetic campaign to get Jason and our friend John to submit to the Panda Buffet in New London, Connecticut. On the drive back to NYC from a friend’s wedding, we had just passed through Rhode Island without glimpsing a single viable dining option (State motto: “Taco Bell? Fat chance!”), and I was quickly moving through the nausea-and-headache stage of hunger to one of open weeping, when we spied the Panda Buffet tucked unobtrusively next to a mattress store. After some pleading on my part, I was perusing all five of its bizarre food bars in a kind of transported bliss. Even though I would have settled for anything above a Pet Smart at that point, I was secretly delighted that we ended up at a Chinese buffet. Salvation, thy name is fortune cookie.

I understand that a buffet is not most people’s idea of paradise. Dwell on the all-you-can-eat concept for too long, and it will seem a little grotesque to even the most expansive eaters. It should come as no surprise that it was a 1940s American hotelier, Herb MacDonald, who took the little Swedish sideboard of cold fish known as the smorgasbord and raised it to the gargantuan, fixed-price spectacle we know today. Who among us hasn’t fallen for its gluttonously seductive charms? Once, as a child, I ate so much at a buffet that I got sick at my aunt’s house later, and I can still remember the panicky look on her face when I woke her in the middle of the night, a look that said, “Good lord, my sister’s youngest child has killed herself with crab legs.”

But I maintain that my main attraction to the All-You-Can-Eat buffet has less to do with sheer quantity and more to do with the spectrum of choice. Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Wrong Stop Edition

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Shannon

This 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

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Shannon

“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.”

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 →

What Will Oscar Eat?: The Slayer Strikes Again

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Shannon

The slayer at rest: "What tomato? I was just doing this crossword..."

I suppose we had become complacent. Long weeks had passed since we experienced any incidents of my cat Oscar snagging tomatoes from the upper shelves in our kitchen in the middle of the night and slaughtering them in what, judging from the aftermath, was similar to a scene out of Kill Bill. So when a wealth of juicy tomatoes started rolling in from our backyard and from our CSA, we were less than diligent about hiding them. And, once again displaying a curiously gourmet sensibility, the smell of all those heirlooms and beefsteaks became too much for him.

We had long ago given Oscar the middle name Tomato Slayer, but even so, it was a little disturbing to find a thoroughly violated tomato in a bowl of vegetables last Sunday morning. What was strange was that this occurrence went against his usual MO of knocking the tomato to the floor and having his way with it, thus eliminating any possibility that he was really just using it as a toy and not eating it. This time he had simply sunk his teeth into it, chewed out a big hole and lapped up all the juice and seeds. If I looked closely, I could still see the fang marks, and the thought of him perched above the bowl like some fat furry succubus, red liquid dripping from his chin, made me shudder. Continue reading →

Picking Apart Picky Eating

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Shannon

The most reviled ad campaign of my childhood

“I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor,” Julia Child said. It was no grotesque vermin that prompted this declaration, no poisonous bit of flora. It was cilantro, an ingredient that many foodies would eat by the fistful.

She’s hardly alone. It’s rare to find someone who really and truly enjoys eating everything. My father winces at the sight of asparagus, my boss gags on any tomato sauce that is too sweet, my friend Dave turns pale at the thought of white substances located anywhere along the mayonnaise/sour cream/Alfredo sauce continuum. What’s more, I’d be hard-pressed to name the favorite dish of any of these people. The items that repulse them are just weirder and more interesting.

But where do these strange food hatreds come from? Is it cultural? Physiological? Psychological? There’s a whole field of psychological research behind the notion of conditioned food aversions (also called Sauce-Bearnaise Syndrome). One nasty encounter with a food, and our minds can turn us against it for years to come. The theory is based on the idea that our foraging ancestors had to learn to stay away from noxious berries and such, but anyone who ever did too many shots of Jägermeister will be intimately familiar with the basic concept. The thing is, many foods become guilty merely by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was hardly the fault of that can of red cream soda that I drank it right before I got a bad case of the stomach flu when I was eight years old, but it was many years before I could drink any of its brethren.

But the conditioned response explanation seems to me, at best, incomplete. Continue reading →

Name that Kitchen Gadget!

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Shannon

In scouring the Internet for this Friday’s pop quiz, I found an OK Cupid page devoted to “singles interested in obscure kitchen gadgets.” Believe me, they covered quite a spectrum, these singles, from a chipper looking New Zealander making a peace sign at the camera to a scowling woman from Tempe whose eye shadow was almost as impressive as her cleavage.

At any rate, gadgets clearly have wide appeal and since we had fun a few weeks ago with our historic utensil puzzle, we thought we’d let our readers test their wits with some more modern marvels. If you can identify all nine of the items below, you should start your own culinary school…or at least troll for some new admirers on OK Cupid.

Don’t follow this link until you’re ready to see the answers! Continue reading →

How to Feed (and Shvitz) a Cold

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Shannon

This is from the Brooklyn Banya website. Full disclosure: most of the women in bikinis I saw were not wearing hats.

I tightened my towel and slithered along the wall, trying not to interfere in the conversation between the proprietor of the Brooklyn Banya and another man (which was perhaps a friendly disagreement or perhaps just shy of coming to blows—it was hard to say), but before I could inch out of sight, the owner grinned at me happily, pumped his fist in the air and said, “Yaaaah! Americaaaan!” I took this as some sort of ebullient welcome to his house of Russian-ness, so I sniffled and weakly raised my fist in return.

A summer cold is an insidious affliction, sneaking up on you with its chills and fevers while everyone else is still frolicking happily in the sunshine. And so when one hit me this past weekend, I decided to fight fire with fire—I was going to sweat the thing out of me.

It’s true that, at least for most people, the main attraction at the banya on Coney Island Avenue is not the food, but I had sound reasons for considering this a PitchKnives excursion. For one, even the non-edible portions of a bath house have a hint of the culinary. Where else can you simulate the experience of baking yourself (dry sauna), parboiling yourself (steam room) or poaching yourself inside a eucalyptus leaf (wet sauna)? But more importantly, I figured that any people who included Siberia within their borders would boast some powerful cold-battling vittles. Continue reading →

Reminder: Send Us Your Best Summer Cocktail!

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Shannon

Temperatures are once again rising like a flock of seagulls on the wing. It’s important to hydrate…and why not throw in a little gin while you’re at it? We’re calling on all you gifted mixologists out there to cool our sweaty brows.

Send your signature summer cocktail recipes to submission@pitchknives.com. We’ll try the ones we like best and rate them according to taste, creativity and capacity to refresh.

It’s only right that the winners receive a token of our gratitude. What will it be? An artful swizzle stick? A crocheted beer coozie? A hand-mixed glass of Shannon’s signature cocktail, the Bee’s Knees? You’ll just have to win to find out.

Entries are due this Saturday, August 11. So get to it! Shake, stir, and please, please chill. The address for entries is, one more time, submissions@pitchknives.com.

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

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Shannon

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 →

PitchKnives and Butter Forks

Stories of food, from the seed to the platter

Author Archives: Shannon