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 →

Food News: A Wackjob Farm Bill to Eat More From Your Wallet

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So we’ve got this drought in the Midwest and its attendant spiked food prices forecast for the next three years.  We’ve got the existing farm bill scheduled to croak on September 30th.

And we’ve got two new farm bills in Congress waiting to entrench our problems.

The drought is assuredly caused in part by global warming, just as last weekend’s tornadoes in Queens and Brooklyn were, just as all of the wackjob weather we’ve seen for the past few years has been, just as the wackjob weather surely to come will be.

And rather than work to protect our national food supply by making it less vulnerable to climate change, both the Republican and Democratic farm bills make our meals more vulnerable.  They also accelerate the threat.

The United States sends billions of public dollars to the growers of a few high-impact crops (corn!) through elaborate, Byzantine subsidies.  Those crops—and more specifically the unceasing monocropping that sucks ever more nutrients out of the soil without putting any back—kills soil.  Crop rotation can fix that problem, but our massive industrial agricultural machine doesn’t allow time for that.  Instead, we use astonishingly large amounts of fossil fuel-based fertilizers each year (which accelerates climate change and whose use kills the microorganisms that make soil vital) and continue to monocrop corn and a few other grains (which means a single weather trend or a single pest can wipe out entire agricultural regions, as we’re seeing in this parched summer). Continue reading →

Garlic Green Bean: My Madeleine

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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 →

Dead Man Gnawing: Duane Allman Was a Man of Peaches and Mutton (1971)

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Dead rock stars occupy a strange place in the pantheon of Humanity’s heroes.  You’ve got brave, doomed soldiers and noble, self-sacrificing leaders and visionary, steadfast iconoclasts and idealistic, graceful martyrs.  And then 1938 rolls around, Robert Johnson is poisoned, and shortly thereafter you’ve got dudes who choke on their own vomit in the backseats of cars floating up to Heaven to chill with Hercules and Abe Lincoln and St. Thomas Aquinas.  Rock star deaths tend to be violent or self-indulgent, which upon reflection seems to make them the perfect heroes of the Western World’s 20th Century.

Plane crashes, car wrecks, and suicide aren’t the prerogatives of PitchKnives.  And though we do cover booze, instances of rock stars drinking themselves to death are pretty pedestrian.  There are, however, instances of food becoming entangled with the myths of pop’s premature deaths, one of which I’ll note now, the first in a short series.

Duane Allman was, I was shocked to discover when researching this piece, only 24 when he died.  Jesus Christ!  The mutton chops on the man made him look 40.  And mutton is certainly a food.  Continue reading →

A Matter of Taste: Pairing Writers and Beer

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“What beer should I drink when reading this author?” It’s a question I ask myself on a regular basis. I was inspired to commit some of my favorites to paper when I read an Esquire Magazine post that paired beers to football teams. A little cute. Essentially they just attached a good local brew to each team. There is a science to matching beer with anything, though: food, parties, type and severity of bad day, and yes, authors. I realize that many writers vary in style and tone from book to book, but as with a brewery’s particular strain of yeast, every one of their books tastes a little like the others.

How do I choose? Every pick has to do with the personality of the writing and of the writer herself. Subject matter, setting, sentence structure, attitude, nationality, political bent, story arcs, hairstyle, and ability to hold liquor. Lets pull a few recent reads off my bookshelf.

  •  Billy Collins: Are you allowed to drink beer while reading poetry? Well, no one’s stopped me yet. Man up and try something powerful and brooding like Maudite, a strong Belgian dark from Unibroue that can (and will!) fly you across the River Styx in a canoe, as promised on the label.
  •  Jonathan Franzen: Known for his family epics, his fascination with birds, and his floppy, writerly hair, Franzen is best read with something a little green and a little crunchy, like Peak Organic’s Pale Ale – down to earth and still pretty waspy.
  •  E L James: You really have to drink to read her. I know; I tried. But there’s no question here: Lagunitas’ A Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’.  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 →

Mac and Cheese, Naked Women, and the Offense That is Ketchup at the West Indian Day Parade

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The West Indian Day parade rules every Labor Day in our part of Brooklyn.  It’s the American version of Carnival.  No where else will you see Chuck Schumer plodding down Eastern Parkway followed by a tractor trailer loaded with twenty 56-inch speakers, a brass band, a DJ, and 15 half-naked women rapturously grinding like bikinied peacocks in the headdresses of a golden Aztec god.  These women always make me ashamed of my own stomach muscles.

This parade is stupendous in part because politicians seeking reelection are seemingly required to be there.  Who knew the descendents of Carribian slaves carried so much clout.  Hillary Clinton was a staple for her years up here.  This year, Governor Andrew Cuomo was the most shocking manifestation of a Ken doll that I’ve ever seen.  He gave a kid in front of me the point-wink-thumbs-up triple play.

 

 

Shannon is a parade person.  We’ve decided that such a category of person exists, that she is one, and that I am not.  I come for the costumes, to be reminded of countries I had forgotten existed, and to see so many people so happy.

And the food.  This is a food blog.

Curried goat, ox, fish.  Fried breadfruit and rice & peas.  Ackee fish and fish cakes and oxtail.  Grilled corn with its silk singed black and covered in butter, salt, and chili.  Sorrel sugar drink that tastes like root beer.  Collards and fried shrimp.  Young men trolling the crowds and hawking little six-ounce bottles of booze juice in all the shades of a pack of Lifesavers. 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 →

What Will Oscar Eat?: The Slayer Strikes Again

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crossword cat

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.

violated tomatoWe 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 →

Tomato Porn

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Witness the Brandywine’s bawdy sense of humor.

How did we enjoy her?

I laid her in slices, along with slices of a Purple Cherokee, alongside Bulgarian sheep feta, Damascus Bakery wholewheat pita charred on the stove top, and local beefsteaks roasted with salt, pepper, garlic, and rosemary and basil from the garden.

Super good.  Super easy. Continue reading →