Last night, while I was struggling to pull myself together after a weekend out of town, I was reminded afresh of the bounty of the New York City take-out scene. With dozens of places willing to deliver until late, it’s a miracle that I ever manage to cook anything at all. But how to choose with so many possibilities? I made this flowchart to help me decide; feel free to use it if you live in the neighborhood or try making your own.
Bergen Bagel, mi amor...
My obsession with carbs is not a new development. In eighth grade health class* we had a homework assignment that involved reading an account of what a fictional someone had eaten in a day and identifying what was wrong with that person’s diet. The person who ate chocolate cake for breakfast or the person who ate fried food at every meal was a no-brainer, but I recall looking at the one who ate pancakes for breakfast, a potato for lunch and pasta for dinner and thinking, “What’s wrong with that?”
Nothing is more enabling for the carb-obsessed than marathon training. It is the perfect cover while snarfing down great quantities of noodles, which is exactly what I have been doing, probably more than is strictly necessary. What is necessary is a carb-heavy diet the day before the marathon (it helps you finish faster and in less pain—I swear I am not making this up), which has led to my elaborate fantasies of what exactly I am going to eat for each meal this Saturday before I run the New York marathon on Sunday. And as I was constructing this ideal New York carb triptych, I realized that I haven’t written much about two of the three places I had in mind, which seems utterly unjust, an oversight that I should rectify.
I. New Yorkers tend to be very opinionated about their bagels, but for me, there’s really not much of a contest when it comes to where I’ll be eating breakfast on Saturday. Bergen Bagels are everything bagels should be: dense, chewy, flavorful, slathered with cream cheese, and without a chip on their shoulders about being toasted. Not that long ago, Bergen Bagel opened a third location just a couple blocks from my house, and, no joke, I consider this one of the highlights of the past year.
II. For lunch, I think I’ll mosey over to Manhattan Continue reading
I’m not really a junk food guy, but I am a weird food guy. And by weird I don’t just mean bizarre (like that pregnant mud eel that Shannon made me eat at a Cambodian “air force” base) but also novel, cute, odd, etc. Maybe my first exposure to weird junk food was through my old man, who still to this day will bi-annually rock a Moon Pie. Moon Pies, in case you are unaware, are two pieces of cardboard stuffed with low-grade putty and shellacked in plastic. Now, even though I know these taste like wood and petroleum products, I inevitably eat one if it’s presented to me sufficiently long after my last taste. The fact that these things are still actually produced and actually purchased for consumption is just too nonsensical for me to ignore.
It's Country Club brand, so I knew it would be refined.
Less nonsensical but equally novel and compelling are what I am going to label here as Hispanic sodas. Jarrito is one brand you may have seen. Its different flavors are different Lifesaver colors. New York has a fantastic collections of these sodas, and a specimen I’d never seen before, one from the Dominican Republic, caught my eye the other say.
That’s right, that’s meringue flavored soda. And the spokescharacter, is that a drop of soda giving the thumbs-up within a different drop of soda? I’m pretty sure it is. How am I going to say no to that?
So I pony’d up two-twenty-five (?!) for this bottle of Country Club and twisted off the top.
Sweet Jesus. 
It tasted like a liquid Dum Dum lollipop, which is far, far less tasty than it sounds. The meringue flavor itself was sort of a mutant cream soda, recognizable but overgrown to Godzilla proportions. It did not taste like meringue. It almost didn’t take like sugar. It tasted like “sweet” turned up to eleven. Perhaps that’s because, I noticed after my teeth stopped quivering in my gums, the bottle had 47 grams of sugar. That’s eight more than Coke. And that was more or less my soda intake for the remainder of 2013.
Last week, the Union Square Farmer’s Market, one of the biggest and best in the city, put on its first nightmarket, billed in a lavender promotional jpeg as “A Midsummer Night’s Green Market.” The farmers stayed twice as long as they usually do, there was beer and music, and a handful of area restaurants turned out to dish out.
So we turned out, too. We were psyched.
It ended up a bit of a very crowded catwalk of very good looking food.
We tried Telepan’s blueberry crescent and fried eggplant with ratatouille, both of which were pretty, decent, unspectacular. Each of these guys were four bucks.
Next up was the peach turnover from Union Square Café, which was not only infinitely superior to its blueberry 
cousin but pretty damn delicious. Once you accept the fact that any turnover stuffed with corn syrup gloop masquerading as fruit is an offense to all that is good and noble in the world, you are left with a turnover’s pastry as its defining feature. The Café’s was fantastic: delicately crispy on the top, firm and flaky elsewhere. Cost: six bucks. Continue reading
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
I 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.
Anh, 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
GoogaMooga, you tease! The beginning of our relationship held so much promise. You debuted with The Darkness, a magnificent treat that so many of your suitors couldn’t get off work early enough to see, a guitar shredder clad in David Lee Roth’s best zebra-striped jumpsuit doing handstands on the drum riser and wailing
falsetto. You wooed me with Mac and Cheese from Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, so creamy and dense, the word succulent comes to mind. And even if Wayne Coyne’s voice was ragged, the La Mamasita Arepa from Caracas Rockaway was crisp, chewy, oily-as-hell, and stuffed with grilled mushrooms and plantains and cheese. It’s true that the mushrooms got lost a bit in the jumble of tastes, but it was yummy all the same. I washed it down with a strange and tasty Chery and Basil soda from Brooklyn Soda Works and then watched Karen O leap and yawp across the stage like a maniac, all dressed in a collision of Liberace and Michael Jackson, grungy blues riffs turned into dance music and Brooklyn jumping about happily. Continue reading
Superfly Presents unleashes the Great GoogaMooga today. We’re psyched. Check out below the thoughts Superfly co-founder Kerry Black has on the grub at the festival.
Why combine a food festival with a music festival, and why is Brooklyn a good place to do so?
Put most simply, we love food and we love music! Together, the two are the perfect combination. We wanted to really celebrate everything that makes New York culture so amazing with GoogaMooga, and Brooklyn is a very obvious leader in both food and music. We’re New Yorkers who are always seeing shows and eating out, in Brooklyn in particular. Then to throw GoogaMooga in Prospect Park was our ideal. There is so much beauty and personality to that space.
How will this year’s GoogaMooga be different from last year’s?
We’re introducing Cafe GoogaMooga this year and three very cool Pop-Ups by April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman, Gabe Stulman and Roberta’s. The VIP Cocktail Experience is a new take on VIP with 10 different cocktail bars like Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog, Clover Club, Pouring Ribbons, and Dutch Kills.
Any particular favorite vendors you’re looking forward to patronizing?
All of them, but let’s see…Roberta’s Ren Fair, Kasadels, Jeepney, and Baohaus.
Marcos Lainez’s family has been selling fresh Salvadoran food to hungry soccer players in 
Red Hook since 1988. Their signature snack is the pupusa, a stuffed corn pancake created by the Pipils Indians in the territory now demarcated as El Salvador, but they also turn out freshly fried plantain chips and atoll de elote, a hot drink made of yellow corn. Pupusas are similar to arepas or gorditas, except instead of regular corn dough, pupusas are prepared with nixtamal, a kind of corn flower that’s mixed with an alkaline solution that makes the nutrients more easily absorbed by the body. The Pipils (or their progenitors) figured this out around 2000 BC, using quicklime and ash. We asked Marcos about his pupusas, Brooklyn eats, and the weekend’s performers. We edited his answers a bit to fit the format.
What is Red Hook El Olomega Pupusas’ specialty?
Our specialty is the Pupusas. A pupasa is a traditional Salvadoran dish made by hand using traditional, non-additive corn flour. The main ingredient is pork & cheese but can be made of a variety of flavors, like beans & cheese and spinach & cheese. From our menu my favorite pupusa is a very traditional Loroco flower and cheese.
Why is Brooklyn a good place for El Olomega?
We have been in Brooklyn for over 20 years and the pupusa is still fairly unknown
here and in the U.S., but each day it is gaining popularity among a very wide group of people. Brooklyn is now a very diversified borough, and this is the time and place to let them know about this Salvadoran treat.
What band are you looking forward to hearing at GoogaMooga? What’s the best concert you’ve ever seen?
I am looking forward to hear the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I am not familiar with them, but had to give my friend a ticket because he has talked about them so much that I am very excited. Saturday and Sunday I expect to be very busy, so I will do a quick tour each day. Continue reading
Kelly's personal fave (photo courtesy of KelSo)
From vegan cupcakes we leap to beer, which, if you ask me, is not a bad leap to make, particularly if it’s the delicious Brooklyn-made brews from KelSo Beer. In fact, I think that a fairly good test of a local bar is whether or not it has KelSo IPA on tap; it’s a magical substance that tastes like someone waved a wand and turned a juicy grapefruit into a beer.
So there’s good news for beer lovers attending GoogaMooga, as KelSo will be serving up refreshing craft beverages all weekend long. Here’s more from KelSo brewer and co-owner Kelly Taylor on how he and his wife and business partner Sonya Giacobbe keep Brooklyners happy:
What is KelSo’s specialty and why is Brooklyn a good place for it?
Fresh, classic, and satisfying beers. The people of Brooklyn appreciate quality and freshness, and demand a lot in their local foods. In our beer, it doesn’t have to be a “blow to the head” to be appreciated.
What is your favorite beer of the moment?
Our nut brown lager. Great with food or alone. Malty/toasty/clean. Good to cook with as well. If not ours, I love the Captain Lawrence Freshchester pale ale. Very fruity and smooth.
What’s your favorite Brooklyn restaurant that’s still off most people’s radar?
I love love love al di la in Park slope. Always excellent food. Down the street and known for great beer but lesser known for great sandwiches is Bierkraft. Truly amazing. Continue reading