Category Archives: NYC

Great GoogaMooga: Aimee Follette from Sun In Bloom

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cupcake

The vegan chocolate peanut butter cupcake from Sun In Bloom that I just demolished

The Great GoogaMooga is upon us! With concerts ranging from The Flaming Lips to Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, the food and music fest promises to draw the hungry hordes to Brooklyn this weekend. So that you can properly prepare to get your grub on, we’re running some profiles of the vendors we’re most looking forward to as we count down to the festival.

Last year, GoogaMooga was heavy on the pork, but this year it’s aiming to please its vegetarian friends as well. Hoisting high the vegan banner is Park Slope’s Sun in Bloom. Here’s more from chef and owner Aimee Follette on community, massaged kale, and Radiohead:

sun in bloom

If you look closely, you can see that they give a source for this quote. I think that's pretty cute.

What is Sun In Bloom’s specialty and why is Brooklyn a good place for it?
Sun In Bloom’s specialty is creating hand-crafted gluten-free vegan foods, made with some serious love, that can be enjoyed by everyone.  I opened Sun In Bloom with the intention to introduce the healing power of food and how it truly can create a foundation for us all to experience our best life.  My vision for Sun In Bloom being a community meeting place goes hand-in-hand with why people move to Brooklyn; they move to Brooklyn to be part of a strong community. I think generally, people have a strong desire to be healthy and are recognizing the food they eat will either make them feel good or make them feel sick.

What is your favorite dish of the moment?
As the chef of Sun In Bloom, I only create dishes that I really love.  However, I do have an affinity towards our Bella Divine salad — kale massaged in a live (made from sprouted sunflower seeds) sesame ginger dressing, raw sauerkraut, dulse, and avocado. Continue reading →

The Fish-&-Chips Classes Beneath John Lydon’s Salty Smirk: The Atlanic Chip Shop

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I am, I sometimes admit, something of a poseur vegetarian.  For the past few years, I’ve dabbled in the occasional non-Kosher bottom feeders and,  on the even rarer occasion, an honest-to-God fish.  I feel bad about the fish, though.  I dwell on them once I’ve eaten them.  So I only do so a couple of times a year.

One of those times was a few weeks ago at The Atlantic Chip Shop, the purveyor of the best fish and chips, deep-fried chocolate bars, and Carlsberg on tap in Brooklyn.  Shannon was out of town and my buddy Rachel was in, and Rachel, having become something of an informal (but forceful) advocate of all things meaty over the past decade or so, jumped at the chance to go.  She always jumps at the opportunity to witness someone eating meat.   Have you noticed, vegetarians, how excited some folks get if they suspect you might eat some flesh?  They act like it’s Christmas morning.  It’s cute.

The Chip Shop in fact offers some choice tasty veggie options, including a mushroom mac and cheese and a Welsh rarebit, but the fish is the most captivating opportunity.  It’s divided between three pesca-social classes—Cod, Haddock, and Plaice—and you can choose between them while sitting beneath a few Sex Pistols posters hanging on the wall, which John Lydon probably would appreciate. Continue reading →

Cheese-Making Part II: a Bowline, some Brine, and Abruzzese

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Cheese is without a doubt my favorite food, so I was psyched when Shannon took us to the cheese-making class.  Shannon listed her take-aways yesterday, but she overlooked a few things.

  1. Cheese (according to our teacher, whose expertise, while genuine, seemed possibly inflated) predates recorded history.  The first written record is in Egyptian Hieroglyphics and recounts a traveler who filled his drinking pouch, made of animal intestine, with milk.  The jostling on his journey, combined with the rennet living in the intestines, produced curd.  Patrick declares that such an individual had to be male because only a male would simply chug milk without sniffing it and only a male would, after tasting something rather questionable, immediately seek out his friends and force it upon them.
  2. The Arabic word for cheese is “mish.”  The Arabic word for apricot is “mish mish.”  The etymology involved here intrigues the hell out of me.  It makes me think of English Wensleydale all stuffed with dried fruits.
  3. Mozzarella, when newly made and still wet, is shockingly easy to tie in knots. I’m

    The bowline, as you might remember from your BSA Field Guide, is useful because while under a heavy load it neither slips nor binds.

    talking you can tie a loop and freely pull each end in opposite directions and the cheese slides together as easily as any kind of modern rope made of pulp and plastic fibers.  Here, I have demonstrated this fact by tying a bowline, one of the classic Boy Scout knots.  Yeah, man, I still know that stuff. Continue reading →

Sorta Kinda Chinese Tea Series Entry One: Taro

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I’m not sure how far bubble tea has made it out of our big cities.  In case it hasn’t made it to your locality: bubble tea, invented in Taiwan in the ‘80s, is tea (sometimes kinda maybe) that is filled with tapioca balls, which are little gelatinous spheres approximately a quarter inch in diameter.  Bubble tea is thus usually served, whether hot or cold, with oversized straws that can accommodate the “bubbles.”  These straws are typically whimsical shades of purple or pink or green.  The cups are frequently adorned with cartoon creatures that defy classification except to say that, by virtue of including features like a single eye or a blob shape or the power to bounce and blink without the use of any limbs, they are distinctly Contemporary Asian.  The only Western cartoon counterpart I can think of is the blob that used to bounce unhappily beneath a rain cloud in that Zoloft commercial.

Bubble tea, in short, is meant to be fun.  It is to tea what a Frappaccino is to coffee.

And it is just one kind of many tea drinks I have discovered living in a city with a large East Asian population.  Bubble tea seems to frequently contains no real tea.  Other “tea” drinks served either at tea shops or Chinese bakeries contain only milk or something called “creme” or water mixed with assorted powders the color of Willy Wonka products.

One of my favorites is sesame black milk tea.  It involves steeping a black tea bag in a cup of hot water and milk and stirring in some kind of magic sesame powder.  I had that again the other day while eating a Chinese cream bun that immediately made me feel as if I had swallowed half of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. Continue reading →

Unordinary Sweets for Your Valentine

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macarons

You're the wind in my mill, baby.

As the blizzard looms, so looms Valentine’s Day. It’s the last weekend to dream up something sweet to woo your Valentine, and people will almost certainly be rushing to snap up the famed chocolates at Jacques Torres and Kee’s. But what if you long for a more unorthodox and inventive way to express your undying love? I have some suggestions.

Papabubble, 380 Broome Street
If you’re one of those people who thinks that hard candies are only for grandparents, you’ve probably never had one flavored with pear and bergamot or raspberry and sage. In this little shop in Little Italy, hard candy is the only thing offered, but it is raised to new heights. The candymakers (all of whom have such ostentatious facial hair and earnest expressions that you’ll wonder how they made it over the bridge from Williamsburg) hang and stretch and color and mold enormous hanks of sugar as customers look on, hypnotized. Special Valentines offerings include a “heavy petting mix” (featuring faces of cute animals) and a double-ended heart lollipop.

Mille-Feuille, 552 LaGuardia Place
I went many years confusing macaroons with macarons. For anyone who has suffered from similar bafflement, the latter are the small French pastries made of meringue and almond flour that look like Day-Glo sandwich cookies. Continue reading →

The Secret to Fresh Pasta

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A recent haul from Caputo's

There are many reasons I like Roger. We often agree about books and movies and music. He was once the state Monopoly champion of Rhode Island. He knows all the best puppy videos on YouTube, and though he is my boss, often shows them to me while I’m on the clock. But I think that the reason I like him most of all is that he is the one who told me about Caputo’s.

The topic came up because we were talking about making pasta. Roger, a bit of a foodie, makes his own noodles from time to time, and though they are tasty, it’s a time-consuming enterprise. “Really,” he said, “for four bucks, why wouldn’t you just buy it at that little Italian place on Court Street?” He meant Caputo’s, and he sent me the address. Regular readers of this blog will already know that I believe there’s value in knowing the long way of doing something; making something from scratch is a pleasure in itself. But even I have my limits. The secret to fresh pasta is this: you buy it at Caputo’s.

Caputo's Fine FoodsCaputo’s has an unassuming storefront in Carroll Gardens. It is one of those places that looks old, in a good way, as though maybe it staked its claim when Brooklyn was still a forest and the neighborhood simply grew up around it. In addition to the refrigerator cases of fresh pasta and sauces and soups, there is an olive bar, a cheese case, bins of glistening homemade mozzarella, shelves of dry pasta and bread and tiny jarred wonders, and freezers of pizza dough and cannoli filling and always, always, more pasta. It is all heaven-help-me groan-worthy. My Caputo’s shopping trips end only because of the limits of my wallet and my refrigerator. I have always said that if I could choose only one cuisine to eat for the rest of my life, it would be Indian or Mexican, but now I need to add a caveat that I would choose Italian, provided that all of the ingredients came from Caputo’s.

But the food, glorious though it be, is not the only attraction. Continue reading →

The Audacity of Restaurant-Closure Denial

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wally's square root

Happier days: a photo of Wally's from their website

According to the stages of grief that Elizabeth Kübler-Ross outlined, I am still in the first stage: denial. I know this because when Jason told me that Wally’s Square Root Café had permanently closed, I asked him several times if he was sure and then, in my heart of hearts, decided that he must be wrong. I know this because I hopefully check their still-intact website and have several times dialed their phone number, even though it has clearly been disconnected. I know this because I can’t quite bring myself to walk by its shuttered storefront.

Wally’s was a diner near the Pratt campus in Clinton Hill. It was a little rough around the edges, with mismatched furniture and modern proverbs scrawled all over the walls and a slightly dazed-looking waitstaff and strange aging artifacts, like toy slot machines, sitting around.  But I, for one, found all of this rather charming, and the food was heavenly, making Wally’s one of those neighborhood ace-in-your-pocket places that you keep at the ready for guests or for a lazy Sunday morning. The pesto-laced Green Eggs and Ham was a wonder on a plate, and they could make it vegetarian in the blink of an eye. The potatoes were crisp little nuggets of pure joy. And the Dirty Mac—I can’t even describe it for fear that I might begin to weep. It might have just been a hole in the wall, but it was my hole in the wall.

There is a particular kind of restaurant grief that overtakes me in situations like these—situations in which not just an eating establishment but an entire series of unwritten future experiences are shut down forever. I know that things change and that neighborhoods evolve. I have been guilty of rolling my eyes when Jason speaks with a kind of nostalgia about the liquor stores and fleabag hotels that have all but disappeared from our neighborhood. But I would be lying if I really care about that at the moment. What I really care about is the lemon-ginger sweet tea at Wally’s and how I will never drink it again.

I can think, really, of only one semi-comparable experience: Continue reading →

Turkey Bones and the March of Time

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McSorley’s Old Ale House, in the East Village, is not my favorite bar. The service is inevitably surly, the place is always in-your-face packed with tourists and frat boys, the smell is a bit on the musky side, and the weird little half-pints of beer only come in two varieties (brace yourself, Llalan), dark and light. They didn’t even let women in the front door until they were forced to do so in 1970. Basically, if the bar itself was a person, I probably wouldn’t like him much.

bones, pre-dusting

A photo of the bones, pre-dusting, from the New York Times

But I can’t help but hanker for an occasional trip to McSorley’s. Established (or at least allegedly established) in 1854, it’s one of the few places where you can still feel how old of a place Manhattan really is. If you could manage to elbow your way to a table and order up one of their cheese plates (The cheddar—so sharp! The onion—so raw! The mustard—so spicy!), you’d have a perfect vantage point of some weird artifacts of Old New York, like photos of long-gone drinking club members and antique fireman helmets and turkey wish bones hanging above the bar covered in decades of dust. You could eye those bones and, depending upon the story you chose to believe, think about the quirky bar owner who’d collected them or the WWI doughboys who never made it back from Europe to take them down. And, a little tipsy, you could have deep thoughts about death and decay and the long slog of time and wash it all down with a gulp of light. You could have, that is, until the health department stepped in last year. Continue reading →

What All the Hip Sugar Plum Fairies Are Up to This Weekend

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sugar-sweets-cupcake-2012New Yorkers with a sweet tooth: you may now begin rejoicing. This Sunday, October 21 is the 3rd Annual Havemeyer Sugar Sweets Festival, a bacchanal of sugary goodness benefitting the City Reliquary. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with the City Reliquary, it’s a cool museum devoted to quirky New York artifacts. Ever wanted to see a display of paint chips from the L train or a set of dentures recovered from Dead Horse Bay? You’re in luck.)

Both bakers and eaters of sweet things are welcome at the festival, so head down to the intersection of Havemeyer and Metropolitan in Williamsburg on Sunday and check it out. Even if you don’t happen upon the PitchKnives jam on offer, there will be plenty of treats for sale, as well as contests like the Best Booze-Infused Dessert, Best Sweet Slice and Best Fall-Flavored Treat judged by professional confectioners. Check out all the details here.

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 →