Category Archives: NYC

Now I Can Say I’ve Done It

Posted on by
hot dog contest

Joey "Jaws" Chestnut, at left, and his closest competitors

It was long before high noon, but the sun was blisteringly hot, the smell of cheap beer and vomit was already in the air, and I was watching Olympic gold medalist Greg Louganis as he dove into a fifteen-foot-wide apple pie. I was back at Coney Island, awaiting my very first Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest. The original competition at Nathan’s was supposedly held in 1916, but the annual spectacle as we know it today didn’t really take shape until the 1970s.

Spectacle is really the only way to describe it. Long ago, ESPN decided that hotdog eating alone does not a televised special make, so it is now embellished with trampoline artists, Brooklyn Cyclones cheerleaders, men in hot dog costumes, and pie-diving events while college-aged boys in sequined Uncle Sam hats and Captain America suits look on and yell obscenities at anyone Canadian. And Greg Louganis? Even if he was doing it to raise money for the ASPCA, I really didn’t want to see a sports star from my childhood reduced to wiping globs of caramel and nuts from his eyes. We live in a very strange nation, one in which eating food is not enough; rather it must be gorged upon…or dived into.

“Why are you here?” I asked a middle-aged man standing next to me. (The younger gentleman on the other side of me was too busy opening a can of Coors with his teeth to be bothered with my existential crisis.)

Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Hotdog, from Maximilian II to Jimmy Durante (1200s & 1916)

Posted on by

Two days from now, many New Yorkers and perhaps a greater number of tourists will celebrate the 236th anniversary of These United States by watching a group of Americans stuff as many hotdogs down their gullets as they can.  I refer, obviously, to the famous hotdog eating contest Nathan’s Famous hosts each year.

The hotdog seems to me a most American food.  You can eat it with one hand.  It’s  inexpensive on the Wallet of Now but maybe not so much on the Self of Tomorrow.  Its immigrant origins are hotly debated by those jockeying for brand superiority in a never ending race in which only one can be the victor.

So I poked around.  Here’s what I found: Continue reading →

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

Posted on by
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

Posted on by

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 →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Provenance of Our Big Gulp (1676 – 2012)

Posted on by

Among my different jobs is one that takes me to public middle schools to teach creative and academic writing.  In those classrooms, I have discovered that the craptastic school lunches I sometimes ate while that age are nothing compared to the contemporary dining habits of the Bronx’s eleven-to-thirteen set.  Oversized plastic cups of sugared coffee slushy and a few Dunkin donuts, as well as the bags of Skittles or Doritos that were less of a surprise, are routine.  Of course, I had a class at one of those schools whose lunch period began at 9:10, just after first period.  It’s safe to say that our kids are both getting and seeking a raw deal.

And that takes us to Michael Bloomberg, who in spite of getting the law changed so he could have a third term, seems likely to go down in history mostly for banning smoking in bars, making us a more bike-friendly city (!), and trying to outlaw oversized soda containers in certain types of business.

Well, it's not Joe Camel...

I presume the soda ban is national news; I can’t imagine the Glen Becks of the country passing up such an opportunity.  And so I’ve scrounged up a few key pieces of soft drink history: Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Bonnaroo Edition

Posted on by

Andrew at Solar CafeThere is a lot of good food at the annual Bonnaroo music festival in Manchester, Tennessee. Much of it, along with dozens of good bands giving it their all, can be found in the central area of the festival, but for a perennial favorite of my brother-in-law Andrew (of Andrew Leahey and the Homestead), we were going to have to venture out into the great beyond. We were headed to the end of the line, and we were on the hunt for a mean tofu scramble.

A little background here: because both Andrew and my husband write about the festival for various publications, I have become an exceedingly spoiled Bonnaroo-goer over the past few years. They had once again managed to land us in “guest” camping, which boasted benefits like free showers and actual trees to shade our tents from the broiling Tennessee heat. (“Oh, no! This weekend, we’re like the one percent!” Andrew said, with a tiny bit of genuine class guilt.) But to get a taste of a particular dish that Andrew and his wife, Emily, had come to crave in Bonnaroos past, we needed to wander into the melee of the general camping area, where the great ninety-nine percent were partying in every conceivable fashion.

It is almost impossible to describe the verve, conviviality and downright filthiness of general camping. “I bet the best food is somewhere out here,” Andrew proclaimed with authority. Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Melting Pot Edition

Posted on by

mural in AstoriaA lot of people think of Astoria, Queens as being synonymous with good Greek food. But the truth is that, like a lot of New York City, Astoria is a little bit of everything. Queens’s status as the most diverse county in the nation is on display no matter which way you turn. Take, for example, the block I walked around when I first stepped off the Q line: a Chinese acupuncture place across the street from the Thai restaurant that was next to the Spanish café that was just a few steps from the Cuban bakery (Havana Express) where I stopped to get coffee and biscotti. And that was all before I even set foot on Ditmars Boulevard, where everything about Astoria becomes squared.

It’s hard not to stand on Ditmars without thinking the word “bustling,” so I decided that the Bay Ridge strategy of taking a lunch spot survey would work well here. For an hour, I zigzagged around the surrounding residential blocks, soliciting lunch recommendations. While my methods were hardly scientific, I did speak to a lot of people: white people, brown people, Greek people, Italian people, grumpy people, talkative people, dog-walking people, frat boy-looking people, tattooed hipster people, and lots of elderly people.

Their responses, of course, were no less diverse. Continue reading →

Our Newest Contributor Is…You!

Posted on by

fifties cookSure, we love writing for the blog, but it’s not just about us, us, us. One of the reasons we started PitchKnives is so we could hear your stories about food and gardening. So in our second month, it’s time to make your voice heard. All you need to do is write to us at submissions@pitchknives.com

Here are some easy ways to get involved:

  • See one of Jason’s Concrete Jungle signs? Snap a picture or tell us about how you found it.
  • Have a great restaurant you’d put up a fight for? Tell us about it and you might just get picked for Grub Match. Next up are NYC brunch favorites, but other themes and cities are already in the works, so elect the place you love most.
  • Need a lunch date? Convince me that there’s a spot near your subway stop that I have to try, and you could be part of our Lunch at the End of the Line series.

But that’s not all. You (yes, YOU) possess the power to write an awesome food feature. Did you just make a rad new chimichurri sauce? Did you just discover the secret to growing the perfect carrot? Did you put together the perfect picnic? Send your ideas to submissions@pitchknives.com. We love photo galleries, too.

So, go on! Make our mouths water!
–The Editors

Concrete Jungle: Laxton’s Progress Shell Peas, Manhattan Bridge, NYC

Posted on by

One of my pleasures in life—one that combines in a strategic way my humanistic impulses with my unbecoming “Told ya so!” competitiveness—is proving to people that they will in fact enjoy foods they now despise, so long as they have them my way.

Dark greens like kale and collards are prime catalysts for achieving this conflation of the altruistic and the vain, but so are peas, an early treat from the year’s bounty.

Most of us know peas as at best little green balls filling up a freezer bag best used as an ice pack and at worst mushy gray globs taking up plate space next to the mashed potatoes.  This is a travesty.

Continue reading →

Grub Match: Tri-borough Showdown

Posted on by

“I expected to be disappointed in one, and I was. The other one I expected to like, and was disappointed in that one, too. Oh wait, is this the part where I’m supposed to be nice?”

That was the kind of feisty, go-for-the-jugular attitude evidenced in our three Grub Match contenders before the match had even begun. Monisha, Marie and Roger had gathered to defend the honor of their own restaurant picks and discuss the merits and shortcomings of the other contenders’ choices. The sun was hot. The beer was cold. They looked ready to rumble.

ready to rumble

Let’s get this match started…. Continue reading →