Definitely Soup

So I decided that the stock, or maybe soup, or maybe stock, or maybe soup, that I was working on should be soup after all. Figured that after going out and buying stew beef, I may as well turn this directly into something I could eat. Grabbed another couple of carrots and another couple of sticks of celery out of the fridge, cut them up and added them to the pot. Went to the grocery store and picked up a couple of small potatoes and a shallot; peeled them, cut them up, threw them in with the rest, left it all to simmer for another couple of hours. Voila: soup!

And let me tell you... it was great! Here's what it looked like in the pot, after I'd eaten about half of it:


And in a bowl, ready to go:


I don't know that there's another expensive steak dinner in my near future, so I won't have steak bones to start with again, but I think I may try the same thing with just stew beef sometime. Maybe I'll buy some marrow bones too, because mmmmm marrow.

Adventures In... Stock? Soup? TBD...

About a week and a half ago, my cousin Mike and I went to Wolfgang's in Tribeca and had some steaks. (Well, had a steak, since Wolfgang's does "steak for N" in the same style as Peter Luger.) When we got done eating, there was this lovely t-bone with a fair amount of meat still on it, and it seemed like it would be a shame to just let it get thrown away, so I took it home planning to make beef stock out of it. (I had done the same thing a couple of years ago with a couple of Peter Luger steak bones, and figured maybe I could manage the same thing now.)

So I started the bone boiling in water, added a couple of carrots and a couple of stalks of celery and an onion, figuring that those were about the basic ingredients of beef stock. And salt and pepper, because everything needs salt and pepper. After about four hours of simmering the first night, I realized that the taste was very watery, and that I had to add more beef. So I went to Trader Joe's and bought a pound of stew meat, browned that in a hot pan and then put it into the pot with the rest. At this point it occurred to me that maybe instead of stock I could make beef vegetable soup, so... now I'm trying to decide whether to do that. I guess we'll see what I decide! Stay tuned...

Josh's New York

I think maybe I was the only one who watched the TV show Keen Eddie, which aired briefly on Fox in the summer of 2003. Keen Eddie was a fish-out-of-water cop show about titular New York policeman Eddie Arlette (played by Mark Valley, currently starring in the TV comic book adaptation Human Target), who has been assigned to work for a police precinct in London. The show also starred Julian Rhind-Tutt (perhaps best known as Angelina Jolie's sidekick in the first Tomb Raider movie) as Eddie's uptight English partner, Colin Salmon (of, among other things, three of the Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movies) as their no-nonsense superintendent, and Sienna Miller as Eddie's will-they-or-won't-they landlady.

One of the show's plot devices was this: In the pilot, which told the story of how Eddie bungled a case and was sent to London to clean up his mess, we see a few scenes in Eddie's apartment. On his wall, we see a map of New York (referred to, and maybe also labeled, "Eddie's New York"), with matchbooks from various establishments tacked up at (presumably) their locations in the city. During the pilot, there's a fire in the apartment, and the matchbooks and lots of other things burn to ashes, perhaps symbolizing the destruction of Eddie's career in New York. Once he's posted to London, he starts a new map, adding a new matchbook each episode corresponding to an establishment that was related to the episode's plot. (This was a plot device, at least, for the five or six episodes that aired before Fox pulled the plug. I haven't yet bought the DVDs to see whether they kept it up for the whole season, but I assume so.)

Well, I thought, that looked really cool, and I decided to emulate it. I picked up a wall-sized map of Manhattan (where I lived at the time, since supplemented by a Brooklyn map), tacked it up on my wall, and started taking matchbooks at restaurants and adding them to the map. (Over the past few years, due to the much-appreciated smoking ban, some restaurants have offered cards rather than matchbooks, but those work just as well, although they're sometimes larger.) Here's what the map looks like this evening, November 2, 2010, as I'm writing this:



Writing out a full list would be a tedious process and would just result in boring you, so I'll just include some of the highlights:

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, from the Harlem location of the Upstate NY institution:



Vintage New York Wine Bar (which sadly closed a couple of years ago), a wine bar/restaurant focusing on New York State-produced wines; they stood out by offering, instead of matchbooks or cards, a cork imprinted with their business information:



Delhi Brasserie, an Indian restaurant in Southwest London that I visited during my first trip over there back in the summer of 2006, shown at the eastern edge of Long Island because if I were to locate it precisely to scale it'd probably have to be two buildings over:



Florent, a Meatpacking District institution since the mid-'80s that closed a couple of years ago after being priced out by the blandification of the neighborhood:



I'll add new entries here for new matchbooks as I add them to the map, and perhaps also add pictures for some older ones if I'm stuck for things to write about here.

Dish Soaking Fail

I'm not sure how this happened, but... this happened:



And not through any action of my own, to be clear, but somehow a soup spoon and my vegetable peeler... attempted to mate? While they were soaking in a bowl in my sink? I don't really know. What I do know is that my attempts to separate them resulted in this:



And now I need to buy a new vegetable peeler.

I Wrote A Thing About Soccer

and if you are interested in that sort of thing, you should go read it. It's posted over at Craven Cottage Newsround, which is an excellent blog for fans of Fulham Football Club.

Wait... What?

So when I finally got around to firing up the Philly cheesesteak episode of Food Wars that aired a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that it pitted Pat's against... Tony Luke's? How on earth do you do an episode about cheesesteak and not have it be Pat's vs. Geno's? I mean, those are pretty clearly the two most famous places (if you Google "philly cheesesteak" you get the Wikipedia article, Pat's, and Geno's, in that order, as your top three hits), not to mention the fact that they're right across the street from each other would make for good TV. I almost didn't want to watch the episode because this seems so wrong, but I had to see whether Geno's even got mentioned - they didn't, and the shots of Pat's were framed so as not to show it either. I can only assume there must've been a contract dispute or something.

By the way, they changed the format (no longer a blind taste test, the owners of the two places come out and talk to the judges while they're eating; the host is now one of the judges and they structured it so that she cast the deciding vote, rather than a local, which was also odd), and the winner was Pat's, but that almost seems secondary to the strange choice of contestants.

(I should add that this has also been discussed on the show's official discussion forum, where multiple astute viewers also noted that Joey Vento of Geno's was in the show's introduction prior to the changes mentioned above.)

Chicken and Rice Follow-Up

You may recall that back in the spring I wrote about a trip to get food at 53rd Street and 6th Avenue, New York's most famous corner for chicken and rice. Because my friend and I didn't want to wait too long, we ordered food from the cart on the southeast corner of the intersection that is, I was informed, functionally identical to the more well-known cart on the southwest corner of the intersection that gets ridiculously long lines. You may also recall that I wasn't particularly impressed by the food we ate, and resolved to return and try the food at the more well-known cart at some point when the line wasn't so long.

As luck would have it, I had an opportunity to do so last night. I spent the better part of the evening on the roof deck at Ava Lounge on 55th (good drinks, gorgeous view, prices to match) celebrating a friend's birthday, without having had dinner beforehand, and afterward found myself right near the chicken and rice carts and needing food. And, even better, the famous cart was just setting up for business for the night and there wasn't any line at all. Ordered my chicken and rice, paid my $6, took my white sauce and my hot sauce, and sat down on a bench nearby to dig in while it was fresh.

And... meh. The food was the same as last time, and I still don't see the appeal. Granted, there's a lot of food for $6 and I always approve of a good value, and the hot sauce was just as hot as I remembered. But honestly, the chicken was bland, as was the rice. I couldn't say for sure since I don't spend a whole lot of time in Midtown, but I'd be inclined to guess that there's better food to be had at other carts right there in the immediate area; the food at the good ole Frito-Lay truck (since re-named "Gyro House", despite the fact that it does not reside in anything resembling a house) is certainly better. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad or anything, and if someone handed me a free chicken and rice platter I wouldn't turn it down, but I'm certainly not going to spend an hour waiting for it anytime soon.

Salad, Minus Five Minutes

Can I Order Just The Other 1%?

Ode To My Produce Store

I love the place in my neighborhood where I buy fruits and veggies. Atlantic Fruit & Veg. (for some reason named on Yelp as "Atlantic Vegetable and Food") is just up around the corner from me on Atlantic Avenue between Court and Clinton Streets, and it's awesome. They have a very good selection, the produce is always fresh, the cashiers are friendly, and it's cheap! Tonight, on the way home from work, I bought:

1/4 of a watermelon
4 nice tomatoes on the vine
4 peaches
3 Gala apples
1 D'Anjou pear
2 ginormous cucumbers
1 head of romaine lettuce
1 bag of carrots
1 pint of blueberries

Total cost? $16.71.

I love my produce store.

Plate Of Meat

Last Thursday night, I made my first trip to Red Bull Arena, the recently-opened soccer-specific stadium that's home to the New York Red Bulls of Major League Soccer. The move from Giants Stadium to the team's new home represents a positive step for the historically unsuccessful MetroStars/Red Bulls franchise not just because of the sport/team-appropriate aspects of the stadium itself (e.g., natural grass playing surface, standard-width soccer field, no football lines painted on the surface, seating capacity appropriate for the sport, etc.), but also because the relocation from East Rutherford to Harrison puts the team's home a stone's throw from Newark and Kearny and Belleville, home to large groups of Americans of Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian, Uruguayan, Italian and Irish descent that helped make North Jersey into one of the historical hotbeds of American soccer. (Tab Ramos, Tony Meola, Claudio Reyna and John Harkes, bold-faced names in the history of soccer in the United States, all grew up in the immediate area.)

In particular, the new stadium is a short walk across the Jackson Street Bridge away from the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, historically a landing place for thousands of Portuguese, Brazilian and Spanish immigrants. This means that spectators will find themselves within walking distance of a large number of ethnic restaurants in the Ironbound for pregame and/or postgame eating and/or drinking, in contrast with the utter lack of options in the immediate vicinity of the Meadowlands. (It should be noted that, though a major renovation is in the works, the Harrison PATH station is presently woefully unequipped to handle postgame crowds, making a postgame walk over to Newark an even more attractive option.) In addition to the variety of options available in Newark, Red Bull Arena itself pays tribute to the area's ethnic heritage in the assortment of food available at concession stands.

Because it was a weeknight, my friends and I didn't have time for a sit-down dinner at a restaurant before the game, but rather planned for a meal at one particular stadium concession: the Casa Seabra Rodizio Grill, a rodizio-inspired concession stand immediately outside one of the main entrances to the stadium and owned by a family that operates a number of restaurants in the Ironbound, including the similarly-named Casa Seabra.



That's the stadium at the left-hand side of the frame, to give you an idea of how close it is to the grill. As you can perhaps see from the menu shown in the picture, there are a number of sandwiches on offer for $6.50 each (linguiça sausage, pork steak, sirloin) as well as pao de chouriço (bread stuffed with sausage) for $4, but we each opted for the $10 rodizio platter including sirloin, linguiça sausage and chicken breast, along with rice and beans:



For $10 (i.e., barely more than you'd pay for a hot dog at one of the baseball stadiums in the city), this was a phenomenal value. The chunks of grilled chicken were a little dry, but that's a tough one to avoid when cooking large amounts of chicken. The sausage and (especially) steak were tasty, especially when eaten with some of the chimichurri sauce that was included with the platter. The beans were flavorful as well, and the rice was... well, it was rice. (In the picture, it's shown sprinkled with some Tabasco sauce, which we actually all agreed seemed hotter than normal Tabasco; I know Tabasco produces an extra-spicy hot sauce made from habanero peppers, but this was not labeled as such.) I'd heartily endorse Casa Seabra Rodizio Grill if you're making a trip out to the new stadium (unless you're a vegetarian, in which case you'll find little of interest there; I believe there are more options to you, like empanadas, inside the stadium); the only down sides are that the only utensil provided is a fork (a knife might be useful to cut the steak, and a spoon to scoop the beans), and the unnecessarily blaring music and hype-man trying to get the crowd fired up right nearby.

Behold the Power of Trends, and a LONG Tangent

This post was supposed to include some nice pictures of last Friday's dinner. (OK, it still could, for reasons I'll discuss below, but bear with me for the moment.) On Friday evening, after work, I met up with my sister Lauren and my brother-in-law Brian to have dinner at The Meatball Shop, a fairly new (opened in February) and significantly buzzed-about Lower East Side restaurant specializing in (no points for guessing this one) meatballs. The menu includes five different kinds of meatballs (beef, pork, chicken, veggie, and a weekly special), and you can order any one of the types in a variety of ways including a variety of different types of sandwiches or a la carte, as well as various sides and beverages and all that.

So, of course, meatballs are delicious, and we decided we wanted to give it a try. The reviews mentioned that there could be a long wait for a table, but we figured that we could always put our name down, leave a phone number, and then go get a drink at a bar nearby. But when we arrived, we were told that the wait would be a whopping two hours! OK, really, come on. I'm sure these meatballs are very good, but are they really that much better than what you get on a meatball sub at your local pizza place (my coworkers and I sometimes go to Liberatos Pizza in the Financial District) that that kind of a wait is justified? I mean, I'm not averse to waiting a reasonable amount of time for food. 45 minutes in the park waiting for my burger from Shake Shack? No big deal. Line outside Tomoe Sushi? I haven't been there yet, but everyone says it's worth the wait. But two hours for meatballs? Well, we didn't think they could possibly be worth the wait, and decided to head somewhere else.

After a bit of wandering, we wound up at a cute little place called The Pink Pony and decided to give it a try. (It didn't hurt that they had a sign saying "we have air conditioning!" and it was really hot outside.) Lauren ordered a nicoise salad, Brian ordered short ribs, which both looked very good. (Brian loves short ribs, so there wasn't much doubt that he'd be happy, and the tuna in Lauren's salad was nicely seared.)

I ordered cassoulet, which I'd never eaten before, but had been meaning to try for a while because: So after I took the bar exam back in the summer of 2006, I took a vacation to Europe for a few weeks. One travel day, when I was taking a TGV train from Bordeaux to Barcelona (or, technically, to Narbonne to transfer to a different train to Barcelona), I got, well, stranded. The train just stopped working with no explanation. (Well, there might have been some explanation, but not an explanation that I was going to be able to pick up on with my "Ou est la toilette?"-level understanding of French.) At first we were just stopped basically in a field, but after being held there for something like an hour we pulled forward at a slow speed until we arrived at the nearest station, in a small town named Castelnaudary. There we sat for... a few hours, as I recall. I still didn't really know what was going on, only that it was starting to look more and more like I was going to miss my connection. They were letting people off the train, though, so I got up to stretch my legs and eventually found out, from an English-speaking conductor (SNCF conductors wear little national flag pins representing various languages they speak, which I thought was clever), that there was some sort of electrical problem, that they didn't know how long it would be, but that they would make sure that everyone did get where they were going if we missed connections. (I later learned that all the electricity in southwestern France was not working that afternoon; I'm not sure whether that meant just for SNCF, or for everyone in the whole region.) I managed to call my hotel in Barcelona to let them know that I would be arriving late that night (the Spanish that I had learned in high school and college was, and still is, rusty but at least somewhat functional), and then settled in to wait. I couldn't really go anywhere, though, because there was no telling when the train would be ready to leave, and in any case I couldn't really communicate with anyone to figure out where I'd go even if I could go somewhere. The train eventually left Castelnaudary a few hours later and arrived in Narbonne close to midnight, something like five or six hours after I was supposed to make my transfer. SNCF, true to their word, put me and a bunch of other Barcelona-bound travelers onto a bus that eventually arrived at around 3 in the morning, and someone at my hotel (formerly Hostal Palacios, now Hotel Praktik Rambla, highly recommended) was there to let me in even at that late hour.

Aaaaaanyway, if you'll forgive the rambling (though this is all actually part of a much longer story that I'm certainly not going to go to the effort to type), the connection is: after I got home at the end of my trip, I decided to read up on Castelnaudary, where I had been stranded for a couple of hours. It turned out that what seemed to me to be a crappy little town in the middle of nowhere (to be fair, not many places look particularly nice if all you see is the train station) was actually a lovely town along the Canal du Midi that bills itself as the "World Capital of Cassoulet." Had I known this at the time, I would've certainly tried to find a place to eat cassoulet rather than whatever crap I found in a vending machine at the train station, but since I didn't, I've been meaning to try it for a while, and now here we are back at where we started.

So, cassoulet. Tasty. Beany. Should've taken pictures, like I mentioned above. I think I'm going to need to try it elsewhere for comparison.

The end? Perhaps, though I do still want to go try those meatballs some night when the line isn't so long.

Well Hello There

Sorry for the lack of posts lately; I'm sure there will be more forthcoming soon, if I can just remember to take pictures and actually write about things. One thing that can definitely be filed under "coming soon" is the garden out back by the verandah (read: planter on my fire escape).

In the meantime, the always-excellent Ted Berg of SNY takes some time out from his normal sportswriting to bring us Sandwich Week. It's not my own material, obviously (save for a few comments to Ted's posts), but worth a read nonetheless if you like sandwiches. (And who doesn't like sandwiches? You don't like sandwiches? What's wrong with you? You know who didn't like sandwiches? Hitler. Think about it.) Check out his posts on:

the Chacarero Completo at Barros Luco, 300 1/2 East 52nd Street
Ted's own homemade Cuban sandwich
the Sloppy Bao at Baoguette, various locations around the city

And stay tuned for what I assume will be several more sandwich posts, assuming Sandwich Week is accurately named.

Trader Joe's Update

You know, I'm going to have to stop going to Trader Joe's and buying way more than I planned to if they can't figure things out so that I don't have to spend 25 minutes in the checkout line at 9:30 at night. Jeez.

Deal Of The Century

So, hold on a second. You go into the bar. Not just during happy hour, or only on certain days of the week, but any time on any day. (I was there at around 11pm on a Tuesday.) You order a drink. Not just expensive drinks, or special drinks, or skunked kegs that they're trying to get rid of, but any drink. (I had a draft Yuengling for $4; most drafts were $5 and a couple were $6, and most bottles were $4 or $5. Nobody I was with had liquor, but I would guess it would be comparably reasonably priced.) The bartender hands you your drink, and with it you get a ticket. It's just a standard red ticket, but it may as well be golden.

Because, you see, at Lulu's (formerly known as the Alligator Lounge, at the corner of Greenpoint Avenue and Franklin Street a block West of the G train at Greenpoint Avenue), with each drink you buy, you get a ticket redeemable for a free personal pizza that's made to order.

Let me repeat that. Buy a drink, get a free personal pizza. How awesome is that?

And the pizza is actually pretty good. Made fresh when you order it, not frozen and heated in a microwave or something. You can add toppings for $1 each if you want; they had about four meat toppings, four vegetarian meat substitutes, and ten or twelve veggies. Here's mine, with pepperoni and mushrooms:



(Sorry it's a camera phone picture and not better quality.)

But I mean... even if it weren't great pizza, it's included for free with something you were buying anyway. This is just incredible, if you ask me. I'd keep going on about it, but I think it's pretty obvious by now how I feel.

By the way, tip the guy who's making the pizza. Totally worth it.

Damn You, Trader Joe

Tonight I went to Trader Joe's to buy two things. Two.

I needed a box of cereal and a quart of yogurt. I waited until around 9:30 to head over to TJ's because if I try to go there when I'm on my way home from work (generally in the 7:00-8:00 range), it's always packed and you can easily spend half an hour waiting in line. On the other hand, if it's closer to closing time, the line is shorter and I can get in, grab what I need, and head out.

Well, so much for that. Yogurt is right by the checkout lines, so I went to pick up cereal first. On my way from the door to the cereal, I passed by bread, and the loaf of bread I have in the freezer is down to two slices, so I decided to grab a fresh loaf of whole wheat bread ($2.49) because I'll probably need it sooner or later. Then cereal. I grabbed a box of maple pecan clusters ($3.99), which was what I planned to get in the first place, and as long as I was in the cereal aisle, I picked up a box of golden flax cereal ($2.49) because hey, it's not perishable and I'll eat it eventually. I was all set to head over to the dairy case and pick up my yogurt, but then I realized I was almost out of granola to mix in with the yogurt, so I picked up a fresh bag of three berry granola ($3.29) for when I run out; it was right there next to the cereal.

So then, I could've just walked to the end of that aisle to the dairy case, gotten my yogurt, gotten in line, and that would've been the end of it. Instead, I decided to make a quick trip around the store and see if I saw anything I wanted. And that was where it really went awry. Walking out of the cereal aisle the way I came, I saw a box of whole grain cereal bars with apple ($1.69) that seemed like they'd be good to have on hand. In the next aisle, I decided I needed fresh jars of peanut butter ($2.99) and jelly ($3.49) because that's one of the things the bread was for in the first place. Then I figured maybe I should balance the grainy things I'd bought out with some fruit, and on the way over to the fruit aisle I grabbed a bag of reduced-salt roasted cashews ($5.49) because the bag I have is almost empty. In the fruit aisle, I only picked up one grapefruit ($0.89) because once I was there I remembered that I had done my fruit shopping yesterday. But they also have meat near the fruit, and I picked up a package of boneless skinless chicken breasts ($7.09) for dinner for the next few nights.)

Leaving the meat section, I saw the canned foods aisle, and of course Trader Joe's excels at canned food, so that required a stroll. I picked up a can of chili ($1.99) and a carton of red pepper and tomato soup ($2.79), because it's always nice to have something on hand that's easy to heat up and eat. At the end of that aisle, I figured I probably had enough, and wandered back up the frozen foods aisle towards the dairy case, and while I was going through there a box of ice cream sandwiches ($3.69), and while I should know better, they called my name like a grail-shaped beacon (Bad, bad Zoot! Bad, naughty Zoot!) and into the basket they went. At that point, I was up to where I needed to be, so I got in line, grabbed the yogurt ($2.99), and checked out.

So I meant to spend $6.98, and instead Trader Joe got himself $45.36 of my dinero. Damn you, Trader Joe.

Mother's Day Brunch: Dessert

As I mentioned at the end of my post about Mothers Day Brunch at No. 7, later on that same day the family had ourselves some dessert. (In between, we stopped back at my apartment so that my sister and I could help our mother learn how to use her new iPhone; our father really hit a home run with that Mothers Day gift.) We took a walk down to Blue Marble Ice Cream at their location on Court Street in Cobble Hill, not far from my apartment. Earlier that week, while picking up dinner at Nectar (right next door to Blue Marble), I noticed a line out the door around 9pm on a weekday evening, and decided it was high time to give the new scoop shop (formerly the home of a Tasti D-Lite) a try.

Because it was mid-afternoon on a cool day, there wasn't a line, just one family that had already received their ice cream occupying the one table inside the small store front. My brother-in-law and I both ordered small cups of their blackberries and cream ice cream, which was excellent. Very creamy, very fruity. (All the ice cream was very creamy, not too airy.) I didn't actually even finish mine (maybe because of the big brunch we'd had a few hours earlier), and took the extra home to eat after dinner. The guest of honor (i.e., Mom) ordered a small cup of banana chip, which had a great ripe banana flavor, and just a sprinkling of small chocolate chips mixed in. My father ordered... gosh, I can't actually remember. A small cup of ice cream, but what flavor? Caramel chip, maybe? I'm sure he enjoyed it, in any case. My sister opted to go against the grain and have a brownie, then trade some of the brownie for tastes of everyone's ice cream. (We're very good at trading tastes of everyone's food in my family.) She chose the Sweet and Salty Brownie, made with caramel and fleur de sel, which (true to their locally-sourced ethos) Blue Marble gets from Baked in Red Hook. The texture was very rich, almost fudge-like; the caramel and salt flavors were subdued enough that I might not have noticed them if I weren't aware that they were there.

All in all, the dessert was very good, and I definitely endorse Blue Marble as an option after you've had a meal near one of their locations. (They're also in Boerum Hill on Atlantic Avenue between Bond and Nevins, and in Prospect Heights on Underhill Avenue between Sterling and St. John's right near Grand Army Plaza, as well as at the Brooklyn Flea.) Not sure I'd necessarily go too far out of my way to eat there; nothing against them, of course, there's just so many good dessert options in the city. Based on the brownie, I'd also recommend checking out Baked in Red Hook at Van Brunt and Dikeman, not too far from the Fairway and the IKEA.

One more note: be forewarned, it's not cheap ice cream. The small cups were (I can't precisely remember) either $3.75 or $3.95, and the Brownie was, I think, about $3, so for the five of us it came to around $20. If you want better value for your ice cream dollar, you can't go wrong at TJ's.

I Told You So

Food Wars and I were right: Duff's has the best wings in Buffalo.

Want proof? That's where the President goes.

Ah man, now I want to eat wings.

Brunch At No. 7

(I apologize in advance for the lack of pictures in this post; I completely forgot to take any of the food.)

For Mothers Day this year, my sister suggested that the family should have brunch somewhere in Brooklyn, since we've already sampled a good number of the places in Hoboken, where she and my brother-in-law live. Always cognizant of an opportunity to let my borough of residence make a good impression, I suggested No. 7 in Fort Greene, which has received some excellent reviews since opening a little over a year ago, including (perhaps most notably) being named one of 2009's Top Ten Best New Restaurants In America by Bon Appetit Magazine.

We arrived for our 11:00 reservation to a crowd waiting both inside and outside the restaurant; they apparently open for brunch at 11, so nobody had been seated yet, but once they had begun seating parties, we were quickly shown to our table. The interior is lovely; it has a retro-country look with a tiled floor and antique mirrors and a marble-top bar, and towards the back of the restaurant, where we were seated, there are skylights and windows to let in natural light. Everyone who worked there was very friendly; full marks for service.

When we sat down, we were greeted with a plate of bite-sized raspberry cakes, one for each of us, as a Mothers Day special; they were good enough that my father asked for more of them, but they didn't have enough, so he ordered a very tasty cherry-cheese pastry-type-thing for us to share. (I can't remember exactly what it was called.) My father and I both had bloody marys, which were pretty good, though I thought there was a little too much going on in them (two sticks of celery, a toothpick with two olives, a wedge of lemon, a wedge of lime, and a straw). My mother and my sister both had lemon lavender spritzers, which they enjoyed.

We also shared, among the five of us, an order of tater tots and an order of corned beef hash. The tater tots were good, but, I mean, they were tater tots. The zesty dipping sauce they were served with was nice, but I preferred them with the (house-made, I assume) hot sauce that was on the table. The corned beef hash was a whole other animal; not like what I've seen elsewhere, the corned beef was shredded into pieces that were maybe a little smaller than what I'd call bite-sized, and was mixed with zucchini and yellow squash and onions, rather than potatoes like expected. I think we all agreed that it was very good.

No. 7 appears to do the "deconstructed" thing with their food. When our main orders came out, my mother observed that they must have a whole lot of the little ramekins that the side ingredients all come in. For example, my scrambled eggs (perfectly cooked in my opinion, though I prefer scrambled eggs a bit less well-done than some people do) arrived in a medium-sized bowl on a large plate, with three freshly-made tortillas (about the size of my closed fist), and separate smaller bowls with sliced fontina cheese, rhubarb pico de gallo, and curried crema (sort of a crème fraîche; the curry flavor was so understated that I couldn't even remember what it was seasoned with at the time). All the ingredients worked well together; like the tots, I thought the eggs were excellent with some hot sauce added.

As for the rest of the family, my mother and brother-in-law both ordered yellow squash grits, which were served with spring vegetables (a mix that included broccoli, I'm not sure what else), swiss cheese (they both agreed that cheddar would've been a better match), fried hominy, and a poached egg (also served in one of the ramekins, and with only the white showing at first; my mother forgot that it was an egg and put her fork into it thinking it was sour cream, and was quite surprised when egg yolk started leaking out). My father ordered the french toast (which seemed to be made from corn bread, quite an interesting choice) with passion fruit syrup, hummus (another interesting combination), and coconut chantilly. Finally, my sister ordered the waffle, which had the most traditional accompaniments of any of our dishes: almonds, banana butter, and real maple syrup.

Though some of the combinations were odd, we all agreed that everything we ate was very good. I'm definitely hoping to go back for dinner sometime, and I highly recommend it if you're in the area, or even if you aren't but you're looking for someplace new to try in the city. It's pretty much right above the Lafayette Avenue station on the C train, and a quick walk from the Fulton Street stop on the G train, or the big 2/3/4/5/B/D/M/N/Q/R Atlantic-Pacific LIRR Flatbush Avenue complex.


View Larger Map

Soon to come... a short addendum about yesterday's dessert.

Cinco de Mayo, Dos Mil Diez

Tengo una gran idea: voy a escribir este entrada de "Josh Eats" en español. Las señoras Gerson y Gordon (mis profesoras de español en mi colegio) estarían muy orgullosas!

El miércoles pasado, fui a Chelsea Piers con algunos amigos de mi equipo de softbol de este verano para practicar al bateo. Por supuesto, porque estaba el Cinco de Mayo, después fuimos a un restaurante Mexicano cerca de Chelsea Piers para comer y (claro que sí) beber. Porque es lo más cerca que encontremos, fuimos a Tequila Chito's en el calle veinte y tercero entre las avenidas octava y novena. Porque estaba el Cinco de Mayo, el restaurante estaba muy lleno de gente, pero no esperábamos mucho tiempo antes de recibir una mesa.

Desafortunadamente, la primera mesa que recibimos estaba muy cerca de los altavozes, y la música estaba muy fuerte. Pedimos y recibimos otra mesa más lejos de los altavozes, y después pedimos unas bebidas. Unos minutos más tarde, recibimos las bebidas (una cerveza para Janssen, y algunas margaritas para mí y Emily y Tom), y también ordenemos nuestra comida. Si las margaritas no fueron las mejores de todas las margaritas que he bebido en mi vida, tampoco no fueron las peores.

Emily disfruta su margarita:


Tom bebe delicadamente:


A Janssen le gusta el olor de su cerveza:


Algunos minutos más tarde, recibimos nuestra comida. Estaba bastante bien, pero pedimos salsa caliente y el camarero no lo nos traí, hasta que lo pedimos otra vez mientras estábamos pidiendo mas bebidas, y cuando finalmente lo recibimos, casi hemos acabado de comer. Pero, entonces, nos traí más bebidas que no hemos pedido, y estábamos muy feliz.

Emily disfruta ambos margaritas al mismo tiempo:


Más tarde, nuestra amiga Nicole llegué, y traí pastelillos pequeños de Baked By Melissa:


Y, claro, también disfrute una margarita en su cumpleaños:


En totalidad, fue una buena noche, pero yo no volvería al mismo restaurante a menos que estaría muy cerca de lo.

(Renuncia: No he hablado ni escrito en el español en algunos años, y tal vez hay faltas en este entrada. Discúlpame.)

The Deceptively-Labeled Frito-Lay Truck

Like I mentioned when I wrote about the chicken and rice carts at 53rd and 6th a few weeks ago, I have a preferred street-meat truck near my office that I'll visit typically once a week, though occasionally more. It's the one parked on Cedar Street just east of Broadway, right next to the HSBC. Normally, I can actually see it out my office window, but naturally the day that I'm writing about it is the day that it isn't there. In lieu of that, here's a previous photo out my office window, with the truck in the top left:



And, in fact, it's also visible in Google Street View:


View Larger Map

Anyway... why was I writing about this? Ah, right, because it's almost lunchtime, and I'm hungry, and I was thinking about going there today. And then I remembered that a couple of weeks ago I had snapped this dynamite photo (with my camera, even!) of food I'd bought there for the purpose of sharing it, and I wanted to pass it along:



How delicious does that look? Lamb and rice, white sauce, hot sauce, lettuce and tomato, grilled carrot and onion and pepper and eggplant, usually a couple of spicy banana peppers. $5! With a 20-ounce Snapple and a grilled pita on the side for scooping, $7! I think I decided what I want for lunch...

I now present to you...

The Jerseyest ("Jersiest"?) wine in the history of wine:



Seen, naturally, at a liquor store in Jersey.

If this isn't consumed in mass quantities during the next season of Jersey Shore, I will be sorely disappointed.

Detroit Part 3: Coneys

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one thing I was looking forward to doing in Detroit was trying out some Coneys, especially since the two places that will be featured on the forthcoming Food Wars episode, Lafayette Coney Island and American Coney Island, are right next to each other and only a few blocks from the hotel where we stayed. (By the way, the new Doubletree is quite nice.)

We didn't make it to either place the first night we were there, but the second night, after some adult beverages, we decided to give it a whirl. The bartender at the last bar of the night, Pappy's (also recommended), recommended Lafayette, so that's where we headed. I ordered (if I recall correctly) a loose meat coney, pictured here:


Excellent, excellent post-drinking food, though that practically goes without saying. Tasty hot dog, tasty chili, mustard, raw onions, what could be bad?

Of course, intrepid culinary explorers that we are, we decided we couldn't let the night end without doing a compare-and-contrast at American while Lafayette was fresh in our mind. For the sake of consistency, I ordered the same thing, pictured here:


After a few bites and a pause to consider, the natural question was asked: which did we like better? As luck would have it (since we we wouldn't want to have to split up on subsequent trips), a consensus was reached: American was the winner of our personal food war. We thought the casing had more snap (though both are natural casings, we're told), and the chili had a better flavor. (Chopped raw onion and plain yellow mustard can't and didn't really vary much from one another.) Once that had been determined, it seemed only natural to return to American, and return we did for our remaining two nights in the city.

One more photo (this time taken with an actual camera, rather than the camera on my phone) of a pair of coneys at American:


But really, it's a hot dog with chili on it; you can't go wrong at either place, nor, presumably, at other places around Michigan that make the same thing.

Detroit Part 2: Beer and Pizza and Beer

As I mentioned in my previous post, we went to a Red Wings game the first night we were in Detroit. We'd enjoyed some good beer with dinner, and it would've been a shame not to keep that going at the game, so keep it going we did.

Now, Detroit is practically in Canada, and one of the nice things about that proximity is that there's no shortage of Canadian beer. In particular, at Joe Louis Arena you can get 24-ounce cans of Molson XXX. If you're not familiar with this fine product (which isn't available everywhere in the USA), it's Molson's strongest offering at 7.3% alcohol by volume. It doesn't really taste the best (it's on the sweet side, if I recall correctly), but, like Samuel L. Jackson beer, it'll get ya drunk! (Or, if you prefer, like Uncle Jemima's Pure Mash Liquor, you'll get bent just as fast as possible.) So... mmmm mmmm good.

Another stop we made while we were in Detroit was for Chicago-style deep dish pizza at Pizza Papalis in Greektown. Those really thick pizzas (they're practically casseroles, they're so deep) take a while to cook, so they have a clever ordering system. First you put your name in for a table. While you're waiting for a table, you go to the pizza counter and put in an order for your pizza and they give you a receipt for your order. Once your table opens up, you give the server that receipt so that s/he knows to bring your pizza to you, and also order anything other than pizza. While you're (still) waiting for your pizza (which takes about 40 minutes), they bring you your other food (we shared a salad, which was probably a good idea), and then the guest of honor arrives and is devoured. Here's a picture (not mine):



The pizza (bacon cheeseburger pizza) was delicious, and tremendously food-coma-inducing. Chicago-style pizza: not really the same food product as New York-style pizza, but still good.

Later that same night, we also stopped at the Detroit Beer Company, a brewpub with some good house-made beers. I was still pretty stuffed from the pizza so I didn't have too much, but everything was tasty, and the decor was classic brewpub, with the tanks visible there and all that good stuff. I also snapped this picture, part of a bigger photo on the wall showing (if I'm not mistaken) a party celebrating the repeal of prohibition:


People and dogs agree: beer is awesome.

Detroit Part 1: BBQ

My friends and I arrived in Detroit on Wednesday afternoon April 7th, and had tickets to see the Red Wings game that evening. Rather than eat arena food, we decided to find a restaurant for a pregame meal. Slow's Bar-B-Q had been recommended, and sounded nice and filling, so we figured we'd give it a try. It was about 5pm when we arrived, and I thought that would be early enough to get a table without much delay, but apparently it's a popular pregame destination and we had about a half hour wait for our table. While waiting, we had a chance to sample from a great variety of Michigan beers available on tap; I particularly enjoyed Bell's Oberon.

Once we were seated and had a chance to peruse the menu, I decided on "The Big Three," a combination of pulled pork, pulled chicken, and sliced brisket. The table had five different BBQ sauces, (if I recall correctly) sweet, spicy, apple, mustard, and North Carolina-style vinegar, and I thought this would be a good way to experiment with all of them. The entree included two sides, and I went with mac + cheese and coleslaw. The order wasn't cheap ($17.95 isn't, for instance, significantly less than you'd pay for a three-meat combo at Dinosaur BBQ here in NYC), but everything was tasty and the portions were generous. Here's the mac and cheese, which was, by the way, perhaps the best I've ever had:



And this is how much meat was left after I was getting close to full and decided to take a picture:



Everything was, as I said, very good; the brisket was, perhaps, not as good as at Hill Country, but I enjoy when there are a variety of different sauces and you get to try out different tastes in one order. Most of us had leftovers, if I recall correctly, and it was a shame our hotel room didn't have a refrigerator so that we could have brought them back with us. No big deal, though, as we definitely all had our fill of meat.

Overall, definitely a place I'd recommend to future Detroit visitors, and a great example of how someone who's interested in urban renewal can take an old building in a drab area and turn it into something exciting.

Dear Washington DC,

It doesn't matter how big the slices are, pizza does not have provolone cheese on it.

Love,
Everyone else

P.S. Oh shit, Katz's and Second Avenue Deli do battle over pastrami next week. I was wondering what they would pick to do an episode in New York, and this seems like a great choice. Send a salami to your boy in the army, because it's ON.

Chicken and Rice Interlude

Yes, yes, I know, Detroit, but in the meantime:

So yesterday evening, after work, I met up with some friends at Rattle 'n' Hum on 33rd Street. (Incidentally, if you're in NYC and like beer, they've got a cask ale festival going on this weekend that's definitely worth your while.) Due to a variety of other circumstances, by the time we were done at the bar it was about 11:15pm, and I hadn't eaten anything since about 2pm, so some food was called for. Being that I was up in that direction, and also that I was with a friend in town for business and staying at a hotel up on 54th, I decided a trip up to the chicken and rice carts on 53rd was in order.

For those of you who might not be aware, the corner of 53rd Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan is something of a nexus for halal food carts. This is especially due to one particular cart on the southwest corner of the intersection that serves from 8pm to 4am and gets crazy long lines (and where the food is reputedly so good that one time a guy got killed for cutting in line), but there are a number of other carts in the area for people who don't want to brave the line.

Well, I was hungry, and my friend had to be up early, and we didn't want to brave the line. However, having done my research (or, well, having read someone else's research on the matter), I had an idea of a shortcut. According to Midtown Lunch, there's another cart on the southeast corner of the same intersection that's there through the day and into the evening, but not as late, that serves the same food. Seeing that cart, with the same bags pictured in the linked Midtown Lunch article, that's where we went. $6 gets you a nicely sized tin of rice topped with chicken, some shredded lettuce, and a few small slices of pita. The bag also included two cups of white sauce and two (much smaller) cups of hot sauce, though there were bins containing these cups and you could take more if you wanted.

Rather than eating outside, we took the quick walk across the street to my friend's hotel and ate there. We dug into our meals (my late dinner, my friend's midnight snack), and... well, I hate to say it, but, eh. I didn't honestly think it was any better than what I sometimes get for lunch for $5 at my regular truck that's at the corner of Broadway and Cedar Street during the day. (It's the one that's a repurposed Frito-Lay truck, if you're looking for it.) The chicken and the rice both were good enough, but I didn't think they had a whole lot of flavor to them. The shredded lettuce was shredded lettuce, inoffensive but not really adding anything to the dish. (In contrast, my regular truck mixes some onions and peppers in with the meat, and the veggies on the side will typically also involve some tomato and cucumber.) The slices of pita were a nice touch, I suppose. The redeeming feature, if anything, was the hot sauce: it is really hot. Like, clear your sinuses, make your eyes water (or maybe that was the pollen allergies), have to mix it in with the rice and the white sauce, kind of hot. And that was just from one of the two little cups!

Now, there's a chance that the cart we went to isn't actually still the same food as the one with the long line. The Midtown Lunch article is from about three years ago, and the famous cart's website (yes, it has a website) doesn't say anything about the cart on the southeast corner, though it does make sure to point out that the cart that's on the southwest corner during the day (the famous cart doesn't arrive until about 7pm) is not the same food. Next time I'm up in that neighborhood at night, maybe I'll wait in line at the famous cart and see if perhaps I really did eat the wrong stuff, but at this point I'm not getting my hopes up.

Detroit Preview

I got back from Detroit on Sunday afternoon and, due to a combination of factors, haven't had a chance to compose my thoughts or even sort through my pictures. In the meantime, here's a quick look at what's ahead:

• Tasty BBQ
• Food coma-inducing pizza
• Coneys
• Beer
• More beer

And maybe also a few initial thoughts on the city itself. Detroit is... bleak. There's a lot of empty space (read: surface parking lots galore), and a lot of empty buildings. Nobody appears to live in the city; I don't think I saw any supermarkets or clothing stores or laundromats or others of that sort of thing that serve local residents. (OK, maybe in Greektown, but not in most of the parts of the city where I visited.) As a result, while there are plenty of people around the city for events (e.g., Tigers opening day last Friday, the Frozen Four), at night there don't seem to be many people around. I don't think I felt unsafe, but I wouldn't want to be walking around alone at night either. If the city is going to improve, that needs to change. There need to be reasons for people to want to live in the city, and there need to be ways for commuters to get into the city (read: better transit options) that don't require the vast oceans of parking lots that make the city seem so bleak. (The Detroit People Mover is nice for getting you around, but not for getting into and out of the city.) If that were the case, that empty space could then be turned into something a bit more vibrant.

OK, but this isn't an urban planning blog; go read Planetizen or Streetsblog if that's your cup of tea. This is about food and drinks. So, I think if the urban renewal I was alluding to above were to happen, Detroit has the makings of a good food scene. Some of these empty buildings that I mentioned above could be converted into interesting dining spaces; I'll have pictures from one such conversion later on. There's a heterogeneous population, an airport bringing visitors to town, good meat available. We ate some good food, and like I said, if Detroit heads in the right direction (which isn't a given, of course), there could be more out there.

A Lot of Information In One Hour

This week's episode of No Reservations was a special on cooking technique, featuring input from some big names in the food world. The show opened with Tony doing a quick demo on proper knife technique (you know, so you don't cut your thumb off). We saw Dave Pasternack of Esca (phenomenal restaurant, BTW) demonstrating how to boil and serve a lobster, legendary cookbook author Jacques Pépin showing the simple technique of making an omelette, Scott Conant of Scarpetta teaching a simple recipe for pasta and fresh tomato sauce, zillion-Michelin-starred Thomas Keller working through his well-known simple roast chicken technique, Laurent Tourondel of the BLT family of restaurants cooking a lovely bacon cheeseburger, and Les Halles chef Carlos Morales (note: don't use an "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google search, because the most famous person of that name is apparently a gay porn actor) cooking french fries and then a steak (number one mistake Tony says most people make: not letting the steak rest for a few minutes before cutting it) complete with grill marks. Interspersed between the various other segments, in a bunch of shorter bits, Tony showed us how to cook beef bourguignon, including prepping each of the ingredients and then the cooking process. The episode concluded with Tony and Carlos eating what they had cooked and talking a bit about cooking and restaurant eating. Definitely worth a watch if you ever do your own cooking.

Pork Chops

I'm sorry, but I just don't think I could ever keep Kosher. Not when a pork chop, rubbed with salt and pepper and oregano and garlic powder and cooked simply (I used a George Foreman grill because I'm lazy, but you could just as easily use a grill pan or something like that) is so darn tasty.










Serve it up with a simple salad:



And that's what we call dinner!

Jucy Lucy

So Food Wars was in Minneapolis this week, to taste test the Jucy Lucy. I was in Minneapolis about... a year and a half now, I guess, and sampled the Jucy Lucy at Matt's Bar, one of the two restaurants featured on Food Wars (both of which claim to have invented the delicious concoction).

This post really could use a picture in order to illustrate the deliciousness of the Jucy Lucy, so I'm going to borrow one from Wikipedia:



Let me tell you, it was a glorious experience. The cheese is inside the burger! I mean, how great is that? I've tried to make that for myself, but it never works, so I appreciate the technique in addition to the great taste. I didn't get to go to the 5-8 Club, the other contender for the best Jucy Lucy, but I'll be back in the Twin Cities about a year from now, so I'll have to do my own taste test. (If you're curious, Matt's Bar was pronounced the winner, with the Minnesota Vikings' mascot casting the deciding vote.)

No Detroit episode before my trip next week, but no matter - we're going to eat some hot dogs regardless!

Then What Is It For, Exactly?

It's Passover. As such, I bought a box of matzah at the Key Food on my way home from work on Tuesday. ("Matzah"? "Matzoh"? "Matzo"? Firefox's built-in spell-check likes only the latter two, but I like the first one and that's what I'm sticking with.) It's Streit's, a perfectly cromulent brand of matzah to be buying, I thought. (I mean, their website domain name has "matzo" in it.) The ingredients are flour and water, just like the ingredients are supposed to be. (I bought whole wheat matzah, because I think you're generally better off eating whole bread products when possible, so technically the ingredients were "whole wheat flour" and water, but that's splitting hairs.) Looked great. Brought it home, ate some matzah. (In the form of matzah pizza, because it's awesome, but again, besides the point.) Last night I looked at the side of the box and what did I see? "Not for Passover use."

...

What?

But... But This Is Brooklyn!

I love my neighborhood. I live in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, and it's wonderful in so many ways. As far as restaurants go, there's a good neighborhood sushi place, good cheap Thai, passable wings, a good local burger place, a good chain burger place, and, of course, FresCo. When I feel like cooking, there's a small local grocery store and a Key Food and Trader Joe's and the awesome Sahadi's and not one but two great wine shops and an incredible beer store, as well as plenty of bodegas if I need ketchup or cereal or whatever. Tons of bars I enjoy: Brooklyn Social, Ceol, Boat, Gowanus Yacht Club, Zombie Hut (yeah, I know it sucks, but whatever, it's still fun), Floyd and Brazen Head to name a few. Good shopping too, but that's sort of outside the scope of what I'm writing about here.

But here's what's missing. There is no pizza place open past 12:30am on weekends. Like I said, there are bars, there are drunk people leaving those bars, there are drunk people coming home to the neighborhood from bars in other parts of the city. So why, why, why, is Domino's (I'm not even going to link them, because friends don't let friends surf for chain pizza) the only place to grab a slice on the way home? It's inexplicable to me, and if I had lots of money to invest in businesses, I'd definitely go in on an open-late pizza place, maybe along Smith Street near the subway. Anyone have some investment capital and want to sell some pizza?

Food Wars

Recently, the Travel Channel debuted a new show called Food Wars. During the course of an episode of the show, host Camille Ford (who is quite telegenic, it must be said; par for the course for this sort of show, I suppose) travels to a city having a cuisine that's a local specialty and two top-rated establishments serving that specialty. She visits each establishment, speaks with its owner and learns about its history and its method of preparing the cuisine. She also speaks to some of the most passionate fans of each establishment. The owners meet, and the terms of a taste test are agreed upon: the location, as well as the specific item to be judged (e.g., for the episode about fried chicken, the leg was selected). Then a blind taste test is conducted with five panelists trying the selected item: a designated "super fan" of each establishment, as well as three local personalities. The panelists vote, and a winner is determined. It's great TV, except for the fact that I always end up craving whatever it is they're eating by the end of the episode. In short, I'm not sure whether I want Camille Ford's job or whether I want to marry her.

Anyway, so the first episode of Food Wars was filmed in the bustling metropolis of Buffalo, New York, where, as we all know, the local specialty is wings. I can say, without hesitation, that I love wings. I could eat them all the time if they weren't fried and coated in delicious, spicy, buttery sauce, but if they weren't fried and the sauce weren't buttery, they wouldn't be nearly so good. (Trust me, I've tried.) It's quite the dilemma.

Moving on, Buffalo is, of course, the home of the wing. The wing, as we know it, originated at the Anchor Bar; the story of its creation is told better elsewhere, so I won't attempt to rehash it here. A few years ago, not long after college, my friend Mike was living and working in Buffalo, and during the course of a weekend trip to visit him, I was able try the wings at both the Anchor Bar and at Duff's, the other establishment featured on Food Wars. (For some reason, while their franchise locations in Toronto have a website, the original Buffalo location doesn't, so I'm sending you to Yelp instead.) Before that trip, I had heard of the Anchor Bar as the place where wings were created, but wasn't familiar with Duff's; fortunately, Mike, living in the area, knew that both were worth trying. To shorten the story a bit: since that weekend, I've gone to Duff's every time I've been back to Buffalo, but haven't been back to the Anchor Bar, so I was quite pleased to see that Duff's was declared the winner on the Buffalo episode of Food Wars.

Since the premiere, Food Wars has also done episodes in Chicago (Chicago-style beef sandwiches; I wonder whether maybe they had too hard a time narrowing it down to two places serving Chicago-style pizza or Chicago-style hot dogs, both of which would sooner come to my mind), Pittsburg (the one in Kansas, not the one in Pennsylvania, for fried chicken), and Lockhart, Texas (for barbecue). I don't have much familiarity with any of the places they went, though one of the places in the Texas episode, Kreuz Market (pronounced like the word "rights" with a K on the front of it) is the inspiration for Hill Country, one of my favorite BBQ restaurants here in New York. I do know they've got an upcoming episode in Detroit to eat at coney islands, which I hope airs soon since I'm going to be in Detroit in a few weeks. Definitely a show worth keeping an eye on.

The "Chuck" Introduction

Hi, I'm Josh, and here are a few things you might need to know.

Food is good. Cooking is good, eating is good, et cetera. Thus, a food blog.

I have a job, and it pays the bills, but I don't have a whole ton of excess spending money, so I'm not going to be going to Per Se a few times over the course of a week and writing a review, much as I might love to do so. Rather, the focus of this blog will generally be on towards reasonably-priced foods: sometimes on cooking with everyday ingredients, but more often on reasonably-priced restaurants, food stands and the like. I mean, look, if you're willing to drop $50 or $100 or more (how much is the dinner prix fixe at Masa? $400?) on dinner, you're going to have a good meal, because odds are you're you're at an establishment with trained personnel using quality ingredients. Places that give you a good meal for $5 or $10 or $15 need love too.

Because that's one of my areas of focus, one food writer I'm a big fan of is Zach Brooks (and the rest of his crew) at Midtown Lunch; now there's a guy who's taken a niche and made it his own. Other everyday reading includes Ted Berg's TedQuarters, where devotion to Taco Bell is elevated to an art form (along with some of the most sensible writing about the Mets on the web), and Sports Illustrated/Kansas City Star sports columnist Joe Posnanski's excellent JoeBlog, which takes asterisked footnotes to a whole no level.

During the recent "Obsessed" episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, Tony did a segment where he spoke to a few food bloggers, and expressed his distaste for people who have to take a picture of everything before they eat it, while their food is getting cold in the meantime. I tend to agree with him on this point: eat it while it's hot. To that end, while I'll occasionally snap a photo of something before I eat it, it'll be few and far between. I think we're all better served by leaving such snaps to better photographers than I, in any case.

That's probably enough to get the ball rolling. Looking forward to writing more in the coming days...