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?
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
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.
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...
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...
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