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.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, July 19, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
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.
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.
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