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.

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.

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.

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?