A Tale Of Two (Huge) Sandwiches: Part The Second

A couple of weeks after eating the White House sandwiches I mentioned in the first part of this post, I found myself in Brooklyn on a weekday afternoon in need of lunch. On days like that, sometimes I'll make a trip out to DeFonte's in Red Hook. While I was disappointed to learn that the DeFonte's hot roast beef hero is not, in fact, the sandwich featured in the "Sandwich Day" episode of 30 Rock (and, note to self, go to Fiore's next time I'm in Hoboken), it remains well worth the trip.

On a couple of previous visits, I've ordered the aforementioned hot roast beef hero (with fried eggplant, fresh mozzarella and cooking juices from the roast beef, delicious) and taken it to eat in nearby Red Hook Park. However, on this particular day the weather was unpleasant, so my plan was to get a sandwich and bus it back to my apartment before digging in. I wasn't sure a hot sandwich was the best choice given the anticipated delay of about 30 minutes, so I decided to go with a Nicky's Special.

This delicious sandwich has ham, capicola, salami, fried eggplant, provolone, hot salad (more on this in a moment), marinated mushrooms, lettuce, tomato, oil and vinegar. Because the small size sandwich (on 1/3 loaf of italian bread, $10) is too much food for one meal, but not enough for two, I decided to order the large size (on 1/2 loaf of italian bread, $12) and be sure to get two solid meals out of it. I'm afraid to say that the picture I took doesn't remotely do this sandwich justice, but take a look anyway:



If you're curious, there are better pictures on the web if you do a Google image search for "defonte's nicky special". You can't really tell from my picture, but half of the large sandwich is so much food that I wasn't hungry for dinner both days when I had the sandwich for lunch.

The hot salad is really what knocks this sandwich out of the park. Mixed spicy vegetables (probably marinated in a vinegar/peppers mix) provide some bite to cut the richness of the meat and the cheese and the fried eggplant. The only "problem", if it can be called that, is that the bread was stuffed so full of good ingredients that the hot salad tended to fall off the top, but this is still way preferable to a sandwich that's all bread. Highly recommended (as is the hot roast beef sandwich I mentioned above), and note that if you want to give it a try but don't frequent South Brooklyn, they recently opened a satellite location in Manhattan at 21st and 3rd.

A Tale Of Two (Huge) Sandwiches: Part The First

You know what's good? Sandwiches. Sure, a fancy meal is awesome every now and then, but sandwiches are delicious and filling and generally quite affordable. Honestly, I think the greatness of sandwiches is so universally acknowledged that I don't even need to say anything more on the subject.

A few weeks ago I found myself in Atlantic City for the 2011 ECAC Men's Hockey Tournament. The outcome of the games... well, we don't really need to talk about that. But I was happy to be down there because it gave me an opportunity to try out the White House Sub Shop. If you're not familiar with it, the White House is a famous deli not far from Trump Plaza (which, by the way, has free self-parking just a couple of blocks away) that's been turning out huge, awesome, cheap sandwiches for decades, and has the yellowed celebrity photos on the wall to prove it. You can't read a review of the White House without hearing stories of how people stop there on the way out of town to buy a bunch of sandwiches to take home, or have them delivered by courier, or how Frank Sinatra reportedly had a bunch shipped to his movie sets. So, I had to give it a try.

I had read stories of people waiting in line for an hour or more at the White House, but my arrival was conveniently in the lull between lunch and dinner and there were only a couple of people in line ahead of me. Once my number was called, I gave my order to the sandwich-maker (who called me "Chris" because apparently I look like a guy named Chris): a half tuna and a half White House Special. My plan was to eat the tuna for a late lunch/early dinner, and the Special (salami, ham, provolone, capicola) as a snack on my ride home later that night. It should be noted here that a half is on a half a loaf of bread - about a foot long, still a big sandwich. The tab for both sandwiches came in at around $14. I took my sandwiches to a little park across the street and dug in. Here's a picture of the tuna sandwich:



Or, let's be more precise: this is HALF of a half tuna sub, after I had devoured the first half before it occurred to me to take a picture. Note 20 ounce soda bottle shown in the background for perspective. You get a lot of sandwich for $7. The bread was fresh and awesome, and actually sturdy enough to basically hold all the ingredients; the tuna was chunky and tasty and not overly mayonnaise-y; the tomatoes were fresh; the onions and oil and vinegar gave it some kick; the lettuce... was lettuce. This was a delicious sandwich, and big enough that I couldn't finish it. (Without any chips on the side or anything, either.) Stashed the other sandwich in the trunk of the car (so the inside wouldn't smell like meat for days afterward), went to the game.

Well, I think the picture of the first sandwich demonstrates the flaw in my plan: these sandwiches are way too big to eat while driving. As a result, I wound up making my way back to the Parkway and pulling off at the first rest area I found, only a couple of miles up from the Atlantic City Expressway, to pick up a bottle of water and go to town on that bad boy. Unfortunately, because I was eating in the car (sorry Mom), I wasn't able to take a picture of the Special, so I'm borrowing these, with credit to Always Hungry New York:



In addition to the great bread and the delicious meats and cheese and lettuce and tomato and onion, note the hot pepper relish on top. That stuff was a particular highlight, definitely something that sets sandwiches from the White House apart from what you might find elsewhere. Because I wasn't all that hungry after eating the tuna sub earlier, I ate half of the Special and brought the rest home for my father to enjoy (and also out of guilt since I had made a sandwich with the last of the roast beef for lunch earlier in the day).

Incredible sandwiches. Just thinking about them makes me want to go have lunch right now. If you ever find yourself in Atlantic City, you should definitely make a stop. I'm told their cheesesteaks and meatball subs are excellent as well. (NB: They also have a location set to open in the Trump Taj Mahal sometime within the next couple of weeks.)

Part 2 soon to come...

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.

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.

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.

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.


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

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?