Category Archives: Restaurants & Food Courts

Heros & Villains

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Instagram Post 3/5/2020

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Sometimes you just want a big ol’ sammich and nothing else will do, and I found a number of likely candidates while prowling around Essex Market (88 Essex St) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I spied this over-the-top example at Heros & Villains, stall 41, called The Big Kahuna: dry-aged beef from neighboring Essex Street Shambles (shambles being an archaic term for an open-air slaughterhouse and meat market) onions, peppers, pickles, aioli, cheese sauce, spicy ketchup, lettuce and tomato. Happily, you could still taste that the meat was of good quality even through the agreeable jumble of sauces (all made from scratch). Craving satisfied.
 
 

Al Raouche Restaurant

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Instagram Post 2/29/2020

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Brain and brain! What is brain?

This is brain, lamb brain to be precise, one of the mezza (you might see meze) available on weekends at Al Raouche, the Lebanese restaurant at 169 Crooks Ave, Paterson, NJ. Boiled and marinated, possessing a texture that was yielding but with the tiniest bit of resistance, naturally mild in flavor and not at all gamey, it was so fantastically garlicky that you wouldn’t know you were eating lamb. That, plus a generous drenching of olive oil and lemon juice provided the dominant character of the dish. And that’s a good thing, Miri.
 
 

Chicago’s Pizza With-A-Twist

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Instagram Post 2/28/2020

If pizza is a romance between Italian and American cuisines, then I guess that would make Indian Pizza a ménage a trois. And, yes, it’s a thing in India too. (Indian pizza, that is.) Chicago’s Pizza With-A-Twist is a franchise with at least 45 locations in the US, one of which is 259-07 Hillside Ave in Floral Park, the focus of this post.

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You’re looking at a half Butter Chicken, half Tandoori Paneer model; other toppings include Paneer Tikka Masala, Curry Paneer, Aloo Chaat, and Palak Paneer (with pesto sauce, of course) among many more.


Isolating a slice of each (chicken left, paneer right) reveals a disappointing similarity that I had tried to avoid though considerable deliberation when we were ordering; I don’t know if alternative choices would have mattered. The dominance of red onion, garlic, ginger, cilantro, and tomato overwhelmed any subtleties that the two mild sauces and toppings might have brought to these slices. Don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t bad at all, I was just after a little more variety at the time.

(I do know about Korean pizza and other international suitors, but that’s a story for another day. 😉)
 
 

Toros Restaurant

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Instagram Post 2/18-20/2020

Home to a multiplicity of international restaurants, bakeries and markets, Paterson, NJ is a magnet for ethnic food lovers. Peruvian, Mexican and Dominican restaurants flourish if you know where to look, but on Saturday we revisited the Middle East strip and focused on Turkish cuisine for lunch. Here are a couple of starters from Toros Restaurant at 1083 Main St (just past Nablus if you saw my last post).

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Manti, considerably larger in most cuisines, are diminutive in Turkey – mini dumplings filled with ground lamb and topped with garlic sauce.


We ordered the Large Meze appetizer consisting of (menu’s spellings) lebni (yogurt, dill, walnuts); hummus; patlican soslu (eggplant and red peppers in tomato sauce); patlican salatasi (charcoal grilled eggplant salad); babaganus; and acili ezme (spicy vegetable salad). EVERYTHING was deeply redolent of garlic, of course.


Bread, obvs.


Arnavut Cigeri, tender, juicy (yes!) chunks of beef liver, floured and fried with delectable seasonings.

These next two are a bit of a mystery to me – not on the menu. One of our group approached the steam table area and chose them, so I didn’t catch the names. The check read “az yemek” for each of them; az means small, yemek means meal or dish, so I’ll go with a loose translation of “small plates”.

This is some kind of chicken and pasta thing…


…and this is some kind of greens and cheese thing. Your guess is as good as mine. (Probably better if you’re Turkish. 😉)


Izmir Kofte – minced beef and lamb blended with onions, garlic, herbs and spices, grilled, sauced, and potatoed.


These were (past tense by design) Sigara Boregi: sigara (cigar or cigarette shaped) boregi (think burek, etc.) referring to baked pastries made from phyllo dough, filled, in this case, with tangy feta cheese. (Yes, we started with more 😉.)
 
 

Tonii’s Fresh Rice Noodle

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Instagram Post 2/16/2020

Tonii’s Fresh Rice Noodle, 83 Bayard St in Manhattan’s Chinatown, serves up a wide variety of agreeable Chinese rice rolls (cheung fan, amid alternate spellings) in a casual, no-frills atmosphere; you’ll find the usual beef, pork, chicken, shrimp, and veggie options among numerous tempting multicomponent combinations. Condiments are available tableside, but we had to request peanut sauce, so be forewarned.

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Our choices for the day included this crab & egg version, fully dressed,


roast duck (prior to condimentation, just for comparison),


and Tonii’s Special: pork, chicken, and dried shrimp, the best of the three.

Incidentally, way back in March 2016, I did a comparison of Chinatown sponge cakes here called “Sponge Information” and the winner was Kam Hing. Perhaps you’ve been enjoying these puffy paragons of perfection a few storefronts away but if you’ve noticed that their doors have been shuttered recently, not to worry: both business are owned by the same folks and Kam Hing’s peerless sponge cakes are available at Tonii’s.
 
 

BB.Q Chicken

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Instagram Post 2/14/2020

KTown, Part Three.

BB.Q (aka Best of the Best Quality) Chicken is a bewildering South Korean franchise. It established a “Chicken University” (look out, McDonald’s) complete with auditoriums, seminar rooms, and training areas plus an R&D center staffed by Ph.D. level researchers, all dedicated to creating unexcelled fried chicken for their thousands of locations. They take particular pride in their use of costly 100% EVOO for frying because they believe it’s healthier and tastes better.

So why do I find it bewildering? Because for all their culinary and marketing bona fides, I found their chicken disappointing.

Upstairs at the 25 West 32nd St location in Manhattan’s Koreatown, the “Grab & Go” area is a model of efficiency. Mini buckets of a number of chicken varieties – many unusual – perch patiently in a warming cabinet; take a tray, load it up, bring it to the cashier, find a table, and chow down.

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This is boneless Galbi Chicken, “smoky, sweet and savory; marinated Korean Barbeque flavor” (unlike any galbi I’ve ever tasted BTW).


Boneless Surpfried Chicken, “a new kind of fried Chicken that never existed before! Crispy fried chicken with a hidden layer of caramelized onion sauce.”

Both were extremely dry, partially the result, I suspect, of sitting uncovered in the warming cabinet for an unspecified amount of time. Had they been covered, of course, they would have steamed and lost any crispness they may have started with. Further, it seemed like every unhappy bite was white meat, dry by definition.

All this is in stark contrast to my last post from Pelicana Chicken where there’s a sign informing customers to anticipate 10 minutes cooking time for boneless and 14 for drumsticks and wings.

Now, maybe I “did it wrong” and someone out there has had a better experience than I. Should I have ventured downstairs to the chimaek (fried chicken and beer) seating area, perhaps to consume equal quantities of chicken and draft beer or soju? Is the chicken prepared to order down there? Should I have chosen a variety that was less “creative”? Let me know. Seriously. I’ll go back for Round Two if you make a good case for it.
 
 

Pelicana Chicken

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Instagram Post 2/11/2020

Part Two: More from Koreatown and Food Gallery 32 (11 West 32nd St).

Roosting on the third floor, there’s an outpost of Pelicana Chicken, a chain of Korean Fried Chicken restaurants along the East Coast. Available styles here are Boneless Chicken, Drumsticks, and Wings which can be ordered with any of ten different sauces, either in regular or crispy versions. Pelicana has a reputation for being one of the definitive KFC venues and I’d have to agree. (BTW, remember when KFC meant Kentucky Fried Chicken?)

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I actually thought the boneless version had the edge; although equally delicious, it was crisper than the wings (in both cases I ordered the “regular” to keep the playing field level). Since the pieces are far from uniform, there’s more opportunity for craggy crevices, hence crispy crunch.


But that’s not to say I didn’t like the wings; of course I did. When it comes to wings, size matters: too small and they’re not meaty enough, hence unfulfilling; too large and any subtle nuances of the coating get lost in the mass of meat, hence overpowering. These were juuust riiight. Goldilocks would have basked in the afterglow.

The chicken recipe itself isn’t spicy; the kick comes from the sauces, so order them on the side if you want to regulate the heat. That day’s sauces of choice were Pelicana Signature (spicy) – a must-do IMO – and Honey Garlic (the yellow one), also great. I didn’t do any beer that day, but “chimaek” (치맥) a portmanteau of “chikin” (Korean for fried chicken) and maekju (beer) is a thing at Pelicana and elsewhere. Next time – with friends.
 
 

Jian Bing Man

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Instagram Post 2/10/2020

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Part One. Someone mentioned Korean food and my thoughts went straight to Northern Boulevard in Queens. But I realized I hadn’t visited Manhattan’s Koreatown in far too long and that includes the time since the renovation of Food Gallery 32 (11 West 32nd St) so a jaunt was long overdue.

One of the first floor vendors there wasn’t Korean at all (don’t worry, there’ll be Korean food in subsequent posts); Jian Bing (煎餅), literally fried pancake, are Chinese street food, griddled crepes flipped, filled, folded, and frequently found in Flushing’s Chinatown. The eponymous stall, Jian Bing Man, serves these along with a few noodle and rice dishes. It’s a familiar DIY format – [1] choose your type: signature (crispy bao cui, like deep fried wonton skins on steroids), you tiao (like crunchy fried savory crullers), or egg (neither crispy nor crunchy and therefore flaccid and pointless IMO since the first two incorporate egg anyway); [2] your sauce: spicy, hoisin (they call it soybean paste), or both; and [3] extra toppings (actually fillings, but why quibble?).

The 16 toppings included the usual suspects like pork floss and sausage in addition to the less common BBQ chicken and cheese. I’m a traditionalist when it comes to jian bing so my first mistake was to investigate what they did with BBQ pork (actually pork belly) and BBQ chicken. As you can see, there was an abundance of meat inside, but less would have been more; better yet, I should have cleaved to my time-honored favorites. My second mistake was to get it to go. It arrived tightly wrapped then boxed which had the effect of steaming any crispy crunchitude out of it and left me biting into a study in sogginess.

Don’t do what I did and you’ll probably end up with an okay jian bing. More KTown soon.
 
 

Chilaquiles Rojos con Cecina

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Instagram Post 2/7/2020

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In my last post, I referred to our Ricos Tacos visit (505 51st St, Sunset Park, Brooklyn) as “hunger quelling”. That’s because we ordered more than that massive torta; we also indulged in one of their Platillos Principales, specifically, Chilaquiles Rojos con Cecina. Chilaquiles are tortilla chips that have been drenched in very spicy red (in this case) salsa. The dish is classically served with crema and crumbled queso fresco.

Mexican cecina is usually characterized as thinly sliced beef that’s been marinated, salted, and dried. Accurate though it is, I’ve never much cared for that description because it just doesn’t sound all that tempting. IMO, the drying process concentrates the flavor of the meat in a manner similar to that of dry aged beef and the result is an intense burst of beefiness with each bite. See what I mean? Better yet, go taste what I mean.
 
 

Pierna Adobada Torta

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Instagram Post 2/6/2020

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A hunger quelling visit to Ricos Tacos, 505 51st St in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, featured this Pierna Adobada Torta. A torta is an over-the-top Mexican sandwich; it begins with perfectly fresh bread from which some of the fluffing has been removed to make room for your specifications – from the aforementioned top burrowing down through the strata, ours were chiles en vinagre (pickled chilies), avocado, fresh onion, tomato, quesillo (a soft, white, Oaxacan pasta filata string cheese not unlike mozzarella), and sautéed onion from the pierna adobada, roasted pork leg in adobo sauce, the star of the show. Top notch.

Given the choice between a torta and a cemita (a different type of Mexican sandwich that features a sesame seed bun and pápalo, one of my favorite herbs), I generally choose the latter, but it didn’t appear on the menu. As we were leaving, I discovered that they do indeed serve these gems, had I only asked. I didn’t know. But now you do. ¡La próxima vez!