Aug 11
I’ve been so preoccupied the past few days with work work and impromptu trip planning that I forgot to mention my guest post on Gowanus Lounge. My finger isn’t quite on the pulse of new Brooklyn developments (I never know what’s going on even in a three-block radius from my own apartment). Luckily, others have that covered so I can spend more time on the mundane and me-centric.
I’m not sure how one becomes a “culinary critic of tinned foods” outside of simply declaring yourself as such, but I do like the notion. A few weeks ago, I was speculating on how the French can make eccentricity chic, but it’s the Japanese who make batshit crazy cool.
Ok, collecting canned food isn’t exactly crazy (and I’ve never understood what guano has to do with mental instability). I’ve been known to find and hoard a few oddball foodstuffs but I don’t have outlets like Chika Takai. She serves canned food in a restaurant, has published a book translated as “Canned Food Maniacs” and guest spoke and produced a menu for Nichiro’s 100th anniversary celebration.
I’m not even wild about canned food (though I love spicy Thai catfish in a tin) but I’m impressed. I now want to become the foremost culinary critic of chain restaurants.
I’ve never been to Florida and have never really had the desire to pay a visit, but I will now be going to Miami over Labor Day weekend. I’m a way in advance planner (to the point of annoyance) but someone in my household isn’t and just yesterday got the idea to go away at the end of the month. Toronto was the first choice, just a simple, quick trip, but the prices went way up today (see, advance planning). Miami and Dallas were presented to me as alternatives (I have no idea how those were arrived at—I’m not in direct contact with the out-of-town flight searcher) and I said it didn’t matter one way or the other. So, Miami it is. I just wanted to not be in NYC for a few days.
But what on earth do you do in Miami? Everything I see on TV is frightening, and I base all my travel plans around fictional shows. I don’t want to go to a horrible club like Nikki Beach on last night’s Top Chef. I was semi-forced to watch Miami Vice on cable last week and I’m really scared that South American drug lords, neo-nazis and Colin Farrells with sun-streaked slicked back hair and a ‘stache (love those S’s) will be roaming the neon-lit, palm tree lined streets. Oh, pardon, calles. I don’t know that I’ve ever had cubano made by a Cuban, so that’s a bright spot. Dexter is set in Miami, right? I don’t recall an abundance of tan flesh or bikinis on that show (just lots of dismembered body parts and blood), so maybe I’m safe, after all.
Ok, I really hope I didn’t hallucinate this. And I wish I knew how to capture video from TV. About twenty minutes after posting the above, I flipped channels, found nothing of interest (I tried watching Last Comic Standing and it was too painful. I do kind of like Mind Control With Darren Brown, though. He’s the anti-Criss Angel) and lazily left it on the USA Network where an old Law & Order: Criminal Intent was on. Griffin Dunne was playing some possible lawyer/killer and he was reassuring his redheaded Eastern European mistress with these sweet words:
Griffin: You’ve been bugging me to take you away for the weekend. I’m taking you to Connecticut.
Sexy Slav: I want to go to Miami…South Beach.
Griffin: This time of year? It’s like a damn sauna. You’ll like Connecticut, it’s got a casino.
Sexy Slav: Z’ere eez no sandy beach there (I can’t type in dialect). I got beautiful bikini today with little string go up between here (motioning towards her ass).
Griffin: Oh yeah? Why don’t you wear it in the hotel room?
Sexy Slav: You promised me Miami, you promised we’d go away for a month.
Griffin: Look, just give me this weekend, and we’ll go to Miami for Labor Day.
See? Miami is clearly the choice Labor Day getaway. If it's on Law & Order, it must be true.
Breaking news: women eat meat. Who knew? Next thing I know, you'll be telling me that females are wearing pantaloons and driving horseless buggies. I thought all ladies were subsisting on Wish-Bone® Salad Spritzers™ and fro-yo (oh boy, that's an even fouler word than clot). If it weren't for the Times's style section I'd never be privvy to such universal absolutes, “Everyone wants to be the girl who drinks the beer and eats the steak and looks like Kate Hudson.” You think she means "fat" Kate Hudson?
"When it comes to the sensations of the sea, we've got 'em covered: The flavor of a chilled pea soup washes over you like a wave; sea salt crackers capture the water's clean perfume; anchovy dip hints of ocean depths; and a seafood salad is like an offering from Poseidon himself."
I’m no Gourmet basher. In fact, I was kind of digging the strange dated photo-style they were using for a while (Sara Dickerman at Slate noticed too. I wish I had the wherewithal to more fully articulate these observations).
But once again, I’ve been mesmerized/baffled their bizarrely staged photo spreads. Last month, I was gripped by the overly rustic farm stand. Now, it’s a maritime theme, “Surf Sup” that’s giving me pause. There’s a fine line between eclectically sourced tableau and tablescape. I should know, I watched Sandra Lee this evening (one of the beauties of periodically working from home). Convenience food often charms rather than scares me, but her white pizza put me off, maybe it was the jarred alfredo sauce base (and when I was young enough to think nothing of fat grams, I bought 99-cent Classico alfredo sauce at Grocery Outlet like it was going out of style, um, literally)
I guess I could deal with a miniature lighthouse replica decorating a table. An old suitcase, lantern and patinad celestial globe? Not so sure. The component that pushed me over the edge, though, is the coat rack. WTF? A. You don’t need a coat or hat during August (I wanted to kill women wearing sweaters and jackets on my Monday morning commute. How does 80s with pure humidity require a second layer?) anywhere in the continental United States during daylight hours. B. You don’t need me to tell you that a coat rack has no business being outdoors on a grassy expanse.
I like the menu (I might make the anchovy lemon dip with green beans) and I even like the pert, nearly retro text. I have a hard time getting past those photos (yes, there are more) though.
Yay, blue food, and now it’s healthy. Well, at least blue corn tortillas are, according to a study from the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. For what it's worth, it seems that they’re higher protein and lower glycemic than white varieties. I’ve never been a voracious tortilla eater, but I’ll at least keep blue ones in mind since they're so handsome. I wonder if there’s any extra benefit to eating blue cornbread?
The last thing I wanted was to be a summertime loser. It’s already August and I haven’t eaten a single real tomato (at least not while sitting on my couch watching the increasingly opaque John From Cincinnati). I managed to drag myself up to the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket just shy of closing time, and then reminded myself why I’m lucky to live two blocks from Caputo’s.
I had browsed tomato recipes on Epicurious and actually chose three, two for later in the week, but it was the crispy pancetta, burrata and tomato sandwich that seemed low maintenance enough for a scalding Sunday night. I’ll admit that Bon Appetit isn’t on my regular reading list so I had no idea that I was making this month’s cover recipe until I saw the picture on another site’s banner ad. Maybe I’d been subliminally influenced all week?
Simple as they are, sandwiches and salads are two things I like to leave to professionals. My versions always end up as weak imitations or when made up by me, just plain weak. You only need to compare my version to the original for a glaringly disproportionate bread/filling ratio. I didn’t think it was a big deal if I substituted pane rustico for brioche but that was a bit of a mistake. The crust was hard on the mouth and the inner crumb kind of dominated.
The only blob of burrata left at Caputo’s was truffle-laced, so that subtly changed the flavor. Not for the worse, though. I will freely admit to being borderline ignorant with Italian food (I hate it when home cooks are all unabashedly clueless with cuisines that I love, though). I wasn’t familiar with panna and had no idea what type of leaf the wet cheese ball had been wrapped in (I think it’s a leek relative).
Once you got past the breadiness, the center was a cohesive blend of all ends of the flavor and texture spectrum: salty, gooey, fleshy, bitter, a little tart and not terribly sweet (using the prescribed egg bread would’ve taken care of that). I made a second small sandwich using the same bread sliced thin, crosswise and it was close to ideal.
Next mission is to find uses for ripe tomatoes that don’t involve cheese, olive oil and basil. I know that’s a classic combo but I’m keen on this rendition using fish sauce, white anchovies, cilantro and ginger. The strange thing is that I’m 85% certain that I made this dish before but I don’t remember getting the idea from Food & Wine.
Sidecar and Sunshine, dinner and a movie choices I made Saturday night, both left me with the same message: stick with your original mission. Sunshine I’ll leave nebulous and unspoiled. Sidecar, I’ll explain a bit.
Newly opened restaurants should be approached with caution and patience. But curiosity got the better of me with this South Slope oddity near the Blockbuster and Rent a Center (only the classiest neighborhoods have leather sectionals and plasma TVs on installment plans).
They didn’t have their liquor license yet, which was a minor disappointment because their list of cocktails sounded promising. But I wasn’t too crushed because a BYOB six-pack is a money-saver. We made our first mistake by turning down a weirdo small table in the window that practically had you sitting with the party next to you. We thought we’d wait at the (alcohol-free) bar until something opened up.
The space is high-ceilinged and handsome with de rigeur mid-‘00s hanging filament bulbs. More seating is allotted to drinking than dining which would be fine if there were drinks. And there were people who seemed to be just drinking, which was kind of baffling. Who would hang out a bar not serving drinks, drinking? I guess it’s better than imbibing in your own living room.
We skimmed the menus that were given to us, cracked open a couple Stellas obtained on the corner and figured we’d wait it out. The couple sitting next to us at the bar, who I swear walked in after us, approached the hostess and next thing I knew they were seated. Not cool.
There’s nothing as annoying as being in line at a grocery or drug store when a cashier yells “next” only to have a newcomer walk right up with no one in charge acknowledging who was actually next. I like a tight ship.
As long as we were waiting, we weren’t going to go hungry so we ordered crostini topped with a sweetish pate, served with a mixed salad and a few beet cubes. This is where the stay-the-course plan began falling apart. Our mission was to eat dinner sitting at a table and apparently, we had strayed the second we ordered food from the bar. The place started clearing out and every single person who’d come in after us was now sitting at booths.
Clearly, we’d been brushed off. I realize once you order food at the bar it’s kind of like your request for a table has been cancelled out (though the original couple next to us who were immediately seated had also ordered food at the bar first) but we still had entrees coming and no one else at the bar was eating full meals. At this point there were two empty tables, so we asked once again to be seated (I was either going to walk out or seat myself). You would’ve thought we were Al-Qaeda with the amount of reluctance received. We were given the eye for the remainder or our meal.
So, after about 45 minutes we got a booth and our entrees that I saw sitting on the metal shelf for at least ten minutes. They were looked at and touched numerous times, though no one seemed to have any idea where they were intended to go. It’s not that big of a restaurant for such confusion.
My creative grilled cibatta banh mi (called a banh de, which I am guessing is a play on DeCoursy, the surname of the brother-owners) with a shooter of cucumber juice was likeable. And James didn’t have complaints about his fried chicken, mashed root vegetables and succotash. But the food was all secondary at this point.
I hate service to overshadow a meal and I’m trying to temper knee-jerk harshness but there were glitches I couldn’t get past. It wasn’t Williamsburg-bad, there was a semblance of professionalism but I didn’t care for the way things played out. I wanted to like the place and the components were all there: tasty reasonably priced food, eclectic juke box (The Vaselines and Exploding Hearts were both pleasing) and potentially fun cocktails. Yet nothing gelled.
Sunshine, too, started off with promise before evolving into a horror flick. Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into before it’s too late.
Sidecar * 560 Fifth Ave., Brooklyn, NY
I’ve never been able to wrap my head around farmers market fanaticism (though I did pay a brief visit to Grand Army Plaza’s on Saturday and picked up some tomatoes and opal basil). I get my entertainment from wide-aisled, fluorescent-lit mega markets. The Western Beef H.Q. will always be my favorite mainstream grocery store but Stop & Shop wows in other ways.
We really only go when we need to return bottles (though it’s often fruitless since I figured out they don’t take brands they don’t sell, so all our Trader Joe’s and various microbrew brands were rejected). I made a whopping 95 cents from plastic Vintage Seltzer. If anyone knows of any self-serve bottle returns in South Brooklyn, please do tell.
The two bright spots are the baked goods and metal shelves teeming with discontinued items. They used to hide the marked down rejects in the back near the bathrooms but it has been moved so it’s the first thing you see upon entering. You don’t often see price-slashed cast offs in NYC, probably because there isn’t enough room.
I picked up a can of oil-packed Genova Tonno (which I just discovered is owned by Chicken of the Sea) which isn’t half-bad tossed with white beans, red onions and arugula. But it was the Trivial Pursuit Pop Tarts that took top prize from the shelf of misfit food. I genuinely like Pop Tarts so I’m still debating whether I should eat them or save them along with my other just-for-looks snacks like Strawberry Fluff and KC Masterpiece ranch-flavored bbq sauce that I hoard on an Ikea Ivar shelf downstairs.
Ready to eat cheesecake filling was new to me. I thought those no-bake Jello “cheesecake” mixes were instant enough. There’s something about this plastic tub that implies the filling will never make its way into a crust and more likely alternate between spoon and mouth.
I couldn’t believe Stop & Shop didn’t have Lofthouse cookies, that’s their one reliable item. But single serve carrot cake and 7UP crème cake (we bought both) made up for the lack of soft cookes.
Do they still have Little Buckets at KFC? Ok, yes they do (I love answering my own question). S&S makes Boston cream, strawberry shortcake and said carrot cake in short stubby plastic containers that remind me of a fast food dessert.
A cheap jumble of raisin and nut studded cake, whipped cream and piped cream cheese frosting. For only $1.99, I got three snack occasions out of this.
I wondered how long it would take for micheladas to go mainstream. I wrote about them some time ago and I still wouldn’t say they’re wildly popular, especially not outside of Mexican restaurants.
I first saw Miller Chill a few weeks ago at a New Jersey Chevy’s. Of all the places I might’ve spotted the bottled beverage, a suburban Chevy’s makes the most sense. This beer cocktail is simply a chelada with salt and lime, no chile. I always thought the spice was the fun of a michelada.
I haven’t seen the Budweiser Chelada in person but I am aware of its creepy existence. Creepy because it contains Clamato. And I thought that addition was weird enough in chips.
What mildly unknown regional drink will get popularized in the U.S. next? Kvass? Chile beer sounds fine but the thought of rye bread beer makes me want to hurl. Cauim? I would like to see how Anheuser-Busch would handle the chewed manioc aspect. I’m sure it could be commercialized with synthetic enzymes. My vote is for lamanog and it looks like it’s actually being served at Cendrillon.
Linen Theme by The Theme Foundry
Copyright © 2025 . All rights reserved.
Follow
