Category: Food

Into the Heart of Darkness

I pretty much like all foods. I mean, almost. After I got over cilantro tasting like dish soap, and beets tasting like dirt (they still do, but now I don’t mind), the only thing left that I really don’t like to eat is:

Cooked green peppers. [horror-movie reverb font]

They remind of school lunch. Even at parts per billion, they manage to contaminate a whole dish, and make it taste…cheap, or something.

So I’m feeling a little anxious about going to Cajun-land tomorrow, where every recipe seems to start, “First, you saute your green peppers…”

There’ s a major disconnect here: I can’t imagine that an entire cuisine is actually going to be disgusting to me. I mean, it has hundreds of years of tradition and love behind it–how can it be bad? How can it really taste like spaghetti day in 1981 at A. Montoya Elementary?

But what if I’m served a big bowl of gumbo by some smiling old woman, who’s been slaving at a hot stove for decades…and I really just don’t like it?

I’m keeping an open mind. Believe me, I want to shake this negative association. I assume it’s just like getting used to guitar feedback. I just need to eat the Pixies, rather than, say, Whitesnake. Uh, right?

Meanwhile, this new post from Dan Baum, complete with photos of plump fried oysters, convinces me I’m doing the right thing by going, and facing my demons. It’s not like I’ll starve.

(Also, a Google map I made, based on assorted recommendations–any other suggestions?)

New Territory in the City

Now that I have some very steady freelance editing gigs, I don’t wind up seeing as much of the city as I used to, when I was scrambling all over town from month to month. But just this week I happened to take a job located in the new 7 World Trade Center building.

Never mind the Jenny Holzer installation in the lobby, the high-tech elevators that convince you no one but you works in this building, the staggering view and light from way up here, the weird perspective onto Ground Zero, where I could watch the toy-size backhoes doing K-turns all day long, and the fact that I can look out from the 29th floor and see carved stone elephant heads adorning the building next door.

It’s just invigorating to come up out of the subway in this area, with the air crisp and the buildings soaring up, and everyone looking busy busy busy. In my little Queens bubble—which is all about immigrant NYC, and that energy (and my own personal sloth)—I’d forgotten about this kind of NYC energy: humming financial engines, strong architecture, the fact that we’re all on a little island that humans have completely, ingeniously covered in stone and concrete, like a scab.

Meanwhile, inside the building, I’d also forgotten about office culture…or at least a whole new set of quirky behavior under fluorescent lights. And because everything at this office is perfectly gleaming and new, I feel all the more like I’m on a TV set. It’s great to be able to walk into a totally new world for three days, and then walk back out.

Incidentally, it seems like everyone is always eating here. All day long, I hear the rustle of candy bags being torn open, the pop of deli container lids, conversations about where to get sandwiches. I guess it’s part of settling into a new space, getting to know the neighborhood, sorting out what’s stocked in the corporate fridge (seltzer water—classy!).

Or else it’s just time for me to eat lunch.

What’s the Arabic for “way-back machine”?

Saturday night I went to Ali’s Kabab Cafe for dinner, by myself. It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve been there. There was something about being alone, and for once not seeing anyone else I knew, that reminded me of when I first moved to New York, and Astoria. I just sat there and read a little, and occasionally stared mistily into space, thinking of…geez, nearly a decade ago.

Back in 1998–or maybe it was 1999 by the time I got to Kabab Cafe for the first time–Ali’s felt like a little airlock between New York and Egypt. Not that I missed Egypt exactly (here’s one reason why), but I still felt a little out of step with glossy, consumer-y NYC, and I needed a little more dim lighting, hot tea and weepy Umm Kulthum music in my life. In those early days, going to Kabab Cafe felt like I was visiting a foreign country again, one whose GDP was based on nostalgia, atmosphere and clouds of sheesha smoke.

Now I know half the other regulars, Ali and I are friends, and he doesn’t smoke the water pipe in his place anymore. Almost nine years have slipped by since I was in Cairo–and now I’m set to go back again, in less than a month.

Last time, I was there for a year doing the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA). Not only was Arabic irrelevant to Americans back then, pre-9/11, but the social shenanigans of twenty wacky students in the pressure-cooker of Cairo were utterly wasted, because reality TV hadn’t been invented. This would’ve been ratings gold: mix medievalists up with political wonks, throw in a few Mormons, shack us up in grand, decrepit apartments with dusty chandeliers, and make us all sit in class together for eight hours a day. Weirdly, I am still friends with a good portion of these people.

This time, I’m going to update a guidebook to Egypt—a job I’m now feeling like the 25-year-old me should have done. In my preparation for the research trip, I’m finding it very difficult to brush away all the emotional associations and remember the details that might be relevant to a traveler who’s not sucked into a yearlong process of ego destruction via high-school-style social snubs, recurring illness and failure to grasp the infinite subtleties of Arabic grammar and vocabulary.

Such as: Men will harass you like crazy on the street. (Mental note: Buy more sports bras. Breasts must be locked down.)

And the gauntlet of cab drivers at the airport—it’s like the paparazzi, but not. Know where you’re going, and how much you’ll pay.

And it’ll probably already be crazy hot. And pack Kleenex—the smog makes your snot run black at the end of the day. And be careful crossing the street (especially careful this time, with my now-blind eye).

As you can see, I’ve been slowly building up to a full panic. It’s a very specific version of a broader pre-trip anxiety that always seizes me, no matter where I’m going (this Thursday: New Orleans, where I will certainly miss Jim and Daphne’s wedding because I will have been mugged and shot and left in the middle of a potholed street).

I’m trying hard to think positive. Normally I would do that by thinking about food.

But Cairo is a difficult place, food-wise. Not only is it not exactly bursting with deliciousness, but my gut flora were so traumatized by my decade-ago visit that my stomach still lurches a little when I think of, say, tabbouleh on a hot summer night. (Why did I eat that? No sane Cairene eats parsley salad in the summer.)

So I think it was my solo visit to Ali’s that warmed my heart a little, and created room for the barest flutterings of excitement as I was flipping through guidebooks today: al-Tabei, that place with the super-garlicky marinated tomatoes; Fatatri al-Tahrir, where you can get a flaky “pizza” topped with jam and coconut and nuts; kushari, the lentils-n-rice topped with a zingy vinegar-tomato sauce; even those 20-cent mashed-potato sandwiches with the crunchy bits of cilantro; and the chicken livers and French fries at the Odeon bar.

After that, I run a little dry in the restaurant department, but now, in my reverie, I’m on to bars and clubs (Atlas in 1992, my first trip, now that was a scene, and that upstairs joint where the Sudanese prostitutes hung out) and then, most important, my salvation in Cairo: grocery shopping.

The shiny-clean milk store. The corner shop where I realized, after months, that I could buy eggs in any number I wanted, rather than base 12. The master orange-juicer down the street. The neighbor greengroceress who heckled me for not being a regular customer. The creak of donkey carts laden with cactus fruit and mangos rolling past my window.

There’s plenty more. But no one wants to read Zora’s Proustian Guide to Cairo. I’m glad I’ve arranged a long visit—the whole first week will likely be spent getting all those Masri madeleines out of my system.

And then the next week, I’ll be back to beating off the street lechers with a stick, fighting with cab drivers, stomping up stairwells to fleabag hotel after fleabag hotel and cringing in horror every time I blow my nose.

Yallah—off we go.

Banh Mi at Home, part deux

Last week, I actually bought some new cookbooks. You’d think, as a regular cook with a bookish bent, I’d be awash in the things, but some terrible stinginess always takes over whenever I approach a bookstore. (Have I mentioned how much I love the public library? The only problem with checking cookbooks out of the library is that inevitably some jerk has torn out the page for the one recipe you really want.)

But last week I was at Barnes & Noble and had a moment of weakness. Not right at first, though: Once I squeezed past the Rachael Ray endcaps, I was reminded of the paradox of cookbooks: On the one hand, no publisher claims to want to buy them, and yet the racks are stacked with totally unappealing, readership-of-three titles like All Shrimp All the Time, 365 Salt and Pepper Recipes, and Lose Weight Eating Rhubarb.

ethnic parisAmid all the dreck, one book did catch my eye: The Ethnic Paris Cookbook. Intriguing title on its own, but I admit I had gotten a random PR email about it the week before. I’m incredibly suggestible. Inside, there was a lot of the faux-handwriting font I’m not so fond of, but otherwise it looked pretty nifty: low on glossy food porn shots, high on food I’d like to know more about (African, Japanese), useful restaurant recommendations and, and, AND a recipe for Bahn Mi [sic?]!!! It even ended with the words “You can easily make them at home.” Oh, the French–they make everything look so effortless.

So I actually shelled out real cash. Just a couple of years ago, I would’ve hunkered down in a corner of B&N and discreetly copied the recipe into my notebook. I’m bourgeois now, baby!

A while back, Peter and I made a couple of attempts at the banh mi, and they turned out very tasty, though not quite as balanced as they probably should’ve been. Let’s just say ham-handed is a word that’s rarely used to describe Vietnamese food.

So I set Peter loose with this recipe–and he actually followed it more than I’ve seen him follow any recipe in his life. It was a little unnerving. But it was highly successful as the first test of this cookbook, because the recipe yielded some mighty fine banh mi.

The crux of the matter, of course, is the pork. The cookbook recipe, from a restaurant called Thieng Heng, calls for first making a caramel sauce (as my urge had been the first time around), then adding that to a puree of shallots, garlic and ginger in which the pork is marinated for a little while. I never would’ve thought of that technique–and certainly not of adding the ginger. After that, the pork is cooked under a broiler and sliced.

Uh, except we only had ground pork. But that worked fine too. And Peter couldn’t believe that the pickled veggies wouldn’t have fish sauce in them, so he glugged some in there.

Perhaps to make up for these infractions, Peter then did follow the recipe when it said “spread mayonnaise on one half of the bread.” Bizarre. This kind of restraint is not familiar to me. It must be an ethnic Paris thing.

Anyhoo (or Bref…, as I just learned in French), the sandwiches are good. Damn good–good enough, in fact, to make me feel glad I plunked down my $30, which is roughly ten times the price of a banh mi from a deli.

Next up, from the “Africa sur Seine” section: the Bushman Cocktail (cognac, Cointreau, ginger juice, chilled champagne).

RECIPE: BANH MI
(adapted from The Ethnic Paris Cookbook–we couldn’t really stop ourselves from messing around. I mean, who puts one clove of garlic in anything?)

This makes enough for four modest-size sandwiches, or three sandwiches for total pigs. With this in mind, you’ll need four six-inch lengths of baguette. Or, if you’re in the NYC metro area, those small Portuguese sourdough loaves (not rolls) work pretty well–they’re a little bigger, for the three-serving-yield option.

First, for the caramel:

1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup water

Bring to a boil in a heavy saucepan and cook till dark brown, about 10 minutes. Off the heat, add:

4 tbsp hot water

It will spatter–stand back. Once everything has settled, add:

2 tbsp fish sauce (nuoc mam)
2 tbsp soy sauce

Restrain yourself from slurping this all up. Turn to the marinade:

2 cloves garlic
1-inch piece of ginger, peeled
2 shallots

Dump these in a blender or Cuis (chop ’em up a little if you’re using a blender, to help things along) and puree; add the caramel mixture and

2 tbsp vegetable oil

and blend till you have a nice saucy paste. Pour this over

1 lb. or so ground pork

and mash everything together lightly. Let sit for half an hour or so, while you work on the pickled vegetables:

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup rice vinegar
2 tbsp fish sauce

Stir this all up in a nonreactive bowl–you will have quite a lot. Then cut your veggies into thin strips or slices:

1 seedless cucumber
1 carrot
1 small red onion
1 small daikon radish

Dump these into the vinegar-sugar mix and let sit.

Also, prep your garnishes:

Coriander sprigs (not just leaves–the stems give a nice bit of crunch)
Jalapeno slices (optional)

Now you’re ready to cook. Preheat your broiler. Drain most of the liquid off the pork mixture (surprisingly, a lot will have gotten absorbed) and place the meat in a cast-iron skillet. Spread the mixture into a large patty shape, but let the surface stay craggy and uneven. Stick the skillet under the broiler and let it go till everything is nice and crusty brown–depending on how hot your broiler gets and how long it has been preheating, this can take anywhere from 3 minutes to 8 minutes. Flip the patty over (as well as you can’t doesn’t matter that much if it breaks up) and brown the other side. The pork will have almost certainly cooked through by this time; if it hasn’t, just set the skillet lower down in the oven for a couple minutes more.

Keep the broiler on to toast your bread very lightly. If your bread is very bready, you might want to pull out some of the soft inside to make more room for filling.

Slather your toasted bread–top and bottom–with:

Mayonnaise

Drizzle on some:

Sriracha or other red chili sauce (optional)

Lay a quarter of the ground pork on the bread (if you’re being restrained), then top with pickled vegetables and the coriander and jalapenos.

Squash down the sandwich to make sure everything holds together and the flavors blend. Slice in half and serve.

Life-Saving Ice Cream

pomegranateLast night Tamara and Karl brought over the wave of the future: Haagen-Dazs Reserve Pomegranate Chip.

I’m always a fan of the fruit + chocolate combo, which is too rare, and this stuff tasted pretty damn good, if not completely pomegranate-y. But I couldn’t stop mulling over the irony that this particular combination surely would never have come into existence were it not for Americans’ preoccupation with miracle-working foodstuffs. It’s practically Health Food Ice Cream: two fantastic antioxidants bundled into a single pint!

To H-D’s credit, the marketing department refrained from touting these wondrous life-extending qualities on the package itself (there’s not much room on the label, after you’ve put on the required part about saturated fat). But the web site can’t help mentioning it, along with the vitamin C and folic acid that pomegranates supposedly have.

Oh, and I’m not making this up: There’s a recommended wine pairing! “A late harvest Zinfandel is the way to go.”

Handy, cuz I hear red wine is pretty good for you too.

[UPDATE: Ah. Just discovered the antioxidants are mentioned on the package–inside the lid. So when you’re standing around in the kitchen, eating straight out of the container, wondering if you should stop sooner rather than later, then your eye will just happen fall on this encouraging bit of nutritional news.]

I always knew Whoppers were better

Burger King to Serve Up Cage-Free Food, go the reports on the wires today. The fast-food co. plans to order more of its meat and eggs from producers who “do not keep their animals in cages and crates.”

This looks like great news, but the cynic in me is just counting down the seconds till the words “crate” and “cage” get redefined. Also, the current percentages of BK ingredients from such enlightened producers is 10 percent of its pork and all of 2 percent of their eggs–the latter is set to double by the end of the year. And it’s not like I go to BK to order pork or eggs.

Still, it’s a start.

Alex Witchel–off the deep end

For a while, I was keeping up with Alex Witchel’s particular flair for self-loathing and misery in the New York Times Dining section. Then, miraculously, she seemed to get a little more upbeat, and I forgot all about her.

Maybe today’s essay is just a desperate bid for my attention? First of all, the hed, “The Hunger and the Hostility Vanish in One Bite,” is a little alarming. Because if I know La Witchel, there ain’t gonna be no hostility vanishing.

This essay is ostensibly a light-hearted look at just how hilariously small NYC’s restaurant scene is, but, guess what, the great food makes up for all those awwwwk-ward! encounters. But there’s a token mention of only two food items–a bistro chix liver dish and Nobu’s miso cod–and then it’s on to a distressing tour of Witchel’s bitter psyche.

I thought the lowest point was when she dwells on the wrongs dealt her in high school, going so far as to call out a rival from those bad old days, a woman who ruined Witchel’s meal at the Palm by saying hello and praising her writing:

Dear Devoted Reader: I know that you slept with my boyfriend 24 years ago, and I have not forgotten.

I think I’m meant to say, Oh, snap! But I’m really thinking, Oh, sad. Witchel is older than I am, and she’s still pissed about this? Can’t we all just collectively agree that most everything we did in high school was foolish, and that we’re actually pretty decent people after all?

But then she goes on to tear apart a trashily dressed woman from L.A., bridle at the fact that said lingerie-clad hussy was speaking to her husband (who’s a little famous–people want to talk to him for more reasons than female rivalry), and then do that crazy, for-ladies-only “I hate you but instead I’ll smile and offer my umbrella, and then later dis you in a national newspaper” trick that I assume girls learn at summer camp?

And, again, we’re also treated to Witchel’s extremely problematic relationship with food…which always makes me wonder why she gets to write a food column, when it turns out she doesn’t really like to eat it. The instant some chicken livers pass her lips, she feels obliged to self-flagellate:

I went straight for the chicken livers and mushrooms, which I love — they have an Old World, homey taste, like something my far-from-French grandmother used to make — and which I almost never let myself order, hewing instead to the straight and narrow green salad. But desperate circumstances call for extra calories, not to mention extra cocktails.

There’s just nothing more unattractive than women publicly disavowing their meals. Just eat the damn thing and like it! Don’t make me feel obliged to say, “Don’t worry–your ass doesn’t look fat in an Old World, homey way.”

And then the last line of the essay, after she does the hypocritical umbrella escort to the boudoir-couture woman, she pats herself on the back:

On a full stomach, I’m actually a forgiving girl, myself. At least until breakfast.
Which I don’t eat.

Alex. Honey. No wonder you’re such an eye-scratching bitch. Starvation is a fast track to crankiness. Just eat some goddamn eggs and toast and sit in a sunny window and drink your coffee. I bet you’ll feel a whole lot better about high school.

Free Products Work, Part 2: UglyRipe tomatoes

uglyripeFrom the generous marketing department at UglyRipes HQ, I got nine of these behemoth tomatoes in the mail. They arrived during the dreariest stretch of February, and we consumed them at a rate of more than one per day. We were extremely sad to see them go.

Before I get into the UglyRipes and their actual quality, let me just say first that of course, in an ideal world, we would all be scampering around in hand-woven hemp shifts and eating purely organic tomatoes only in the prime weeks of August, and letting the juice from these pristine heirloom beauties, all perfectly warm from the sun and fragrant from just having been snipped from the vine, dribble down our collective chins.

But, my children, the world just does not work that way.

Not only is New York a dreary place of celery root, potatoes and increasingly spongy apples all through the winter, but think of the poor people in, say, the upper Midwest, who might not even get a good local tomato in August, thanks to the fact that all the nearby farms have been turned over to soybean production. Sometimes you’ve just got to work with what the grocery store gives you (kinda like going to war with the army you have). Plus, um, sometimes you just really need a BLT.

For all these reasons and more, I am heartily welcoming UglyRipe tomatoes to the mainstream supermarket produce scene. Although they arrived at my house in a precious little Harry & David–style padded box, these are not super-crazy-premium tomatoes, massaged individually by octogenarian Japanese farmers, prayed over thrice daily and watered only with morning dew.

They are meant for nicer supermarkets, and as such they are priced not outrageously, between $3 and $4 per pound. Consider that Dutch greenhouse on-the-vine tomatoes, which are creepy simulacra of “wild” tomatoes, and the pink Styrofoam that’s your standard winter offering from Florida (thanks for nothing), which can be anywhere between $1 and $3 per pound, UglyRipes are also a relative bargain.

I gotta say, when I took the first one out of its little padded pigeonhole, I was sick with dread. It was hefty—at least half a pound—but very firm, clearly bred for long-distance travel. It looked great: bright red, and with those sexy little folds all around the top (ugly? No way—hot!).

But it didn’t smell like a damn thing.

So disappointing. This was shaping up to be one of those great marketing let-downs, like the BeDazzler.

But I just took a deep breath and chopped that baby up and made a Greek salad… And damn if it wasn’t just a little bit of summer in a bowl! Yes, the overall vibe could’ve been a little sunnier and warmer, and I could’ve been sipping some ouzo at the same time, but this tasted like actual real tomato, and there wasn’t a hint of mealiness to be found.

I went on to test the eight remaining UglyRipes in a quick spaghetti sauce (pretty good—I’ve been using canned for so long I’d forgotten what that could taste like), many more salads and, of course, BLTs (for which the Uglies got the worthy partner of my Heritage Foods Berkshire bacon and some hydroponic Boston Bibb lettuce). Over the course of the week, some of the tomatoes got a little riper; a couple started to get a little mealy, but they still had really strong flavor—nicely acidic and reasonably sweet, even though it wasn’t incredibly complex.

For the BLTs, even Tamara, who will eat celery root all winter even if it kills her, was swayed. “That is a mighty fine tomato!” she exclaimed. Karl looked overjoyed, because it meant there were now some tomatoes he might be able to buy in December without getting a seasonal beat-down from T.

UglyRipe HQ also sent me the marketing materials, through which I was intrigued to see that Uglies are grown not only in Florida, but also Mexico and New Jersey, depending on the time of year. So in the prime of August, those babies are bursting out of rich New Jersey soil, which for some reason seems to be the best tomato soil of all—I will be curious to try them then, and compare them with smaller-batch heirlooms from the Greenmarket.

In the meantime, though, UglyRipes are clearly leading the field in a competition that didn’t even exist until they created it: an all-season tomato that really tastes good.

And even if you don’t agree with the practice of shipping produce hither and yon, and are weaving your hemp shift for the coming All-Local Revolution, consider that UglyRipes may actually remind many Americans what a good tomato tastes like—and thus convert more people to the idea of food developed for flavor, not for shelf life or its ability to withstand being dropped from a truck.

It’s a bold concept, but I’m glad to see the good folks at UglyRipes HQ are getting it. Thanks, you tomato freaks!

New Astoria CSA!

Silly me–years and years ago, I joined a CSA (community-supported agriculture) group here in Astoria, thinking it would be a great way to meet people who also liked food, and get a great batch of vegetables every week. Instead, the members seemed to be largely of the wan, food-as-nutrients type, and I overheard many heated discussions about homeopathy as I quickly stuffed my burdock, kale and carrots in my bags and ran from the fluorescent-lit community center. And that was on the weeks I was able to get my stuff–a three-hour window on Tues afternoon wasn’t exactly friendly to anyone with a job. (Not that I really had one–but _sometimes_ I did, honest!)

Well, hooray to say that organization has been replaced by the livelier, hipper Astoria CSA, who have moved the drop point to chummy little Cafe Bar on 35th Ave. In an extra-smart move, they’ve partnered with some meat-and-dairy farms as well–the meat doesn’t come as part of your weekly share, but you can order it separately, and it will be delivered along with your veggies.

For those who haven’t heard of CSAs: you pay a lump sum at the beginning of the farm season, usually starting in mid-May, and every week a selection of vegetables (looks like the new group will do fruit as well) is delivered to a drop point. The selection is different each time, and you get stuff usually through Thanksgiving, though that period sees a lot of curly kale and brussels sprouts. Because you get a surprise selection of five or six things every week, it’s a great way to make you creative with your cooking–“It’s like Iron Chef, every week!” said my roommate Aaron the summer I did it at our old place.

_Don’t_ do it, though, if you’re thinking it will somehow magically be cheaper. Not that it’s outrageous at all–it’s just that unless you’re used to paying for organics, you’ll have a little sticker shock. In fact, considering Astoria has some of the best produce shops in the city (as well as a small Greenmarket, over on the west side), you’re probably wondering why you’d join a CSA at all…

Well, Astoria’s best is never organic, and it’s local only during tomato season. Plus, everything’s been sitting around for who knows how long. Your CSA share is picked the day before you pick it up, max. So, bottom line: you get Greenmarket-quality veg, without any schlepping (and actually, to get back to price, the CSA is often cheaper than buying at Greenmarkets).

Get more info at www.astoriacsa.com, and if you’re interested, stop by Hellgate Social Wed. at 7:30 for a movie screening (“Future of Food”) or Cafe Bar on Tues, Mar 27, at 7pm for a Q&A session.

(Despite the meet-up at Hellgate Social, this group is distinct from the Hellgate CSA, which mostly serves the Ditmars area, though of course it’s open to anyone anywhere in the neighborhood willing to stop by Cafe Bar once a week.)

Asstd Astoria News: pork inventory, Bambino, Aces and a visit to The Island…

1) I am effing done. Late, late, late, and very anticlimactically, but the damn Moon New Mexico manuscript is in. (“Wow–all the letters are worn off your keyboard,” remarked Tamara with awe.) Chew your nails in anticipation till September…

2) The jamon is done. Well, at least seriously cut down to size, and the bones stuck in the freezer for later soup-making. That pig leg has been hanging around our pantry since October, and I despaired of ever seeing it go. Not only did it add some heft to a hotel pan of mac-and-cheese, but our pantry is incredibly roomy now.

3) We had a fine housewarming party finally, one that employed all the talents of resident Astorians and honorary Astorians: Peter did some masterful work with lightbulbs, Karine dressed up the buffet table in only the way she can, Tamara and Nicole made a fine floor show, and Bob bid everyone “buh-bye.”

But enough about my little house… On to the greater neighborhood, on which I have barely set eyes since December, due to my miserable slog toward (and then past) deadline.

4) Il Bambino Cafe really exists! I mean, I knew it did, abstractly, because I ate a delicious fig-and-gorgonzola panino from there back in early February, but that was only because flu-ridden I sent patient houseguest Laura out–on the coldest day of the year–to forage for me. So I didn’t see the place in the flesh until last week, when I had yet another tasty sandwich, as well as a little salad of gigante beans, pesto and chorizo–v. savory. And very friendly staff. It’s in the place that Martha’s Bakery was in, way back, on 31st Ave. Perhaps in homage to that, it also serves ginormous cupcakes, some even trimmed with cookies, which scare me a little. Cupcake escalation is getting out of hand. Better stick to sammies, which come in a dizzying range of possibilities.

5) Aces, on 36th Ave between 32nd and 33rd Sts, looks very promising. I had a super-tasty mojito there last night for $8, which is fantastic, considering it’s the size of a Big Gulp. It helps that the owner, Miguel, is also the bartender. The decor is bare-bones, but the food is solid: I shared a romaine salad with buttermilk dressing and poached egg, and a little bowl of clams and chorizo, which were drowning in butter. After Tamara and I had slurped up all the clams, we then took turns picking up the bowl and actually drinking the stuff left in the bottom. We’re not proud. But it did prompt the waiter to arrive at my elbow with a fresh plate of little toast crisps, so we could go back to more dignified sopping. Maybe they were just embarrassed by our desperate devotion to butter, but in any case, it came across as attentive and thoughtful.

6) Island Eatery, on 36th St. just south of 35th Ave, is totally bizarre. Objectively, it may be perfectly normal, but Tamara and I were coming off a near-three-hour movie (Zodiac), and a slog through the theater lobby that made us feel like we were back at a mall in the Southwest, and I had read a mention of the place on Joey in Astoria, quoting Time Out, that had made me imagine a cheery little womyn-owned eclectic cafe. It was clear Time Out was just working off a press release, because once you go there, whoa, the four-head espresso machine is definitely not one of the main things to mention.

Instead: “I feel like I’m in Beirut,” I said to T. as we staggered in, blinking, through the little vestibule filled with baggies of herbs growing hydroponically and hanging from the ceiling, and into a huuuuuuge, soaring white space that had been stuccoed about four inches deep all over. It was glowing with flattering light and resounding with a vaguely jazzy beat. I’ve just spent three weeks copy editing a spring home-design magazine, and it was deeply disorienting to see all that stuff I’d just seen in photo shoots, such as white swag canopies and square pinstriped patio pillows, all in real life in front of me. It was a little like that scene in Fight Club, where all the prices pop up on his furniture. T. and I were standing there looking baffled, and I was having a flashback to Lebanon c. 1999, the single flashiest-yet-not-completely-tacky place I’ve ever hung out, when the managers/owners swooped down and introduced themselves to us. I was fingering a newly discovered hole in my sweater as we were seated next to a trio of insanely well-groomed ladies doing the underwear-as-outerwear thing.

Did I make it clear it was Sunday night?

Anyway, it looks like the place is another endeavor by the folks who own Cavo, up on 31st Ave–in fact, I think they own that whole giant building there on 35th Ave, including the diner Cup. So it’s huge, it’s glam, it’s filled with glossy Greeks. The bartender even gave us the bill all curled up in a shotglass, Athens-cafe-style.

But the menu is a lot broader, and it actually looks promising: full menu till 11, bar menu 11-1am, and it’s all tapas-y things, with a few big plates. Tapas run $8-11, and are things like bacalao fritters, cockles, merguez-and-couscous salad, and I can’t remember what else. Lots of hearty ingredients, in the home-style Mediterranean vein, so definitely worth a re-visit once the kitchen gets up and running next week. And I’ll make sure I dress a little nicer.

(The Joey in Astoria mention is here, where Tamara has added an extended comment, particularly on our less-than-awesome $11 cocktails.)