The New York Times Book of New York
Page 54
In July, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Barbara R. Kapnick agreed to a special referee’s finding that Sal owes his brother Jimmy $422,240 in damages. This followed a 1999 ruling by Justice Kapnick that Salvatore was in contempt for violating—bear with us here—another judge’s 1989 ruling in the case.
Sal, standing in the modest old-world Grosseria, with its 100-year-old tin ceilings and ancient marble countertops, says his yearly revenues are $500,000 to $600,000 now, down from double that in the early 1990’s. He estimates his brother’s revenues at $3 million a year; Jimmy, who is 65, will not confirm that, but recently spent $2 million remodeling his 180-seat restaurant.
The Grosseria has made two offers to settle, one of which prompted a counteroffer that “would not be consistent with my client staying in business,” said Clyde Eisman, Sal’s latest lawyer.
Although the Sept. 11 tragedy has brought many families together, “to have any reconciliation, one of the parties has to say ‘I’m sorry,’” said Jimmy. “I don’t feel the need to apologize to him for anything, and I don’t think he’s going to apologize to me.”
Let the Meals Begin: Finding Beijing in Flushing
By JULIA MOSKIN | July 30, 2008
A young woman eats sweet beans and shaved ice at the Flushing Mall in Queens.
SEATED AT A RICKETY TABLE, SALTSHAKER poised above a bowl of delicate chicken-and-ginseng soup, the young Taiwanese woman considered a question: why not use soy sauce?
“Soy sauce is so American,” she said finally. “It makes everything taste the same.”
Everything tastes different in Flushing, Queens, the best neighborhood in New York for tasting the true and dazzling flavors of China. The dumplings are juicier, the noodles springier, the butter cookies flavored with a bit of salty green seaweed, as a cookie at a French bakery might be sprinkled with fleur de sel. The perfume of roasted Sichuan peppercorns and the sound of dough slapping against countertops lures visitors down to the neighborhood’s subterranean food malls, where each stall consists of little more than a stove and a specialty: slow-cooked Cantonese healing soups; fragrant, meaty Sichuanese dan dan noodles; or Fujianese wontons, no bigger than a nickel, that spread their fronds in clear broth.
The food of Flushing now includes dishes that don’t fit many American notions of Chinese food: griddle-baked sesame bread from China’s large Muslim minority, potato-eggplant salad from Harbin in the northeast, Beijing-style candied fruit, and grilled lamb skewers, from China’s long-unreachable western frontier near Kazakhstan. There is now a mind-bending variety of noodles and dumplings: the flour foods (mian shi in Chinese), those wheat-based staples that feed China’s north and west, as rice traditionally feeds the southeast. (The Yangtze River is the divider.) These places often feel a thousand miles away from Midtown, especially when you try to order or ask questions in English. Practicing the following terms might help: jiao zi (jee-OW tsuh) is the generic word for “dumplings,” and mian tiao (MYAHN tee-ow) for “noodles.”
One of the best cooks in the food court of the Golden Mall—a grand-sounding name for a basement warren of folding tables—is a man who goes by the name Shi Liangpi, based on his signature dish. He is originally from Xi’an in central China, the beginning of the ancient Silk Road. “Xi’an was one of the world’s first great cities,” he said. And Mr. Shi’s cooking does seem to represent a sophisticated civilization. For liangpi, a dish of cold noodles in a sauce that hits every possible flavor category (sweet, tangy, savory, herbal, nutty and dozens of others), he prepares both translucent wheat noodles and springy wheat gluten from scratch, in addition to four different sauces, and mountains of bean sprouts, slivered cucumbers and sprigs of cilantro. His lamb stew is infused with fresh green chilies and cumin: stuffed into hot, griddled bread rolls, it makes the best sandwich in Flushing.
Solving a Riddle Wrapped In a Mystery Inside a Cookie
By JENNIFER 8. LEE | January 16, 2008
There are approximately 2,500 Chinese restaurants in New York City and most of them serve fortune cookies.
SOME 3 BILLION FORTUNE COOKIES ARE MADE each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere. In India, they taste more like butter cookies. A surprisingly high number of winning tickets in Brazil’s national lottery in 2004 were traced to lucky numbers from fortune cookies distributed by a Chinese restaurant chain called Chinatown.
But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.
Now a researcher believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan—an idea that is counterintuitive, to say the least.
“I am surprised,” said Derrick Wong, the vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in Brooklyn. But, he conceded, “The weakest part of the Chinese menu is dessert.”
Ms. Nakamachi, a folklore and history graduate student at Kanagawa University outside Tokyo, saw her first fortune cookie in the 1980’s in a New York City Chinese restaurant. At that time she was merely impressed with Chinese ingenuity, finding the cookies an amusing and clever idea. It was only in the late 1990’s, outside Kyoto near one of the most popular Shinto shrines in Japan, that she saw that familiar shape at a family bakery called Sohonke Hogyokudo.
“They were shaped exactly the same,” she said, “and there were fortunes.”
A visit to the Hogyokudo shop revealed that the Japanese fortune cookies Ms. Nakamachi found there and at a handful of nearby bakers differ in some ways from the ones that Americans receive at the end of a meal with the check and a handful of orange wedges. They are bigger and browner, as their batter contains sesame and miso rather than vanilla and butter. The fortunes are not stuffed inside, but are pinched in the cookie’s fold. (Think of the cookie as a Pac-Man: the paper is tucked into Pac-Man’s mouth rather than inside his body.)
“People don’t realize this is the real thing because American fortune cookies are popular right now,” said Takeshi Matsuhisa as he folded the hot wafers into the familiar shape.
His family has owned the bakery for three generations, and it has used the same 23 fortunes for decades. (In contrast, Wonton Food has a database of well over 10,000 fortunes.) Hogyokudo’s fortunes are more poetic than prophetic, although some nearby bakeries use newer fortunes that give advice or make predictions. One from Inariya, a shop across from the Shinto shrine, contains the advice, “To ward off lower back pain or joint problems, undertake some at-home measures like yoga.”
Brooklyn’s “Little Odessa”
By BRYAN MILLER | July 20, 1983
THERE AREN’T MANY BEACHES THIS SIDE OF the Baltic Sea where sunbathers can cool off at a boardwalk food stand with a chilled bowl of beet-red borscht and sour cream. In the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, not only can bathers do that, at a takeout lunch stand called Gastronom Moscow, but they can also walk a block away to restaurants that serve such Russian specialties as Caucasian lamb casserole, grilled chicken with walnut sauce, Ukrainian dumplings, mutton soup, piroshki and, of course, caviar and iced vodka.
Brighton Beach is one of the newest patches in New York City’s colorful ethnic quilt, a home for an estimated 25,000 Russian immigrants, most of whom are Jewish and have arrived in the past five years. They have brought to this once-fading seaside neighborhood their exotic alphabet, uplifting music and megacaloric foods.
Once referred to as the Nice of New York because of its broad urban beach, the area’s new nickname, “Little Odessa,” is now more appropriate. Many of the immigrants come from that Ukrainian city on the Black Sea, which they say in some ways resembles this seaside neighborhood. The feel of this corner of the city can best be experienced on a stroll along Brighton Beach Avenue, where most of the Russian-owned stores can be found.
On a recent afternoon the downstairs meat counter was thick with animated Russian women calling orders to a half-dozen employees behind the counter. Except for the bountifully stocked display counters and some boxes of American breakfast cereal, the shop could be a scene in Odessa or Kiev. Virtually all the food signs are in Russian without English subtitles, and not a word of English could be heard. The store was doing a brisk business in Russian-style rolled shoulder of veal seasoned with garlic and black pepper as well as spicy homemade kielbasa and black bread.
Upstairs at the International is devoted to pastries and candies. An American’s attempt to elicit an explanation for one intriguing-looking dessert—stubby chocolate fingers with little candy decorations—illustrates the frustration non-Russian-speaking customers can face.
“Patata, patata,” replied the saleswoman matter-of-factly when asked what they were. “You mean they are made from potatoes?” “Patata, yes, patata.” It turned out that they were marzipan potatoes, a popular pastry named for their potato shape.
Indian Food For Indian Diners
By ANDREA KANNAPELL | January 19, 1997
CHINESE PACK THE RESTAURANTS OF CHINA-town and Japanese fill good sushi bars, but in the Indian restaurants on Sixth Street, a South Asian face is rare at the table.
A trip to Jackson Heights, Queens, helps solve this urban mystery. Centered on 74th Street and 37th Avenue is a bigger Little India. And here, among the sari and grocery stores, the diners and import music outlets, immigrants from Delhi to Bombay to the Punjab uniformly greeted questions about Sixth Street with a polite, but complete, lack of interest.
Food is, of course, the main issue. Jacob Bino, the 28-year-old manager of the Delhi Palace restaurant, spoke for many when he said he had never even been to a restaurant on Sixth Street. “Sixth Street is known for cooking for Americans,” he said. “Also, I think the price is very cheap. Real Indian cooking is very expensive. The spices—cardamom, cinnamons. Very expensive. Saffron. Even the clay oven for tandoori, that costs $7,000 or $8,000.”
A few doors down 74th Street, at the counter of Sargam Audio Video, the manager, Raju Bains, 29, said there are other obstacles. “There are so many parking problems in Manhattan,” he pointed out. “I went one time, to Gandhi, three years ago,” he said. “It was good. But here, I’m right near the Jackson Diner and Delhi Palace. That’s good food also. The restaurants here, they have parking.”
A Random Tasting Tour: The Flavor Is Ethnic
By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN | October 6, 1993
AS EVERYBODY KNOWS, ANY FOOL WITH money can eat scrumptiously in this city, there being no lack of good or fancy restaurants and no shortage of guidebooks. But where can you get really good pofpof, moinmoin and iddlies? Where is there palm wine? In other words, where can you taste delicious things you have never even heard of for the price of a movie or less?
Robert Sietsema knows. He is a Midwesterner who more than 15 years ago abandoned his doctoral dissertation on Robert Louis Stevenson to pursue a woman, now his wife, to New York City. He worked in book publishing and became the bass player for a well regarded but now extinct Alphabet City noise band. For the last several years he has been processing words in a job he does not love.
What he does love is the great variety of foods in ethnic eateries. Most of his lunch hours are spent checking out leads like a pushcart in Astoria that reportedly has the best souvlaki. So great is his enthusiasm for his subject that he spent a recent day off on what turned out to be a 46-mile scarfing expedition.
“This I believe is the best jerk in the city,” said Mr. Sietsema at the first stop, Harry’s Jerk Center, a five-table establishment on East Gun Hill Road in the Bronx. “Other Jamaican places grill the chicken or the pork before they coat it with allspice,” Mr. Sietsema said over the music. “Here they barbecue, which provides the smoke you need for first-rate jerk.”
My mind was filled with thoughts of Indian food as we headed to Queens. Specifically I was imagining a plate of chole puri, a simple enough Punjabi dish that I grew to love during the four years I lived in India. There it was on the menu of the Jackson Diner, a place that was all the more unusual in that it offered both the well-known dishes of north India and the vegetarian patties of south India, the iddlies dosai and uthappam.
We worked off that meal by driving into Brooklyn, to the Valle of Mexico Aztec Grocery in Williamsburg. “Every day at 4 o’clock the woman who owns the shop comes out on the sidewalk and makes really delicious tacos over a camping stove.” She was there as he said she would be, and the tacos were indeed delicious.
We needed to sit somewhere and wash it all down. Mr. Sietsema led the way to the Demu Nigerian Cafe on Fulton Street. That’s where breakfast includes pofpof and moinmoin, but it was too late in the day for that. Instead we shared a large cold bottle of palm wine. Palm wine, it turns out, is a little tart and goes very well with doing nothing.
“You want to try a spleen sandwich at Vasteddi’s on First Avenue and Seventh Street in Manhattan?” Mr. Sietsema asked.
Next time.
STREET FOOD AND VENDORS
Curb Food Markets Boom; Summer Brings Brisk Trade to the Pushcarts
By CATHERINE MACKENZIE | August 18, 1935
Food vendors continue to clash with authorities. Piedad Cano turns her famous arepas from 10:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays to avoid the police.
ALL THE YEAR ROUND NEW YORK BUYS foodstuffs in the streets, but summer is the peak season for trading at the curbs. At fixed pushcart stands, or from itinerant peddlers, housewives shop for bargains in melons and peaches, in cucumbers and carrots and new green corn.
This month has seen the first big move to change the old order of the pushcarts, and all the official assurances of the Department of Markets have not banished the peddlers’ uneasiness.
Up on Park Avenue, under the New York Central Bridge, from 116th to 121st Street, New York’s biggest pushcart market is still trying to settle down at its temporary stand, while the city decides about building the new stalls long projected for the old market area from 111th to 116th Street. The vendors moved in August.
The discussion concerns the glass fronts that will protect the new stalls, instead of the old tarpaulins; the steam heat that will warm them in winter instead of scattered little fires of broken crates and barrel staves. But will there be room for them all? Will the fees be too high? “They” say it will be all right, but anyway you take it, things will never be quite the same without the pushcarts.
Upward of 6,500 permits are held by pushcart peddlers.
There are 55 active retail public markets in Greater New York. Of these the largest of those enclosed are the downtown Washington Market, the municipal market at First Avenue under the Queensboro Bridge, and the Bronx Market. None of these attracts the poor or the thrifty housewife in such numbers as the pushcart markets do; upward of 6,500 permits are held by pushcart peddlers. The majority are stationary in pushcart markets.
Each of the larger pushcart markets has its special reputation for produce and values. The biggest of all the pushcart markets is the one on Harlem’s Park Avenue, where there are 700 licensed pushcarts. The new stalls may make for a more efficient market, but never one so picturesque. The shoppers are shrewd about values and wary of short weight and short change. They look out for counterfeit money, too. Suspiciously the dealer crumples the proffered dollar, warily the purchaser inspects the quarters and half dollars offered in change. It is something for the sightseer, but the market patrons are here to get their money’s worth.
When the “Alphas” Come, Street Vendors Run
By JAMES BARRON | April 24, 1994
There are over 3,000 food carts in the city t
oday.
IT WAS NOT QUITE NOON WHEN GOPAL SAHA, Mobile Food Vendor No. 18575, made his first sale of the day: a $2 Haagen-Dazs Cookie Dough Dynamo sandwich. “Looking good,” he said, stuffing the two already-crinkled bills deep in a blue jeans pocket. In another 20 or 30 minutes, the crowd swirling past his pushcart on West 49th Street in Rockefeller Center would swell to three or maybe even four abreast on the sidewalk. Potential customers all.
Suddenly, Mr. Saha’s worst nightmare began to come true. “The alphas are coming,” yelled the hot-dog vendor down the block. That is street-seller talk for the police, who have begun a crackdown on food carts in congested Midtown neighborhoods the city has declared off limits.
A blue-and-white police van whizzed down the block, stopping next to Mr. Saha’s stand. Officer Henry Dopwell of the Peddler Task Force’s summons enforcement unit hopped out and told Mr. Saha to hand his license to Officer Jose DeJesus, behind the wheel.
“Hard day,” said Mr. Saha, 28, who was a rice- and vegetable-wholesaler in Bangladesh before he immigrated four years ago. “Hard job. Too many problems. I pay taxes. I pay for a vendor’s license. And then they close me down.”
Not quite. All the two officers did was to hand Mr. Saha a summons and tell him to move outside the no-vendor zone. But it was Mr. Saha’s third summons of the week, meaning a fine of at least $100, up from the first-ticket minimum of $25. Officer Dopwell warned that if Mr. Saha did not get going, the police would confiscate his cart, presumably without letting him remove his merchandise, which would soon melt.