Offbeat Eats

As many of you know, I love good barbeque, especially Texas barbeque, enough that several times I’ve even traveled down to Texas almost every year for at least one smoked meat bender. But living up here in New England, good BBQ joints are few and far between, and it takes more than a little bit of research to find the good places (another nod here to the excellent work of Gary over at PigTrip.net who does an excellent job picking the wheat from the plentiful chaff). But while a few of the places up here do some decent work, I’ve been really craving some good barbecue, so one weekend in late June, we got on the bus, and headed down to check out Mighty Quinn’s Barbeque in New York City.

Two weekends ago, we did another day trip to New York City, courtesy of the Dartmouth After Hours program. This time, we were unabashed tourists, and decided that the best way to spend our morning was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which we rather enjoyed, and this was my first visit there in 30+ years). After a morning at the Met, it was decidedly time for lunch, so we headed across the street to the Neue Galerie. The Neue Galerie is a neat little museum featuring early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design. And, more imporantly, it’s home to two Viennese-style cafes: Cafe Sabarsky (upstairs), and Cafe Fledermaus (downstairs), both serving up the same menu of Viennese coffee and German sausages. This time, however, Cafe Fledermaus was closed for a special event, so we had to wait in line for Cafe Sabarsky.

Coming back home to New Hampshire from Cleveland requires a rather lengthy drive across New York State, with two options: the Thruway, or the slightly longer route taking the Southern Tier. Due to some rather heavy snow coming off of the lake, we opted for the Southern Tier route, which resulted in us passing through Corning, NY around lunch time. We decided to stop there, since the location was convenient, and I’ve got a soft spot for Corning since I was born there. Like most of our visits there, we ended up on Market Street downtown, this time giving Atlas Brick Oven Pizzeria a try.

Duff’s wasn’t our only visit in Buffalo, however. After a good round of wings, you find yourself with some fire in the belly (and, if not careful, on ones lips and fingers as well), and I always find it’s good to follow up with some ice cream. Well, Allie’s family is of the same general belief, so when we finished up at Duff’s, they suggested heading a few miles west on Sheridan to check out Anderson’s Custard. Anderson’s is one of the more prominent Buffalo-area custard chains, with about a dozen locations scattered through the Buffalo area. And they aren’t just a custard joint, they’ve got a full food menu as well, with various sandwiches, fries, and the Buffalo-obligatory beef-on-weck.

Since this year’s holiday vacation drive to Michigan via the US route is around 13 hours, this gave us a good excuse to break the drive up into two pieces, with a night in Buffalo. I rather like Buffalo as a food destination, since while it’s not exactly known for haute cuisine, it does have quite a few interesting regional specialties that I rather like. One good example is the beef-on-weck sandwich, one of my favorite variations of the roast beef sandwich (and you can read about one such beef-on-weck joint with my review of Charlie the Butcher’s). Another is Buffalo-style hot dogs, with Ted’s Hot Dogs being one of my favorite hot dog joints (although I usually visit their location located in the far, far distant suburb of Tempe, AZ). And, probably most famously, Buffalo is home of the Buffalo wing, with the Anchor Bar and Duff’s being two of the more-regaled places to get wings. Well, our stopover in Buffalo gave us another opportunity to check out Duff’s (the last two times I tried to go we got there after closing).

Again applying the adage of “no rest for the weary”, we were barely unpacked and laundered from our trip to Austin when we decided that it would be a great idea to go down to New York for the day. Carol works for Dartmouth, and as part of one of their employee programs, they occasionally offer day trips to Boston, New York, or Montreal for a rather good price ($55 round trip to Manhattan, for example). The catch is that it’s a day trip, so it involved getting up really early, and getting back rather late. But it’s a great way to take a quick trip to New York City for some food tourism and knocking a few more places off of the hit list. Starting out in a remote Dartmouth parking lot at 5am, by 10:45 that morning we were dropped off at Bryant Park, and having a late breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien. But after that, it was time to head down to City Hall, and walk the Brooklyn Bridge. Arriving in Brooklyn, we turned off of the bridge approach to explore Dumbo (from District Underneath the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). It’s a rather nice neighborhood, with several nice shops, and a particularly nice park by the river (the Brooklyn Bridge Park). But one of the main reasons we went to Dumbo was… Pizza. Grimaldi’s Pizza, in particular…

I recently had a family-related trip to Corning, NY (where I was born), and found myself craving dinner in downtown Corning (Market Street, a.k.a. The Gaffer’s District). While this part of town has quite a few restaurants (including one I’ve already reviewed), most of the places are pubs, Italian places, or pizza joints, none of which were really appealing to me. I was craving something a little more upscale, and a quick web search led me to Three Birds. Nestled in at the eastern end of Market Street, Three Birds is in a doubled-up storefront having a rather ornate bar on one side, and dinner tables on the other. Being a solo diner this time, and somewhat light on my appetite, I decided to sit at the bar, which also allowed me to peruse both their normal dinner menu, as well as the lighter bar menu.

Well, at 7pm on May 1st we finished the “Manhattan Death March” by arriving at the south end of Battery Park. After a short break as we watched the sun starting to set, it was decided that a celebration was in order, and that beer and pizza was going to be the order of the evening. After some discussion of various pizza options, we settled on John’s Pizzeria on Bleecker Street in the West Village. Down the street from Joe’s Pizza that I hit up earlier in the day, John’s is a very different pizzeria from Joe’s. Coal oven instead of gas fired. Whole pies and no slices. Table service instead of counter.

After stopping for a break and some pizza in Greenwich Village, the Death March then proceeded east to Greene Street to work our way south to Church St and the WTC site (and then on to Battery Park, finishing the nearly 20 mile hike). This wasn’t completely planned (early routes had us traveling down Broadway), but this ended up working out quite well, since we happened across a Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream Truck on Greene between Spring and Prince. This wasn’t the first Van Leeuwen truck we spotted, there had been another over by the High Line, but this time everyone was in the mood for a short ice cream break. Van Leeuwen serves a number of premium ice cream flavors, with a nice thick, creamy ice cream base. Flavors run from the standard chocolate/vanilla/strawberry (although all are naturally flavored), with several nut- and spice-based flavors as well, including pistachio, hazelnut, and ginger.

I’m enough of a fan of both New York and pizza that last fall I even did a Pizza Tour of Manhattan and the Bronx from Scott’s Pizza Tours. While I definitely have my favorite pizza places in this world (Bianco, Lombardi’s, Patsy’s, and the New Haven places), there’s plenty of room for variety in the pizza world. Indeed, the folks over at Slice compiled this handy guide to 21 different regional pizza styles that are out there in this modern world of mine. However, if you really add up all the styles, look at all the chains, and really look at what people think and expect with the word “pizza”, the result is something similar to your basic New York style “Slice” of pizza. A thin but still chewy crust with moderate saucing and fairly heavy cheese (and not too many toppings), this is your standard “fold it down the middle and eat while standing” pizza, usually bought from a place advertising low cost slices ($0.99 used to be common, although recent inflation has hefted a lot of those prices to $1.25 and $1.50 these days)…