Offbeat Eats

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)…

Our next lunch stop on the Manhattan Death March was for hot dogs. Like many regions of the country (as an aside, Wikipedia has a rather nice summary of regional hot dog variations, New York City has it’s own take on hot dogs. In fact, it has two: the “dirty water dog” (a typical street cart dog, so named since they simmer them in warm water in the cart) and the “papaya dog”. The latter is the interesting one, since, despite the name, the papaya dog doesn’t actually have papaya in or on it; it’s the same Sabrett’s hot dog you’re buying from the dirty water carts on the street, although they’ve grilled it instead boiling it, and it’s generally offered up with both kraut and hot onion sauce as condiments…

Last fall, I had dinner with a bunch of my friends down in the DC area, and during the after-dinner conversation an interesting topic came up: “What would it be like to walk from one end of Manhattan to another?” Well, I’d actually done this before (back in 2006, when I was visiting friends in NYC and had 6 hours to kill), but wanted to do it again, with some more time to kill. So did a bunch of the other folks, so we picked a date and decided to just do it. The result was the “Manhattan Death March”…

In this modern world of web review sites, twitter, facebook, and the like, it’s not uncommon for places to get a lot of hype these days. Sometimes the hype is warranted. Sometimes it isn’t. On our recent trip to NYC, we decided to meet up with my friend Roy and give it a shot. In the case of Shake Shack, the modestly-sized, well, shack in Madison Square Park in New York City, the hype is substantial. Pretty much every respectable burger blog has talked about (sometimes I swear AHT has an article a week on the place), as well as several magazines. The lines are often daunting as well. But, at least from my experience, the hype is warranted (especially if you know a little line management, such as going off-peak).

On weekend and vacation mornings, I really enjoy relaxing with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, and have a nice sweet breakfast, such as pancakes, waffles, or maybe a sweetroll or something. Unfortunately, this sort of thing can be a little difficult when you happen to be in New York City. Luckily, about 18 months ago my sister-in-law introduced me to Le Pain Quotidien (“The Daily Bread”).