This year, Rachel and I were invited to our friend Daisy’s house for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a time for celebrating family traditions, and like many families, Daisy Martinez’syearly observance of the holiday is one of integrating her American-ness with her cultural identity, which is Puerto Rican and Latino.
Turkey (“Pavo” in Latin-American Spanish) the iconic American centerpiece of Thanksgiving, has also been integrated into Puerto Rican culture as Pavochon, which was probably created by New York Puerto Rican immigrants (“Newyoriquens“) between 50 and 70 years ago as an affordable substitute for roast pork, or Lechon, for Christmas.
Like Lechon, Pavochon is rubbed with a garlic, salt/pepper and oregano wet adobo and marinated for over 24 hours and then roasted. This one was marinated for 48. In the last half a century, Pavochon has since been imported back to Puerto Rico, is a popular dish eaten throughout the year and is served alongside Lechon in the central Guavate region.
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For those of you who have been living under a rock the last several years, my friend David Sax has been working diligently on his book Save the Deli, a chronicle of his travels throughout the United States and Canada in his efforts to seek out what remains of our dying Jewish Deli culture.
I was invited to his launch party this evening and I have to say, the man seriously knows how to throw a kosher rumpus — invite Borscht Belt King and Friar’s Club dean Freddie Roman as master of ceremonies, attempt to feed some of the hungriest fressers in the city with enough cholesterol and saturated fat to kill a rogue elephant, and get Jewish Elvis to entertain the masses. Now THAT my friends is a party.
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Taverna Kyclades in Astoria, Queens has a nice outdoor dining area and specializes in fresh seafood cooked in Mediterranean/Greek style.
As I have written in my previous posts about Telly’s Taverna and Kabab Cafe, Astoria, Queens has now become my go-to place to eat lunch or dinner before heading out on a trip, given that LaGuardia has now become my preferred airport to travel from.
Astoria has many, many Greekrestaurants, some of which are old established restaurants such as Telly’s Taverna, Uncle George’s (Papa Georgi) or Stamatis, and others are newer. One of the “newer” ones is Kyclades, a seafood specialist cafe which I had gotten a few nice recommendations about from Greek friends that really know their food.
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NTDTV’s International Chinese Culinary Competition, which previously was exclusive to Asia, as seen in these photos of their preliminary competition in Taiwan, is now coming to New York City, at Chelsea Piers (Pier 61) September 20th and 21st, 2009.
The Competition is comprised of 5 cuisine categories: Cantonese, Huaiyang, Szechuan, Shandong, and Northeastern Chinese. Gold-prize winners will be awarded $10,000 each. Contestants are required to prepare 2 dishes within 45 minutes during preliminaries and 3 dishes within 60 minutes during finals. Self-selected dishes must come from the traditional menu lists published by the Competition. It’s an individual competition and contestants are not allowed to bring assistants.
If you’re a fan of traditional regional Chinese cooking, this is a must-attend event.
Every year, at the time during the late summer when the stars align in the shape of a medium rare hamburger, the foodie elite of the world converge on a single place, much as in ancient times when the Pagans converged on the Stone Henge to celebrate the solstice.
But instead of dancing around naked and eating questionable vittles around giant stone monoliths, we converge (mostly) clothed upon Water Taxi Beach to celebrate the birthday of one of our own, Citysearch.com food editor, notorious carnivore Feedbag food blogger Josh Ozersky, aka Mr. Cutlets, also known as the devourer of worlds.
Each year, it’s been a different themed creature that is sacrificed and prepared a multiple of ways in order to feed the hunger of the Beast from Brooklyn. This time, it was a whole flock of lamb.
Here’s one of the cute little animals being cooked over hot coals on a rotating spit. Wanna see it on video? Yes, of course you do.
The smell that was permeating Water Taxi Beach was absolutely seductive. With all this Lamb, shouldn’t we be celebrating the re-birth of our lord and savior?
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Telly’s Taverna, one of the oldest operating Greek restaurants in Astoria.
As I mentioned in my previous post about Ali’s Kabab Cafe, Astoria is starting to get more of my restaurant business as LaGuardia has become a more frequent departure and arrival destination for my business travel. Traditionally Astoria has been one of the largest Greek communities in the United States. Considering that I love Mediterranean and Greek food, that happens to be a fortuitous combination.
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Ali Kabab Cafe on Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens. This tiny storefront could be easily overlooked by a passer-by given the dozens of Middle Eastern restaurants and stores on that block. Don’t pass this one up.
Lately I’ve been taking more flights in and out of New York’s LaGuardia airport given that fact that I have been giving more and more of my airline business to Delta, who has a substantial presence at LGA in both the main and Marine Air Terminals. The side benefit of this is that LaGuardia is right next to the town of Astoria, which houses one of the largest Greek and Middle Eastern communities in the United States.
The main strip of Steinway Street, which used to be predominantly Greek 20 or 30 years ago is now more of an enclave of Lebanese, Palestinian and Egyptian stores and cafes. One such cafe that I had always wanted to visit but never really had the opportunity to eat at is Ali Kabab Cafe, a tiny, cramped but eclectic cafe that rightfully boasts some of the best Middle Eastern food in the New York metropolitan area.
I do have to warn you that if you eat at Ali’s, you are not just going there for the food, which in and of itself is creative and phenomenal and will not be like any Middle Eastern food you have ever eaten before.
You’re going there to be a guest of Ali Al-Sayed, who is a character that can only be described as an intellectual entertainer. If you strike up a conversation with Ali, you had better be prepared to listen, because this guy is a student of art, history and politics. If you have any interest at all in Egyptian and Middle Eastern culture, you’re in for even more of an experience. Just ask him questions about the stuff hung on his walls and you’re going to get an earful. He is the closest thing to a culinary ambassador that Egypt has in New York, or perhaps the United States.
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You’re definitely know you’re not getting Asian-Fusion cuisine when you see a sign like this.
The old school New York Jewish Deli is going extinct. We have perhaps less than a dozen notable places in Manhattan, let alone the five boroughs that conform to the classic Jewish Deli archetype where you can get a good Pastrami or Corned Beef sandwich, and I may even have to downgrade that dozen to less than a handful, including Katz’s, 2nd Avenue Deli (which re-opened in 2008 in a new location) , Carnegie, The Stage, Sarge’s and Junior’s (which has really focused on its cheesecake business now more than anything else, although they do a great burger). All of those landmark delis are either downtown or in Midtown. Other fine examples, like Liebman’s in the Bronx, are lesser known but are part of the city’s restaurant culture that is in rapid decline.
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As I mentioned in a post last week about broadband service outages, Last Friday, I was upgraded to Optimum Online’s Ultra service. Ultra is a new service offering from Cablevision which provides DOCSIS 3.0 service, which is rated at 101 Megabits (Mbps) or 12.53 Megabytes (MB) per second for download speeds and 15 Megabits or 1.85 Megabytes per second upload. Both of these speeds are advertised as “Up to”, in other words burst mode speeds in optimal network conditions.
Ann & Tony’s restaurant in the Arthur Avenue section of Belmont in the Bronx is one of the oldest continually operating Italian restaurants in the borough, dating back to the 1920s.
Twitter is a very interesting phenomenon. I’ve only really started using it in the last year, initially as way of sending automatic updates from OTB and Tech Broiler to people who actually cared about using the service. A year ago, I thought the idea was pretty pointless, with these limited 140-character messages that people send out that everyone on the Internet can see, which seemed to focus on fairly dumb, exhibitionist status updates such as “eating a Cannoli” or “This alfredo sauce is @#$%ing awesome dude!” so I stayed away from issuing my own updates because I didn’t want to look like a total ass. I knew a lot of people were LOOKING at Twitter, but I didn’t feel like engaging in it beyond the “let’s feed my blog updates into it and see how it goes” capacity.
But then something else happened. I joined FaceBook, which hooked me up with a lot of old friends and many other foodie and technology industry colleagues. But FaceBook, like Twitter, requires you to enter updates about what is going on with your daily life to make your friends feel like you haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. So if I was now committing to doing FaceBook updates, I might as well start updating my Twitter as well. So I downloaded Twitter software for my Blackberry and my PC and started sending updates to Twitter, and automatically syncing those to FaceBook.
So now I’m addicted to Twitter. I have TweetDeck running constantly in the background on my PC and whenever I’m traveling I have TinyTwitter running on my BlackBerry. When people have questions, such as when Eater“Retwittered” a particular person’s inquiry about where to eat in the Bronx on Arthur Avenue, I offered up some advice. No later than 10 minutes afterward, I get a message from Twitterer @RalphNapolitano:
@jperlow saw your tweet about Arthur Ave. When are you coming to eat in my restaurant…LOL!!!
So I look Ralph up. Along with this brother Anthony, he Co-owns Ann & Tony’s, one of the many Italian-American restaurants on Arthur Avenue. Normally, when restaurateurs want me to come visit, I usually get an email extending an invite to an open house or a press event, or sometimes even a phone call from a publicist, but receiving a challenge over Twitter to come eat was a first. Okay, then, I’ll play. What kind of guy broadcasts a message like that to the entire Internet and not expect a serious foodie like myself to take him up on it?
I told him I was coming over that very evening, with hungry wife and friend in tow, and he had better be ready to face the consequences if the food wasn’t any good.
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Posted by offthebroiler 
Posted by offthebroiler 
Posted by offthebroiler 
@jperlow saw your tweet about Arthur Ave. When are you coming to eat in my restaurant…LOL!!!
