late october, cobble hill.
Yesterday was just one of those impossibly lovely late October Sunday afternoons, where the leaves haven’t quite turned (still!), but the trees are slowly shedding anyway, and the sun peaks through the thinnest of cloud coverage, and the air is crisp but not yet brisk. Too hungry to make the trek to Williamsburg for biscuits and gravy, Mark and I instead headed to Char No.4, where they serve a more-than-solid Biscuits Benedict with bacon gravy and country ham. (At the bottom right hand corner of the food shot, you can see a little dish of their housemade hot sauce — should you go to Char No.4, do not miss this. It is extraordinary, and while it should be applied sparingly, it should be used on everything. Then again, I am not very good at following my own advice re: sparingly.)
Post-brunch, we headed to Cobble Hill Park, probably my favourite of all neighborhood parks in the city. It feels more like a little square, like a mini version of Gramercy Park, less moneyed but still very genteel (and, unlike Gramercy Park, open to the public). The park is bordered on all sides by residential houses, mostly brownstones, but on the southern side of the park there’s a little alleyway of sorts, Verandah Place, with a row of homes that are squatter, less august, more cottage-like than the majestic brownstones around them — a bit like Washington Square Mews, near NYU — that reminds me a bit of London. Sitting in the park, making a valiant but ill-fated attempt at the crossword, I’d look up occasionally at the little row of homes, and it would feel like the city, and the impending workweek, and all of my worries (except trying to figure out the answer to 38 Across: Donut shape is apparently, frustratingly, toroid) — well, minus that, all of my worries seemed a million miles away.
philly in nyc.
[Near the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2008]
My friends Matt and Irene and their two adorable wee ones are visiting today from Philadelphia. Hooray!
new haven pizza sunday.
We ate a lot of pizza on Sunday.
So after months of batting around the idea pretty much every time we’d meet up for an NYC pizza, Andrew and I finally got around to setting a date for our New Haven pizza trip. We had four places in mind: Frank Pepe’s, Sally’s and Modern Apizza were definite go-to spots, since they’re considered the exemplars of classic New Haven pizza; the fourth would be determined en route. So with a jetlagged Mark in tow, we zipped up 95 and made it to New Haven at 11am. On a Sunday. For pizza. The entire town was still quite asleep.
We’d all heard about Bar Pizza’s famed mashed potato pie, and since the place opened at 11:30, it was our first stop. Ordered a plain pie with cheese (New Haven’s “plain” pizzas are just tomato sauce and crust, so you have to ask for cheese as an extra topping) and a mashed potato pizza with bacon on one half. The cheese pie was good, with a bright sauce; really, nothing to write home about, though I worried that the actual cheese application would be a harbinger of things to come: a little heavy-handed, cheese-wise, and a touch saltier than I like. More on this later.
But oh my! That mashed potato pizza was really quite lovely, if not a proper pizza per se. The bacon, while good, actually overwhelmed the potato favor, which had a bit of nice garlic undertones. The crust was your typical bar pizza crust — thin, not-quite crackery, but closer to cracker than not in both texture and height; these pies were the anomalies, crust-wise, since the dough didn’t have what would prove to be a fairly common New Haven chewiness. As with the rest of the New Haven pies we would encounter, there also was not much cornicione to speak of.
Up next: Frank Pepe’s. I really wanted to like Pepe’s this time around, since the last (and only other) time I’d been there, we ordered a large half-cheese, half pepperoni and garlic pie, and I couldn’t get through more than a single slice. Too much cheese, to the point where I kept having to take some off, not only because there was too much, but because I wanted to confirm that there was actual sauce underneath. (I posted a picture of that pie here.) It was an incredibly disappointing pizza experience. I hoped that it was just a rare off-day at Pepe’s. And it seemed like it might have been: in advance of this past weekend’s trip, I’d gotten so many raves from friends near and far about Pepe’s (even my old college history professor chimed in with a rave review!), and how we had to order the clam pie to really experience the Pepe magic. So we ordered a medium cheese pie and a small clam pie and crossed our fingers.
Well … sigh. The pizzas weren’t terrible, but they also just did absolutely nothing for us. The sauce on the cheese pie was perhaps the best thing, but even then, it was completely overwhelmed by cheese. So. Much. Cheese. I couldn’t really gauge if the crust was any good, because, again, CHEESE. The clam pie faired better in this regard, since it was adorned with little more than fresh clams, a touch of lemon, and some olive oil and herbs. No cheese to get in the way of the potential magic. And yet, even so, the crust — crisp around the edges, with some chewiness in the middle — just wasn’t all that memorable. And the brininess of the clams got to be a bit much.
We left Pepe’s a little dejected. With nearly two hours to kill before the next pizza place, Modern Apizza, opened for the day, Mark succumbed to his post-China jetlag with a nap in the car, while Andrew and I sat in a nearby park and did the NY Times Sunday crossword. It was barely 1pm on a Sunday afternoon, and already we were wiped out.
To be sure, Andrew is doing his best not to look wiped out. The cup of coffee he’s holding probably helped.
I want to say that Modern Apizza changed everything around for us, but … nope. Bar Pizza and Frank Pepe’s pies were definitely pies that you could eat without a knife and fork. Modern Apizza had a thinner, floppier crust, and overall …. wetness … that made it incredibly difficult to eat, even with utensils. This was a soupy, gloppy pizza, with so much, yes, cheese, that it just kind of bummed me out. The sauce, from what I could tell, was pretty bland, though I guess it didn’t really matter since this was one of those pies where the sauce and cheese were just completely integrated. The sausage on the back half of the pizza was nice, though. And do New Haven pizzerias cut their pies into irregular thin slivers because the weight of the cheese would otherwise cause a normally-cut slice to be unmanageably floppy, with cheese sliding off this way and that?
So with an hour before Sally’s was to open, and our pizza’ing at a low, Mark went back to sleep and Andrew went to the park to read. The crossword was sort of pissing me off, but I suspect now that it was all the dairy that was making me grumpy. Dejection by dairy. We needed to find a way back to pizza exhuberance.
And then, just after 5pm and after a 30 minute wait in line, Sally’s opened its doors and we piled into a booth. After the last couple of spots, we were starting to fear cheese, so we ordered a small cheese pie and a medium tomato pie. It was only after our pies came out that we realized we should’ve reversed the order, maybe even gotten a large cheese pie instead (though the tomato pie was quite tasty). This, my friends, is how it is done. Welcome to Sally’s.
The small cheese pie above may not look like much, but sweet Jesus, that was a great pie. Mark’s been griping for ages now about how there’s no craveworthy pie in NYC (don’t get me started; he’s from Chicago and is very particular about his pizza. Again, don’t get me started). He took a bite of this pie and immediately declared that this was a pie he could crave. I was too busy marvelling at the balance between crispy-chewy and subtly salty crust, bright and tangy sauce, and nicely (and, compared to the rest of our New Haven pies, conservatively) applied cheese to utter anything other than a few groans of delight. As I recall, Andrew, sitting across from us in the booth, just kept nodding his head in approval, to no one in particular. Had we been a bit more on the ball, we should’ve immediately ordered a second cheese pie on the spot. (Though, given that it took 20 minutes for someone to take our order, and another 20 minutes before we got our drinks, and I think close to 40 minutes after that before our tomato pie came out, ordering another pie might have kept us there well after 9pm. Sally’s is not known for their service, both attitude and speed-wise. You are forewarned.)
We left Sally’s completely stuffed and satiated. If you need any more proof, here’s a blurry but absolutely telling photo of the inside of the trunk of our rental car.
Clockwise from top left: leftovers from Frank Pepe’s, Bar Pizza, and Modern Apizza. Yup: despite being the last stop on an incredibly filling day, we ate every last bite of our pies at Sally’s. We took this photo underneath a streetlight just down the block from Sally’s, which is just a couple of blocks away, on the same street, as Frank Pepe’s. As we drove down the street, past the long line snaking out of Pepe’s, my urge to roll down the window to tell everyone to go instead to Sally’s was tempered by our collective desire to let the Pepe’s fans remain deluded. Are we terrible people? Maybe. But you’d be terrible too, in order to keep the crowds away from pizza awesomeness. Sally’s is in my top 5 east coast pizzas, possibly top 3. Though we had to slog through a lot of cheese to get there, the weight wait was definitely worth it.
the mysteries of pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh, meet Kodachrome. Kodachrome, do your thing.
I should note that some of these were even shot on Kodachrome 25, perhaps the lowest speed film I’ve ever shot with, and which produced some pretty great, muted photos. (Or, as my friend and Pittsburgh host Dan put it, “Even Sir Pizza manages to achieve an air of studied melancholy.”)
the pregame show.
It just didn’t seem right to subject myself to an austerity diet in advance of our New Haven pizza extravaganza, so on Saturday I just gave in to my apparently inescapable need for smothered eggs with biscuits and gravy at Great Jones Cafe; crema-filled bomboloni, cappucino, and vino at Maialino for dessert (are you supposed to have dessert at brunch?); happy hour at Ten Degrees in the East Village; and glorious seafood and tonkatsu curry plates at Curry-Ya for dinner. The only sour note was the Phillies’ loss to the Giants in the National League Championship Series opener, though the raucous crowds at Pacific Standard (mostly SF Giants fans, but what can you do?) were pretty hilarious.
No Saturday brunch would be complete without a lot of city-wandering, and somehow we managed to do a nearly complete loop from near the Bowery up to Bloomingdales (long story) and back down to the East Village again, with a nice stroll around Gramercy Park and a much more claustrophobic one in Eataly. Sweet Jesus, that place is a shitshow. I’m all for a market where I can buy hard-to-find Italian food products, but once you attach Mario Batali’s name to it, the whole thing becomes a Thing To Experience, and no longer about the food itself. There’s no way you’re gonna convince me that eating in the various in-house (in-market?) restaurants is going to be much better than a high-end Vegas food court. Especially when you’re forced to stand at a high table, nibbling on your soppressata and robiola, convincing yourself that This Is Awesome, while random shoppers absent-mindedly bump into you as they saunter past.
Then again, you’re also talking to someone who spent the following day in an entirely different city, just to eat pizza, so it’s not like I’m suggesting anything approximating a moral or gastronomic highground here. I guess I just have a thing against incredibly noisy food halls owned by orange-beclogged celebrity chefs whose actual restaurants are overrated at best, and possibly just plain mediocre.
Wow. This was not the post I had meant to write. Ah well.
pizza, imminent.
Today: New Haven. Tomorrow: Heartburn. Yup, we’re heading up to New Haven today, three able-stomached eaters and potentially four full-pie pizza joints. Last time I was in New Haven, we went to Frank Pepe’s, where we had the rather underwhelming pie pictured above. I’m hoping that that was a strange anomaly (anomalously strange? Try saying anomalously a couple of times. Sounds weird, right?!), for Frank Pepe’s is supposed to be the standard bearer for New Haven-style pies. (For more on that, read here.) We’re also heading to Sally’s, probably Modern Apizza, and either Bar or Zuppardi’s. I’m certain I won’t be touching pizza for a little while after this, but no matter: it’s a lovely fall day, and we’ll have a blast, I’m sure.
pittsburgh (5).
Lest anyone forget Pittsburgh’s industrial past and present.
not-exactly-ruins-per-se friday.
I had planned to write a brief thought piece on ruins for Low Readership Friday (aka LRF), especially after my trip to Pittsburgh and late night, buzzy talks with Dan about what constitutes a ruin to begin with. Heady, brainy, slightly intoxicating (er … intoxicated?) stuff, no? But I thought I’d spend LRF waxing for a minute about the news I got yesterday that Kodak was discontinuing their Portra 400NC (neutral color) and 400VC (vivid color) film, and was going to roll out (as it were) a new line of 400-speed film. The news has bummed me out considerably, since I rely on 400NC for most of my indoor food photos; the new Portra 400 is supposed to have better, tighter grain quality, which is good, but also more saturation, which I think would be a terrible shame. In the wrong light, greater saturation can make an image feel a bit cartoonish, or maybe like something out of a graphic novel — which is great if you’re a graphic novel, but not so good if you’re trying to capture the feel of what you’re about to eat, in as natural a way as possible. The new stuff is supposed to be less saturated than the existing 400VC (good god, that film reminds me sometimes of those Schwab commercials, or that Richard Linklater film where it’s sort of half-animated but based on something already filmed — know what I’m talking about?), but I’d really just like my old barely-saturated film back, thanks.
To be sure, Kodak is continuing to make its Portra 160NC, which is my outdoor standby, and which I love perhaps more than all other film stock — if they ever stopped making that, I’d have to seriously reconsider my life as a film photographer. (Mostly joking. I’m not going to stop crossing my fingers, though, that this doesn’t actually come true.) And it’s funny, because I didn’t feel this sense of loss as much when I found out that the venerated Kodachrome was no longer being made. For me, my work with Kodachrome has the feel of an ongoing experiment, like playing around with your grandfather’s random old radio equipment, not really sure if it’s going to work and not really worried one way or another. After all, I still had my old standbys to fall back on if the Kodachrome results proved unremarkable (which they have so far, by the way).
But after a trip to B&H Photo yesterday and discovering that even they are out of their remaining 400NC stock … I won’t lie – I had a moment of complete panic: my camera was at the end of my very last roll of 400NC. I’ve posted the results of that roll up above – some odds and ends from Pittsburgh and Brooklyn, including Ritter’s Diner and Mineo’s in PGH, and my new favorite neighborhood spot, Brucie, over in Cobble Hill (okay, okay, my new favorite neighboring-neighborhood spot), and my leaf-littered street the morning after that insane hailstorm earlier this week. Looking at these photos, I know I should be thinking more about how I captured really great meals with great company, or the quietness of my block after a stormy, thunder-filled night. But I’m just sort of pissed that I won’t be able to capture moments like these in the same way, with my old, reliable 400NC. I’m sure the new stuff will work just fine, and I’m sure I’ll make do, and I’m sure that there won’t be any overall massive shift in how my food photos look. But it’s frustrating all the same; the vagaries of film photography are such that once you find something you like, you try not to mess with the formula too much, you know?
In an increasingly overwhelmingly digital market, the pressure to keep film stock up to snuff with digital sensors seems misguided at best. Why take away the feel of what a film photo can do? Argh. But maybe this is all just the curmudgeonly Andy Rooney in me. I’ll shut up now and go putter the weekend away with my camera.
pittsburgh (4).
On day two of my Pittsburgh trip, Dan and I drove out to the Ohiopyle State Park, about 90 minutes southeast of the city. The leaves had only just started to change color — and even then, it was only in scattered spots — so we weren’t at peak fall foliageness. Nonetheless, it was great to wander around near Cucumber Falls, with the moss and fallen leaves wet underfoot from recent rains, and then look out on the Youghiogheny River, a tributary of the Monongahela, where we spotted a couple of kayakers and some folks gamely wading into the water. The city girl in me forgets sometimes how nice it can be to spend the afternoon far, far away from the hustle and bustle of traffic and pedestrians and all of that. And how calming a slow moving river can be. And! how absolutely lovely it can be to be driving at dusk, with a baseball game on the radio (inane announcers aside, ahem), surrounded by nothing but hills and violet trees darkening in the twilight.
pittsburgh (3).
After the ongoing Yashica debacle and at least four rolls of 120 film turning out pretty, well, ugly — it was with a sigh of relief that my first roll of slide film (Kodak Elitechrome 100) came back relatively decently, especially given that half the shots were taken in ridiculously low light. The photos here are mundane food shots, but trust me, after two nights of scanning the horrid 120 negatives, predictable and mundane suit me just fine.
Then again, these weren’t exactly mundane eats: two rounds of hot dogs and a huge basket of excellent, twice-fried fries at D’s Six Pax & Dogz; biscuits, sausage gravy, eggs, and home fries (me) and eggs & corned beef hash (Dan) for Saturday brunch at DeLuca’s; a saucy half-sausage, half-cheese, tavern-cut pie at Sir Pizza that was incredibly reminiscent of childhood pies at Shakey’s; and! the piece(s) de resistance: great slices of lemon meringue and dutch apple pie at Glisan’s, a restaurant way out in Markleysburg, PA, near the Ohiopyle region (more on that later). Yes, we drove an hour and a half outside the city for pie; what did you do last weekend?
On Saturday after brunch at DeLuca’s, we wandered around the Strip District, the old market area down along the Allegheny River. There are some great old pasta & cheese shops, as well as fish stalls and the like (yay salt cod!), and it seems like just about all of Pittsburgh heads down there on Saturday afternoon. It was a great way to walk off an incredibly filling meal. There were a few more great eats after this, which I’ll hopefully get around to posting soon, including mussels + frites at Point Brugge, followed by Sunday brunch at Ritter’s, and finally a couple of pre-flight slices at the great Mineo’s. Pittsburgh was awesome, even if I have some cruddy, unpresentable rolls of film to show for it. Well, I do have a few extra pounds to show for it, but that’s another matter entirely.
And no, Dan and I have no idea what “wine juice” is. Anyone? Anyone?
hong-an tran 
