It Is Happening Again

Ok imagine you're a baseball fan, say a Yankees, Dodgers or D-Backs fan, and one day the rules change so that every other day a new stadium for your team opens in the team's (and your) town and official major league players are added in for each stadium so lots of games end up being added to the season schedule for each team. This would probably result in your being very excited that there are many more games to see each week, each night even, and this would spur you on to see all the games in your now bigger baseball club but then you'd start to think about it realistically and wonder, how will you ever have enough time or money to go see them all?

Welcome to my world. I'm a foodie. And this is the hell I'm again living in.

Cake Story

With the exception of pudding, I have not eaten a decadent chocolate dessert in a while, and that’s too long for someone like me. That's why recently I’ve been thinking more often than usual about chocolate cake. And that’s what brought me back to a tale from the Broadway days, about really great chocolate cake, and the meanest boss ever.

Flashback

In the early 1990's I worked in Times Square at a Broadway theatrical advertising agency. Lucky for me my account group had the best client in the office. His name will not be posted here due to the efficacy of Google search engines. I will, however, tell you that he is from the United Kingdom and there is a tribute DVD about him on Amazon.com (click here for link) that I wish I owned. This post will refer to him as (code name) Seth. He is, in my opinion and many others, one of the world’s greatest theatrical producers and visionaries. And in spite of his success and the global popularly of his productions which include "Phantom of the Opera" and "Les Misérables," he is a highly respected, brilliant, and good man.

I heart Carmine's, and now you know

Carmine’s is and always has been one of my favorite New York restaurants, and that’s surprising, since I’m not a person who particularly cares for “red sauce” Italian cuisine. As one of the city's busiest and most profitable dining establishments, this convivial family-style Southern Italian simply does it right. And as happy as I am out west, it’s a place I think about and miss quite a bit.

Owned by small restaurant group Alicart, Carmine’s has two Manhattan locations, my favorite being the newer, grander Times Square/Theater District one. Carmine’s had its following on the upper west side all along, but opening the second location in the early 90's in heavily trafficked real estate truly stoked their reputation. My office happened to be across the street at 1515 Broadway, so those were the years I fell in love with the place, and learned a few things about Carmine’s too:

Yes I am REALLY surprised

Ok, so I am really surprised that there are things that I like, even love, in the food world that I thought I would never like, accept, or do. And some things I’m surprised about in general, that’s here too. So let's roll it.

1. I do not like home fries at breakfast, or ever. The only potato I tend to eat at breakfast is the McDonald’s hash brown. Flavorless, oily home fries on my breakfast egg plate are always ignored. Not the same at The Red Lion in Silver Lake. Their home fries, listed on the menu as German potatoes, are a steaming, glistening pile of flavor: sliced potatoes sautéed in some magic fat with onions and bacon. What you say? Most home fries are sautéed in fat with onions? Pah! You have no idea what you're talking about. The flavor on these is stupendous. I highly recommend, along with a low cholesterol exercise and diet plan after.

"I'd like my burger rarebit, please."

I may never have mentioned this to you but I have been on an unofficial food Quest for a long time. So long that it was forgotten! To bring you up to speed on the specifics, here's an inquiry I wrote to Gourmet Magazine four years ago.

My note to them

To: Gourmet, Feedback
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 3:53 PM
Subject: in search of a great cheddar sauce

Bagels & Some Lox

Writing about bagels & lox was not an immediate idea. I was thinking about salmon really, and have lots to talk about there. Then I remembered how the arrival at the perfect bagel & lox experience is not automatic, nor obvious. I arrived at it only through the guidance of others, though living near great bagel shops and markets helped too.

Even though I come from a secular Jewish household, family gatherings – from my memory at least – did not include the ubiquitous bagel & lox platter. Oh I’m sure there was lots of lox, and white fish, but I suppose as a young person with typical palate limitations I was attracted only to the lox-hidden-in-the-cream-cheese spread. And no complaints there. This bagel preparation was delightful and the end of the road for me at the time. Real lox was just too icky.


It's Poutine Time

Greetings, oh fans of the potato and all things starchy. It's time to open your mind to new delights of the spud. As a girl from Jersey, you may say I've been inclined to diner out at midnight with some disco fries (french fries with gravy and melted cheese), and maybe that's true! (It is true.) However our neighbors to the north have another way of saying it, and making it, that is near and dear to those who know it, and also appears in a Google search when you type in disco fries (as in, "not to be confused with..."). The name of the dish, seen above, is poutine.