eating in brooklyn

So, a couple weeks back we were in NYC, doing a veritable walking food tour of the city, armed with suggestions from the trusty Serious Eats and Everybody Likes Sandwiches blogs.  I am not going to review the places we went, since I'm pretty sure Serious Eats has covered every place we went at some point.  I am simply going to tempt you with food photos and hopefully provide at least one idea for a place to stop next time you're in the Big Apple.  


Let's start in Brooklyn!  Bear in mind, I know there are more neighborhoods in each of the NYC boroughs--I'm just listing the places we managed to make it to!


Crown Heights

We stayed with our friend in this neighborhood and had a lovely breakfast at Carribbean restaurant Trini-gul.

a "double" from Trini-gul

I could eat doubles every single morning for breakfast.  The heavily seasoned chickpea stew glues two soft flatbreads together and fills my stomach with a satisfying ball of starch to start off the day right.  Pictured with authentic Brooklyn chain link fence.

Our last meal in New York was a memorable one.  A couple of days before we had passed on eating pastrami at Katz's Deli (the Lower East Side food tour coming soon!) in favor of wrapping up our trip with the pastrami at David's Brisket House & Deli.  I guess I will never (?) know what I missed by skipping Katz's, but I do know I was not disappointed at David's.  

a classic pastrami on rye with mustard from David's Brisket House

My eyes probably grew wide when the fellow assembling sandwiches pulled a huge hunk of fragrant meat from a steam tray and put it on the meat cutter, juice dripping off the edge of the table and onto a strategically-placed towel.  So tender, so fatty, so hard to forget.

Williamsburg

Sunday morning we made it out to the Brooklyn Flea at the East River Waterfront in Williamsburg.  There's also one in Fort Greene on Saturdays.  It was every bit the foodie haven that it had been advertised to be.  

pupusas from the Red Hook Vendors: pork "special" at left and chicken/cheese at right 

Matt, posing dutifully with watermelon juice from the Red Hook Vendors 

a fatty, crunchy (!) roast pork Porchetta sandwich 

for dessert: the "goodwich" from The Good Batch

I wanted so badly to have stroopwafels from The Good Batch, especially the peanut-butter-filled kind.  Somehow, even after we purchased an ice cream sandwich from that very stand, we failed to realize that it was indeed the stroopwafel place.  Oh, well.  They were probably out of them anyway and that would have just made me more crazy.

Not pictured (our camera battery died at dinner) is pizza at Forcella in Williamsburg.  Now, none of us ordered the montanara pictured in the Serious Eats review, but we did have a couple of the fried pizzas, and they were folded up and fried like calzones plus sauce, rather than flat as depicted.  We were confused, but no less satisfied.  

Coming soon: a pictorial food romp through Queens!

eating in queens

Here comes the next stop on our NYC food tour...only three months after the first installment!  Better late than never?  


Oddly enough--and it seemed to strike New York residents as especially odd--we stayed exclusively in Brooklyn and Queens the first 2/3 of our week-long summer trip.  We didn't even make it across the water to Manhattan until the last two (food-filled) days.  Those photos will be coming along, hopefully soon.  It's not necessarily that we didn't want to go to Manhattan, but there was already so much to see and to eat in Long Island's boroughs.  So, without further ado, Queens!


Long Island City


We spent one hot day in LIC and managed to swing by M.Well's diner for brunch between "Warm Up" festivities at MoMA PS1 and just before the diner was scheduled to move from its location at that time.  (Not sure what the status is currently.)  M.Wells had just been named in the Bon Appetit list of Best New Restaurants in 2011.  So, it was justifiably very busy, but worth the wait.  All our food was amazing.  Would definitely seek it out again when we return to the city.

adorable diner car interior 

egg-sausage sandwich with cheddar, pickled jalapenos, and tomato

fish & chips 

simple, but rich hamburger 

custardy maple pie 

Flushing

After seeing Serious Eats writers repeatedly gush about the food courts in Flushing, I knew we had to go.  We took the long train ride out on a miserably rainy day and felt almost like we had left the states completely, the smells and sights were so fully Asian.

Here's a photo of the lovely food court at Flushing's New World Mall.

Here's a small corner of the food court where we actually ate something: Golden Shopping Mall's food court.

At the experts' insistence, we sought out Xi'an Famous Foods' cold skin noodles, a Chinese dish--and a combination of textures--like none I'd ever experienced before.  Hand-cut noodles with plenty of bite, cucumber, onions, and cilantro sit in a tear-jerkingly spicy sauce that's soaked up by spongey cubes of wheat gluten.  I want to go back to try stir-fried skin noodles, plus everything else on the menu.

Later on that evening, in sheer, wet exhaustion, we stumbled into a shabu shabu place called La Mei.  The kind couple sitting near us recommended the all-you-can-eat-in-two-hours option.  Even though we weren't all that hungry, we couldn't pass up the chance to dip a ton of different things in scalding pots of broth.  Seasoned buffet-goer Matt broke down during the last leg of our eating marathon, but I got a second wind when the fresh udon noodles showed up.  Oh man, I want some right now.

just some of the many things we tasted: fish balls, beef, napa cabbage, corn on the cob, pork blood rice cake, lamb, whitefish, cuttlefish, shrimp, spinach 

tasty little straw mushrooms

Check back for food tours of the Lower East Side and midtown Manhattan!