Wednesday, September 7, 2011

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!