Eat, Walk, Jet!

These photos are from my final morning in Brooklyn. These were...

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:44:11 -0400

These photos are from my final morning in Brooklyn. These were the last few hours of my month-long Eat, Walk, Jet! adventure. Luckily, it was a quiet, brilliantly sunny morning and I found a lot of great street art to photograph.

Thanks, Brooklyn, I love you. Regardless of the hipsters.

From Flushing to Brooklyn Without a Camera

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:46:16 -0400

I landed in New York last Tuesday knowing that I was two days away from the end of my trip. October 8 was the day my All You Can Jet pass would expire, sending me back to Vermont to grapple with being incredibly under-employed, but full of great stories, photos, food memories, and ideas. After late nights in New Orleans, duck hot dogs in Chicago, the OMG! burger in Portland, and vegan smoothies in Phoenix, I was both ready for the trip to come to a graceful, calm end, and excited that I was finishing up in New York City, the center of it all.

My adventure was largely one of visiting cities: New Orleans, Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, Phoenix, and New York. I ate food you’d expect to hear about—Mexican in San Fran, etouffee in NOLA, hot dogs in Chicago—visited famous landmarks, museums, and centers of culture—Preservation Hall, the Art Institute of Chicago, traffic lights in Phoenix—and tried to absorb a bit of what makes each city unique.

I also had trusty guides. Aaron in NOLA; Adam and Emily in Chicago; Isaac and Elissa, Noah and Elizabeth in Portland; Mike and Hilery in San Fran; Steve and Aly in Phoenix. And now I was going to spend time with two close college friends in New York: first, Charity, who lives in the ‘Burg, and then Kudesh, who was born and raised in New Jersey. Kudesh was taking Wednesday off to guide me through eating tour of, as he put it, “The places no one goes, not even people who live in this city.”

You see, Kudesh is one of the three people who have been reading this travelogue, and he “got” the fact that I was looking for, finding, and enjoying, the food “of” each place I was visiting. And if that was street food, great. If that was fancy tapas and $10 cocktails, that was great too. (Oh, and it was, Toro Bravo. Don’t think I don’t love you, yo.) Kudesh had a vision: Flushing, Queens. His pitch: “This is immigrant food. These are neighborhoods where people haven’t even started to think about learning English, because they don’t have to. And they eat the food they know best, and people are cooking that food. That’s where we’re going to eat.”

He wanted to bring me to the Chinese part of Flushing, where the food courts offered cuisine with ingredients like lamb and cumin, influenced by China’s borders with Central Asian countries, instead the things we associate with the more famous Cantonese and Sichuanese cooking popular in the States. He told me that a Chinese friend from high school had brought him to Flushing after a Mets game when they were in high school, and he had loved the place ever since.

Kudesh met me in Williamsburg, where he laughed at the hipsters at Olso, where I was drinking coffee and waiting for him. (Great coffee, great people-watching, by the way.) We hopped on the 7 and took it out to Queens. When we surfaced from the subway, I understood what Kudesh had meant by people who didn’t have to learn English. We walked up from the subway stop straight into a river of Chinese. Nothing but Chinese. There was not one white person, black person, brown person—all Chinese. None of the street signs were in English—everything was some Chinese dialect. Instantly, I felt like I was in a different country. I’ve never been to China, but hey, I’ve never been to Flushing, either. Maybe they’re more similar than I realize.

Kudesh took a moment to orient himself, then quickly found a building that he recognized. We entered, and were instantly in the middle of a food court. Not a clean, sanitized mall-style food court, but something more real to the way people in developing countries eat and live—a little more worn, a little more greasy, a little more real.

Now, I have to mention something. Kudesh is short, portly, and Jewish. I’m tall, skinny, have a dark tan, a shaved head, and a beard. We started getting looks the minute we walked in. It probably didn’t help that we were talking excitedly and had no idea where we were. (I’m serious: We were the only Westerners in sight.)

As we walked back into the guts of the place, we saw a sign covered in Chinese characters and two words, hand-written, in English with parentheses: (Lamb soup).

“This is the place where the make the noodles right in front of you,” Kudesh said out of the side of his mouth. He was practically quivering.

We walked in to a small dining area with the kitchen at one end, behind a counter. Heads turned towards us. Quick, little conversations started all around us. We decided we’d try to split a bowl, as not to fill us up too much. We were here to sample as much as we could from as many stalls as possible.

There were several stock pots bubbling, a woman making noodle dough, and a man chopping vegetables. We stood at the counter; they ignored us completely. Kudesh turned back to me, with a smile, “Isn’t it great? It’s like they’re saying, ‘What are you doing here? Go away.’”

After a few minutes, during which three people stood next to us and ordered in Chinese, one of the women behind the counter looked up and said, “Yes?” in warbling English. Kudesh held up his index finger and said, “One.”

As we waited, I watched a younger woman prepping the noodles to be cooked. She took a small, flat slab about the size of a salad plate, and sliced it into several pieces. Then she held on to the ends and stretched them several times at arm’s length, across her body, before tossing them into the broth, where they cooked for only a couple of minutes before she poured the noodles and broth into a bowl.

I sat down and waited. Everyone looked up from their soup. I turned around; people in the hall were looking at us. It was great.

Kudesh brought the soup over with an extra bowl. More looks. Then we started to “split” the soup. This caused even more eyes to turn our way. Remember those noodles? They truly are a few feet long. We had chopsticks and small plastic spoons to split our soup between two bowls, and we quickly realized this soup is not designed to be split up. As we laughed our asses off, we started to split the soft, pliant noodles with our fingers, spilling soup all over the place. We must have been the most fun these people had all week.

Once we hacked our way through the noodles and had made a mess of our table, we started spooning broth into our mouths.

God. When you hear about people simmering stock for hours, the way so few people in the U.S. actually do, this is what they’re talking about. The flavor was deep, spicy, rich, and yet fresh in a way I’d hardly experienced before. I’m all for homemade chicken soup, and I’ve made my own stock, but this was something else. This was the kind of broth that makes you salivate constantly as you eat it.

Kudesh and I were face-down, slurping soup and noodles, like everyone else. We put a little hot oil in. Even better. The texture of the noodles, soft and only slightly chewy before giving way, was completely new to me. It was the best soup I’d ever had. Broth, noodles, cellophane noodles under the larger ones, chiles, small pieces of lamb, and cilantro. That was it.

A nice woman next to us could speak a bit of English. “Delicious?” she asked. We both nodded and replied positively. We must have looked like lunatics. We just kept eating and laughing. Then, during one enthusiastic slurp, a drop of hot oil landed right in my right eye, which started spasming and watering uncontrollably.

Kudesh started laughing. So did I. It hurt like hell, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I tried to open my eye and look at him. “Dude, your eye is bright orange. HAAAAA!!!”

We kept eating. I was crying and laughing and slurping. It was heavenly.

Once my eye calmed down and we had just about killed the soup—and entertained the room—we decided it was time to try something else.

We walked to a food stall which Kudesh claimed would serve us beef shin. He actually caught the proprietor’s eye, and pointed to his shin. I thought, Great, now we really look like idiots. But within a few seconds, the cook pulled out a section of beef from his fridge and gestured to Kudesh, who nodded enthusiastically. We sat and waited.

When the plate arrived, it was a large portion of thinly sliced beef with a side of green onions and cilantro. The cook suggested a sesame seed bun, and said, “Chinese hamburger!” We nodded.

The beef was a bit dry, and when we tried to put condiments on it and place it in the “bun,” we were told to eat it without sauce. We tried. Still dry, not so flavorful. So when the guy went back behind his counter, we tried a little soy sauce. Better. But still, after eating more than half the dish, we decided it was more important to move on than fill up on something so uninspired.

As Kudesh said, “Strikes and gutters, dude. Now, we have to go downstairs, into the bowels of this place. That’s where the really good stuff is.”

We found our way downstairs, and indeed, there were more stalls, and more people. We were almost paralyzed by the choices. Dumplings all over the place, lots of soups and noodles, illegal DVDs—this place had it all.

As we stood wondering whether we should order dumplings from this one lady, we noticed she had pig’s feet. We ordered one, caught up in the moment. When she simply pulled it off a tray and plopped it in front of us on a plate, we knew we may have gone wrong again. But we ripped into it—as much as you can rip into a pig’s foot. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of a room-temperature roasted pig’s foot, imagine a sheath of rubber under which you find cartilage, solid fat, and a tiny amount of tasty flesh. It was an absurd mission—find the goodness. After about a minute, Kudesh muttered out of the side of his mouth, “This isn’t very good.” I almost didn’t want to admit it. But then a few seconds later, I said, “Yeah.” Once or twice we thought we had figured it out, finding a tidbit here or there, but we looked at each other and finally gave up. We were mercenaries, after all. The foot may be good as an ingredient in a soup, or perhaps split and stuffed and roasted, served with a sauce, but it’s not good—at all—as is

After two minor mishaps our capacity was diminishing, and Kudesh wanted to make sure we had a lamb burger. Now, not the kind of burger we’re all used to. In fact, as we turned the corner to the lamb counter, I was thinking, “Wow. Writing about this would be great. People need to know about this place.” And then the obviousness of it all hit me: There was a huge, blown-up photo of the lamb burger guy with Anthony Bourdain. Of course. It made perfect sense: This building had Bourdain written all over it.

We ordered. When the “burgers” arrived, I saw that they were sandwiches of roasted, chopped-up lamb thick with cumin, salt, and chili peppers. The meat was dark, spicy, and packed into what looked like a large steamed bun. It was outrageously good. We knew we had hit it the Chinese jackpot again. And who would have thought it? Two Chinese-food grand-slams featuring lamb.

But we also knew we were bordering on more mainstream fare, as not only did we have Bourdain’s face smiling down on us, but there was a young white woman eating here among us. Kudesh said, in between bites, “This guy will move into the city. He won’t stay here.” And there it was: Success motivates people to leave their communities and seek out success in the bright lights. Hey, good luck to the guy. I know every one of my friends who eats meat would flip for this guy’s food. And we only tried one dish.

Once the lamb sandwich was down, we knew it was time to move on.

We walked out of the building and back into the bright sunlight and constant flow of people. We bought a cold “white gourd” tea from a street vendor. It tasted like… gourds. And honey. We walked around the neighborhood, drinking in all the local sights and flavors. We went into a market to check out the wares, and found live turtles and frogs in buckets beside several types of shrimp, shimmeringly fresh salmon, and littleneck clams.

Kudesh described how Roosevelt Avenue changes from Chinese to Indian to Mexican as you walk along it. So we hopped on the 7 for a few stops to the Indian part of Roosevelt. We checked out the markets and sari shops and gold shops. Kudesh told me stories about growing up in Edison, New Jersey, where he hung out with kids who all knew these communities in Queens. It was like a little bit of New York’s immigrant history rolled into an eating and walking tour.

We strolled down Roosevelt, with the elevated train directly above the street and people going about their lives in the city. We talked about old college friends, girlfriends and wives, his daughter, and just about everything else as we slowly watched the signs and people transition from Indian to Mexican. The merchandise in shop windows changed from saris to luchadore masks. We bought fresh juice from a vendor and walked on. It was a perfect, late-summer day, and we had plenty of time to just wander.

After a while, we took the train into the city and walked from Grand Central through Murray Hill, then Grammercy Park, and decided it was time to sit down at a bar to drink a pint or two. And yet, we still wandered all the way to the Lower East Side and sat down at Izzy’s, a bit of a punk-ish hipster bar, and drank a Brooklyn Lager. There were more stories, more memories, a lot of talk about writing, and then, finally, we had to be somewhere.

We had decided to eat at Diner, the famous Williamsburg restaurant and hipster hangout, for my last meal. I wanted to eat in the neighborhood, and Charity said flat-out that she thought it was the best food in Williamsburg. We met up at Charity’s apartment on Bedford Ave., then walked the few blocks to the small, unassuming diner that has housed the restaurant since 1998. It was busy, of course, so we dipped into Marlowe and Sons, next door, and drank Porkslap Pale Ales by candlelight while Kudesh and Charity caught up. I love Brooklyn. You can get good microbrew in a can and drink it by candlelight while waiting to eat at a place called Diner that serves food that is anything but. (Did I mention the illustration of two pigs chest-bumping on the front of the Porkslap can?)

Diner was everything it should be. We walked into the low-lit dining room, which is, as you would expect, the inside of an old diner. We sat at a booth. We were surrounded by incredibly good-looking people dressed in incredibly good-looking clothes. Our server was tall, African-American, serenely confident, and immpeccably good at her job. When there wasn’t an old-fashioned on the drink menu, she made sure the bartender made something Charity would like. And she did. Kudesh and I drank scotch cocktails. Then our server came back and sat down next to Kudesh. She proceeded to tell us every detail about the ten or so dishes on the menu, from salads to entrees, with an intimacy and subtle pride that showed this was all about the food. She wrote down the main ingredient of each salad, appetizer, and entree on the white paper covering the tabletop, so we would remember. It was so relaxed that she could easily have taken a sip of a glass of wine and been our dining companion.

Charity ordered grouper over Swiss chard. We ordered Delmonicos with fries. Rare.

It was another one of those flawless meals. The atmophere was almost dreamlike—low light, old friends, impossibly attractive people all around—and the food was exactly what you’d want it to be. The meat was succulent, tender, and served in its own juices; the fries were crisp and hot. Our server recommended glasses of red to go with the meat. We ordered coffees and a flourless chocolate cake for dessert. My espresso was chocolatey, spicy, and slightly bitter. The cake was smooth and topped with lightly whipped cream. We were all beside ourselves at how good everything was.

It was a perfect day. I had been from Queens to Midtown to the Lower East Side to Brooklyn. I had eaten both peasant food and a fine steak; drank beer out of a can and quaffed a Scotch cocktail. I was with one friend who is a corporate lawyer and lives in Brooklyn, and another who cleans up toxic spills and lives with his family in New Jersey. Duality has certainly been an unintentional theme of my trip, and it was fitting that the final day and night were spent in the same way.

I’ve been very lucky during this month-long adventure, and I’d like to thank Kudesh and Charity for helping me close it out in grand fashion, only a short walk from Charity’s apartment. If that doesn’t hold to the surpremely loose Eat, Walk, Jet! ethos, I don’t know what does. But Porkslap beer, cheap Wayfarers, and red meat are all contenders.

I was sitting at the gate in Sky Harbor, the Phoenix airport...

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:16:53 -0400

I was sitting at the gate in Sky Harbor, the Phoenix airport (Great name, f*cking embarassingly bad food.), when I saw our plane getting suited up for the flight. Having commented weeks ago about the amount of JetBlue branding on the jets, I took this photo. The huge Yahoo! logo and smaller BlackBerry logo made me laugh, as usual. But when I boarded the plane, it all made sense: I was on a BetaBlue aircraft. This is JetBlue’s test project for providing wi-fi on flights. Yes, Internet access on the plane. Sounds great, right?

Well, it’s not exactly what it seems. You really have to read the not-so-fine print. “Email/IM/Shopping Onboard.” It isn’t really Internet access, and the finer print tells you “…does not provide for Internet surfing….” It’s hard to say what the reasoning is, but clearly they’re keeping a pretty tight hold on bandwidth and browsing. It could be for that reason—they have no idea what will happen with bandwidth, with users and how they’ll browse. Which makes sense—no illegal downloading, no pjorn (or course), no questionable content. You have to go through their own custom page to link through to either your email client, or Amazon for shopping.

It’s a great starting point. Business people can check their mail on the plane, which is certainly the most important point of use, except for family or friends who have to monitor some other timely, crucial situation (though you know it’s more about obsessively checking email). Folks who have nothing better to do but shop can do that, too.

The only issue I had, other than my inability to browse, was that the two times I tried to log on, there was no service. As the brochure says, “…users may lose connectivity from time to time due to network coverage limitations.” That was certainly true. It seems like a lot of marketing and branding for a limited, awkward service. Here’s to the near future when we can all log on and do what we need to in the cloud, from the clouds.

Steven. Eating a fish taco at Two Hippies. Steve is a good man....

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:02:55 -0400

Steven. Eating a fish taco at Two Hippies.

Steve is a good man. We spent two crazy years living on a tiny desert island off the coast of Senegal, out in the Atlantic about 300 miles from Africa. The name of the country is Cape Verde. We were on Sao Nicolau, teaching high school English. Peace Corps. Lots of Super Bock, Cape Verdean pop music, ever-present dust, walking (we didn’t drive for two years), small-town gossip, and lots of books. Good times. Now we eat tacos and wonder when Mr. Jackson is going to run for Congress. (Inside joke, sorry.)

My last day in Phoenix was easily one of the healthiest and most...

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:47:00 -0400

My last day in Phoenix was easily one of the healthiest and most relaxing of my entire Eat, Walk, Jet! month. (I know because I’m finished and writing this in retrospect.) Steve and I hiked North Mountain, then we drove across town to Aly’s cousin’s house and lounged in the pool. I have a great photo of me chilling in a floatie with a Tecate in the little drink holder, the sun all over me, and my smiling face looking over the New York Times Magazine. There was a fifteen or twenty minute span when my head was back on the floatie and I was drifting around the pool in and out of the sun, where there wasn’t a thing in my mind. Nothing. For some people it takes sitting and concentrating on their breath; for me it takes chlorinated water, a blow-up toy, a cheap Mexican beer and a dry breeze. I’m easy.

That evening we were looking for a place to eat and almost by chance stopped at this South Indian place. I forget the name, but it had “100% VEGETARIAN BUFFET” painted in four-foot-high letters across the windows in the front of the place, which faced one of the millions of six-lane roads in Phoenix. It’s a great technique, because it’s so much bigger than a sign, but you would usually associate that kind of promotion with a car sale (“O% FINANCING UNTIL JUNE ‘10!”) or a going-out-of-business sale (“EVERYTHING MUST GO!”).

Aly spent some time in South India a while back, and she helped us order. I can’t say what we had, other than it was all absolutley fantastic—and so much healthier than most of what I’ve been eating.

I have to say that between the morning smoothies and juices and vegetarian pizza, I ate well—and healthy—in Phoenix. Thanks to the hippies. (No, really, we even went to a drum circle. In Phoenix. I’m serious. Mind-blower.)

After nearly a month of recreational eating, I thought it would...

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:17:00 -0400

After nearly a month of recreational eating, I thought it would be good to get a little exercise. Steve and I spent a couple of years hiking dry, volcanic trails while we were in Peace Corps in Cape Verde, so we decided to tackle something on the edges of the Valley.

North Mountain isn’t exactly pretty, with its crown of antennae, nor is it an ambitious hike, but it was nearby, a good workout, and gave us some spectacular views of a vast, flat valley broken up along the horizon by a smattering of dramatic peaks and distant, sleepy ranges.

As an article on The Arizona Republic’s website says, the “summit” of the mountain is actually fenced off. There are more antennae on top of this mountain—towers, cones, huge discs and boxes—than you can imagine. And you can’t truly summit because of them.

As Steve said, “I wish we could see the view from up there.” Amen. I also got a bit of a headache once we were standing as close to the top as we could get, surrounded by TV, radio, cell phone, and God knows how many other forms of signals. But I was also probably a bit dehydrated.

After Ranch Market and a nap out on the lawn, I rallied, and...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:29:00 -0400

After Ranch Market and a nap out on the lawn, I rallied, and Steve, Aly and I headed over to the Harkin Theaters in Scottsdale to see “Seraphine,” a French film about the painter Seraphine de Senlis (also known as Seraphine Louis). A woman who spent most of her life cleaning houses and painting in secrecy, she was “discovered,” almost by accident, by the German art collector Wilhelm Udhe. Udhe is famous for buying Picasso before anyone knew who he was, and championing Henri Rousseau, another “Naive” or “Primitive” French painter. Her story intersects with World War 1, the Great Depression, and the familiar threads of genius, madness, mental illness, fame, and the conflicts between those who “get” avant-garde art and those who don’t.

As we were waiting for our tickets, I couldn’t help but laugh about this automatic mister that was pissing down cool mist on us. I can undertand this when it’s 115 degrees out, but it was a pleasant 80 degrees or so. This is just dumb. I think it’s a bit of a Scottsdale thing—a posh, unneccesary, and mindless use of natural resources. I mean, the place is a f*cking desert, you know?

He kinda looks like Champ, doesn’t he? (You Vermonters...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:36:27 -0400

He kinda looks like Champ, doesn’t he? (You Vermonters know what I’m talking about.)

So, this is Ranch Market Part 2: Groceries. After our meal,...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:23:25 -0400

So, this is Ranch Market Part 2: Groceries.

After our meal, Steve and I started to wander around the market. I was taking photos left and right, mostly in the produce section. I got as far as the differnt types of queso fresco when a security guard tapped me on the shoulder. No photos. I was bummed, but it was understandable. He said I could check with customer service, so I walked over to the window to inquire. After a few minutes, the manager walked up and asked me if she could help. I explained my situation, and she shook her head. She explained, politely, that it was a corporate policy. We had a nice conversation, and she said she completely understood my interest. She gave me a little marketing shpiel about checking out the website and other stores, and then we parted ways.

I kept wandering, seeing things I’d never seen: a multi-worker tortilla assembly line, a fish counter with a half-dozen types of ceviche, bulk bins of dried chiles, a cooler with cheeses and sausages of all varieties, a meat counter longer and more in-depth than anything I had ever seen (have you seen a skinned cow’s head before? Or beef tongue?), and so many things I can’t even remember to mention.

It truly was a supermarket, a great example of an American idea adapted for an immigrant market. It reminded me a bit of the huge Korean markets I used to visit out on 82nd Avenue in Portland, years ago. Only this was bigger, and I dare say, better. If anyone had any curiosity about how Mexicans actually buy and cook their food, one could learn a lot by shopping in this market. I wish I could go more often. For now, I’ll have to remember and check out the few photos I took before I was shot down.

Their website is here. The chain is actually called Pro’s Ranch Markets.

Phoenix was looking sleepy until Steve told me we were going to...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:08:37 -0400

Phoenix was looking sleepy until Steve told me we were going to a Mexican market. I saw a vague image in my mind of a huge outdoor market resembling the one on the Plateau in Praia, the captial of Cape Verde, where Steve and I were Peace Corps volunteers. Who knows why, but that’s what I envisioned.

When we pulled into the parking lot of Ranch Market, I was surprised, and a bit skeptical. It looked like a supermarket. I asked Steve, and he said that’s exactly what it is: a Mexican supermarket.

I was still skeptical… Until we walked in the doors. Then I saw that it was exactly what he said it was, but I don’t think you can imagine a Mexican, or Hispanic, supermarket, until you walk into one. What did I see? Racks of brightly colored cakes, huge multi-gallon tubs of agua fresca in every color in the rainbow, ceiling fans with streamers hanging from them, a dozen long tables with Mexican families eating lunch, half-a-dozen food counters with every kind of food available—and that’s just the entry way. Imagine the biggest supermarket in your town, and instead of being sterile and poorly lit, it looks like there’s a party going on, and instead of mounds of broccoli and tomatoes and cucumbers, there are tiny limes, dried chiles, dried Jamica flowers, cinnamon sticks, and avocados.

Again, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But that’s what you see when you enter. I walked straight towards the signs that said, “5 tacos, $5. Mix and match.” There was a taco station with a steam table with about twelve inserts. There was a different filling in each: chorizo, carnitas, pollo, carne asade, buche, lengua, cabeza, tripa, pastor, and much more. I was beside myself. I knew I had to try something new, so I did a three-taco special with rice and beans, and orders cabeza (beef head), lengua (beef tongue), and buche (pork stomach). Sure, I had a tiny little flutter of, “Hmm, cabeza? Buche?” But hey, why not?

Steve wandered off (he’s a vegetarian), and I started talking up the taco lady. She was skeptical at first, as I was the only whitey in the line, but as soon as I asked, “Why two tortillas?” She did a double-take and warmed up.

“I don’t know. I’m Mexican, and I’ve just always eaten them that way. But I think it may be because if you only had one it could break.”

(Hear that, Sabe?)

I told her my friends and I had thought the same. We started talking about what the best topping woul be for each type of meat, and she told me that chopped onion and cilantro is the best. She also let out a little gasp of pleasure and closed her eyes. I loved it. And then she insisted that their guacamole was great as well, and said she would bring me some.

The thing I liked best about this was that she was openly enthusiastic with hardly any prompting. I didn’t tell her I was traveling, I was a taco enthsiast, a writer, a researcher—any of that. She just loved that someone was asking about her cuisine. It was perfect.

Right as I sat down, Steve joined me. He had bought a cheese tamale and grabbed some pico as I bought us two agua frescas. If anyone out there hasn’t had one of these, it’s essentially a mix of water, sugar, and fruit. I had watermelon (though I just chose by color), and Steve had jamica, which I think may be hibiscus.

It was time to dig into the offal. I grabbed the lengua first, and took a big bite. It was very rich, but not fatty. It had that hard to describe flavor that offal, or “the parts we usual don’t eat” have. A flavor in the same category as hearts and kidneys. Dark, rich, complex. I loved it.

Cabeza was next. It was a lot like a mix of beef and pork, but fattier. Good, but not as unique as the lengua.

Buche was last, and the one I was most uncertain about. Stomach, you know? It ended up being a bit chewy, almost rubbery, and pretty greasy. Not bad, but nothing to rave about. But along with the guac, rice and beans, and a pretty little roasted jalapeno, it rounded out an amazing plate of food.

There was a bit of heat. The taco lady had also given me a little side of pickled red onions and habeneros, and all the sauces and salsas were ripping hot. There’s a photo in here of Steve’s face. If you look close, you can see he has sweat under his eyes. This was always the way we knew the food was hot when we were in Cape Verde. I had to snap a pic.

I don’t know why I love this food so much. I clearly have something for simple, pragmatic cuisine, often with Hispanic origins. Mexican food makes me crazy. What can I say? As Steve pointed out, it could also be that I don’t get it very often. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, right? After all, Steve said that Mexican becomes ordinary when you live near the source. I’ll take it. Maybe it’s another reason to be willing to accept that there’s very little good Mexican food in Vermont.

I spent my summers in Phoenix when I was a kid. The rest of the...

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:16:00 -0400

I spent my summers in Phoenix when I was a kid. The rest of the year I was in Vermont. It’s amazing that after my parents divorced, the only custody deal they could figure out was for my brother and I to spend summers in 115-degree heat and winters surrounded by several feet of snow. Maybe that’s the reason I’m rarely uncomfortable in heat or cold.

This time around, the Valley of the Sun has been full of surprises. Friday night, Ally, Steve and I made pizza at home and then hit First Friday. I used to go to a similar celebration in Portland: the first Friday of each month, the arty area of each city opens up its galleries, and beckons citizens to come out, one and all, to see what great (and not so great) art is being created and shown in their city.

I was excited, as I’ve been able to visit a few museums on this trip—the Portland Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco MOMA—and I was looking forward to seeing a what the locals were up to.

As anyone who has attended a First Friday anywhere knows, part of the evening is looking at art, and part of it is the scene. There’s great people watching, especially because there’s a high hipster count whenever art and self-promotion come together.

But first, I must digress. We used one of my favorite new developments in Phoenix to get downtown: METRO light rail. My dad was a car salesman when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of searing summer days driving from dealership to dealership, listening to guys talk about Kelly Blue Book values. I remember Phoenix—and Scottsdale, where my dad lived—as a place of cars.

I’m not sure what the old man thinks about light rail, but it did what it was designed to do: it moved a lot of people across town without having all those cars on the road. There were times during our trip it was packed, and others when it was quiet. I’ve taken a lot of public transport on this trip—the street car in NOLA, buses and a tram in Portland, the blue line in Chicago—and I have to say that I love public transport.

When we finally made our way to the artistic fringe of downtown Phoenix, most of the action was on a long strip with studio spaces dotted along the sides. It was packed, mostly with young people, who were out checking out paintings, photography, sculpture, and, of course, each other.

At one point there was a row of houses that held some of the coolest, most lively work. Each house had the feeling of being a little collective, with four or five people showing work. A lot of it was youthful, urban, and influenced by illustration. A lot of the photos I posted here are from one house that had a lot of large, wild, colorful Anime-style canvases. So many artists take themselves too seriously, and this was a great example of someone having a lot of fun. And I noticed that more people hung out in this house than any of the others.

After all the visual art, I couldn’t help but dip into Revolver Records. The tiny independent record store was packed with new and used vinyl, and looking at the walls made me salivate. It felt great to soak up all the energy from seeing so many classic and obscure titles and then walk away. (That’s my way of saying I’m too broke to buy anything.) And the photo in this set couldn’t be more perfect: right as my finger pushed the button, a classic, bespectacled hipster kid turned my way.

On the way home, there was a taco truck we had seen on our way in. It was tucked into a little parking lot near the light rail stop. They had a big white truck, a grill, a table with sauces, and a tent with four picnic tables out. I’d say the clientele was 90% hispanic. There was steam and smoke billowing up from the grill. The scent of carmelizing flesh was heady. But at that point, I had already eaten a pizza feast, a tamale downtown, and drank my fair share of beer. Did I wimp out? Sure. Am I starting to feel all the excess of the last few weeks? Perhaps. But there have been so many tacos since then, let me tell you….

Steve and I walked out of Ernie’s Cantina, after a couple...

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 12:50:00 -0400

Steve and I walked out of Ernie’s Cantina, after a couple of ice-cold PBRs, and hit the closest quik-stop for some Tecate. (We’re living high on the hog here in Phoenix.)

I love how you can tell something about the local population by the food in the local gas station. In Vermont, you find lots of trail mix and granola bars. In Phoenix? Limon chips by Frito Lay. And these “Hot & Spicy” pork cracklins from El Sabroso. I think you can find pork rinds in VT, but not with a translation at the bottom that says, “Fried Out Pork Fat With Attached Skin.” Fantastic. (My belly didn’t exactly agree, though. Hmm.)

"He introduced himself as a young man of a certain background and renown, but he was still a horse."

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 12:31:00 -0400

““He introduced himself as a young man of a certain background and renown, but he was still a horse.””

- Caption on a very nice print I saw last night at First Friday in Downtown Phoenix. I neglected to get the artist’s name.

The Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market. Now, I like food. And I...

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:22:00 -0400

The Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market.

Now, I like food. And I like to eat. Over the last ten years, a handful of movements, from Slow Food to Farm to Table to the focus on localvore eating have slowly brought us more locally produced, artisanal, out-and-out high-quality ingredients, from meats to cheeses to produce to wine. I love all of these things. I’m lucky enough to live in Vermont, which is becoming a artisanal cheese heaven. Long gone are the days when Vermont was known only for Cabot Cheddar.

But I was floating a few feet above the ground during our trip to the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market last weekend. Our new friend Hilery walked us through the market, both pointing out the best vendors for whatever it was you wanted—mushrooms, seafood, tomatoes, chocolates—and shopping for the epic meal she had planned to cook on Saturday night.

I have never seen so many high-quality ingredients in one place. Ever. The sheer variety was astounding. Italian olive oils, black truffles, a half-a-dozen varieties of plums, dry-cured meats, fresh oysters, coffee, heaping boxes of heirloom tomatoes… Should I go on? This place is a dream for cooks. And even though I wasn’t planning on cooking a thing, I could still feast with my eyes and dream. I wasn’t the only one. You should have seen the look on Anna’s face as she struggled with whether or not to buy one of the most delicate, beautiful orchids we’ve ever seen. “Do you think I could bring it back on the plane? Would they let me? Oh, is this just an impulse? It’s sooo pretty! Gorgeous!”

The great part is, we were in for a treat. Hilery, one half of Mike-and-Hilery, who we were staying with, was once a chef and is planning a restaurant. I won’t go into detail, but let’s just say it’s a very small place with a focus on Italian food and a wine list featuring California’s bounty of oenophilic bliss. Hilery and Mike know as much about food—and wine—as anyone I know, and walking through the market with her was a revelation. This woman knows how to shop for food, weaving from vendor to vendor, picking cheeses, meats, veggies—a pork butt here, Mediterranean mussels there, a bright orange Chicken of the Woods mushroom, a bottle of Sicilian olive oil. Let’s just say it built quite a bit of anticipation for what is a long story involving a great crowd, a lot of wine, several courses, and the finest pasta dish I’ve had in a long time.

I have a photo of the menu, but it’s in Italian. I’ll ask Anna to translate it and then I’ll tell the story later…. For now, here are some photos.

This is a photo of the side of a truck on Mission Street in San...

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:47:18 -0400

This is a photo of the side of a truck on Mission Street in San Francisco. If anyone can explain what it means, please let me know. Otherwise, it’s simply awesome.

The SFMOMA. The Richard Avedon exhibit. It was easy to enter the...

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:39:00 -0400

The SFMOMA. The Richard Avedon exhibit. It was easy to enter the show and be bowled over. From the early ’50s fashion shoots to the early ’80s portraits of unknown Americans from the West, Avedon kept it real—and inventive. Though little of his ’90s output was shown—it seems that many photos from his years at The New Yorker weren’t included—there was enough to not only understand him, but see him transition from the early ad days to the stark, understated portraits. God bless the white seamless and extraordinary models.

Oh, and there’s other stuff here. I took some photos of sculpture, as well as the tea we had, with a calm, sweet wedge of raspberry cake. And tea. And a latte from Blue Bottle. And the hipsters who served us were so funny. I’ve never felt such an overwhelmingly distainful vibe from a guy who serves coffee and cake. I mean, coffee and cake! They’re both pleasurable things!

Tartine Bakery & Cafe is located at the corner of Guerrero...

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:26:00 -0400

Tartine Bakery & Cafe is located at the corner of Guerrero and 18th Street in San Francisco. We may have found this place on our own, but we knew about it because Anna’s agent, Kitty, worked with the folks from Tartine on their book deal a while back. So we’ve had a copy in Anna’s apartment for months. We’ve drooled over it, made exclamations, and insisted that if we had a chance, we’d visit and eat at the famed, James Beard-award-winning bakery.

And that’s what we did! And as with most things that interest white people in San Francisco, there was a high level of both hipsterism and artistry in the food and the venue. I’ve posted photos of the art installation in the cafe: it’s a mix of large ink drawings on paper and what looked like ink-and-water-painted text on the walls. It has a very animalistic-horror-comic-book vibe going on, or, as Anna put it, “It looks like the kind of thing a kid in junior high would doodle in his notebook, but reinterpreted by someone who went to art school.” I think it’s hipster-highbrow-meets-Napoleon Dynamite. (You know how hipsters are all into deer heads and taxidermy and all that stuff? This feels like part of that, except with a little fantastical regression mixed in.)

But what about the food? Oh, well, I didn’t take many photos of the food until we’d plowed through it. We waited until about 12:30 to go and eat, so not only was there a line, but we were so starved we didn’t know what to order. So we went with Anna’s roommate Ben’s recommendation of the bread pudding. I wanted chocolate, but not too much chocolate, so I asked for a chocolate croissant. And we picked a ham and cheese croissant as well. And a coconut macaroon for dessert. And coffee.

The bread pudding was everything you’d want it to be: soft and chewy, sweet, creamy, and topped with huckleberries and peach slices. Comfort food at its best. The croissants were huge, which made them very American, but the chocolate was gooey and the ham and cheese savory and satisfying. The coffee was pretty typical (kind of a surprise for San Francisco), but it hit the spot. Anna was in heaven here, and insisted that the pastries were some of the best she’s had, which is saying a lot, as sweets are her thing (and she’s spent time eating pastries in Paris).

It was the kind of morning/afternoon where you sit, relax, people watch, and scheme the rest of your day. It was a beautiful, sunny hour and we came up with the idea of going to the SFMOMA to see the Richard Avedon retrospective. Which we did. Photos are on their way!

San Francisco, TK

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:15:34 -0400

I’ve been back from San Fran for a couple of days, and yet, no blogging! As amazing as it sounds, I’ve actually been working. Transcribing a great interview takes time! Luckily, at State of Mind, we have interns who help us with this task. When I’m freelancing, I’m not so lucky.

There are plenty of photos, text, and video to come from SF, so check back in when you get really bored. Tacos, coffee, tomatoes, salumi, and Hilery’s Saturday Night Epic are all on their way.

The joys of being home are simple: a familar bedroom, friends, a...

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:32:00 -0400

The joys of being home are simple: a familar bedroom, friends, a homemade dinner, great stories, and laundry.

I was home for about 20 hours, and in that time I was able to take a nap, interview Jason “Liggy” Liggett—Wilco’s lighting designer—eat pho ga and shrimp spring rolls, be treated to homemade pizza by Miss and Sabin, and drink IPAs and watch South Park. (I also did laundry.)

A word about those pizzas. I have to emphasize here that Miss and Sabin are as talented as any cooks I’ve ever known. They have both subtlety and confidence in the kitchen, and work together as only an old, almost-married couple can.

Pizza #1: Fresh Junior’s crust with bourbon glazed local apples, carmelized onions, cheddar cheese, fresh sage and a drizzle of balsamic reduction. I wish I had a photo of that one, though it wouldn’t matter. You can’t eat a photo.

Pizza #2: Same crust with roasted root vegetables from the garden: three kinds of carrots, and beets. All the veggies carmelized nicely and that sweetness was counterpunched by some Maytag blue cheese. Shazam! (A bit of balsamic pushed it over the top, of course.)

Pizza #3: Fresh heirloom tomatos and basil out of the garden, with some mozzarella. Whew. This was a nice contrast from the first two.

Yeah!

Ah, the final day in town. Portland, I’ve loved you…...

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:12:00 -0400

Ah, the final day in town. Portland, I’ve loved you… again. What a visit: biking to work with Isaac, pizza and IPA from Hopworks, Rio Bravo and the Portland Art Museum with Noah and Elizabeth, tasting wines at Sokol Blosser, and picnicing with friends as the Vaux’s swifts performed a ritual with 20,000 bodies.

And on that final day, I ate the most outrageous thing I’ve ever been presented with: the OMG! burger from BrunchBox. I posted a photo about it already, but here are some more. Along with my morning coffee at Barista. Billy was welcoming, made a recommendation, and then proceeded to explain the roots of vacuum brewing to me as he made my coffee. Which was perhaps the most subtle, flavorful solution I’ve ever sipped.

Noah and I closed out the day drinking pints with our old high-school friend, Nancy Kirkpatrick (Wheeler). A few old stories, plenty of “What is _________ up to?”, and promises to see each other soon. (They were sincere!)

Off to Vermont and San Francisco!

(I’m actually already in San Francisco, but I haven’t had time to post these photos yet.)