Well folks, we have finished the first letter of the alphabet, and the last A may just have been the best.  After traipsing from borough to borough (plus Elizabeth, New Jersey) for our first 11 countries, we needed look no farther for Azerbaijan than Cafe Sim-Sim, 312 Ditmas Ave. in our own neighborhood of Kensington, Brooklyn.

As our core trio would once again be joined by friends, I thought it was best to call ahead to make reservations.  After a good 25 attempts on which a woman’s pleasantly recorded voice told me that my call could not be completed, I came to the conclusion that the listed phone number for this place was defunct, so I decided to head over there to make sure it actually still existed. read more »

On another one of those bitterly cold, snowy nights we’ve been experiencing so often this winter, we ventured out of the warmth of our Brooklyn residences and made the trek to the Lower East Side, where we met two friends at Cafe Katja.  It’s a small place, with a nice bar and just a few tables.  We were seated fairly quickly, which was lucky because not too long after our arrival the place became slam packed. read more »

For the 10 readers who care, I take full responsibility for the delay in posting the details of our trip to eat Australian food. Because I appreciate you, dear readers, I will also provide you with a number of worthless excuses. I was busy. I was too full of ribs and pulled pork. I had exams. I was too excited about Tim Tebow and the 2009 Florida Gators. I was serving on jury duty. Thank you for understanding. read more »

Armenia marked the first time all members of our core trio were not fully involved in the mission.  Noquar was preoccupied with his future outside of this project, so the Nomad and I grudgingly left him to his final exams and trekked to Bayside, in the outer reaches of Queens, where we found Sevan Restaurant, 216-09 Horace Harding Expy, Queens, NY 11364.  Bayside is a strange land pairing the most nondescript houses you might ever see (the Nomad compared them to a child’s drawing of a house) with the most absurdly ornate Christmas decorations this suburban product has ever seen.  We parked the car amid all this nonsense and braved the biting cold wind to find Armenia. read more »

It was a blistering cold evening when we headed out to Queens for our Argentina experience, one of those where you are chilled entirely to the bone after just walking one block.  Even when you are wearing your heaviest winter coat, hat, and scarf.  And this was November!

Luckily we warmed up right away upon entering La Porteña (74-25 37th Ave, Jackson Heights, 11372).  The hosts’ smiles, tasteful wood paneling, and soft light quickly relaxed our shivers.  Knick knacks, Argentine collectibles, memorabilia and photographs of Carlos Gardel adorned the walls.  We settled in to our table, and prepared to devour some meat. read more »

It may appear that we’ve broken two rules of this game.  We left NYC to find the Angolan food described in this entry.  But our travels only took us to nearby Elizabeth, NJ, which is certainly well-situated in the greater metropolitan area (just over the water from Staten Island).  And, because it is home to what was formerly NYC’s only Ikea, most New Yorkers know the town and consider it an extension of the city since most of their furnishings came from there.  So, forgive us, dear readers.  We left the 5 boroughs, but not so much as to lose the heart of the journey. In all honesty, we knew Jersey would come into play at some stage.  It’s inescapable.

The second rule we kind-a sort-a broke was getting food from Antigua and Barbuda before sampling Angolan.  Though this is an apparent breach of parameters, I have an excellent argument otherwise.  Late in October, I rang up the Permanent Mission of Angola to the United Nations, to inquire about Angolan eateries in the area.  The charming and friendly receptionist told me that there were in fact no Angolan restaurants in the city.  Sad news indeed.  We chatted for a while, and I asked her where she goes to eat food from her homeland.  She answered, “At my house!  I cook Angolan food every day.”  To which I naturally replied, “Well, can I come over to your house?”  And she said yes!  But then decided it would be even better if we came to her church on November 9, when they would be having a celebration of their congregation’s second year.  A feast was planned following the service, which would include all sorts of Angolan dishes.  That was certainly worth the wait, so we went ahead and checked out Antigua and Barbuda in the meantime.

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Our resourceful Nomad found Antigua & Barbuda at Pyramid Exotic Bar and Restaurant 3825 White Plains Rd. in the Bronx.  What happened to Angola you ask?  Oh faithless reader, the Nomad had already lined it up for Nov. 9, so she forged ahead not wanting to break our momentum.

When we walked in, there were maybe three or four people standing around the bar and we were greeted somewhat warily by a tall, solid, serious-looking woman. Noquar timidly asked if they were serving food because it certainly wasn’t apparent.  The room was mostly empty with a live music setup in the front and two folding tables along the wall, the larger of which was being monopolized by a kid and his coloring.  The woman seemed a little confused as she told us they were, in fact, serving food (which, by the way, only happens on Fridays and Saturdays).   “Antiguan food?” we asked.

These two words triggered a warm, broad smile.  She still clearly had no idea how or why we had ended up there but she was thrilled we had. The poor kid and his coloring were promptly cleared from the table and we were installed.  There was no menu, so she listed what she had, and since we had no idea what she was talking about, we asked her to give us three of her favorite dishes. read more »

Because we couldn’t eat real Andorran food prepared by real Andorrans we went to Mercat in Manhattan to try Catalan food made by people who had once visited Catalonia. The room was tastefully lit and we sat at a heavy wooden table in the back of the restaurant. There were two shallow baskets containing plum tomatoes and green chilies on the counter in front of the open kitchen. A walk-in wine cellar, a large shelf, was built in to the wall above our heads.

On the very back wall of Mercat was painted a mural that looked like a drawing. In it, what I took to be a Spanish family sat around a long table. The women wore handkerchiefs on their heads and the man wore the clothes of a laborer. On the table were dishes and one steaming pot.  Maybe they were waiting for a more substantial repast, maybe someone outside the scene was preparing pots filled with rabbit stew and bringing in the wineskin from where it had been hung the previous night, but their eyes revealed their world to us. The artist included simple, single short lines, parallel to each other above and below the simple black dot eyeballs of each of her subjects denoting worry. These people were tired, and the lines in their faces betrayed their weariness and their fear that they would have to scrape by for another few days. They were tired and had little to share with us. They may have resented our intrusion into their lives.

In light of our recent forays into the outer boroughs and our research into our next country, Angola, we had started to expect welcomes into worlds that weren’t our own, but this trip served as a reminder that a lot of what people seem to be whispering and writing about Manhattan may regrettably be true. As we studied our surroundings, I couldn’t help but think that the worn down cobblestones running just outside had witnessed so much more than the conversations and goings-on of the well to do residents that lived at the architectural monstrosity across the street at 40 Bond.

40 Bond St, NYC. Photo by Phillip Ritz

We had some interesting things. Grilled chilis, some spicy potatoes, a pasta with shrimp and black squid ink sauce. We had a decent bottle of wine and some cheese.  Everything was pretty good, but a tad expensive.  Maybe we’re the peasants, striving for something we think might sometime be attainable.  Peasants are supposed to be marginalized, some things are meant for people that can truly enjoy and understand them.  I felt that the simple, comfortable food here was somehow meant to be way beyond us.  We finished our bottle of wine and went to Red Mango.

We’ve hit our first big challenge.  Andorra is a tiny, landlocked principality nestled in the Pyrenees mountains on the border between France and Spain.  Of its 72,000 residents, at least 67% of those are from elsewhere in Europe, mainly neighboring France and Spain, as well as Italy, Britain, and Portugal.  The national language is Catalan, which is also spoken in certain regions of Spain (including Catalonia, where you would find Barcelona), the Italian island of Sardinia, and the Roussillon region of Southern France.  Andorra’s main industry is tourism (i.e. skiing) and it’s tax haven status also attracts some wealthy types.

We started out by crawling the Internet in search of any mention of “andorra” and “New York.”  Nothing turned up except a few mentions of the UN Mission to Andorra.  So a friend of the Nomad actually rang them up for us (thanks again!) and they told her that in fact there are no Andorran restaurants in New York City.  Hardly surprising considering that there are only 28,000 or so Andorrans in the world.  The person at the UN Mission recommended that we go to Le Bernadin, as chef Eric Ripert used to live in Andorra (this is corroborated by his biography on the restaurant’s website).  Anyone who lives in NYC or has watched Top Chef probably knows of this restaurant and its famous chef.  And anyone who has been there can tell you it’s a seafood restaurant (not the type of cuisine I would associate with a landlocked, mountainous country), and it’s also one of the city’s more expensive. I hear it’s fantastic though.

We decided not to go that route.  It would be hard to justify a very pricey meal that wouldn’t even quite fit our mission.  But we still had to give Andorra its due diligence.  We came up with a two part plan:

1. Make Andorran food at home
2. Go to a Catalonian restaurant

This is the story of part one.

I started out by cruising the web for Andorran recipes.  There were very few in English, but of those that I did come across, one dish was mentioned on nearly every site: Trinxat.   It’s a potato and cabbage pancake with smoky bacon, described by europeancuisines.com as, “probably one of the best-known dishes of Andorra.” And the recipe looked pretty easy.  I figured this had to be the thing to try.  Apparently it looks like this:

My methodology involved combining a few recipes I found for this dish, and boiling them down to the common elements.  It seemed simple enough.  Here’s is what I came up with:

4 large russet potatoes, peeled

1 head green cabbage

1 package bacon (12 strips)

3 tbs olive oil

2 cloves garlic, peeled

salt and pepper

(you are also supposed to use fatback, but since I couldn’t find any, I left it out.  Probably a critical missed step.)

1.  Discard the outer layers of the cabbage.  Cut the cabbage into fourths.  Bring a large pot of water to a boil, and boil cabbage for about 45 minutes.  Once that is going bring another large pot to boil, and boil the potatoes for about 25 minutes.  Allow both to cool.

2.  Discard the core of the cabbage, and press cabbage to release water.  Put cabbage and potatoes in a large bowl and mash together.  Salt to taste.

3.  Start cooking the bacon in batches.  Set on a plate covered with a paper towel to absorb grease.

4.  Drain off some of the grease from the pan, and then add garlic.  Cook for about 2 minutes until its about to burn, and then mix it in with the potato/cabbage mixture.

5.  (Here is the part where you are supposed to add the fatback to the pan, and cook it for a few minutes, but since I didn’t have any, I left that part out.  Did leave some extra bacon grease in there though.).  Add about half of the potato mixture to the same pan, and spread it around until it’s in the shape of about a 1/2″ think pancake.  Cook over medium high heat for about 10 minutes.

6.  Here is the hard part:  put a plate over the skillet and the flip it over, so the pancake is browned side up on the plate.  Slide it back in to the skillet and cook for 10 more minutes until it’s finished. Crumble the bacon, add it to the top of the pancake, and serve.

Easy, right?  Wrong!  I attempted this flipping of the pancake twice, and met with disaster each time.  The first time, I was using a very slick, brand new, deep Calphalon skillet.  As soon as I went to flip it, the food just slipped right out and landed in a pile on my stove.  I figured it had to be the skillet.  Way too slippery!

So I went for a cast iron the second time around.  It wouldn’t brown.  I waited and waited and finally got too hungry to wait any more.  This time when I went to flip it, I found it the skillet was too heavy to hold with one hand, and hold a plate with the other.  So I got some help.  But the pancake was stuck.  And once again I ended up with a pile, luckily this time I managed to get it on plates, and throw some bacon on top.  Below you have the result.  Not as pretty as the picture above.  But I imagine the taste was somewhat similar…maybe.  Kind of an Irish-ish dish to my taste, but good nonetheless.

And there you have it.  If anyone else decides to try this, I recommend including the step that involves the fatback, and using a light weight, shallow skillet.  Let me know if you are successful, and send in some pictures.

Part two coming soon…

Mediterranean Coffee Shop & Grill

25-75 Steinway St., Astoria, Queens, NY

It turns out New York is short on Algerians, which on consideration makes perfect sense.  Algerians are far more likely to immigrate to Paris or Marseille, where there are already large, deeply rooted North African communities.  Still, after some digging on a few online community boards, we discovered that the small Algerian community that does exist here has found a home among the hookah bars and North African groceries of Steinway St. in Astoria, Queens.

The neighborhood is primarily Egyptian, but we found a nice and well patronized Algerian spot there.  The dining room had a buoyant, communal feel with large long tables, and it was packed when we arrived (though it had completely cleared out by the time we left at around 9:30).  We were led through the restaurant and outdoors to a concrete slab graced with a few tables and folding chairs. If you were so inclined, it wouldn’t be too hard to imagine yourself in a small courtyard somewhere in the casbah of Algiers.

It hadn’t crossed our minds that Ramadan had started.  Everyone had come in after sunset to break his or her fast for the day.  Apparently, the restaurant discards its usual menu during the holy month, so everyone who comes in after sundown gets the same traditional post-fast feast, which suited us perfectly and added to the perceived authenticity of the experience.  Our waitress (who also turned out to be the chef) was warm and worked hard to make us feel welcome. Although she seemed to have an excellent command of English, her food vocabulary was strangely limited.  So our efforts to find out exactly what we were eating came to very little.  I’ll do my best do describe anyway.

We were started out with some orange juice obviously meant to get our glucose levels back up after a day without food.  This was quickly followed by a tomato-based soup  packed with vegetables, chickpeas, rice, and chunks of meat that we had a hard time identifying (after further research it turned out to be lamb, and the soup is called harira).  The soup was accompanied by a plate piled with a ratatouille-like dish mostly comprised of tomato and green peppers, two burek, which are crisp, almost egg-roll-style pastries filled with seasoned beef, and an Algerian version of the Indian confection, jalebi.  By the way, for those of you who have been paying attention, we also encountered burek in the last entry.  Algerian burek is much different from Albanian burek, however.  It’s more of a roll than a pie. Next came chopped liver in a punchy tomato-based sauce that I associate with a lot of North African food I’ve had, along with plates of prunes and raisins cooked in a sweet and tart syrup. The bread that accompanied everything was similar to Turkish bread and was perfect for soaking up the soup and liver sauce. Finally, for dessert, we got some healthy-sized chunks of fresh watermelon. We topped everything off with some incredibly strong coffee with milk and tea steeped with fresh mint leaves and lemon.  Our waitress then brought us some more jalebi and some delicious sticky sesame biscuits.

The entire meal seemed designed to provide as many essential nutrients as possible for a fasting body.  Even Noquar, who had been struggling mightily for most of the day after his exploits the previous evening, seemed to brighten as we worked our way through all the food.  From the vegetables in the soup, to the iron and protein in the liver, to the fiber and natural sugars in the dried fruits, we went home feeling very well nourished… perhaps even too well nourished by the time all that fiber had worked its way through our systems.