An Exciting Night in the Big City

Sure, we’re living the high life here, catching bad Bollywood movies at a skeevy theater in Jackson Heights. Going to the Bronx Zoo. Playing Skee-Ball in the ever-shrinking arcades of Coney Island. But what is a typical weeknight like in our non-stop go-go new life?

Around 5:30 I shut my laptop after spending a few hours getting nowhere with some configuration files I have to rewrite in order to make my team’s stuff integrate with the Flagship Product. I took out an old mixing bowl and threw in some boneless chicken breasts, poured some soy sauce over them, added some garlic, then changed my mind about what I wanted to do and added some yogurt, some ginger paste (a fine invention available at your local Indo-Pak market), cumin, coriander and tumeric. I heated up a skillet, put in some oil and a pat of butter and started cooking some of the chicken.

I did some dishes, turned the chicken, did more dishes. I was on the second batch when Lenore got home from work. She split open a spaghetti squash, drizzled some oil, sprinkled some herbs, and put it in the oven.

The chicken was ready long before the squash was. In the end, it was tasty and wholesome. I put the rest of the considerable amount of chicken in the refrigerator.

The other day, Lenore had found the charger for the digital camera battery. She offloaded the photos that had been on it, most going back to just before the move. I sent some e-mail. Distant thunder rumbled. The wind-up monkey in the window clattered, wobbling in the wind.

Around 9:30, the apartment was still warm from the day’s near-90-degree heat and the cooking, despite eight or nine open windows and a breeze. We put on shoes, grabbed our keys, went for a walk along Broadway (not that Broadway, the Queens one), past shuttered 99-cent stores, hookah smokers outside the Moroccan cafe, darkened butcher shops and bakeries, past the strange bookstore, past the crazy nativist radiator-cabinet-maker’s shop with windows plastered with screeds against immigrants that must be great for business around here. Past shoe stores and Irish pubs and drugstores and newsstands and Croatian bars and the nightclub that smells like a urinal cake. After twenty-odd blocks the commercial strip petered out at the corner of Crrescent Street. We were standing by a taqueria we’d never given much thought to before. The front windows were open to a walk-up counter. A sign in Spanish bragged that their taquero, a gentleman named Alberto, was the best taquero in New York, and furthermore, that he is 100% Pueblan.

We looked over the list of meats on the takeout menu and at the wide steel pot on the grill filled with pig parts and fat sausages swimming in gravy and grease, a garland of grilled whole green onions laid on top. In accordance with my Unofficial Taqueria Rule when not acutally hungry but confronted by an unexplored taqueria some distance from home, we shared one involving the least-common meat on the list, in this case oreja. “You want ear?” asked the counterwoman.

We better understood why you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. For one thing, ear meat is thick, rubbery and cartilaginous, not much like silk at all. It also leaves a sticky residue on your fingers, what with that layer of cartilage and all. The meat, when combined with the nice chipotle-spiked salsa, tasted a bit like a hot dog, probably the sum of the pork, cartilage and smoke things going on. It’s not my favorite taco filling, but it’s not my least-favorite, either.

The wind kicked up. The moon was haloed by an orange haze. The city had issued a smog and ozone warning today. We crossed the street and walked back home, past the Japanese convenience store, past the grand old catering hall being gutted to make way for another megagym, past banks and hair salons and cafes. The apartment had cooled down some. The cat wanted to be fed.

 

Consumer Guide to the Meat Products of Southeastern Astoria, Part II

Well, not really. But the folks at Muncan do make some fiiiiiiine sopressata, Tirolean salami, capicola (chewy until pan-fried, at which point it becomes pretty amazing) and some good hot dogs.

My current programming gig  is pretty nifty. I’m doing what I set out to do — Rails development — and I’m getting to make use of things I learned doing my own projects over the preceding year like authentication and deployment, and learning new things too, like how OpenID works.

It’s telecommuting, though, and pretty extreme telecommuting at that. My project’s team has me and one other person here in New York, the project lead an hour or so out of the city in Connecticut, two part-time consultants another hour deeper into Connecticut, one coder each in Montreal and Ohio, a testing/QA specialist in Switzerland, and a Linux sysadmin building the infrastructure working from home in New Zealand.

Today I had to bring two coworkers up to speed on some deployment stuff I hammered out over the last few days. One was the sysadmin in New Zealand. We did it, as most discussions tend to be, via instant messaging, while I was wrapping up for the day and he was making coffee or whatever it is people drink at 7AM in New Zealand. Probably something with lamb in it. My manager had started the morning expressing a bit of regret over not all working together in an office at times like this, where a lot of knowledge would be transferred by osmosis — and by poking heads in doors and leaning over the tops of cubicles. Instead I spent my whole morning tutoring one colleague, and the late afternoon walking another through most of the same steps.

The working-at-the-kitchen-table thing gets old quickly. It’s isolating work, and though solitude is important for productivity, so is interaction with colleagues. Instant messaging, sporadic email and a weekly around-the-horn conference call doesn’t quite do it.

Did I mention that we had some reet fantastic Issaan food at Zaab, a tiny sliver of a restaurant under the train tracks in Jackson Heights a couple of nights ago? There are some sixty “spicy salads” (their words, not mine) on the menu and we had two — one the usual green papaya thing, only more fiery and pungent, crunchy with bits of largish dried shrimp heads and tails, and another completely unlike it, a jumble of chewy, crisp hunks of jerky-like pork, pork-rind-y blocks of aggressively fried fish, and craggy slabs of chicken, all strewn with bits of crisp vegetables and insanely hot but brightly flavored. Mmmm.

 

Consumer Guide, Salty Meat Edition

IL BAMBINO AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR ASTORIA’S NEXT TWO DECADES, (34-08 31st Ave., Astoria, NY): We were in town a couple of months ago and walked past this place while it was being readied for opening. The guy we spoke to sounded Irish. The menus were for panini and Northern Italian small plates. I said to L., this isn’t Astoria food — it’s hipster food. When I lived in the neighborhood during most of the ’90s, it was always supposedly on the brink of becoming trendy, but whenever someone tried to open a cafe or bar or restaurant catering not to one of the entrenched immigrant and ethnic groups but to young professionals and fresh-out-of-college hipsters moving to the neighborhood, it flopped. The Brick Cafe, which opened shortly before I left the nabe in 1999, was perhaps the first exception, and even it drew somewhat on neighborhood tropes (mostly tad Italian food, glass-enclosed sidewalk cafe) so as not to feel too alien.

Things have changed. Friday night we went there for a bite and the place is not flopping. Apart from the two of us, every other table was occupied by a big party opening bottle after bottle of wine (BYO for now) and ordering a steady stream of plates. We got a neat little broad-bean-chorizo-pesto salad and split a terrific panino ($8) of prosciutto, fig spread and gorgonzola. The party taking up the rest of the place looked like midcareer publishing types. The music was indie rock, the staff multiculti. In otherwords, there was nothing Queens about the place. It was pure brownstone Brooklyn. The surrounding stretch of sleepy 31st. Ave seems to be becoming Park Slope with its “Himalayan” Teahouse (ersatz Zen food, half sort of Himalayan if you squint, half pilates-instructor Japanese) and that fusiony, interesting Japanese place down the street.

I have mixed feelings about this. The food was delicious, the place was fun and inviting, and I suppose the emerging critical mass of transplanted college grads means we might not have to leave the neighborhood constantly for a social life. But it also means it’s only a matter of time before many of the things that have made Astoria so applealing for many years now — the stable, multigenerational family character, the vibrant ethnic businesses, the tight sense of community — begin to give way to Everyplace Else. Italian bakeries will give way to “artisianal” breadmakers with less soul and prices three times higher, neighborhood shops will go upscale, the cafes where you can forget about work and converse for hours over coffee and baklava will get free wifi and industrial scones shipped in from New Jersey. On the other hand, with all these native English speakers, the neighborhood might get a decent bookstore. (GRADE: A MINUS)

THE PASTRAMI FROM MUNCAN FOOD PRODUCTS (near 44th and Broadway, Astoria, NY): Across the street from a Bosnian butcher shop, a few blocks from an Italian salumeria, Muncan specializes in Central and East European smoked meat products. Run by what I understand to be a Romanian from Serbia or something like that, they’ve got mititei, dry sausage, blood sausage, bratwurst, weisswurst, Hunagian, German and Croatian styles of salami, bolognas, hot dogs, several headcheeses, beef and lamb basturma, smoked ribs, pigs’ feet, pigs’ ears, slab bacon, pork shanks, veal loaf, pork loaf, pork butt, and just so you don’t need to make too many other stops besides picking up some beer or vodka or slivovitz or raki, they’ve also got a few kinds of burek, loaves of bread and wheels of kashkaval.

It could take years to try everything, especially if I don’t want to die of a heart attack, but I can tell you that this one kind of Croatian dry sausage we tried was quite good, and more importantly that the beef pastrami is just plain extraordinary. It’s firm, juicy, smoky, garlicky, peppery and not excessively salty. Crusted in spices and the thinnest layer of fat, it’s an absolute marvel. I called L. at work to tell her about it as I sliced bits off for breakfast.

“It’s off the hook,” i said.

“Did you just say ‘off the hook’?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, god,” she said to a coworker. “S. just used the phrase ‘off the hook.’ Get on the phone. Tell Amy what you just said.”

“Hi Amy.”

“Hi.”

“This pastrami from a place down the street? It’s off the hook.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Sure, she laughed then. Shortly after getting home, though, she tried some.

“Oh, my, god. This is… off the hook.”

“I told you.”

We finished off the rest of the slab with some rye bread and mustard.

“That was off the hook.”

Oh, and at $6.99/lb. I’d have to be an idiot to buy supermarket cold cuts ever again. It sure is nice that the Cold War, bad IMF and World Bank policy and strife in neighboring Yugoslavia brought so many people here from the Balkans during the 1990s. Yum. GRADE: A PLUS