Trench press

My round up on everything growing up along the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (a k a, "The Trench") is in today's NY Post.

The Real Deal was nice enough to link to it. (As was Brownstoner -- although they were slightly cheeky. But, hey, it's a free country.)

I'm really looking forward to that Pok Pok!

Bucking, a trend

Percy's is the best dollar slice in NYC.

There -- I said it.

I actually said it more than a week ago in the Post (but for some reason didn't blog about it until now.)

Of course, just because Percy's is the best, doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of pretty good single dollar options.

Two Bros., which has been popping up all around the city is pretty excellent, when you consider that it's only a dollar. (My main criticism of 2 Bros. is that it's a little doughy, for me.)

Likewise, 99 Cent Fresh Pizza isn't bad -- which also has multiple locations. (That slice is a touch greasy, but also not bad.)

The owner of Percy's (Jim McGown) said something interesting though:

He thinks that all pizza is either going to become $1 slices, or $4 slices, within the next couple of years.

The market can't really sustain the middle-range slice. If $1 slices are decent, that's what people will eat. If they want something truly spectacular, they'll shell out $3 or $4. (Particularly in NYC where people will pay for the cachet of getting a great slice.) But where is the market for the $2 or $2.50 slice?

It might be lights out for them.

In the meantime, check out Percy's.

Let's go Metro!

This is my roundup of everything that's happening in Downtown Brooklyn's MetroTech area.

The stuff about the snake is gleaned from my own personal experience -- I remember coming out of the Fulton Mall's A&S and walking past the defunct movie theater (the same movie theater where I saw such '80s classics as "The Karate Kid" and "Back to the Future" when they first came out) and saw a snake charmer with what looked like a 9 foot long snake!

I nearly ran! (I managed to just walk quickly away.)

The area still has a ways to go, but, yes, it has made some remarkable progress.

Happy new year!

Here's wishing you a (slightly late) Happy Year of the Dragon!

I actually wrote an account of a food crawl I took in Chinatown a couple of weekends ago here.

Of the places I went to, Peking Duck House was my favorite.

...But as a Chinese-American friend of mine said when she heard the list of places I had visited: "Ah... you had Chinese food for white people."

It's sort of true. To get a really good Chinese meal, I almost think Manhattan Chinatown is over. You have to go to Flushing. (There are, of course, great and authentic Chinese restaurants in Manhattan -- but very few of them are in Chinatown.) But if you're looking for a place to celebrate, check out Legend for some seriously good Sichuan food.

Good DR

Yes, your schlubby friend fired his first gun ever last November at Casa de Campo, in the Dominican Republic. (The accompanying story was published in the New York Post on Tuesday.)

I have to admit (New York liberal objections aside), it was kinda fun.

Although, I will also admit: I was not as good a shot as I expected to be.

All those years of playing Duck Hunt on Nintendo apparently don't translate into good shooting skills.

Oh well. I'm probably never going to shoot another gun again. But worth trying once.

Humm dinger!

Daniel Humm, the great chef at Eleven Madison Park, spoke to me about his favorite dining spots in New York -- you can read it here.

If you don't know Mr. Humm and his cooking, he's pretty hot right now. Adam Platt recently declared 11 Mad the best restaurant in the city. (Better than Per Se, better than Masa, better than Jean-Georges, better than Daniel... although, according to the Plattmeister not a 5 star restaurant. Huh?)

He also got his third Michelin star, and has the Eleven Madison Park cookbook out. (Which is a very gorgeous book -- even if the recipes are really a little too hard to try out at home. But that's the case with most celebrity chef cookbooks.)

I went to 11 Mad last year -- for my fiancee's birthday. It was pretty delish. (Not the single greatest meal I've ever had, but unquestionably excellent.) I have the feeling that he's entering the celeb chef realm -- so you might hear a lot more about him over the next couple of years.

And Humm's food picks around the city were good ones. Very little was haute or chichi -- a lot of them were hidden and secret. Enjoy!

Do do that fondue that you do so well...

My little history of fondue and its recent revival can be read here.

I don't see the sidebar part online -- which is all about the etiquette of eating fondue -- but there are essentially four rules:

1) Don't double dip. (Who are you, George Costanza?)

2) Stir the pot.

The one criticism one of my experts made of the finished story was that I made it sound a little too easy... the truth is, that if you don't stir the pot when you dip, you'll create a giant cheese cinderblock at the bottom. Definite no-no.

3) One piece of bread at a time.

4) If you drop your bread in the pot you have to buy the next round of drinks. (Or, if you're female, you have to kiss the chef.)

Enjoy!

Would you pay $19 for a grilled cheese sandwich?

This is the question I asked in last week's New York Post.

I was surprised at how many people said, "Hell yes!"

Indeed, Terrance Brennan of Artisanal makes a pretty good case for why the grilled cheese is underpriced:

Cheese is damned expensive!

Yes, gourmet cheese is a fortune. But I always felt that the glory of the grilled cheese is that a downscale version (i.e. the Kraft single) is perfectly delicious, and therefore, there's no need to blow big money on a chichi version. (One publicist sent an email to the Post saying that the restaurant she reps does NOT serve a grilled cheese. The relevant item was a croque monsier... What a crock!)

But, I must admit, a lot of these fancy grilled cheeses were delish.

All I want for Xmas

So... how much do you love your kids?

I found some parents who gave their kids some really good presents: i.e., a new apartment.

Happy holidays!

Fry and see

In their continued efforts to kill me, The New York Post sent me to report on the third annual Latke Festival at BAM on Monday night.

It was delicious. (If extremely fattening. And I'm not sure if I ever want to eat another latke again.)

One can read my brief account of it here, along with the winning recipe and a really nice photo gallery of some of the prettier looking latkes.

Of course, I was not the only reporter there. The Forward was there, as was the Wall Street Journal. (And I'm sure a few other places I missed.)

I thought the judges picked well for the winner -- Jason Weiner's (of the restaurant Almond) bluefish, goat yogurt and dill latke. Weiner did an excellent job. I'm only a little disappointed I didn't have the space to talk about a few others that I really liked.

My three other favorites (aside from Jason's) was Mae Mae Cafe's latke, which was made like a Reuben sandwich on a "rye" latke. (The chef told me it was her first time making a latke -- but she did an excellent job.)

I also liked the duck confit latke (pictured), and The Plaza's foie gras latke.

Happy Hanukkah!

2011 in Real Estate

My review of 2011 (and look ahead at 2012) in real estate can be read here.

Curbed was nice enough to link to it.

As an editor at the Post said upon reading my article:

"It's like nobody learned jackshit over the recession."

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

How much Lower can you goer?

I'm a little late posting this, but here's an article I wrote two weeks ago about the deals you can get on the Lower East Side....

...if you can find them!

Is NYC facing a bagel crisis?

The short answer:

Yes.

The longer answer:

It's been dying for decades.

In the wake of the crisis at H&H (their west side bagel plant is in danger of closing down), I put my thoughts on the death of the New York bagel here. (It generated more mail than any article I've written in years.)

Truthfully, it's nearly impossible to find a decent bagel in this city any more. At least, not like the bagels I ate when I was a kid. My favorites are probably Absolute Bagel on Broadway between 107th and 108th and Bagel Hole in Park Slope (7th Ave., between 12th and 13th Streets).

But in the old days, of course, the city had at least one great bagel spot in every neighborhood.

Sigh.

Frankly, I think this is in the same depressing vein as what's happening in Jewish cuisine in general. (There are only a handful of Delis worth visiting in the city, either. David Sax has long taken up that campaign.)

Harlem is doing better than you thought

A lot of real estate watchers out there assumed that Harlem was doomed in this recession.

We felt that Harlem was reliving some (unfunny) real estate history.

Just as the neighborhood was overbuilt more than 100 years ago with the coming of the IRT line (the city's first subway) and property values plummeted when recession hit, most observers in recent years felt that Harlem real estate was one of two areas in Manhattan where developers were completely overbuilding. (The other being the Financial District.)

Buildings that were unfinished when the recession hit were doomed; buildings that were only partially sold were likely to remain that way.

But it looks like this is not entirely the case.

Developers aggressively cut prices (the average went from $836 per square foot during the height of the market in 2007 to $582 now) and thus managed to work through the glut of inventory -- the sales figures are the best on record.

I wrote about this here. And the Real Deal was kind enough to pick up on my story here.

Thonx for coming!

Last week, in honor of Bronx Restaurant Week (happening right now! Check it out here) Baron Ambrosia led me to several of his favorite spots in the borough.

If you don't know the great Baron Ambrosia, he is the Odysseus of the Bronx food scene. He wanders the borough, samples its wares, and films it all for his show Bronx Flavor.

He's also an extremely sweet and hilarious guy.

I wrote up his picks for Restaurant Week here.

My favorite was Coconut Palm. If you've never had chicken gizzards, this is your chance to try them. (Chewy, but not in a bad way. And in this delicious curry sauce. It really smacked one out of the park.) Also on the menu: black pudding (which is made in-house), duck fried rice (perhaps the best fried rice I've ever tasted) and fried shark. (That was the only thing that was slightly disappointing. But not bad, by any means.)

But, in any event, this week is a great excuse to visit some Bronx restaurants -- go out there and try 'em!

Patty pad

If you don't know of George Motz (and you like hamburgers) you should!

Motz is the author of Hamburger America, and a couple of weeks ago he invited me (in my capacity as NY Post reporter) to take a look around his South Slope apartment.

It was pretty cool!

You can read the resulting story here.

Mmm...mmm... UN

Big news week for the UN:

Palestinians ask for a state!

Iran continues to act douchey!

And, of course, there's my story in Wednesday's NY Post about where the diplomats at the little countries go when they want some home cookin.

We picked five countries with under a million people.

The most interesting story was probably the Bhutan restaurant. It's a sushi restaurant... but the owners are from Bhutan. And, if you call in advance, they'll make you some authentic Bhutanese food. (It was almost like going into a speakeasy.) I got a dish of dry and spicy cured pork and beef -- which was terrific! (A little chewy. But good.)

Unfortunately, a lot of the story wound up on the cutting room floor. But here are some of the juicy details.

My favorite of the restaurants (that I visited) in terms of taste was probably the Cypriot restaurant -- seriously delicious.

Marc Weydert, an attache for the Luxembourg mission to the UN told me that Lea Linster is the only female chef who has won the Bocuse d’Or competition -- and she's from Luxembourg.

That being said, there’s no straight Luxembourg restaurant in New York City. (Café Luxembourg on the Upper West Side was named after the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.) And trying to find some of the more rustic Luxembourg dishes such as "Wäinzoossiss" (a special Luxembourg-style sausage made with spices and wine) or "Kuddelfleck" (tripe or cow’s stomach, coated in breadcrumbs and fried in oil) is a hopeless cause. However, "Gromperekichelcher", which is the Luxembourg equivalent of potato pancakes, are not too difficult to find an approximation of.

And, Weydert adds, Luxembourg wines are making an appearance in New York, too. La Cave, a wine shop in Mamaroneck, NY, is about to start carrying some of the best Luxembourg wines: Riesling, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Gewurztraminer.

Finally, I was a little disappointed that I wasn't able to get into more detail about the Icelandic food at Scandinavia House. According to Morten Sohlberg, the owner, the lamb "is lamb which we raise on our own farm upstate. It’s a specific breed that comes from Iceland."

East Harlem for $500 per foot

If you are looking for your first apartment, you might consider East Harlem.

Prices are $500 to $600 per square foot.

In fact, I found a guy who is paying less to buy an apartment than to rent in the neighborhood!

Moreover, a lot of these buildings require only a 5% (or in some cases less!) downpayment.

But you'll have to live without a Starbucks or a decent Chinese restaurant.

A decade later

It's difficult to believe that it's been 10 years since 9/11.

The Times has an excellent round-up of first-hand experiences from that day, as well as a round-up of all the implications of the attacks (in literature, on our economy, in the Arab world, etc.)

Of course, every publication did something this week to memorialize that horrible day.

The New Yorker's coverage was particularly heartbreaking. The great George Packer (The Assassins' Gate) and the great Adam Gopnik (Paris to the Moon) wrote twin pieces about American erosion in the past 10 years (how veterans came back from Iraq and Afghanistan with virtually zero prospects of getting a job, and a general decline-of-the-west article, respectively) that both left this schlub feeling depressed -- particularly Packer's. (Unfortunately, the articles are firewalled.)

New York magazine had an interesting idea to treat the issue as a 9/11 encyclopedia. Entries start at Abbottabad and end at Zazi, Najibullah (the failed, homegrown terrorist) with everything from "Survivor, Last Pulled Out" to "Freedom Fries" in between.

The Post has a huge tribute issue out today -- but earlier in the week, your humble correspondent got to do one of the more upbeat stories: How the Financial District rebounded after everyone thought it was as good as dead. And, indeed, (with some massive hiccups along the way which I didn't have space to get into) it did just that.

And, perhaps, I should leave it there.

High Five

My visit to 1212 Fifth Avenue.

The building is on the park and only about $900 per square foot! (Of course, it's also on 102nd Street...)