Slices of pizza can be found just about anywhere in New York City, and while a fair share serve at least passable product, there’s also a sinister undercurrent of Very Bad Pizza capitalizing on the city’s good name, ranging from the flatly mediocre to the criminally despicable. None of this enters into the equation here. The concept of a Laundromat / Pizzeria is such a perfect fusion of terrible and fantastic ideas - the desire to eat pizza while you wait for your laundry pushed into strange battle with the instinctual need to not get grease stains on your newly washed clothing - that the quality of the food within doesn’t even begin to matter. It’s for this reason that I will never taste Famous Sam’s pizza, content to know that such a combination exists. Further information of interest: the business is abutted to the right by a Puerto Rican restaurant named ‘Shalon’, which Google seems to believe is a misspelling of Shalom. In either case, the place has no qualms about serving a menu healthily apportioned with pork dishes.
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CHAMOIS CHEESE
“Aristotle said that the most savorous cheese came from the chamois. This small goatlike antelope feeds on wild mountain herbs not available to lumbering cows, less agile sheep or domesticated mountain goats, so it gives, in small quantity but high quality, the richest, most flavorsome of milk.” There's something innately disturbing about the short memory of popular culture, the impetuous hastiness with which celebrated things can be completely and utterly forgotten, a reminder that most people’s legacies don’t extend too far beyond their lifespans. So while it’s nice to imagine we have an adequate picture of what life was like 50 or 60 years ago, a sampling of hit movies and TV shows, icons and stars, fashions and trends, there’s really a huge amount of now-vanished information which leaves this image incomplete. Take for example Bob, Rose and Cora Brown, a by-all-accounts moderately famous husband, wife and mother team of food explorers, who wrote several impressive tomes on the joys of adventurous eating. All of these are now out of print, and the Browns can no longer even boast a Wikipedia entry to their name. Bob, the trio’s de facto leader (if only by virtue of having lived the longest and wrote the most) still has a few scant clippings accessible, including this 2010 NYTimes piece, which seems to completely misinterpret an obvious joke about an idea for an automated reading machine. This disappearance is a shame, since the Browns’ gourmand legacy, the concept of combing the globe for new flavors rather than clinging to the comfortable tastes of home, seems especially relevant today.
There are hundreds of pizzerias in New York City, serving round and rectangular pies, ranging from the most delicate Neapolitan construction to the humblest dollar slice, with all manners of variety and toppings in between. There is, as far as I can tell, only one place serving langos, the Hungarian answer to the portable, sliceable, cheese-bedecked pie, and it’s not even a brick-and-mortar establishment. It’s a truck, manned by a friendly fellow who handles the entire preparation himself, which trawls the Union Square area and a few other select locations in Manhattan. This is a shame, because as Eastern European cousins to accessibly exotic snack foods go, the langos is pretty fantastic, a snappy cold weather retort to the relaxed rhythms of peninsular eating. The primary difference between it and a pizza is the use of fried dough as a base, rather than an airier baked crust, which immediately removes any possible applications as a health food. Freshly fried as I waited, the dough didn’t have any lingering grease residue, and despite its Magyar origin point was reminiscent of Navajo fry bread, another hearty but surprisingly light item not readily available in the city. The biggest difference from the standard pizza comes via the swapping out of sauce for sour cream, which is topped with grated gouda, although Old-World variations apparently often involve quark, liptauer, or good old Swiss Emmentaler. I had my langos fortified with a sprinkling of smoked ham cubes, although in retrospect I probably misordered; in the interest of exploration I should have opted for Hungarian salami. The result was delicious nonetheless, a sharp counterpoint to the silky smoothness of pizza, and the pleasant mixture of gently fried bread and two healthy helpings of dairy grants it a wholesome, satisfying quality which, if not quite at the level of a great slice, explains how the snack has managed to spread out all over Southern Europe.
The heat is on at Diamond Star Deli on Flatbush Avenue, with this beautiful wraparound sign advertising a fiery grill that I'm reasonably sure does not exist on the premises. More interestingly, the mixture of flames and the surrounding sky-blue background, with a well-done burger-and-coke combo neighbored by a stack of ethereal pancakes, creates a nice heaven and hell dynamic.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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