Not quite a deli landscape, but this simple mural, spotted in the Bronx, achieves a sort of heavenly luster unmatched by most hectic sandwich collages. Elevated against a beautiful sky blue background, the plated behemoth here floats dream-like atop its bone-white host, its impossibly green lettuce as lush and welcoming as a summer garden. Lotto streamers hint at an even greater transcendence just beyond our grasp, while a bevy of grey stars, squiggles and wind wisps push back against the gray cloud (or unpainted section?) hovering above. As for that tube of sausage, looming in the upper left corner, I am totally stumped.
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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.
Composed of chocolate syrup, milk and seltzer, it’s a famous anomaly that the classic New York egg cream contains no actual eggs. Vietnamese egg soda (Soda Sữa Hột Gà), on the other hand, is packed with yolky goodness, balanced out with the heavy tang of sweetened condensed milk and the fizzy snap of seltzer, the kind of concoction that’s almost a meal in itself. As served at Com Tam Ninh Kieu, in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, it pairs well with the sharp flavors of the restaurant’s namesake dish, which makes use of ‘broken rice’, the irregular toss-offs of the rice world, which have long since been rediscovered as an ideal flavor vehicle. Served with all the trimmings at Com Tam, the once-neglected rice is accompanied by two fried eggs, a slab of pork chop and a shrimp cake, a sort of Indochinese spin on a lumberjack breakfast. Breaking the cardinal rule of carbonated beverages, I took the remainder of my soda home, where it was reconstituted in this fantastic Silver Gulch pint glass, with a bit more seltzer added to cut down the egginess, nudging the texture out of full-bodied nog territory.
Following a recent visit to the Bronx Zoo, I ventured into the wilds of Van Nest, a small, diverse neighborhood just outside the southeast gate. The western fringe of this area, dominated by the Cross Bronx Expressway and the city’s last remaining stretch of NYW&B tracks, seems to firmly prove Jane Jacobs’ theory of border vacuums, a depressed stretch of boundary wasteland marring the appearance of a place better known as the childhood home of Regis Philbin and Stokely Carmichel, and which boasts what may be the most ornate station in the subway system, or at least the one most resembling the property of a Spanish landowner.
Photographed in front of Edgar Allen Poe's former home on Grand Concourse: one can of Mr. Brown iced coffee. Produced in Taiwan, now using milk from New Zealand after getting tangled up in China's 2008 melamine scandal, these little coffee drinks taste like a sort of muddy take on the glass bottle Frappucino, with a mascot who bears a striking resemblance to 'Big Daddy' from "The Simpsons' Spinoff Showcase."
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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