Like most serious diners, I try to do everything in my power to avoid a bad meal. Yet my classification of such may differ from that of others. For one thing, I don’t really care about service, as long as it’s not so wretched as to spoil the entire experience, and can find pleasure even in a moderate amount of inattention or a slightly supercilious attitude. Maybe this is a consequence of years spent in New York, where gruffness is sometimes the price paid for good eats, and off-kilter service is often a sign of an overall level of comfort at a place attuned to its own specific rhythms. To me, a bad meal is one where there’s no inspiration, no effort, everything previously frozen or made from a mix, the staff reduced to mere survival mode in order to keep the doors open, all the joy leached out of the preparation process. As margins tighten, this sad state seems to occur more and more. Thankfully, it’s still less common in Puerto Morelos & Isla Mujeres, a distinction which holds for a variety of reasons.
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The last time I visited Puerto Morelos, tamales were everywhere. Beyond frequent appearances on restaurant menus, the town’s main zocalo was also ringed with vendors, carts and tables overflowing with various banana-leaf-wrapped delights, contents veiled by their verdant wrappings. In my head, I’d internalized this as a permanent state of bountiful tamalitude, and figured that upon returning I’d get another chance to sample such ample wares. This was not the case. Possibly owing to the fact that the plaza had been redesigned in the intervening years, the vendors were no longer anywhere to be found. This probably also had something to do with the fact that it was no longer the Hanal Pixan (Day of the Dead) season, with Maya women gathering in a central location to provide a specific culinary service, offering an opportunity to tap into holiday nostalgia for traditional flavors. Now they had returned back to the hinterlands, or at least to another, less central part of town. Thankfully, I was able to briefly visit these hinterlands (more on this, and my few tamal successes, in a bit), getting a small taste of rural life.
Everywhere you go, things are in flux. Like tectonic plates, even the most seemingly set-in-stone cuisines are shifting imperceptibly under their foundations, as time nibbles away at the edges, or cleaves things apart at the center. This is something you can witness on a daily basis in a city like New York, where modifications that have marinated elsewhere for years frequently migrate over and set up shop, a process hastened by the Internet’s innate capacity for hastening trend cycles. Our local understanding of the breadth and depth of regional Chinese cuisine, for example, seems to get an upgrade every few months, with many of those changes represented by items that are far from traditional. Keeping this in mind, when I travel I try to cast one eye toward tradition, the other toward entropy, the two seeming opposites locked into one tumultuous whirlpool, the Yin and Yang of snackhound culture. It can seem overwhelming to attempt to suss out such developments on top of the challenge of absorbing an entire system of local foodways in a few short days, but often it’s just a matter of maintaining sensitivity toward things that fall outside the purview of that pantheon.
Two visions of plentitude via the Ghost of Christmas Present, from Ronald Neame's Scrooge (1970) and Edwin Marin's A Christmas Carol (1938). One a fantasy of overabundance, the other less likely to produce leftovers.
A scene at a late-night diner in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Two Men in Manhattan, revealing some odd selections on its abbreviated menu. Gefilte Fish tops the list, with a trim 40 cent price tag that would equal out to a little under $4 today. Below that things get a bit fuzzier, although a little digging led me to the existence of Pickle Fleisch, sometimes spelled as Pickel Fleisch, which would fit with the obstructed text fragment on the second line of the board. This is not a dish I’ve ever heard of, nor something you’d ever encounter at a modern diner, but this academic paper describes it as an Alsatian Jewish cousin to pastrami. This fits perfectly, since Melville (born with far less flair as Jean-Pierre Grumbach) was himself a French Alsatian Jew by origin. As always, however, this only brings up more questions. Did this dish ever actually dot the menus of NYC Jewish boîtes, or did the director simply add it to his own fantasy menu of comfort food favorites? The NYPL’s menu archive turns up nothing on a variety of spellings, although this is far from definitive proof of anything. What it does confirm is that the item below on the list is definitely farfel. Meanwhile, here’s a sauce for that Pickel Fleisch.
In New York, Pakistani food is often a no frills affair. Just as Dominican and Puerto Rican fare have often found themselves crowded together in multi-use, chowhouse-style establishments, the cuisine of Pakistan often gets paired with that of Bangladesh, its former national partner to the east. Such venues are most commonly taxi stands, catering to a mobile trade, centered around glass counter cases groaning with pre-made kebabs and breads, along with a few curries of the day. Also like Bangladeshi, which has of late received a more elaborate touch via places like the fantastic Korai Kitchen, the fine details of Pakistani cuisine get some further shading at Laree Adda, which, despite a name that literally translates to "truck stop", aims for something a bit outside the norm. The restaurant has as its showpiece dishes cooked, and served, in the same cast iron vessels, known as Kadai or Karahi, used all around the subcontinent, but often associated with the preparation of the specific Punjabi dish of the same name.
Like many people, I recently spent over a year not seeing the inside of a restaurant, with the last meal at least standing out as a notable one: a delectable spread of French-Japanese fusion snacks at Prospect Heights’ Maison Yaki. During this time I missed dining out, but I cannot pretend I did not also feel lifted of a certain burden, free from the eternal searching of menus, the ceaseless hunting for new items, the strategizing to tune every meal to its optimal efficiency. Adventurous eating as a hobby is an often exhausting compulsion, and for awhile, amid a tragic period when it was hard to find much joy in anything, I was relieved of it. Admittedly, I compensated by shifting my focus to food preparation, burning off that excess energy with a frenzied overproduction of fresh pasta, but that’s a topic for another post.
In the U.S. we’re restricted to a few basic varieties for our snacks, mostly falling within the divisions of inflated corn things, baked wheat things, and fried potato things. There’s of course some latitude within and across these categories, especially in recent years, but by and large the American snacking populace is treated like cattle by a cartel of corporate producers with excess agricultural product to dump. I’m sure that’s the case everywhere to some extent, but no matter where you go, poorer consumers tend to bear the brunt of this uncomfortable dynamic; I witnessed firsthand the chaos wreaked by NAFTA while visiting the Yucatan peninsula, where the traditional diet, long centered around local corn products, has been eroded by an influx of high-calorie corn snacks imported from El Norte. Paired with grotesque cost-cutters like fruit substitute soy drinks, this has helped result in a dramatic uptick in obesity, among other negative health outcomes.
Ever in motion, seemingly always changing for the worse, New York City is defined by a shimmering palimpsest of ethnic cultures making faint but indelible marks on the city’s fabric, with even the firmest imprints in danger of someday vanishing beneath the pile. This means that the previous generation’s culinary traditions are perpetually in the midst of being washed away, a process witnessed most recently with the staggering disappearance of pizzerias from Manhattan over the last decade, with classic diners, donut shops and coffee spots displaying an even more marked decline. On the same chopping block sit Jewish delis and appetizing shops, once ubiquitous clearinghouses for culinary tradition that have by now been whittled down to a few choice holdouts. These stalwarts include the Upper West Side’s Barney Greengrass, which as far as I can tell is the last one still serving a once-common Old Man food: Heads and Wings. This is fitting for a place that opened in 1908, and has maintained the same prime Upper West Side location since 1926. Heads and Wings is one name for the collars and fins of Gaspe Nova, also known as “Collars and Flegals,” which get smoked to a golden brown hue. I’ve always been a fan of breaking down leftovers to conserve the best hidden bits clinging to the carcass (my yearly Thanksgiving night turkey deconstruction has become a cherished tradition), so digging into these definitely scratched an itch.
Unfortunately only a glimpse, but some minor gleanings from the sign board of the chow house featured near the start of 1947’s Nightmare Alley, a pitch-black noir centered around a carnival community. Here the “Mex. Chile” utilizes an older spelling, hearkening back to the origin point of the dish, which possibly came about as a convenient 19th century trail ration; dried beef, fat, peppers and spiced dried into bricks that could easily be rehydrated. This option, along with the Chicken Tamale (I wonder when this particular misspelling was first made?) might appear to pin down the carnival’s current stop as somewhere in Texas, but “Spaghetti Red,” which might seem like an offhand name for tomato-sauced noodles, instead points in a different direction. In fact it’s a further-west variant of Cincinnati Chili, a combination of pasta and meat stew that, under this name, is supposedly endemic to Joplin, Missouri, and likely existed further afield at this point, when budget roadhouse dining was king, which makes it impossible to determine exactly where we’re located in the scene. The appearance of Kilroy, the WWII-era proto-meme that had by this point swept the nation and beyond, doesn’t help matters.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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