International Meat Market on 30th Avenue in Astoria carries rabbit. I don't remember the price but I also doubt it's $10 / lb.

Here's a pic of the haul.

A lot of the shops were open yesterday and parking was a breeze at about 11:00 in the morning. We got ravioli and dried pasta at Borgatti; fresh mozzarella, marinated artichokes, and bufala butter at Casa della Mozzarella; amaro and wine at Mt. Carmel; a Parmesan / gouda at Calandra (which was open on a Sunday in preparation for Easter); olive bread, prosciutto bread, and chocolate cherry bread at Madonia; and a sandwich at Mike's Deli, which was also not supposed to be open but was.

Are the shops generally closed on Sundays?

There's a farmer's market in Jackson Heights on Sundays year round. I haven't been recently, but got organic whole chickens last time I was there.

The Key Foods just off the 30th Ave. stop on the N train has a couple of different brands of organic chicken, including Bell & Evans. I don't love these, but they'll do in a pinch and you have the option of getting just thighs, breasts, whatever.

Are there any markets in Chinatown that sell laphet? Supposedly there was one on Mulberry St. once upon a time, but that doesn't really narrow it down. I know there were issues a while back with carcinogens in the dye in some brands....

What else do you recommend from the meat counter, Astoristani? The array is amazing and the smell of the smoked meats is so tempting. Some random things I've picked, though, have been so dry and hard as to be inedible, which makes me wonder about the frequency of turnover.

On another note, their international beer selection has to be the best in Queens.

Has anyone seen whole vanilla beans for sale in Astoria?

Astor Bakeshop sold coffee beans for about a minute when they first opened; perhaps they could be lobbied to do so again. They were locally roasted and very good. Given the wretched quality of everything else available in the area (Queens Kickshaw is too far away from where I live), I order online from a little gem of a coffee house in Nebraska, The Mill: http://www.millcoffee.com/ The site is a little clunky, but they roast their coffee there, really know what they're doing, are reasonably priced, and ship free if you order more than $40 worth of beans. Ethiopian Harrar and A.M. Mayhem are two of my favorite varieties. The beans usually arrive less than a week after I place my order.

Bell & Evans chickens are free-range in letter only, not spirit. While they're better off than chickens raised in cramped pens, they are not literally free ranging outdoors. This may or may not be important to you as a consumer, but there's a big difference between what's called "free range", i.e. not in pens, and pasture raised, which is the natural way that chickens are meant to live. For my money, happy chickens with a diverse, natural diet taste a lot better than even the best of the mass-produced "free range" and "organic" chicken.

Just picked up a bottle of what appears to be pure mustard oil at the place on 31st. Thanks! They had three brands. Do you have a preference?

I'm looking for pure mustard oil. The only mustard oil I could find at Trade Fair was blended with soya oil and doesn't have nearly the flavor I'm looking for. I know there are issues with selling it in the USA, but has anyone seen the pure oil for sale? Preferably in Astoria, but I'm willing to go to Jackson Heights.

Thanks.

I'm sure I'm not the only one looking for this item after the most recent issue of Saveur. Has anyone seen it for sale? Maybe in one of those little Thai groceries near Sripraphai?

There are many, many groceries and bakeries along Steinway Street, in the long blocks below Astoria Blvd. called Little Egypt that Mr. Porkchop mentioned. The people who work there are generally very friendly and have always been willing to help me find any unusual ingredients or foodstuffs I'm looking for.

So what's the protocol--ask for her and just ask her to make a Burmese meal for us?

Can anyone confirm that Sophia is still at Excellent Thai and still willing to cook Burmese food upon request? We'd like to go next week.

Thanks.

Does anyone have a working phone number for this place? The number listed all over the web, including here, is out of service.

Does anyone know where I can find them? Trade Fair on 30th Ave. seems like a possibility, but can anyone confirm?

-----
Trade Fair
30-08 30th Ave, Queens, NY 11102

I'm embarking on a quest to find dried fermented black beans and hong zao paste and I'm not sure about being able to identify them in a market. Does anyone have any suggestions for where to buy these things, and tips for finding them on the shelves? I have a little more confidence about finding: mushroom powder, dried shrimp, dried scallops, and michiu

Thanks.

There's a good write-up on Serious Eats of East Harlem's taco joints. They deemed El Aguila on 116th the best place for tacos. In related, exciting news, signage just went up on the heretofore doomed restaurant front at 103rd and Lexington and it looks like El Aguila is opening an outpost.

http://newyork.seriouseats.com/2011/1...

-----
El Aguila
137 E 116th St, New York, NY 10029

If you don't mind my asking, what's the price of the tasting menu with the wine pairings? I see the tasting menu online at $90 pp but it's unclear whether that includes wine. I expect not....

Also, rhubarb is out of season, so probably pretty scarce.

Does anyone have a favorite place to buy merquez sausage on or near Steinway Street?

Did anyone ever find a good market / butcher on Steinway for merquez?

Here is the URL for the blog post: http://www.eatingintranslation.com/20...

Based on an older post in the Eating in Translation blog, I walked up to New Ivoire restaurant from my office this afternoon. This is a tiny, un-air-conditioned place frequented almost entirely by West African cabbies. I'd tried to go once before, closer to noon, but the owner didn't have any food ready yet.

New Ivoire serves only a few dishes a day, and they rotate throughout the week. Brown rice with lamb seems to be available most days. I got the Sauce Feuille Patate, which was a sweet potato leaf stew with beef. I'm not familiar with the cuisine of this region and this stew was totally unique to me. The sweet potato leaves had an earthier taste than other greens. The dish was very oily, though not particularly heavy. The oil was a bright orange-ish yellow color and a yellow pepper that looked like an enormous habanero floated in the stew. The stew had a nice, subtle kick to it, though it didn't seem hot enough to be habanero. A large portion of white rice soaked up the oil.

I also had a homemade ginger juice. I wish the walk wasn't such a long one, or I'd be drinking this every day. Basically a searingly strong drink that seems to be nothing but plenty of ginger, with some sugar and water. You could probably cut it with seltzer and have a nice ginger soda, but it was delicious on its own.

There were a couple of desserts in the refrigerator. They both had sour cream as the base, though I wondered whether they didn't actually mean yogurt. One was mixed with oatmeal and sugar, and the other with pineapple.

The menu indicates they offer assorted kidney preparations for breakfast, which also look intriguing.

-----
New Ivoire
76 E 119th St, New York, NY 10035

I don't see any space around 28th Street and Astoria Blvd. that could possibly be a restaurant preparing to open.

I'm pretty sure I've seen this as Euro Mart on 31st Street between 30th and 31st Avenues. Regardless, they should get a shout-out for carrying a staggering breadth of beers from around the world and the U.S.

-----
Euro Market
30-46 31st St, Queens, NY 11106

We showed up at Manolo Tapas an hour and a half before showtime at the United Palace down the road. They were already full, so if you're going to go on a show night, definitely make a reservation. They were kind enough to open up the little basement dining room, though, and it quickly filled up.

The space is very pretty, very typical of Spanish restaurants. Their web site says that a lot of the materials used in the construction were salvaged from Spain. The people who were running the restaurant, including the waiters and the runners, were also very nice.

We ordered five tapas dishes and an unusual bottle of Txakolina-style hard cider. (Their wine list is extensive and very reasonable.) I'm not sure whether they had run out of buckets or what, but the waiter took our bottle back upstairs to sit on ice after he'd poured our first glasses. Eventually we had to ask one of the runners to fetch it and leave it on the table.

We started off with the chipirones en su tinta, which is squid in their own ink; an order of pan Catalonian (pa amb tomaquet in Catalonia; usually pan con tomate in the rest of Spain), which is toasted bread rubbed with garlic and spread with tomato pulp and in this case included Serrano ham; and roasted bone marrow with toast, more of the tomato pulp, and a watercress salad. It was all fantastic, especially the squid. My only quibble here was that they'd made a sort of paste / spread of tomatoes and garlic, rather than just squeezing the pulp onto the garlic-rubbed bread, and the paste was too sweet for my taste. The squid was perfect, and the bone marrow was dramatically presented and also really good.

Unfortunately, I can't comment on the octopus dish we ordered or the stuffed piquillo peppers because we waited about 25 minutes after our three first dishes came out, finished our bottle of cider, and finally had to just ask for the check. I was very sorry to leave hungry because the food we did have was fantastic.

I don't want to fault them too much, because they did get totally slammed by the concert crowd. I know this is a fairly new venue; they should check the calendar and better prepare for concert nights. As accommodating as they were about opening up the extra room, they clearly weren't equipped to handle the extra business and it probably would have been better to turn people away.

Bottomline: if you live in this neighborhood, definitely give them a try. They're super friendly, the ingredients are high quality, the space is nice, and the food authentically Spanish. If you're going up to Washington Heights for a show, though, maybe give them some time to work out how they're going to handle those nights.

-----
Manolo Tapas
4165 Broadway, New York, NY 10033

My husband and I got take-out from Sabri Nihari last night. It was good, but it didn't knock our socks off. We had the signature nihari, which is beef in a sauce. The beef was very tender and the sauce definitely had depth to it and a very mild heat. I had trouble finding much meat on the hunks of bone-in goat in our goat dish, but that's not really specific to this meal. I'm not sure what the name of the goat dish was, but it was apparently baby goat. The sauce was similar to the one on the nihari. We also got an order of saag, which was a pretty typical version of the spinach and potato dish. The naan bread was definitely the standout--freshly made to order. The plain basmati rice that accompanied the meal was weirdly greasy.

All in all, the people were nice and the food decent--a good place to have around the corner, but maybe not worth a trip from another neighborhood, unless you were going to get the $300 whole goat! I'd be interested to hear from people about some of the other dishes on the menu. A lot of it looked like standard Indian dishes. There were a couple I didn't recognize and assumed they were more traditionally Pakistani.