versicle's Profile
Pure mustard oil, preferably in Astoria
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?
Pure mustard oil, preferably in Astoria
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.
Tian op - scented candle for Thai desserts
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?
Egyptian: Belady Bread and Koshery
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.
Burmese Excellence at Flushing's "Excellent Thai"?
So what's the protocol--ask for her and just ask her to make a Burmese meal for us?
Burmese Excellence at Flushing's "Excellent Thai"?
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.
Valantine's Day Meson Asturias (Jackson Heights) report
Does anyone have a working phone number for this place? The number listed all over the web, including here, is out of service.
Curry leaves in Astoria
Does anyone know where I can find them? Trade Fair on 30th Ave. seems like a possibility, but can anyone confirm?
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Trade Fair
30-08 30th Ave, Queens, NY 11102
Best place in Queens for Taiwanese ingredients?
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.
A Whirlwind Tour of Manhattan's Best Taco Places
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/2011/10/the-best-tacos-on-116th-street-in-east-harlem-spanish-harlem-mexican-nyc.html
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El Aguila
137 E 116th St, New York, NY 10029
Aldea
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....
Where can i find rhubarb in queens or brooklyn?
Also, rhubarb is out of season, so probably pretty scarce.
Merquez on Steinway
Does anyone have a favorite place to buy merquez sausage on or near Steinway Street?
Columbian Chorizo and Moroccan Merguez
Did anyone ever find a good market / butcher on Steinway for merquez?
New Ivoire in Harlem, E. 119th St.
Here is the URL for the blog post: http://www.eatingintranslation.com/2010/04/new-ivoire-restaurant.html#more
New Ivoire in Harlem, E. 119th St.
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.
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New Ivoire
76 E 119th St, New York, NY 10035
El Shater sunnyside - moving to Astoria
I don't see any space around 28th Street and Astoria Blvd. that could possibly be a restaurant preparing to open.
Buying Kingfisher beer in NYC?
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.
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Euro Market
30-46 31st St, Queens, NY 11106
Dinner in Washington Heights
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.
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Manolo Tapas
4165 Broadway, New York, NY 10033
NW Astoria - intel on Sabri Nihari Grill and Lorusso? (LONGISH)
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.
Dinner in Washington Heights
Manolo Tapas has an interesting menu. Maybe we'll check that out. I'll be sure to report back. Surprised there's not more on the board for this neighborhood. A shame.
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Manolo Tapas
4165 Broadway, New York, NY 10033
Dinner in Washington Heights
We're attending a show at the United Palace Theatre later this month and I'm looking for dinner suggestions. All I'm really seeing on the board is El Malecon, the Dominican place. I get a fair amount of Dominican food from the deli across the street from my workplace, so I'm not too excited by this option, no matter how good it is. Are there other places people would recommend?
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El Malecon
4141 Broadway, New York, NY 10033
Salt and Fat in Sunnyside
We ate there tonight. Between my husband and me, we split four dishes: the yellowtail with speck, the pulled pork sliders, the pork belly tacos, and the "crack" and cheese. It was fun and the food was good, though it felt more like bar food than the kind of place you'd go back to again and again for dinner.
I agree with the other poster that the speck was more like prosciutto. The "crack" and cheese was a dish of fried potato gnocchi. Turns out frying potato gnocchi basically turns them into tater tots. What they call a bechamel sauce is actually cheese melted, maybe in a white sauce. Wickedly good, but not what I expected. The pork sliders were good, if a little sweet for my taste. Probably the pork belly tacos were the best thing we had. There was a pleasing, unusual taste combination between the crispy corn taco, the fatty pork, and the vinegary vegetables (not sure it was actually kimchi tonight).
There were some timing issues. We were sitting near the entrance to the kitchen and it seemed like the kitchen was sending out dishes in waves--like several of the fried gnocchi, and then several of the sliders. Our final dish came out a good five minutes or more after we'd finished the other three and it came out with a handful of other yellowtail dishes.
Duzan on Steinway
My husband and I finally walked across Astoria to try this place and it was well worth it. We both had the chicken shawarma, after the guys running the place gave us a little plate of it to try. I'll echo the other posters comments that the bread was great. We also had the hummus with the pine nuts and garlic, something they made while we waited. I don't have anything to compare it to, but the portion didn't seem small. We also got one of the chopped salads--cucumber, tomato, green chile pepper.
What I really liked, on top of the food being delicious, was how proud the two guys running the place were of what they made. It's one of my favorite qualities in a restaurant. The guy who made the salad (from scratch while we waited) tasted it with a fork when he was done and added a little more of something to it before he packed it up for us.
We'll definitely be going back, especially now that the weather makes the walk more appealing.
Loved the mango sauce. Didn't care much for the sort of Russian dressing-ish sauce that one of the guys said was a "fusion thing."
Finding Moroccan amlou in Queens?
There is a Trade Fair on 30th Avenue just west of the 30th Avenue stop on the N/Q. There is an extensive selection of Middle Eastern groceries, but be aware that they're practically hidden in a wing off to the side of the main store. From the front entrance, it's all the way to your left.
Let us know if you find amlou. It sounds delicious. I've also looked for argan oil, but not been able to find it, so if anyone has recommendations--great. I tried a number of the markets on Steinway.
Where to buy the best fresh pasta?
Yeah, I'll likely try Raffetto's, not least because I'm relieved places like that are still hanging on downtown.
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Raffetto's
144 W Houston St, New York, NY 10012
Where to buy the best fresh pasta?
In the Chelsea Market? Eataly?
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Eataly
200 5th Ave, New York, NY 10010
What happened to Marino's Fish Market in Astoria?
I haven't been very happy with the fish I've gotten from this place the last few times I've been there. Some very tough tuna, a bag of half-dead mussels. I don't know if it's just been bad luck, or what.
Jackson Heights Greenmarket
A list of vendors is here: http://www.grownyc.org/jacksonheightsgreenmarket
I've only been once, but I liked the chickens I got from Hoosick River Poultry.
Puerto Rican restaurant?
Yeah, I know this is the outer boroughs board, but La Fonda Boricua is very authentic. There's also Lechonera El Barrio on E. 103rd and Third Ave. I actually prefer the Lechonera, but they're both good.
