Church Avenue Chomp

Happy New Year! It’s 2008 and I started the year off right with a trip to one of my favorite New York places, right at the end of the Q and B lines: Brighton Beach.

Non New Yorkers immediately think Brighton Beach Memoir, a Neil Simon play about growing up Jewish in the 1930s.

The Brighton Beach of the late 90s and aughts or naughts or whatever we are now in is a Russian ex-pat community. A trip out there is about as as close as you can get to leaving the country without actually leaving the country. Not just because it’s far out on the edge of NYC, on a body of water overlooking what may seem, to the spatially challenged, to be France, but because of the chance to be spoken to first in Russian and the necessity of asking people to withhold the shaved dried smoked beef from your salad. It’s a singular experience.

I love this neighborhood for the Tudorish seaside apartment buildings along the boardwalk and the chance to watch old Russians stroll (or be wheeled) and young ones pony for one another’s attention. You can while a day away looking at the ocean over a plate of french fries drizzled with garlic butter and parsley. A few notable experiences aside from the obvious Russian ones don’t fit well into narrative format and will therefore be arranged into a chronogical list:

1. She’s a Mush
New to New York and battling mice in a tenement apartment in the East Village, I call a 718 number in response to an ad for a kitten. 718 = Brooklyn, I thought, and while I was not technically wrong, I did not yet realize that going from the edge to the middle and back out to a wholly nother edge still requires a hefty train ride. (Now that I’ve moved deep, deep into this borough, it is an unforgettable fact.)

Arriving in Brighton Beach an hour later, I pick my way over to and ring the bell of a house ponged sour with cat urine. The owner of the house came down to explain that she was eating a roast beef sandwich and that I should wait. (Sandwichless, in the stink.) She let me in the outside door but left me in a vestibule lined on both sides with cages. The staring cats cried and stuck their paws through the bars to get at me. I felt repelled.

Finally I called up to announce that I wasn’t going to wait any longer, and the woman, still wiping mayo from her lips, ran to show me the real cat storeroom, which was in the basement. She was particularly eager to give me a 4 month old striped gray one tabby who fell over when she reared up to play with me. I felt a connection to her slight ungainliness. “She’s such a mush,” the crazy cat person explained. “A mush! Like a dog!” She told me that the cat was half “Russian Blue,” which is supposed to be a sexy brand of kitty. Promised an animal with mousekilling abilities but dog’s character, I brought her home. In reality, the cat I came home with is standoffish, angry, and insecure. Despite my attempts to name her Katrina or Katrinka or Sabrina or something little and tinkly and Russian sounding in homage to her geographic and genetic roots, I ended up calling her George because of her lack of grace. There is another kind of cat–a French kind commonly described as a “potato on toothpicks,” and surely this better describes her. Still, who needs a graceful cat? Character trumps grace, and I could not love her more. And once you fall in love, you don’t want your pet to do a job, like eat dirty mice. Pets are for snuggling.

2. “Cheese Eating Cheese”
During a spate of unemployment in early 2002, I have as little energy as I have money. I live in a studio apartment on the ground floor. It’s dark and I spend a lot of time alone. One day I muster collect myself as best I can, haul on a blue two-piece and go out to the beach with a paperback, giant hat, and towel. I am alone on this trip. It is a weekday, I will see no one I know, and I will wear my bikini no matter how I look. (How I look is both pale and like I do not have washboard abs.) The moment I set foot on the sand a pretty lithe brown man with big curls runs circles around me, working himself up for an introduction. He’s recently moved to New York from the ancient city of Fez, where he worked as a tour guide. He’s very bright and very sensitive. I enjoy both his company and his washboard abs. We talk while we splash in the water. Later he walks me to Coney Island, buys me some fried shrimp. We watch people fish off the pier. “You are so crrreeeeeamy and whiiiiiiiite,” he describes, in a truly appreciative tone. “You are like cheese,” he continues, as we enter the arcade, which makes me laugh, even if that wasn’t the intent. He rides the train back to my house with me so we can continue our conversation, before he turns back to Sheepshead Bay to go home, and we agree to see one another again. We date for 2 months until cultural differences intercede. Cultural differences include his proclivity for quotes such as “You are so pretty. Not beautiful, like Monica Lewinsky, but very nice to look at. More like Princess Diana, but your features aren’t all in synchronicity such as the lovely Diana’s were.” But these conversations are amusing, and he does seems to like me. At one point during our relationship he watches me eat a spinach pie on my couch. It is full of fenugreek and fresh mozzerella. He watches intently. “So creamy and white,” he breathes. “You are like cheese eating cheese.”

3. Booties
I like to go to Brighton Beach with my friends Jennifer and Mike. Jennifer and Mike can both lie in the sun (I need an umbrella) and like to take what they call a “freak walk,” which is where they admire the crazy old ladies in leopard-pattern bras, or men in banana hangers, or people with legs splayed in large nylon undies surely never meant to see the light of day. Brighton Beach makes you realize that you’re really in the middle, physically and in terms of your taste, and that can be a good thing. In addition to the “freaks,” Jennifer is gay and likes to look at ladies. Mike is straight and likes to look at ladies. Mike is married to an upright swimmer with lean haunches, but that’s not the sort of thing they’re on the prowl for out here. Mostly, they traipse the beach looking for big jiggly booties on girls with smooth brown skin. “You always want things you don’t have,” says Mike, presumably referring to wife’s own booty, in addition to his own.

There is so much more to tell about the wonders of Brighton Beach. On New Year’s, my husband and I decide instead to pop into the grocery stores along the Avenue, instead of walk over to the beach. We end up looking at real estate, as all New Yorkers do. What would it be like to live here on an all-Russian ‘cept for us block? We could live in a gingerbread house . . . we enter into one grocery store with pastries piled everywhere, and smoked fish sitting in boxes. Steam trays of stuffed cabbage fail to provoke any hunger in me, because I can’t help but wonder whether they are holdouts from last year, though it was only 12 hours before.

We check out the holocaust memorial on the Bay, as we are walking up to Sheepshead. It seems that families can pay in with other families to get a stone to honor their dead. It’s sobering but moving that a community from the USSR seems intact again in Brooklyn. I don’t feel that I have a community that intact.

We stopped into a cafe, which I’d like to write about but it was in Sheepshead–that’s another story. In a post coming soon!

The entire idea for the blog has changed. Why? Because we no longer can look to Church Avenue as the main drag where we will eat. We are still living South of Church Avenue, probably about a mile. But the new focus will be to explore edible things on Church Ave. and South–out towards Coney Island, which we are getting eerily closer to. We’re going to be doing some ethnic food tourism with Israeli sandwiches, Turkish food, Italian in Gravesend, Bangladeshi, maybe some Thai. Check back after we’ve eaten . . . .

UPDATE: We’re abandoningship. Well, not ship so much as our new place.

It’s an irony that this place was where people came to drink in fresh air in the summer, because though the mold inspector we asked our landlords to hire called it fine, I can see from the readings that is has spore counts similar to a building that’s been flooded. I’ve actually been diagnosed with asthma since we moved in our apartment. I now have purple flying saucer of an inhaler that for all its Jetsons charm, terrifies me. After some sturm and drang M and I have both decided to get out of here.

We did a brief search. The first house was around the corner, and we thought we might live there because it would be easy to carry all of our belongings over and we could save on movers.

I thought we might even save on boxes. “We could buy about 4,” I thought, “and then fill them up, and then tote them over, and then unpack, and then tote them back” . . . it’s an easy way to drive oneself crazy. It didn’t work out anyhow: the owners were delightful, the current tenants were delightful, and the house itself was delightful, but we smelled mildew in the all-weather carpet on the back stairs leading up to the second floor of the house. Lately, M and I just walk around sniffing in then neighborhood. So I had to turn the lovely Irish dr. down and then I had to explain why. Luckily, instead of being offended, he probably just wrote me off as crazy.

We looked at another on the same block about 2 subways stops farther out. It’s where M’s mother stayed when she came to visit us a month ago. His mom was going to stay with us but I was afraid that the bad air, which gives me a horrible cough, would poison her, too, so we suggested a B&B. We didn’t check this one out before she came and when we went for the first time, were were greeted by a plump (dead) bunny taxidermied on the newl post. What a fluffy tail! It’s really the central focus when one walks in the house. I found it terrifying and delightful in perhaps equal measure.

The inside of the B&B was the second floor of one of these old houses, and it was actually a complete apartment, full of some bad furniture choices and someone else’s clothing. M’s mother is a huge sport though, and took it in stride, even though the proprietor demanded that she pay in cash and also explained that the lock on her door didn’t necessarily function.

On our way over to the B&B to pick up M’s mom, he and I stopped to ask which was the closest subway stop of a woman pulling weeds in her yard. She was very pleasant. In a twist of fate, that weed-pulling woman will likely be our new landlord.

Must go to work!!

After a long day of priming the living room (which doesn’t appear large to the naked eye but which contains hundreds of tiny, nearly unpaintable details) I was hoping that M and I and perhaps a few others would go to Jerk City, a chicken place on Church Avenue that was written up by Peter Meehan in the $25 and under column in the New York Times.

That article appeared in the food section just days after I’d come up with the idea for the blog, and it reinforced what I was already hoping: that Church Avenue is a wellstorm of low-priced ethnic wonders. I’d first read about a place called E & R (seen elsewhere as ENR) which Robert Sietsema wrote up in the Voice. To paraphrase his sentiments: you are stupid if you spend money at French restaurants in Manhattan, because this Haitian restaurant with terrible ambience where no one speaks English is better. I quickly disseminated that article to my boyfriend, to my friend at work, and to my friend John in order to perk up interest in a) exploring food in Brooklyn and b) being enthusiastic about an eating in a neighborhood that could go either way. (I am a food enthusiast but sometimes I need other enthusiasts to help me along to realize my dreams of eating delicious food.) All of these people nodded vigorously, and I became very cheerful.

(I think that E & R has changed hands, but here is the article, in case you are interested:

http://www.villagevoice.com/nyclife/0044,sietsema,19402,19.html)

These events led me to looking around for writings about other Church Avenue places, and I found some, and then the piece about the chicken joint appeared.

http://events.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/dining/reviews/24unde.html

I was delighted to see it there, but M pointed out that it’s pretty sad that NYC is so pricey that the $25 and under column is relegated to chicken shacks way, way in the outer boroughs. He does sort of have a point.

We wanted to go, though, and would have if we hadn’t been distracted by some leftover fried chicken left over from a very succesful fried-chicken and Jaws-watching party we’d been to the night before, an event designed to kick off the summer season. That chicken was from Dirty Bird, a place on 14th Street in Manhattan that boasts fried organic chicken. When it opened, rumor was that it wasn’t salty enough, or spicy enough, but then the Dirty Birders realized their errors and from the taste of it, they also added a bunch of sugar to the mix–which is not a complaint. (Knowing that in the best of foods the line between sweet and savory is somewhat wiggly, I add both sugar and cinnamon to my spaghetti sauce but only when M isn’t looking because it grosses him out. M, if you are reading this, I am just kidding honey, of course I would not do that to you.)

Because we love fried chicken and because we have been sulking about our lack of kitchen, our hosts from the night before had given us leftovers. During a particularly horrible part of the painting, we were therefore forced to stop and eat cold fried chicken which is even better than greasy hot fried chicken. M knew that it would ruin his taste for chicken but I didn’t think it would matter. It did, however, curb my appetite. Not for poultry, but just in general. Instead of the Church Ave project, we decided to go out to Coney Island instead to say hello to the ocean. But after painting, I was too tired for even that. Eventually we went out for a walk and M steered us in the direction of Church to see what we could see.

What we saw is a complete split from one side of the street to the other. On the south side are gigantic old rarefied houses that you wouldn’t imagine you’d find in Brooklyn. Where did they get shingles, why aren’t there bars on the windows, etc. But the north side of Church Avenue is PURE brooklyn, with bodegas and kids in do-rags and a couple examples of the kind of car service that aren’t even regulated by the Taxi and Limosine Commission.

After walking up and down a few blocks and realizing that we’re far from any of the places I’ve read about except for E & R, which is closed, we happen into a brand-new Mexican place called La Huasteca. We’re wondering whether they’re closed, but they’re not. Can we eat there? Yes. Do some drug dealers follow us into the restaurant? Yes. But they finish their business in the bathroom, quickly, and we’re left with a bunch of nice Mexicans who basically speak no English but seem at the ready to give us Al Pastor tacos, and me a lime agua fresca.

We brought it home to eat and M actually glowed with pleasure at his enchiladas, whose tortillas had been passed through some rich mole sauce before they were filled with chicken, and then resauced with tomatillo. Even though I don’t seek out mole, I do, as a maximalist, approve of multiple saucings for the same plate of food. My tacos al pastor were actually pork in red sauce accidentally, but I also really enjoyed it. We have since been back and I will write further about that meal but in brief, El Huasteca has cleaner flavors and fresher-seeming food that our local Mexican on Cortelyou, called Cinco de Mayo. I will defend Cinco de Mayo to the death in part because it’s one of the only restaurants REALLY close to our house, because since living in Texas I love all real Mexican food. However, we both *love* La Huasteca. They have many different kinds of soup, including a ranchera-style tortilla soup, as well as chicken caldo. The quesadillas are on flour tortillas (as opposed to the unusual cornboats that CdM serves) and the pico de gallo is chunky, bright, and hot.

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet been to other Church Avenue restaurants.

This is for a few reasons:

During the week ,we work too late to consider straying too far for dinner, and even though Church Avenue is only 3 blocks up, it’s still 3 long blocks up.

The REAL reason, though, is because the real project at hand is the house project. And while we’ve made some steps forward, we’ve also taken some steps back. I will tell you a little bit about our house using LISTS as a medium.

LIST OF GOOD THINGS ABOUT OUR HOUSE:
1. M and I live in it together
2. It doesn’t cost very much
3. The ceilings are weirdly fantastic: 6 different tin ceilings
4. There are picture moldings on the walls, so it’s sort of like we live in a castle
5. It is 1 block from the Q, which is an express train that takes M and I to work
6. There is a family of baby kitties in the backyard, and even M., who is theoretically opposed to kitties, realizes how excellent it is to have a pile of kittens outside. He might call it a tableau vivant, because that is the sort of thing he calls things. We can’t get to them since we can’t get down into the yard, which M. thinks is fine but I think is bad because c’mon, it would be good to pet these kitties AT LEAST ONCE but he knows where it would go. But we, and the cat we already live with, can watch them through the window. In this way, it is like we are at the zoo, but it is like WE are at the zoo, and the kitties are the patrons, since we are the people locked in and they are the free ones frolicking around through the weeds, which are very tall, so the tiny ones have to hop, which is enormously cute. I don’t think they paid to get into the yard, though. They are feral.

Okay, 6 is enough for now. Don’t want to exhaust them all at once. I will try to think of a succint list of bad things about the house:

LIST OF ONLY 5 BAD THINGS ABOUT OUR HOUSE
1. It makes me cough
2. This is because we have a mold condition but we don’t know where it’s coming from
3. We don’t really have walls in the kitchen and if we want them, we have to pay to get them. Same with a vent in the bathroom, which is perilously small and in a weirdly public part of the apartment.
4. The house has recently settled even further and the bathroom door, formerly very wonky, now won’t even close, and if you do force it, you are afraid that the pressure will be the final force that makes the back wall fall off into the back yard.
5. There are acoustical tiles first thing when you walk in the door which everyone–or everyone with eyes, at least–hates.
6. Pigeons hang out on our ledge in front, which is bad except for the fact that it makes M suggest nearly every day that we get an owl, which is a really interesting idea.

Would more birds really help us?

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A good piece of news is that despite the fact that our sink is on sawhorses and we don’t have walls in the kitchen, we’ve actually been using it. More later.

I am a tiny bit tired of New York, maybe a little bit ready to move out of the city. But it isn’t time to move out yet. New York is big and deserves credit for lots of different kinds of neighborhoods, so why not seek a new one out? My strapping yet civilized boyfriend, M, felt much the same way. When it recently came time for us to join households, we decided to move to a new neighborhood in Brooklyn, one with bigger houses, lower rents, swaying trees, stay-at-home dads.

Ditmas Park is a turn of the century “suburb” of New York within the city itself. It’s a place with enormous trees and 11 bedroom Victorian houses, some of which have turrets. It’s said that wealthy New Yorkers retreated here to escape cholera here during the summers, though the person I hear saying that most is me, and I can’t remember quite where I heard it.

We’re very much middle-class Brooklynites who are retreating here to escape escalating rents. We were seriously considering $2400 apartments before we settled on this place, but this far out in South Brooklyn hasn’t reached the frenzied pace that our last neighborhoods have. In fact, we chose a place where the deposit for our apartment was exactly $100.

As we searched for a new neighborhood, I knew that I’d wanted to live somewhere superlative in at least one way–and this certainly fit into that category. Super big houses. On the other side of a ridge that precludes us from even seeing Manhattan. Very low rent on a 100plus year old house, but a lot of work that we’d have to do ourselves.

Lest you think we’ve moved to either Chappaqua or Staten Island, Ditmas Park also claims a a growing gay population and an elementary school where 52 languages are spoken. In other words, it’s diverse. Afghanis, Mexicans, fill in the blank, I guarantee that there are some of them here. Would you like to see someone in a chador? Come on over! I guarantee you a good parking spot. Except, please pack a lunch, and pack one for us, too:

None of these interesting people seem to be cooking too much delicious food for us to eat.

There aren’t too many restaurants, or at least, the kinds of restaurants that we think of when we think of such. Ditmas residents are said to have pooled together to lure another restaurant to the neighborhood, and it’s under construction right now: it will be exactly the second gentrified restaurant in the neighborhood–but even the ethnic places don’t seem to be abounding on the main drag of the neighborhood where we live.

Since we’ve decided to settle in a bit more than usual, we thought that was okay. What we *didn’t* realize was that our kitchen in our fixer-upper rental would need to be wholly remodelled and that the only contractor we could afford would take a long vacation in Guyana before he could help us. We moved in a month ago, and in that time we’ve been limited to things that either cross the threshold already warm or are simply toasted.

So welcome to Church Avenue Chomp. This is where we hope to explore and report upon what Church Avenue has to offer. Church Avenue is a commercial strip’s several blocks to the north: a bustling bazaar of things that we might like to eat. It’s a utopia of lower-middle class ethnic groups in Brooklyn. Caribbean? Polish, Russian, Dominican, these are the things we are hoping for. More later!