Eating With Boykji: A Dining Diary in Five Parts
13 September 2010 - James BooIt’s really been a month since I last posted a story on this blog. In my defense: I was extremely busy, then I was extremely lazy, then I was extremely out of town, then I was extremely overwhelmed by my return to reality. On the plus side, the past four weeks have yielded many an eating experience that I’m happy to recount, both here and on Serious Eats. Let the feast of a thousand hams begin!
I’ll start by rewinding to mid-August, when great friend and epic eating comrade Boykji visited New York for a whirlwind tour of the city’s eats. The five days I spent sharing meals with Boyk reminded me of how lucky I am to live in New York, where one can literally spend hours on end walking, eating and repeating without ever getting bored. They also tested my limits more than any stretch of time in recent memory – there’s something to be said about bad influences when two insatiable appetites egg each other on against the better sense of gastric conscience. For better or for wurst, here’s the record of our eating marathon – I’ll be breaking form to spread this over the week, so your RSS feeds don’t explode.
Off the Plane: Visiting the Arepa Lady
When Chowhound was breaking into its fall-of-Rome days, Boykji became the first man to inform me of the existence of a Sainted Arepa Lady – one of Chowhound founder Jim Leff‘s holy grails, the Arepa lady has become a cult figure of food on a national scale. Neither of us had ever been to Jackson Heights. As Californians who prided ourselves on the tacos, tortas and burritos of our native soil, we imagined the taste of Colombia’s perfect food on a Queens corner and wished aloud that someday these visions would become a 2:00 a.m. dinner.
Since Boykji’s flight reached JFK at midnight on a Saturday, we called it kismet and met on 74th St. With an assist from Mr. Roosevelt Ave., we walked briskly to the corner of 79th St. and placed an order for una cada de una: one arepa de choclo and one arepa de queso.
The choclo is essentially a white cornmeal pancake, grilled with whole kernels of sweet corn in the batter and folded over salted queso blanco. The queso, pictured above, is a griddlecake stuffed with sweet cheese and topped with slightly savory queso fresco. Both arepas define the elegance of everyday eating. Formed with cheap ingredients and grilled to order with nondescript latin American cheeses and a smear of margarine, they constitute an eating experience so stupidly simple that biting into one is like setting a restaurant on fire.
We wolfed down the hype in a suspension of disbelief, living in one of those moments when every far-stretched claim about places like Di Fara and In-N-Out seems so true that it’s painful to think that someday we’d lose the ability to ever re-live this bite, buried six feet under and awaiting our fates as an unmemorable, mediocre meal for microbes.
The Arepa Lady
(Myspace page not consistently updated)
Friday and Saturday ONLY
10 p.m. – 5 a.m.
Roosevelt Ave. @ 79th St.
Queens, NY
September 13th, 2010 at 11:26 am
I wonder who was the first to call her the Sainted Arepa Lady.
September 13th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
Did I misread that, or did you just say setting restaurants on fire is stupidly simple…?
Arsonist eh?
September 13th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Jeff – It wasn’t Leff who gave her the name? I’d coin toss it between a Chowhound member and a local reporter.
Nick – If more sainted arepa ladyies were around, I’d be happy to see places like Caracas burn to the ground :P