My new web series is live, and you can see the first episode on Serious Eats New York!

The goal of this series, “1 Minute Meal,” is to produce a gallery of video snapshots that represent the true heart and soul of New York food: independent business owners from all parts of the world, contributing to an incredibly diverse food landscape that anyone with some pocket cash and an MTA card can taste. In New York more than anywhere else, there’s plenty of media and PR circling the hot restaurants, chefs, “concepts,” and openings, but not enough around the Muslim-Jewish deli, the Georgian bakery, the hand-pulled noodle shop, the arepa lady, and all of the other food, places and people I’ve come to love as a New York eater.

Episode 01: David’s Brisket House. Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, New York.

David’s is a Jewish Deli run by Yemenite Muslims, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bed-Stuy. The deli, originally owned by Jewish immigrants from Yemen and Russia, was passed down to a Muslim partner (also from Yemen) during the 1980s. The new David—a nickname he inherited along with the deli—turned the joint into his family’s business, and they’ve built that business into the kind of thing you’d only see in New York: a Jewish deli, run by Muslims with Brooklyn accents, for the benefit of Bed-Stuy. In this episode of 1 Minute Meal, Riyadh Gazali, manager of the Bed-Stuy location, speaks to the deli’s peculiar take on one of New York’s classic meals, while his cousin Sultan and his son Aladdin work the kitchen.

This is just the first of many very short stories to come, so subscribe to the 1 Minute Meal Vimeo Channel if you want to see the full collection of videos as it grows.

David’s Brisket House
533 Nostrand Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11216
718.789.1155

7721 5th Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11209
718.333.5662

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The seasons are turning in New York, and in celebration of being outdoors the Real Cheap Eats food writers’ collective has armed lower Manhattan and North Brooklyn with a guide to 50 cheap eats winners along the L Train. 22 of the dishes, including a killer Puerto Rican lechón written up by yours truly, are brand new additions to our $10-or-less digest.

Click here to read more!

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Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Casablanca Restaurant is the most conflicted. The parking spaces are named after Bogey, Bergman and costars. A sign in the lot welcomes all comers to “Casablanca, Venice,” but another by the door declares that customers are entering the former while leaving the latter. The confusion continues inside, where decorations include not only attempts at Morocco, but also memorabilia from the 1942 film, a mariachi band, women dressed in traditional Mexican dresses making tortillas, and a waiter pushing around a cart of margarita fixings. These contradictions are muddled further by a mural of the America-themed “Rick’s Cafe Americain,” portraying a scene from the film that never occurred – and into which the restaurant owners have had themselves and their staff painted.

But the next day, when somebody asks how dinner was the night before, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t the restaurant’s identity crisis, or its uncountable selection of tequila. It isn’t the life-sized Humphrey Bogart statue, or even the menu of calamari steaks. It’s the complimentary plate of flour tortillas brought to the table as you sit down: freshly made, slightly undercooked blankets of dough and a tomatillo-based salsa with cilantro, avocado and cheese. After inhaling a couple of those, nobody asks about the one-of-a-kind decor. Nobody cares about the restaurant’s history. They only request refills.

Casablanca Restaurant
220 Lincoln Blvd
Venice, CA 90291
(310) 392-5751

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Striking at the heart of winter, the Real Cheap Eats food writers’ collective is warming up 21 new additions to its $10-or-less digest. Highlights from our selection include a West African sweat potato leaf stew, an Indian breakfast gem, a bargain seafood soon dooboo (courtesy of yours truly) and everything under the soup-and-noodle sun.

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A late drive home in Los Angeles can cause fast food tunnel vision. Every highway exit is known to peckish nocturnals for its proximate combo-meal temptations. Fortunately, for my health, the two most convenient options between the 10 freeway and my place are Jack in the Box and Original Tommy’s. After two years living across the street from one in San Francisco, I still have gastrointestinal nightmares of the former. The latter doesn’t have a drive-thru.

A century ago the promise of Los Angeles as America’s Mediterranean, replete with outdoor cafes and pedestrian parks, seemed a perfect fit for its year-round weather. The ensuing expansion-fueled Autopia has since stripped the cement landscape of nearly all its outdoor food counters not on wheels. In 2013 the words “fast” and “convenient” promise vehicular Angelenos the luxury of not leaving their cars, or even their homes.

An exception is Mexican food. Tacos Delta is still alive and well, slinging birria in Silver Lake. Chabelita stayed open even during the Justice Riots. The line at Tito’s Tacos around lunchtime hasn’t waned. The seafood tostadas of my childhood have so far survived Whole Foods’ moving in next door. And the dying breed of outrageous food-stop signage can depend on King Taco to keep the tradition alive. These taco stands still fit right in with modern day L.A.

Outdoor fast food counters serving dogs and burgers, however, seem to hearken to an earlier era.

In a city where people buy coffee at the Starbucks drive-thru, park-and-dine fast food doesn’t flourish so much as it survives. Parking a car for a burger is more likely to involve white tablecloths, aioli and tomato jam than low cost or convenience. Los Angeles forgets that hamburgers are prole food, abandoning burgers under ten bucks to the drive-thru chains. The Georges and Jims, Classic Grills and Sunny Grills, serving pastrami-burgers and fried zucchini, are becoming historical landmarks. Local car owners might go years without ever stepping inside these businesses, barely buoyed by Metro bus riders, teenagers and senior citizens. They blend drably into the streets and strip malls of Los Angeles like California Quails, the vestigial wings of Los Angeles’ Autopian architecture.

Likewise, the dog-and-burger outdoor food counter is becoming a dinosaur. Sure, Pink’s still fools people into waiting in line, and Der Wienerschnitzel isn’t entirely extinct. L.A. Burger hasn’t closed yet (even if it looks like it has), and Lucky Boy in Pasadena still welcomes you happily to town when the 110 ends. But these are becoming unique establishments. Outdoor aluminum benches and wooden counters under pigeon-nested eaves are an endangered species.

The paragon of this species is Original Tommy’s.

Returning to school has reinvigorated two of my old habits: eating fast food and reading about L.A. culture. Despite the former, I rarely stop at the Santa Monica location of Original Tommy’s, nor the thinly guised Thoma’s a few blocks down. Like the ‘Bertos of San Diego, the Los Angeles chili-burger chain has spawned near infinite wannabes across the southland, with varying degrees of quality – some indoor, some outdoor, but rarely any with a drive-thru. The only reason this car owner ends up eating Tommy’s once or twice a year is an appreciation of local history.

Defining the quintessential L.A. burger is a complicated question in 2013, but it never used to be. Before In-N-Out’s empire and imported (and impostor) Japanese beef, there was Tommy’s on Beverly and Rampart, representing fast food for the southwest United States. The tiny stand-turned-chili-burger-complex, with food counters on each side of the parking lot, is still a popular late-night destination. Like another time-honored Los Angeles restaurant, the original Tommy’s location even boasts additional parking across the street.

The food at Tommy’s is as simple as it is messy. The chili comes on everything ordered unless specified otherwise. The condiment itself isn’t a game changing experience, but when combined with thick-cut cheese and a couple of yellow chiles it stands in the pantheon of fast food. If anything, eating at Tommy’s is a challenge of logistics rather than taste. Burger and hot dog buns alike are no match for the erosive properties of chili cheese.

Most of my reading on Los Angeles history has been through its literature. While literary L.A. is more likely to overlap with food culture at Musso and Frank or Trader Vic’s (R.I.P.), there’s something to be said for the importance of Greek-American diners on the cultural landscape, perhaps most famously when Frank meets Cora and his fate at a Greek diner in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Even so, I was surprised to find the Greek-founded Original Tommy’s on the pages of one of America’s post-modern masters: Thomas Pynchon.

You’ll more likely find The Crying of Lot 49 in L.A. literature anthologies, but some of my favorite passages about Los Angeles can be found in his 2009 novel (that hopefully precedes a promising film adaptation).

Pynchon captures Tommy’s gravitas within Los Angeles culture perfectly, from Inherent Vice:

“Agent Borderline closed the folder abruptly and slid it into a pile of others on a credenza, but not before Doc saw a blurred telephoto shot of himself out in a parking lot, probably Tommy’s, sitting on the hood of his car holding a gigantic cheezburger and peering into it quizzically, actually poking through the layers of pickles, oversize tomato slices, lettuce, chili, onions, cheese, and so forth, not to mention the ground-beef part of it which was almost an afterthought – an obvious giveaway to those who knew about Krishna the fry cook’s practice of including somewhere in this, for fifty cents extra, a joint wrapped in waxed paper. Actually, the tradition had begun in Compton years ago and found its way to Tommy’s at least by the summer of ‘68, when Doc, in the famished aftermath of a demonstration against NBC’s plans to cancel Star Trek, had joined a convoy of irate fans in pointed rubber ears and Starfleet uniforms to plunge (it seemed) down Beverly Boulevard into deep L.A., around a dogleg and on into a patch of town tucked in between the Hollywood and Harbor Freeways, which is where he first beheld, at the corner of Beverly and Coronado, the burger navel of the universe.”

Tommy’s Original World Famous Hamburgers
2575 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90057
213.389.1682

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This post is retrospective (not a ranking) on six Burmese restaurants in San Francisco. Since completing the series, Zach has left the Bay Area for the broader pastures of Los Angeles, where he continues to write for The Eaten Path.

The Eaten Path: Mission of Burma SF
June 22, 2011: Burmese Kitchen (Larkin Express)
July 7, 2011: Mandalay Restaurant
July 27, 2011: Little Yangon
November 11, 2011: Burma Café
June 25, 2012: Burma Superstar & Yamo

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Over a decade since I first began reading from its pages, Chowhound is still my go-to resource for food intel. Over the years, complaints filed against the service – a collection of bulletin boards for food-obsessed locals – have clustered around “bad user interface,” “bad user moderation” and “bad users.” But this thread about Brooklyn’s lard bread explains, in one long scroll, why the Chowhound archives are an ongoing source of joy for the diner whose curiosity takes “Madlibs: Best X in Y Edition” to new and savory places.

To be sure, there are some highly qualified declarations regarding on the best lard bread in New York – especially when Serious Eats’ Andrew Coe is concerned. But in regard to local lard bread concerns, I’ve been hooked on the meat-scented loaf ($5.50) at Cobble Hill’s Mazzola Bakery. Cubes of an especially peppery salami give the slightly greasy flavor of the loaf a nice bite. The bread itself isn’t as crusty as I’d like, but its relative (and deceptive) lightness makes for fortified snacking.

Mazzola Bakery
192 Union Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231
718.643.1719

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Happy Ongoing U.S. Congressional Failure Day New Year!

In 2012, The Eaten Path entered its fifth year of food and travel. It’s hard to believe, but easy to stomach. As Zach and I work to push stories onto bigger pages – his into the Creative Writing program at CSU Long Beach, mine into a literary magazine, a local reporting startup, New York’s best cheap eats guide and the digital reel – this blog has never felt more like home. It’s one we’ve had fewer chances to visit, even with all the renovations in place. But while the memories are fresh and there’s typeface in the pot, it’s ours for another year.

Zach

On January 31, 2011, Mele and I were on an airplane to Tokyo. Two weeks later, it was 2012, and we were back in California – unsure when the last year had ended and the new year had begun. Japan never stopped being transient, whether it was Josh driving us around in his Daihatsu or the trains between Osaka and Kyoto. Even the ensuing months, during which I wrote four stories on the trip for The Eaten Path, did little to solidify Japan in my timeline. Today they seem like recorded dreams, albeit delicious ones:

Katsuo Tataki in Kochi City
Japanese Soul Food in Shikoku
Soba and Kamameshi in Kyoto and Nara
Ramen in Shikoku, Kyoto, Tokyo and Yokohama

Upon our return, friends whose thoughts tend to be preoccupied with food had a habit of asking, “What was the best thing you ate in Japan?” I don’t think I ever answered the question the same way twice. Not enough time had passed. But over a year after that trip, the answer is less ambiguous.

On a snowy hilltop in the Shikoku mountains, Josh pulled his Daihatsu into a tiny village. Night had fallen and the snowflakes had thickened. The mood was set for my first onsen experience. Fortunately, the place was near empty. Thinking back on it now, hanging out nude with my friend Josh seems like it should have been weird, but at the time nakedness didn’t seem to matter. We lounged in hot springs under falling flurries and threw snow at Mele over the partition.

Afterwards, Josh, Mele and I went next door to a market and bought ice cream cones. We stood by the Daihatsu in the snow-framed parking lot and ate soft serve under stars and snowflakes. Nearly an hour in the hot springs had made us invincible to the cold inside and out. I can’t imagine ice cream ever being more satisfying than that.

On the way down the mountain we stopped at Jiyuken, a ramen joint tucked into the foothills, to re-up on warmth. In the middle of the restaurant a cauldron of hot dashi broth waited near an assortment of self-serve, seasonal ingredients. We came for the spicy ramen, but I remember the oden while waiting. The combination of hot broth, beef, daikon and hot mustard thawed me all over again. Maybe these are only the fond memories of a Californian writing in tee-shirt weather in January 2013, but those hot and cold hours between onsen and oden are some of the best of all my years.

James

As I trudged into the month of May, my nerves were as frayed as one could expect from a not-quite-workaholic in the New York leagues. A layoff that had been hanging over my head for half a year, becoming more and more welcome by the week, was sliding out of sight, leaving me to choose between another year of stable, professional frustration or employment parole without dole.

For six days, two of my friends, also deciding how hard to dig themselves out of the exact same hole, joined me for the best kind of reprieve from our white collar purgatory. On a Wednesday morning, after downing breakfast sandwiches, doughnuts and dark roast outside Peter Pan, we packed ourselves into an economy rental and hit the highway for French Canada:

Three Meals in Montreal
Dinner at Au Pied de Cochon
Portugese Chicken at Rotisserie Ramados
Sugar Shack: A Documentary

With phones off, stomachs empty and spirits aching for anything different, we tore through three nights of citygoing and two days on the maple farm. The office did not exist. E-mail was not an option. The meals were pure. It was the kind of road trip where destinations don’t become apparent until you’re walking home from your new favoriite pub in the a.m., or standing over all of Montreal from a particularly high bend atop the Mont Royal, or playing “Eye of the Tiger” with a band of French Canadian folk musicians as a barely domesticated wolf sings along just a few feet away. It all felt much closer to home than money, time and adulthood should have allowed.

It was also the kind of road trip that included an unexpected stop at the Ben & Jerry’s factory, where every tour ends with a free scoop – which in turn is only a primer for a visit to the factory’s ice cream parlour. The menu offers factory exclusives and flavors-in-development, with names like “Bonnaroo Buzz” and “Cinnamon Cereal Swirl.” Just outside, tables for four are dotted with holes just wide enough to house a freshly scooped waffle cone.

We nursed our ice creams in the last chill of winter before climbing up a grassy knoll to pay our respects at the graveyard of discontinued flavors – a motley assortment of misses that includes “Sweet Potato Pie” and “Tuskeegee Chunk.” I followed the others back to the car, not quite understanding how far this escape had taken me, but convinced that these were the most important steps I’d taken all year.

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The Real Cheap Eats food writers’ collective is helping New York ring in the end of the world (and the end of the year) with with 22 new additions to its $10-or-less digest. Highlights from our selection include an enormous Yemeni lamb “omelete,” a fried catfish sandwich recommended by yours truly, and some of the best fried rice in the city.

Click here to read more! And click here to buy 2012, starring John Cusack and Scott Templeton from The Wire, on Bluray. I’ll see you at the end of the world.

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Two years ago, I paid a visit to the Chieu Kien Buddhist Temple for a free vegetarian lunch. This week, I’ve been given a chance by New York’s brightest upstart storytelling publication, Narratively, to return to the temple for a deeper conversation with Thich Thien Chi.

The long-form profile can be read here.

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The volume of food and flavor involved in a visit to Shopsin’s is nothing my stomach can handle on a regular basis – and neither is the cost. While staple offerings like “Blisters on My Sisters” and “Wiggly Pete” are priced to move, much of the breakfast special menu hovers around the $20 mark, a line I rarely cross, even for special occasions.

I recently made an exception for “Bubba,” a $19 breakfast of scrambled eggs, dirty rice and corn bread, topped with grilled shrimp and given a trim of fresh greens. It’s a breakfast indulgence that every regular should try once, if only to marvel at the skill hinted at from every inch of the plate. Shopsin’s eggs and dirty rice are good enough to make the meal, and the cornbread itself – with crisp, crumbly edges and a light body – is worth a purchase entirely on its own. The shrimp, intensely salted, singed on the grill and spiced to a sweat, delivers a punch to the palate that makes the dish almost as hard to finish as it is to put down. It’s a good thing.

Shopsin’s
120 Essex Street
Essex St. Market, Stall #16
New York, NY 10002

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Back when I was eating my way across Montreal, I also made a two-day detour to a town called Rigaud, where I joined forces with the Goddamn Cobras Collective to put together a short documentary about a Quebecois “sugar shack” named Sucrerie de la Montagne.

At the start of the summer we submitted that film to the Food Film Festival in New York and Chicago. Over 40 films screened across the two festivals, each showcase accompanied by the foods being shown on the screen and packed with filmmakers, cooks and food fanatics of all kinds. Sugar shack won the Audience Choice Award in both cities, each of which were incredible events that I was way too lucky to attend.

I’m happy to finally share this film with anyone who cares to see. Press play below, enjoy the show, and share the link with your maple-loving friends!

Other TEP favorites from the Food Film Festival:
Mozzarella, Inc. (winner, Best Short Film, Chicago – full film!)
Ramen Dreams (winner, Best Short Film, New York – trailer)
Mickle’s Pickle (winner, Audience Choice, New York – trailer)
Mexican Cuisine (winner, Best Super Short, New York and Chicago – trailer)
Bon Appetit (full film!)
The Mud and The Blood trailer
Vegetable: Friend or Foe?
A Taste of Home

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On an especially early morning in Savannah, I crawled out of bed and stumbled to Clary’s Cafe for breakfast before the flight home. It’s the kind of restaurant whose Americana signage is difficult to judge off the bat, but two things convinced me to dig further: the phrase “est. 1903″ and an abundance of “support the troops” imagery in the front window.

The breakfast menu at Clary’s is as broad as it gets. And while I’d advise against Clary’s breakfast potatoes or grits, the house-made corned beef hash ($10.99) is the best I’ve ever tasted. Prepared from a whole brisket, the bits of corn beef in this hash are lively, well salted, and filled out with a particularly sharp taste of grilled onion. The portion is big enough for two, so if you find yourself in town, take advantage of the open-container policy downtown and make Clary’s part of your hangover plan.

Clary’s Cafe
404 Abercorn St.
Savannah, GA 31401
912.233.0402

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