MarketStEl

Finally, something German from your 'hood. I knew a fellow--a friend of a roommate--who lived at 151 East 83d back in the early 80s and took a keen interest in many things German (he was himself German-American). It was he who told me that this particular part of the UES was also known as "Yorkville" and had historically been a largely German community. I'm guessing that's not so much the case now, but I may be wrong about that.

The landlord probably needs some edumacatin'. I had it on good authority that Nifty Fifty's did quite well in that space--well enough that the landlord saw dollar signs and jacked up the rent. Sayonara, Nifty Fifty's. (Never having experienced it, I may have to take the 113 home one evening and stop off at their MacDade Boulevard location.) I don't know if the landlord brought the rent back down for Fat Daddies, but I doubt it.

Do I need to serve up another History, Geography and Politics lesson? It looks as if I do. When the 18th Amendment was repealed, the 21st Amendment -- which repealed it -- allowed the states to do whatever they saw fit to regulate or restrict the sale and transport of alcoholic beverages within their borders. Keep in mind that while nationwide Prohibition was a colossal failure, there were--and are still--forces that regard alcohol as an evil that must be controlled, and the failure of Prohibition did not convince them otherwise. Some states--Pennsylvania among them--decided that they still wanted to make it difficult to purchase alcohol within their borders. Others--New Jersey, for one--were not as concerned about purchases of alcohol for private use as they were about an "oversupply" of public places where it could be consumed. Both states have liquor licensing systems that allocate a fixed number of licenses based on a population formula, with some sort of grandfather clause that allows jurisdictions where the population falls to keep the same number of licenses as they had at the time the laws setting up the systems were passed. As demand for these licenses rises, their price will rise, and some places will find themselves priced out of the market. For them, it may be easier to simply dispense with the attempt to obtain a license altogether. Hence the high number of BYOB restaurants in both states. However, in Pennsylvania, most of those BYOBs can be found in the five counties that make up the state's southeast. There is little clamor in the other 62 counties--not even the six that make up Greater Pittsburgh--for dramatic change in the way the Commonwealth controls the sale of alcohol. Perhaps if the folks in Southwestern Pennsylvania were as concerned about the matter as we are, there might be some changes in our state's liquor laws (is it just a coincidence that the improvements in the way the PLCB runs its consumer business, such as they are, have come with the ascension of a Southeastern Pennsylvanian to the agency chairmanship?). But as far as I can tell, folks in the other 62 counties see no reason to scrap a system that serves them adequately, which is why even Republican governors have found getting rid of the liquor control regime tough sledding. That said, it still might be worthwhile to launch a campaign targeted at legislators from the Southeast, Lehigh Valley and South Central (Lancaster/Lebanon/Harrisburg) regions arguing for something that Pennsylvania government doesn't do as often as Missouri government does: pass legislation that allows for different rules in different regions of the state. (I cite Missouri because, besides being the state I grew up in, it has a similar geographic and political dynamic, and the Kansas Citians [in terms of nightlife, they play the role of Philadelphians to St Louis' Pittsburghers] have managed to make carefully tailored local-option laws a specialty.)

Nobody's eaten lunch since I last posted? Or is it that nobody's eaten anything they think interesting enough to share? I suspect the latter...but I had meant to share what I had on "cook's day off" the day after I posted, in part because it was something I hadn't expected to find. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that bison is still a rather trendy item, not widely available yet. I probably was wrong in this impression even before I had lunch on the 17th, because the diners I occasionally frequent now offer at least bison burgers, and one of them even serves a bison steak. In any case, I hadn't expected to find one on the menu here-- --at this unassuming steak-and-hoagie joint at 17th and Providence, a few blocks up from Widener. (I waited for my order on the old sofa that is the one piece of furniture in the shop.) But there it was, and here it is: $3.99 to boot. It was a little on the dry side.

this is a joke, right? ← Oh, my, my. I could think of several uses for this product that have nothing at all to do with keeping your banana from messing up your notes or homework. From its design, I'm not so sure that its inventors didn't have similar thoughts.

Thanks for sharing your New York with us, Megan. And special thanks for sharing the inside of your fridge with me. I see I've got a lot of catching up to do when next I'm in town. Regards, Sandy

I'm with you on the sentiment, and I also understand your astonishment at running across a whole bunch o' ready-cut veggies. (For the same reason, I get annoyed at the fact that when traveling, I find it impossible to rent a car with a manual transmission.) But may I hazard an excuse for, if not a defense of, the phenomenon by offering myself as an example? It used to be that I had a relatively short commute: I could leave my Center City apartment at 8:30 and be at work by 9; on the return trip, I could walk through the front door of my apartment at 5:25. This left me with plenty of time to do all the preparations for a decent cooked-from-scratch meal and have it on the table by 7 or 7:30, depending on the dish. I am no longer so lucky. My 8:30 am departure has been moved up an hour to 7:30. On the return trip, if I make my connections, I can be at home around 6:15; miss one, though, and I'm looking at 6:45 or even 7 instead. (I could give you a whole sidebar on the spatial arrangement of the modern metropolis that makes this so much more common, but I promised myself I would refrain from channeling PLANetizen to this board.) If I have a resume client or something similar to deal with upon arrival, or if I don't remember to plan some things before leaving for work, we are now talking dinner at 9. Most folks I know would rather not eat a big meal that late. So what do you do? Figure out ways to shave the time spent cooking--or dispense with it altogether, as a number of (sometimes artificially) busy people now do. Hence the popularity of "home meal replacements" or whatever that industry term is, the explanation why Hamburger Helper is suddenly too time-consuming--and the reason that even the really good produce stands are now selling cut-up veggies in shrink-wrapped packages. As for your poll: Starwich, of course. That conversation has whetted my appetite, and since I'm not going to be in New York any time soon, I'm going to have to experience this place vicariously through you. Sorry to burden you like this.

One of these evenings I should just hop off the 109 in Clifton Heights and do a scouting report.

They probably call them "Philly cheesesteaks" out there, no? Rule 1: If the place adds "Philly" or "Philadelphia" before the name of the sandwich, it's probably a pale imitation of the Real Thing. (This just conjured up a memory of a deservedly short-lived franchise operation called "Philly Mignon." There was an outlet in the food court at Independence Center in suburban Kansas City.) As for my last meal? Never mind what I would like to eat before I die. I comfort myself with the thought that once I depart, there is a Levis hot-dog-and-crabcake special with a glass of Champ Cherry soda waiting for me in Heaven.

When I hear that, I think of the elephant with the giant ears. My brain works in very strange ways. No, it doesn't. I'm sure that's what the people who coined that acronym wanted you to conjure up. Yeah! What are they? I didn't know there was unclaimed territory south of 110th Street. (Wait a minute. The tracks leading to Grand Central Terminal come out from underground at 96th Street and Park Ave, and I believe it's at that point that the UES ends. Conversely, the UWS continues all the way to Cathedral Parkway (110th) and beyond a bit to the Columbia campus (at 116th).

Well, Bleudauvergne, sorry to practise "acharnement thérapeutique" on the thread when I'm the one who complained that it had become too long. But this excerpt is such a laugh that I can't resist. This is hilarious. To any shopper of average competence, this only evokes cheese vendors. [...] Anyone, anthropologist or not, believing that a cheese vendor on a market may actually have made the wheel of Comté or Beaufort that he's cutting up, or even the very camemberts that he sells, seriously needs a good trip back to school. ← Indeed. The above passages that you dissected could just as easily have come out of a book titled "Market Day at the Reading Terminal" or "Market Day on South 9th Street." Only the produce in the latter book wouldn't look as lovely.

Whipped up after our e-mail exchange, I guess? Yeah, the illustration is all wrong for the concept, but I see where you're going with this. Typeface is in the neighborhood, but you probably want something a little wider and more open-looking.

Indeed - NoHo ("North of Houston"), NoLIta ("North of Little Italy"), and so on. You also often see acronyms used for other neighborhoods, though you would read these as the entire name, rather than pronounce the acronym: LES (Lower East Side), UES (Upper East Side), UWS (Upper West Side), and so on. ETA: And how could I forget the (relatively) freshly-coined SoHa ("South of Harlem")? ← I dunno-- I think DUMBO ("Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass") is even better! Trivia: I think SoHo also caught on because of the association it conjures up with the London district of the same name (lowercase "h"), which is IIRC fashionable in its own right and not too far from very fashionable Kensington and Knightsbridge (the latter home to Harrods and its world-famous Food Hall). After that, the deluge of geographic acronyms.

Makes two of us. But I don't think you have to refrigerate the Sriracha. OTOH, there may be no pantry for you to put it in, so I guess that makes sense.

I've had Li-Lac chocolates--a friend bought some back from a trip to NYC when I was living in Boston--and they're luscious. Good to see they're still around. A mass transit shot! God bless you. Your pre-foodblog karma must have traveled 90 miles south this morning. A catenary wire problem on the R3 West Trenton shot the R3 Media/Elwyn schedule full of holes. After arriving at Market East at 7:44 to see that the 7:16 was 75 minutes late (and obviously later still) and the 7:47 (my usual train) 55 minutes late, I decided to take the Market-Frankford El to the 109 bus instead. I got to work at 9:10, as I usually would taking the slow route at this time. ObFood: Lots of coffee and a decent diner lunch.

Alice Waters? We don't need no stinkin' Alice Waters. This project, which grew out of fairly modest roots at a Southwest Philly middle school more than a decade ago, is completely homegrown, has no big names behind it (other than the prestigious university that lends it academic muscle and the foundations that fund it), and has been cited as a national model for both school-community partnership and solid nutrition education. And as far as I know, there's no mesclun mix involved--unless the University City High School students who operate a commercial garden connected to the Urban Nutrition Initiative grow some for their customers. The Urban Nutrition Initiative, unfiltered by me

Seconding Big Bunny: Maybe it's your convenience store that needs upgrading. Though I too have bought bananas from convenience stores--not just Wawa, but also 7-Eleven (the one near me sells singles for 59 cents each) and the indie convenience store right up the street from me. This sounds to me like a solution in search of a problem.

Frankie Johnson's FireHouse Diner (with a blinky neon 'u' while everything else stays lit). But what would people go there to "eat"? Hooters has it's wings... ← jsolomon, you are too much! to eat: Sausages, natch. Weenies, as Fistfulla' suggested. And Cockles ... Now, what would the waiters wear? ← Thongs, of course. (Along with the tux collar and bow tie.) And all the dishes would be served in baskets. Now, as for the backstory: Frankie was Howard Johnson's bachelor uncle...

Though there is a shop called "Philly Style Pizza" on South 11th just below Sansom, right across from the entrance to the Foerderer Pavilion at Jefferson Hospital. They make a decent cheesesteak, but since NYPD Pizza is at the opposite end of the same block, I've never tried their pizza. NYPD, IMO, is what traditional New York-style pizza is supposed to be--yet I've never had it in New York (that place in Brooklyn where we went on a Pizza Club outing late in '04 aside). Somehow, the crusts are always a bit thicker than NYPD's and the slices soggier (if you get a slice of NYPD pizza fresh from the oven, it won't go limp on you; then again, maybe that also applies to the places in New York where I've had slices (aforementioned Brooklyn place excepted, again).

I can't recall the last time I ate a Lay's potato chip. It was probably at someone else's place; I never buy them. Why should I when even the most popular regular local brands are better? But speaking of those brands, I must take issue with the dominant tastes of my fellow Philadelphians. I really don't understand why Herr's is so ubiquitous around here when Utz is so much better. Channeling my post over in Food Media & News about lower-sodium canned soup: Herr's are simply too salty. Utz chips have a light but potato-y flavor with about half the sodium of the other major brands. (And they've bragged about this on the backs of their bags for years now, in a marvelous piece of false modesty: "In recent years, sodium has become a health issue for some consumers. Long before that, Bill and Salle Utz believed that if a basic potato chip had good flavor, a little salt would enhance that flavor while a lot of salt would destroy it. The almost 75-year-old recipe you receive in this package is a time-tested standard in the potato chip industry, which also just happens to have the lowest sodium among all leading chip brands.* We have never advertised that fact, but thought those who are concerned about sodium intake would want to know." [* Until the Feds revised the guidelines for sodium intake, this passage read "...which just happens to meet the U.S. Government standard for low sodium."] (An Utz regular chip has only 90 mg of sodium; most brands have twice that amount or more, as do Utz's flavored varieties. Conversely, and probably for this reason, Utz does not produce a "low sodium" or "lightly salted" potato chip, though it does have a "No Salt Added" variety.)

Hey, bad enough the guy has to mangle my name, but apostrophes? That's over the line. OTOH, you really oughta see me in 5-inch stillettos and a bustier. Hey, how about a program that would appeal to both you and me? Let's call it "Chippendale Cuisine," in which buff guys strip to the waist and prepare sizzling dishes for audiences of adoring ladies and the occasional queer guy, who would provide campy running commentary on their presentation and, um, technique. As for cooking with comedy and education thrown in, Alton Brown does a good job, though I imagine his mix of corniness and geekiness is not for everyone. I find it appealing enough--and his science-of-cooking lessons useful enough--that I may just go out and buy I'm Only Here for the Food.

Quick orientation tip: The numbered avenues west of Fifth all change to named avenues at 59th Street or when Broadway crosses them. The ones east of Fifth keep their numbers. The avenues on the Upper West Side, from east to west: Central Park West (8th), Columbus (9th), Amsterdam (10th), Broadway (eventually 11th), West End (12th). The avenues on the Upper East Side, from west to east: 5th, Madison, Park (=4th), Lexington, 3d, 2d, 1st, York (A). I think there may also be an East End (B) in a few places. The major hospitals (except for Columbia-Presbyterian, which is all the way up in Washington Heights) are all on the Upper East Side. Back to the topic: I've never seen the inside of Zabar's or Fairway, so I'd really like to see pix of both, along with any of the good inexpensive places to eat in your neighborhood. As well as your kitchen and the obligatory fridge shot. I'm especially interested in the kitchen shot to see if a theory I have is proved or refuted. By way of explanation: At lunch yesterday at a cute little old-school-Philly restaurant in Media, my überboss, the Assistant Vice President for University Relations, got to reminiscing of the time she lived in New York in the course of our conversation. I made the observation that New York abounds in decent, reasonably-priced places to eat just about everywhere you turn. I suggested that this was compensation for the astronomical cost of housing there, an explanation that my colleague took exception to, noting that she was paying more for her house in Media than her Manhattan apartment--but failing to note that she had a larger house all to herself whereas in Manhattan she shared a one-bedroom apartment with a roommate. I didn't get around to my second explanation, which was that since the typical middle-class Manhattanite lives in an apartment with a kitchen you can barely turn around in, much of the time--especially for social occasions--it's easier to eat out than cook in. (To be fair, you will find kitchens of this type in Center City Philadelphia too. I almost moved into an apartment that had one a couple of years back.)

Figures you would save the best for last. Nice column there! Good luck with your students and your new arrival now in the gestation stage.

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot Twelve full ounces, that's a lot Twice as much for a nickel too Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you! Nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel, trickle, trickle, trickle, trickle... We're doing this 1930s radio jingle at the next Philadelphia Gay Men's Chorus concert (a nostalgia trip back to the Swing Era). On the topic: I guess I'm not all that spoiled--I will usually make do with something else when what I prefer is not available. (Further edited to add: And I will usually choose another product over my preference if it is acceptable to me and costs less.) The exceptions: --Regular tomatoes--I might succumb to the hydroponic "on-the-vine" ones, but ordinarily, give me Jerseys (in season) or give me death! Oh, I forgot--the big, glorious misshapen ones, please! (In the off-season I usually buy grape or cherry tomatoes, which seem to come out of the hothouse okay.) --Cheddar cheese for everyday use. New York State extra sharp is a must. Vermont will do. Wisconsin? Where's that? And what's with this "happy cows" California BS? (Thread-tying, sort of, with the long-dormant "store brand" thread: My base cooking cheese is America's Choice New York Extra Sharp Cheddar. Good sharp flavor, nice crumbly texture, and the price is right at ~$3.89/lb.)

Well, Melissa, I guess those of us in our forties were old enough to remember Graham Kerr, who I also caught on non-school-day weekday afternoons. I'm afraid my memories of the program are all a blur, as though I had been drinking right along with the Galloping Gourmet. On the other hand, I do remember this: He had the field to himself on commercial TV. Everything else around his time slot was chat shows like "The Mike Douglas Show." (I've now walked past the building where that show was taped too many times to count. ObFood: It now houses Brasserie Perrier on its street floor. It was built in 1937 to house the radio station predecessor of its originating TV station.) It was a good thing he came on in the afternoon; had he come on in the morning, I might never have seen him, for I wouldn't dare miss my favorite game shows. (I'm still a "Jeopardy!" aficionado with a serious "The Price is Right" jones who wishes Monty Hall were still around.) No other commercial TV station in Kansas City aired cooking shows during the day, and after Kerr went off the air, neither did WDAF-TV. They were all content to leave that genre to the "educational" TV station, which we couldn't get until we bought an "all-channel" portable TV set somewhere around 1968. Which is a shame, for he did prove that cooking can be rollicking entertainment.