We were on our way to the Williamsburg Flea Market yesterday when we came across Fabbrica Restaurant & Bar. We were hungry and it was the first restaurant we came to when we got off the ferry (N. 6th St. and Kent Ave.) It was a fortuitous find, crowded but with room at the bar.
Their menu changes throughout the day – breakfast, brunch, lunch, late-lunch, etc. I was lucky to get there when Purgatorio was on it. That’s not Dante’s poem but eggs cooked in tomato sauce. It was the first time I’d ever seen it in a restaurant. My mother made it as a standard Monday lunch, using left over Sunday gravy. She called it Eggs in Purgatory.
I looked at the dinner menu and will definitely go back – hearty Italian food, interesting industrial décor, friendly service and pet-friendly too (dogs at the bar and outdoor tables).
It’s been vacant for a very long time and now it’s a bar & restaurant with great views.It’s the 1st pier on the Hudson River, at the western end of Battery Park on the foot of West Street.
Specializing in sea food, they have an extensive raw bar.
They also serve standard, well-presented pub grub.
Pulled pork sandwich
Liam the bartender and a pint
Oyster po’boy
Lots of hi-quality beers on tap and a well-stocked bar.
In the late 1970s when fire boats were moored at Pier A
Mint Julep Nothing like it in summer. Try it in a silver cup if you have one. Originally made with Cognac, the standard is now Bourbon although some prefer rye.
Ingredients:
Mint leaves
1/2 teaspoon of sugar
Bourbon
In a rocks glass or silver cup, muddle a good size bunch of mint leaves with the sugar and a few drops of Bourbon. Pack the cup with cracked ice and mix the mint with the ice. Add the Bourbon and then add more ice and a sprig of mint.
Magnolia
Ingredients:
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp Cointreau (or 4 drops of orange flower water)
1 ½ oz brandy
1 egg yolk
Shake and strain into flute and fill with sparkling hard cider or Champagne.
Golden Fizz
Ingredients:
1 shot of gin
Juice of ¼ lemon
1 tspn sugar
1 egg yolk
Club soda
Shake thoroughly and strain into small highball glass without ice and top with some club soda.
Two other traditional Southern specialties, the Sazeracand Ramos Gin Fizzgot their own posts.
We recently spent a long weekend in Hot Springs, Arkansas. It’s been a resort for a long time thanks to the mineral water spring and spas. Until about the time Las Vegas came of age in the 1950s, Hot Springs was also a gambling mecca attracting Hollywood celebrities and gangsters. They even have a gangster museum.
Arlington dining room
Lobby bar
Jockey silks
I’ve always appreciated Southern cuisine and Hot Springs has some great restaurants. We started every morning with grits and eggs (and donuts) at our hotel restaurant (The Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa). Grits aren’t too common in NYC so I look forward to them whenever I’m in the South.
An Arlington Hotel breakfast
We had a great dinner at KJs Grill– chicken fried steak, French fries and local draft beer surrounded by paintings and photos of Marilyn.
It wasn’t all Southern American food, there was some Southern Italian too. We had a terrific meal at Luna Bellathat included arancini as good as any that I’ve ever had in New York. The same owners as KJ’s and more pictures of Marilyn.
Small MandolinSlices garlic as thinly as Paul Scovino did in Good Fellas and it’s cheap enough to throw away when it gets dull. Get one in a housewares store for $5 or $10. Watch your fingers, it’s sharp.
Hanging Basket
Good for handy storage of root vegetables and perfect for drying peppers.
Mushroom Brush
For getting that ugly brown stuff off mushrooms.
Egg Beater
Quicker than a whisk for fluffy omelets and zabaglione.
Fish Gripper & Scaler
This gripper was my father’s and is over 50 years old – Delty’s Fish Gripper, Lancaster PA.
Masher
Use it to make a lumpy sauce smooth – squashes tomatoes, onions, etc. as they’re cooking.
Shrimp Deveiner
A great design by Lamson Sharp.
Pepper Roaster
Really a grater but it doubles as a grill for roasting peppers on a gas burner – about 2 or 3 jalapenos or 1 bell at a time.
Processor
This one only holds about 2 ½ cups. I use it for making a trinity or any other fine chopping.
Herb baggie
To keep parsley, rosemary, etc. fresh put them in water in a rocks glass, cover with a baggie and refrigerate. Works with basil too but don’t refrigerate. Rather than a bowl or tray, use baggies for marinating meat and fish
Not too long ago my cousin Jeanne reminded me about a special after-dinner drink my father would make for our grandmother when we went to see her on holidays. It’s called a Pousse Caffe.That translates to something like ‘coffee chaser.’ It’s made by very carefully pouring layers of different colored liquors with different densities into a pony glass. They have to be poured in the correct order or they’ll mix. He held the glass on an angle so the liquor would slowly and gently run down its side. With some care and a steady hand, you can do it.
My father’s five layer recipe starts with a red base of Grenadine Syrup, followed by chocolaty Crème de Cacao, then green Crème de Menthe, clear Cointreau and topped with some amber Cognac. Use about one half ounce of each or vary the amounts for different of thicknesses of color layers.
Pousse Caffe ingredients
It should be drunk in one shot, the way my grandmother did it. You get a swirl of different tastes in your mouth. It’s more a confection than a drink – not too sweet or tart.
Italian Flag Pousse Caffe
Whenever I make Pousse Caffes, since they’re so colorful, all the kids around the table want one. So I’ve come up with a milder version.
It starts with the same non-alcoholic Grenadine Syrup, then a thin layer of the green Crème de Menthe topped with some half and half. The only alcohol is in the ¼ ounce of low proof Crème De Menthe.
Brandy Scaffa
Another version of a layered after-dinner drink is the Brandy Scaffa. It’s not too sweet and has a bit more kick than the Pousse Caffe.
Start with 3/4 ounce of Luxardo Maraschino Liqueurin a narrow glass and then float 3/4 ounce of brandy on top of it. Finish with three dashes of Angostura Bitters sprinkled on top. Then watch it sink to make a reddish-brown line between the two layers. Of course, to get the correct effect, you should do it in one shot.
Use it for deglazing. It’s gentler than a metal one for scraping up the brown bits.
Hachoir or Mezza Luna (?)
I found this chopper at a yard sale. I’m still not too sure how it’s really supposed to be used but its old and interesting. It came from a Philadelphia restaurant.
Mellon Baller
Perfect for removing choke from artichokes. I suppose you can use it for balling melons too.
Cutlet Pounder
When the butcher doesn’t make them thin enough, here you go.
Blender
Good for powdering spices or making Flips & Frulatto. I got this one in a flea market. It’s nothing fancy with only two speeds, on and off.
Muddler
For Old Fashioneds, Mint Juleps Caipirinhas, etc.
Garlic Press
Speaks for itself.
Potato Peeler
Buy a cheap one and replace it when it gets dull.
Olive Pitter
The curved bottom is the perfect shape for squashing olives so you can remove the pit.
New York City used to have one Chinatown and now there are three. In additional to the original in downtown Manhattan, there’s one in Sunset Park, Brooklyn and another in Flushing. This morning we went shopping in Flushing.
Fresh produce, seafood, meat and all kinds of Asian imports beautifully displayed and good prices too.
And did I mention fresh fish…
Asian – Italian Fusion – Spaghetti al Nero Sepia con Bok Choy
Boil washed and sliced bok choy until tender (This recipe works with broccoli rabe, arugula or other greens too. Made like this, weeds would taste good.) Sauté the still wet greens and with garlic and oil. Add S&P, red pepper flakes cover and steam. When it wilts, toss with pasta. Simple, right? A little cheese isn’t bad on this.
Adele Sarno, 85, in her Manhattan apartment, where she has lived since the 1960s. Her landlord, the Italian American Museum, wants to evict her. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Adele Sarno
In Japan, Adele Sarno would be considered a Living National Treasure but in New York she’s being evicted. An 85 years old Italian-American woman is in the way of the expansion plans of the Italian-American Museum. How’s that for irony?
Two quotes for yesterday’s New York Times that sum up the issue: (the complete article is below)
“You’re fighting a museum that purports to exhibit Italian-American culture and then proceeds to evict a living artifact,” said Victor J. Papa, director of the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council.
“So the museum should be running a charity or providing residences at discount rates?” Joe Carella, the spokesman, asked. “That doesn’t match the mission.”
New York Times – 3/25/15
Museum in Little Italy Seeks to Evict a Living Link to the Past
Adele Sarno’s father, a longshoreman, emigrated from Naples, and she grew up in Manhattan’s Little Italy. As a child, she served as princess for the annual Feast of San Gennaro, she said, and one year was even crowned the queen.
Ms. Sarno eventually owned a candy shop and, later, an Italian products store below her family’s apartment on Grand Street until Sept. 11, when business dried up.
The number of people of Italian ancestry who live in Little Italy is shrinking by the year, and may soon drop by one more: Ms. Sarno, 85, is being evicted from her apartment after losing a fight to keep her $820-a-month rent from skyrocketing. But what has gotten tenant advocates’ attention is not just her age, but also the identity of the landlord: the Italian American Museum, which is in the building next door.
“You’re fighting a museum that purports to exhibit Italian-American culture and then proceeds to evict a living artifact,” said Victor J. Papa, director of the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, an affordable housing group that has helped Ms. Sarno in her effort to stay. “That’s absolute hypocrisy.”
A spokesman for the museum said ethnicity had nothing to do with it. The museum owns a total of six apartments, including Ms. Sarno’s, in three contiguous tenement buildings at Mulberry and Grand Streets, and relies on the rental income to help pay expenses.
“So the museum should be running a charity or providing residences at discount rates?” Joe Carella, the spokesman, asked. “That doesn’t match the mission.”
Founded in 2001, the Italian American Museum is “dedicated to the struggles of Italian-Americans and their achievements and contributions to American culture and society,” according to the mission statement posted on its website. Ms. Sarno said she was indeed struggling, with a notice from the city marshal giving her only days to leave. She filed a request in housing court this week to halt the eviction.
“How could you throw old people out?” she said on Wednesday, sitting in her apartment, a mini-museum itself furnished with lamps, marble tables and ceramics from the old country. “I’m not going to be here that many more years. Let me die in my home.”
The players in the dispute have added a cultural element to one of the thousands of eviction cases in New York each year. In this case, Ms. Sarno’s two-bedroom unit could fetch five times the current rent in an area that, like many in the city, has become lucrative territory.
Ms. Sarno, whose only child, a daughter, lives in Wisconsin, wants to stay in the neighborhood where she was born by midwife. Her family, including two brothers, a sister and her parents, who eventually separated, all lived in Little Italy. She said she had moved to her current second-floor apartment, where her father was living, after her divorce in the 1960s.
Not much is left of Ms. Sarno’s Little Italy, now mostly a tourist magnet of a few blocks that has been overwhelmed by Chinatown’s sprawl. The 2010 census recorded not one neighborhood resident who had been born in Italy.
“My good friends all passed away,” she said. “I’ve got my television.”
She still counts on a few friends: the owner of the gun shop next door who takes out her garbage; the young couple upstairs who have a baby and pay $4,500 a month; an old boyfriend who drives her to a ShopRite on Staten Island to save on groceries.
Her doctors and the parish where she was baptized, Church of Most Precious Blood, founded in the late 1800s, remain within walking distance.
The museum moved to Little Italy from Midtown Manhattan in 2008, buying the three buildings for $9 million in order to expand. The recession halted those plans, Mr. Carella said, and the goal now is to find a developer to buy the buildings while allowing the museum to remain rent-free.
Ms. Sarno said she got a letter from the museum about five years ago saying that the rent was being raised to $3,500. With Social Security payments and help from relatives as her only sources of income, she said, she could not possibly pay that much.
With the help of Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, she sought a determination from state housing officials about whether her apartment was subject to rent-regulation laws that would protect her. She learned it was not, and after several years of appeals and legal back-and-forth, the museum was allowed to the pursue eviction in November. The notice to vacate followed this month.
Described by neighbors as an independent woman who goes to bed early, wakes up in the middle of the night and cooks pasta in the wee hours, Ms. Sarno said that if she was forced out, her most viable option would be to join her daughter in Wisconsin, taking along her 19-year-old cat, Tosha.
“I don’t want to go there,” she said. “I don’t drive. I’d be stuck in the house 24/7.”
In an interview, Joseph V. Scelsa, founder and director of the museum, rejected the idea that the eviction was at odds with the institution’s mission.
Little Italy, he said, “is not a community of Italian-Americans any longer.” He said at some point the population that gave the area its name would disappear entirely, but that “the legacy would still remain because we have an institution that does that.”
Other promoters of Italian-American culture saw the irony in the situation.
“I would hope they can find some sort of solution for her,” said Anthony Tamburri, dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College, where Dr. Scelsa once served as director. “The thought of an 85-year-old having to move to Wisconsin is unsettling to be sure.”
Ms. Sarno was queen of the Feast of San Gennaro in 1945.
