A Taste of New York: Thanksgiving

Urban New Jersey. Five minutes drive from Manhattan.

Happy New Year, welcome to 2025! I was born when Dwight D. Eisenhower was still President of the USA, so if you had mentioned the year 2025 to my young self I would have conjured a science fiction paradise future. I was expecting a jet pack to help me fly to work, a berth on a space station, ray guns, stuff like that. Like the Jetsons, but better. Instead we got a president who is a convicted rapist and con man who thinks he can buy Greenland. Not what I was expecting. Why not start the year off with a roundup of where we've been in the last few months. We hopped across the pond for a quick reunion with family in fabulous New Jersey for Thanksgiving.

Fumie, Aron, sister Pam in NYC.

Thanksgiving, if you are not born and raised in Turtle Island, is a particularly American holiday patched together from historical misinformation concerning the meeting of English colonists and the Wampanoag Indians in Plymouth Massachusetts in 1609. This year I decided to spare my family the annual diatribe about how the Thanksgiving holiday is essentially a whitewashing of one of the greatest genocides in history and just let everybody enjoy getting together at my sister's spacious house and enjoy my chef brother's annual roast turkey. For most Americans, Thanksgiving is The Secular Holiday - nobody cares what religion you are as long as you spend a week focused on eating turkey... or something... with family and friends.

Brother Ron's heirloom turkey with my mom's Sweet potato and Corn Flakes.

My son and his GF hopped over from London. My Dad was in fine form at 98 years old, still 100 percent there and stubbornly guarding his right to drive his huge black car (at least to Overpeck Creek park where he bird watches for New Jersey's resident bald eagles.) Part of what I love when visiting my Dad is making his dinner dreams come true. My Dad was raised in the 1930s during the Great Depression when food was a luxury, and my grandmother - from Moldavia - always had a pot of corn meal mamaliga on hand. 

Jack and Aron, Grandpa and Grandson

Ask my dad what he wants for dinner and chances are his answer is "mamaliga." My mother was born in Hungary, and to her mamaliga, or puliszka as we Magyars have it, was considered a dish of the abject poor, and even more - a symbol of what our despised neighbors ate, so we rarely had it at home while she was alive. My Dad also likes steamed clams. When I was a boy he used to take me to City Island in the Bronx specifically to eat clams, thereby insuring that I wouldn't become annoyingly kosher after my Bar Mitzvah. There is nothing more unkosher than clams, except maybe rabbit. So I got him a mess of steamer clams at the H-Mart Korean Supermarket, whipped up a pot of mamaliga, and we feasted.

Soft Shell steamer clams

With only a couple of weeks to spend in the USA, I couldn't touch base with every delicious thing I wanted from the USA. The word is that pastrami sandwiches at Katz's Deli in NYC have hit the $30 mark, which is actually justifiable considering it is the world's best and in NY you can't really get a mediocre plate of Chinese food for $30. Food prices in the USA are really crazy - they jumped up after covid and there is no likelihood they will drop anytime soon. Not good news for somebody like me who knew how to feast all over the city for less than $10 a meal.

Bob G. with Corned Beef

Still... I called my old buddy Bob Godfried, the man who knows all the secret snack spots of most of New York's lesser known ethnic enclaves. Together we drove fifteen minutes from my Dad's home to Garfield, NJ. There, in a generic strip mall, is the Pastrami Grill Bistro, which serves classic, hand carved home made pastrami, brisket, and corned beef in true NY deli fashion for... half the price. Oddly enough, its a Polish deli run by Dominicans and Yemeni immigrants. Next door is the amazing Bratek's Deli, the best Polish supermarket I have even seen outside of Poland. Actually, Brateks is more Polish than anything I ever saw in Poland. The ready to eat foods laid out on steam tables is like an ethnological exhibit of Lechitic delicacies, and the bakery section features unique giant folksy loaves of every kind of regional Polish bread, things you would never see all together in one place in modern Poland. 

A Pastrami Sandwich as she should be.

Bob is known in NY as the man who fixes and tunes oddball accordions - the button boxes of the Dominican meringue scene, the harmoniums of the Indian emigrants, you name it he's tune it, repaired it,  and probably plays it. When you see some incredible ethnic folk music on stage at a folk festival in the New York area, chances are Bob fixed their instruments. And ate their food. And got them the gig.

Let's be honest: New York is where the best Klezmer musicians in the world live, so anytime I visit I try to catch some performances. Pete Rushevksy of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance has been running a series of small acoustic Klezmer performances at the Old Broadway Synagogue, one of the last remaining old-world style shuls still functioning in Manhattan. Pete was joined by Lisa Gutkin of the Klezmatics on fiddle and Lauren Brody on accordion. Lauren was fundamental in the revival of traditional klezmer when she was a member of the seminal band Kapelye, and has since focused on historical recordings of Bulgarian music - order her CD reissues for hours of great listening! 

Frank London and Tina Kindermann at home in NY

Most folks know Frank London for his prolific work with the Klezmatics - now celebrating their 40th anniversary as a band - but Frank and I go way back to our hippie days in Alston Massachusetts... again, we were born when Eisenhower was President. Do the math. A shared appreciation of Balkan and Jewish music along with Count Ossie's Mystic Revelation of Rastafari have bound us ever since. 

Frank spent a lot of last year out with health issues. He's on the mend now, and to prove it he took us on a walking tour of hidden pocket parks and community gardens on the Lower East Side. these were different than the community gardens we have in Budapest - for one thing, we don't have a large population of Puerto Ricans in Budapest. Many of these local gardens serve as meeting places for the long establish PR community of the Lower East Side (aka "Loisada") and are set up with shaded rincons, gazebos, grills and park benches to provide a space for community get togethers.

Frank also took us to Carnitas Ramirez, which he claimed was the best taco in New York City. Picture two representatives of Yiddish vernacular culture entering a place that serves ONLY pork products and consider the theological implications. It was delicious. They have a map of a pig on the wall and you can point to different parts of the pig and they have it already stewed and grilled and ready to consume in taco form. God, apparently, thinks nothing at all of us nibbling on hog tripe and jowl tacos with crunchy chicharone crackling on top. Klezmer musicians get a special dispensation from God in Mexican taco joints. 

I will admit that it was, in fact, the best taco I ever ate. New York came late to the authentic Mexican food party - Californians and westerners have had access to authentic tacos for decades, but the Mexican presence in the New York area only dates back about twenty or thirty years, so we are still in discovery mode. And the place to search is mainly in Queens, but I have had some fine tacos in the Bronx and in Yonkers. One thing I did get while I was traipsing about the city was breakfast at a diner, which in New York can also mean blintzes!

Blintzes stuffed with sweet cheese or blueberry.

Think of them as Jewish tacos! They seem to have grown smaller and neater than I remember them , but still good. While I was visiting I got together with some of my oldest circle of friends, Mike Porcelan and Chris March, who were the backbone of the band Chops McCoy And Something Good back when we were in high school (special mention to the late Jimmy Carter, who was president when I graduated High School.) 

Chris March, moi, Mike Porcelan

Chris and Mike were the musicians I aspired to be like when I first dared to stand in front of an audience with a guitar and embarrass myself. I soon learned that it was difficult to embarrass oneself by playing a guitar, so I gradually moved up to things like mandolin, fiddle, kobza, and Macedonian bagpipes to reach maximum audience reaction. These were some of my best friends at a time in life when I needed friends - they shaped a lot of my life and outlook. I'm so happy I can still enjoy their company.

So that's the brief take on three weeks of New York and New Jersey. On the return trip home to Budapest we flew Turkish Airlines, which offered us a stopover in Istanbul. More on that soon!