Just across the Hudson river from Manhatten lies Fort Lee, New Jersey, gateway to a Korean Cuisine Empire that runs through the neighboring towns of Palisades Park (35% Korean Population) and Leonia (25% Korean). The Koreans mostly emigrated here after the burst of the 1980s "Asian Bubble" economic explosion, and we in New Jersey are the beneficiaries by way of having some of the best Asian food right on our doorstep. Welcome to the Kimchee Belt of New Jersey.
A lot of Korean restaurants follow local specialty themes - barbeque,
bimbambap rice dishes, or in this case, soft tofu soups. The
So Kong Dong Soft Tofu Restaurant at 130 Main St (right where Main street heads downhill towards Edgewater) is so popular that there usually is a crowd on weekdays for lunch and there is a row of benches outside for people to sit on while they wait.
Almost all of the dishes cost $8, and all of them are heavy, spicy soft tofu stews. First the table is covered in
kimchee and pickle dishes. When I was at University we used to consider
kimchee the ultimate in strange food, so much so that among my friends we used the term "that's really
kimchee" to refer to anything wierd. However, the years have softened me when it comes to things like red pepper squid pickles and spicy cabbage fermented with oysters in underground pots, so now
kimchee is something I actually miss when eating in Hungary.
Next the waiter brings a big heated stone bowl of hot rice, fills your korean metal rice bowls, and then pours tea into the nearly empty rice bowl. The tea-rice becomes your end of the meal "extra bonus" soup of hot burned rice soup. But first of all, there is the tofu soup.
Fumie chose the seafood soft tofu soup. I went with the beef and kimchee. I chose hot and spicy - there is even a category of "extremely spicy" on the menu, but that can be a nasty surprise in a real Korean lunch joint. The kimchee course comes with a plate holding raw eggs which you crack into your soup as it arrives - bubbling furiously in its heated stone crock - at your table.
But life is bigger than simply tofu soups... Just down the street on 2053 Lemoine Avenue is the
Dae Ga Barbeque Resturant, which specializes in
kalbi and other Korean grilled meat cooked at your table, as well as seafood.
When we walked in there were fish tanks containing some of the little critters for our inspection.
What the hell are these things? Next to pork and rabbits, it does not get more unkosher than this.
I am pretty good at marine biology, and I am willing to eat all kinds of ocean slime, but these things look like extras from the buffet table at Jabba the Hutt's Star Wars Snack Shack. I am sure that they are tasty, but it may be some time before I get around to trying out this version of "something new." These are
a bit too kimchee for me... In fact, Fumie met her match with a kimchee spiced crab pickle that we all graciously allowed her to have all to her self. For the historical record, she did not eat this. This is Fumie's
seafood Waterloo.
Dae Ga is where the Korean community goes to eat some seriously good meat, and we ordered
kalbi - beef short ribs - and sliced beef tongue. Many places heat up the table burner and allow you to have at your own meat, but Dae Ga sends over their own staff of experienced BBQ waitresses to do your meat right. The Japanese have sushi masters. The Koreans have grill masters.
My brother in law Alec thought the
kalbi a bit too fatty (and went with the rather tasty chicken BBQ) but then, fat is where the flavor is, and these were excellent, some of the best beef I have had in a multifaceted country where we can both be proud of some damn good high quality Korean beef
and have a frigging retarded fascist-appointed Republican scum-sucking war criminal genocidal bastard in the White house.
Dae Ga serves up a serious spread of kimchee and pickles, and the best way to wash it down is a bottle of
shoju - Korean vodka, albeit about half as strong as a western vodka, but a nice clean taste that makes everything you have just experienced - alien sea slugs, pickled crabs, fatty ribs - seem just that much more pleasant. Especially if - as Alec pointed out - it seems to have been labeled in the Korean pronounciation of "Gypsy Jew".
Before Fort Lee was famed as a Korean immigrant center it had long been home to a large Japanese community. The Japanese still have their own bakeries, and as soon as Fumie found the
Parisienne Bakery on 250 Main Street she started asking about how much it would cost to buy a flat in Fort Lee. I mean... they have yakisoba noodle sandwiches to go...
Not to mention an-pan, a red-bean sweet roll, alongside a host of french-inspired Tokyo style bakery goods, decent coffee, and a Beard Papa cream puff outlet in the store.
Beard Papa is a chain from Japan that specializes in filled-to-order cream puffs, pastry shells filled with a thick custard that is addictive and will kill you if you don't find professional help in time.
Fumie biting into a green tea custard cream puff. Just after this she became really interested in the Fort Lee real estate situation. This was inspired by the fact that there were something like six different local Japanese language community newspapers on offer for free in the shop.
One thing to note about towns like Fort lee that lie just across the river from Manhatten - there are some pretty affluent folks in the neighborhood. Jersey towns rate themselves in a pecking order based on how high their local taxes are and which celebrity lives in which town - it's a class system which would make England look downright civilized,
if that can even be imagined. But one sure indicator of how many gazzillionaires live in an area is the local liquor shop - Hudson Market in Fort Lee had a special section set aside where we were able to see these fine wines on sale. I am sure these are very nice beverages... but I'll stick to a nice five dollar bottle of Hungarian Villanyi Pinot Noir,
thankyou very much. 
A quick post from the home front. Weather permitting, Fumie and I will run into New York City when we can - such as today's epic trip to the Hungarian Consulate in my ongoing effort to obtain my Hungarian passport. But quite often we are bouncing around someplace in Bergen County, New Jersey, a few miles ( or - for europeans - an even few more kilometers) outside of Manhatten. In Teaneck, when pressed for cheap lunch, I will often spring for the local Popeye's Fried Chicken franchise. Popeye's is the Second Best Fried Chicken in the World.
The Best Fried Chicken Franchise In the World is actually Church's Fried Chicken, but they don't have any outlets around these parts. Both are marketed as "Urban" fast food... i.e., food sold in Black neighborhoods. Both Popeye's and Church's offer symbolic "southern" or "soul food" options - cajun rice, fried okra, and at both, biscuits. White folks eat Kentucky Fried. I don't.
Popeye's southern style biscuits - fresh, these are good enough for a meal in themselves. Note the Hungaro-Judaic bottle of seltzer next to biscuits... there is no gassy mineral water in the US. At all. Carbonated seltzer water is how we make do in times of need.
Just down the road from Teaneck is the township of Palisades Park, with the largest local population of Koreans in the North Jersey area. Which is a good thing. A very good thing. Woo Jung Korean Barbeque is just one of about thirty local Korean restaurants in what used to be one of the poorest and most run down towns in North Jersey. The Koreans moved in during the 1990s and totally revitalized the area commercially and socially. And they brought some damn good food.
The banchan layout at a Woo Jung dinner. Fumie was hipped to this place by postings written on New York Japanese blog sites. The Japanese are wise to the fact that the local Korean cuisine is better than anything available in Tokyo... and probably the best in the world outside of Korea itself. Below is some galbi - short ribs grilled on the BBQ table. Woo Jung uses real charcoal brought to the table by a waiter, not a gas fired grill... makes all the difference
Just over the river is Hackensack there is Wondee's Thai Restaurant - which serves cheap lunch on Main Street to the local Thai community. Fumie is in noodle heaven... she particularly enjoyed watching a local Chinese-American woman try to explain to the very Thai waiter how a "real" Pad Thai (stifle laughter...) should be made.
Wondee's is the most authentic Thai place we have found yet - it tends to trip up most Americans who think they know "real" Thai food. Fumie spent months eating in Chiang Mai - where her sister worked for a decade. When Fumie walked in she took one whiff of the smell and said "this is the place."
Of course, there are American options to choose from. Legal Seafoods used to be a shack on the Boston Fish Pier where I used to go when I was in University. Cheap, simple, good, and fresh. These days they are a huge national chain, still everything they used to be except cheap and simple. But still good enough for Seafood Woman From Tokyo to attain her invertabrate fix. Behold the lobster. The last lobster we set eyes on was in Croatia, it had no claws, and it cost something like 100 Euros. This was cheaper, and had claws. Fumie ate the claws. I got some tail and the exquisite soft shell steamer clams and mussels. And I also got to eat some of the tail....
Fumie went with the cioppino which is a seafood soup (lobster, clams, fish, musells, scallops... etc.) that dates from the days when Italian fishermen ran the California sardine fisheries, as portrayed in John Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row. The Santa Cruz version of brodetto is cioppino. It may be one of the most authentic continental American dishes there is. If you like aquatic invertabrates for dinner, this will do it for you. Seafood porn on a plate. 
And since it is Xmas season, we want to wish you all a merry Christmas and especially to those poor promotional saps from Ontario forced to stand in a freezing giant fishbowl in Bryant Park in NY City promoting the exotic winter pleasures available in far away.... Ontario... Canada...
Getting into the city from Teaneck usually means taking the $2 "Spanish bus" into the George Washingtion bridge bus terminal, and just up the street lives one of the world's best fish soups... at the Mid Atlantic Fish Market on Broadway near 181st St.
This neighborhood is an outpost of the Dominican Republic - at any given time, about a quarter of the Dominican Republic lives in New York City - and possibly one of the least English-speaking nabes in Manhatten after Chinatown. No matter. Point and pay. Fried and steamed (al vapor!) fish galore at prices below McDonald's.
The last time Fumie was in New York she claimed this place served the best fish soup in the universe, so we had to try it again. the fish soup had changed a bit - not bad, but not the Champion del Mundo it once was, but at $5 it was packed with huge hunks of fish, shrimp, and mussels in a thick yam-based broth.
Just behind the fish soup are two deep fried stuffed clams - chopped clams mixed with herbs and breading and deep fried in the shell at $1.50 a piece. As good as any I ever had in any New England clam shack. I went for the fried flounder and shrimp combo with "spanish rice" and salad- $7.
Almost as good as the tempura plate I had eaten in Japanese lunch joint the day before. At the Fish Market you share your table.
Last time we were there there were no tables, so this is a step up. For cheap fresh fish in Manhatten, we can share tables. You want to spend $50 on a fish dinner downtown, you can have your own table and a snooty waiter to boot. I prefer company at $7 a meal.
The fellow eating next to us didn't speak a word of English, but he was accomodating enough when Fumie decided to ask if she could photograph his fried fish - a whole grouper chosen from the fresh fish laying out on ice on the other side of the fish shop. This is a proper Caribbean meal for a wet and wintery New York day.
Next stop was to get downtown so Fumie could hit the 50% off sale at the Japanese language Kinokuniya books store, which is moving a few blocks to Bryant Park from Rockefeller center. The area was packed with tourists drawn by the famed Christmas tree in front of the NBC building.
A slice of strawberry cheesecake stood us well for an afternoon pick us up.
A midtown delicatessen had cheesecakes galore, but after adding a coffe and taxes - New York City loves its taxes - this cost us almost as much as lunch. Still... good New York cheesecake does not travel well, and this is the real deal. A meal in itself.
Grand Central station has an hourly holographic kaleidescope show, which stopped everybody in their commuting mode tracks for five minutes. It is at time like this that New Yorkers will turn to the unknown person next to them and say "Hey - dontcha just love New Yawk?"
People would lie down on their backs on the floor to watch the images projected on the roof of the Grand Hall. For five minutes this huge public space morphed into one big amusement park for commuters.
Back down into the bowels of the 6 train to the Village. 
And here's a taste of Yiddish dancing... first off, a Maramures Hutsulka as played in Ieud, leading into a nice fast Jewish sirba. Then... playing for tables, in which the musicians park next to your dinner and try to get you to pry open your own wallet and transfer the contents into our musicians' pockets. And guess what? It works. Actually, as you can see, the proper method is to string your twenty EU bill into the horse hairs of the primas' bow. This, my friends, is the true context of traditional music!
White Manna is an old Burger hut that began as a snack stand at the 1938 New York World's Fair and was was moved to the banks of the Hackensack River afterwards. It hasn't had any redesign since.
White Manna's burgers are tiny... a surviving adaption from the Great Depression of the 1930s when a very small amount of meat would be grilled or steamed on top of a huge mound of onions in order to produce an affordably cheap burger sandwich. The only other places that makes Depression-era burgers like this that I know of are in 
The grill cooks in this tiny joint have the drill down to an art form. Take order. Slap tiny meat patty onto grill, toss onions on top, squash together, and wait. This is actually very slow food, and there is always a crowd at lunch. The burgers are still cheap, at $1 for a regular, and usually one orders at least two or three. While we were there once guy ordered eight of them, while his wife ordered only four.
The 1930s also gave birth to the first fast food chain in America, the 
At 50 cents a burger, that is not their target consumer profile. This one is located on Rte. 46 in Hasbrook Heights, NJ, an ugly bit of roadway where you might venture to get a new muffler for your car. Ordered a dozen burgers for three of us - I like their newfangled Jalapeno-Cheese burgers, which my dad thinks is sacriligeous to the Holy White Castle Mythos ("There are Burgers and Cheeseburgers. Nothing else!")
There is something about the cheap meat combination - bits of innards for flavor? Mushy steamed bun? - and the steaming process that gives White Castles a flavor that is every bit as evocative as the madeleines that Proust bit into. These are worth every penny - and it is pennies we are talking about here - and anybody who watched the excorably bad 
Then there is the famous Jersey Diner Burger. My folks decided that they had to try a new Mega-Diner at the Garden State Mall... the Grande Lux Cafe.
This is a shining example of Garden State Grandiousity - it ain't worth building unless it is so huge that the word "tasteless" becomes meaningless. When we first moved to New Jersey in 1966 our first meal was at the old Forum Diner on Rte. Four, a classic Greek-owned highway eatery that remained legendary in Bergen County until it closed last year. Now my folks are entirely pleased to take their custom to the Grande Lux.
For a Disney-sized mega-bistro in a mall, it wasn't half bad. The Angus beef burger with jalapeno jack cheese passed muster, comparing favorably to the White Castle Jalapeno-Cheese burger at only 17 times the price.
Of course, for only $6.95 we don't need to go farther than to 
Fumie has been getting nostalgic for Japanese style hamburger and rice plates. Fortunately, the 