New Jersey famously suffers from an inferiority complex. Located next to the Most Important City in the World, the garden state is relegated to the role of the cheaper housing and shopping zone for the Big Apple. And Jersey is not known for high quality dining in comparison to NYC. That's OK, though. Jersey has better ethnic food. Or at least, anything you can find in New York, but cheaper, and usually more. Take Japanese food... usually considered a pricey date, right? Not in Jersey. Welcome to the
Mitsuwa Market!
One major problem...I don't drive. I used to drive, but gave it up when Fate, my imaginary friend, informed me that if I continued driving cars He was going to take me to live with Him in the
Land in the Sky Where Accordions Are Never, Ever Played. The Almighty kept sending potholes and other cars to smash into my old Dodges and Chryslers. He seemed to have something against me, at least while I was driving. It was obvious that He was trying to kill me so I quit driving cars, many years ago. One less environmental nightmare paying profits into the pockets of King Bush and the Saudi Princes, right? Wrong. Getting around without an automobile in New Jersey is nearly impossible. Luckily there is one bus line near my parent's home that takes us straight to ... the suburbs of Tokyo!
The
Mitsuwa Market in Edgewater New Jersey is just a quick hop from my front door, and since I have to worry about the care and feeding of a Japanese S.O. (Significant Other) it has become our gateway to the Outside World. The day begins with bus to Edgewater... then brunch at Mitsuwa Market, and then we hop on the Japanese shopping shuttle bus that runs between Mitsuwa and the downtown Port Authority Bus terminal at 41st St in Manhatten.
The food court at Mitsuwa feature the stars of the Japanese food court franchise world. The top ramen noodle chain, Santoka Ramen, is so popular among Japanese in NY that they take the bus out to Edgewater just to slurp the noodles of home here. There are several outlets, each offering different styles of Japanese lunch standards - one specializes in
donburi dishes, like the
tempura don pictured below...
I have become a fan of the
katsu, which offers fried foods in a japanese
panko bread crumb batter... these are some seriously cheap meals. I have yet to spend over ten bucks, and the lunch specials start at around $6. I can deal with this.
All of the food franchises advertise their menu in traditional Japanese fashion by using picture perfect
plastic models of the food... which in many cases are far more appealing than the actual sight of the food itself. There is even a district in Tokyo,
Kappabashi, that specializes in plastic food displays. Hey, try
making these at home!
The Japanese version of hamburgers...
hanbāgu (ハンバーグ), here served with a line of filling
gyoza dumplings. Fumie always goes directly to the hamburger lines, and then decides on either
katsu don or ramen noodles... so we have to go back to Mitsuwa on New Years day for the ritual
mochi-pounding sticky rice ceremony and a Japanese burger plate... Thousands of Japanese will crowd the market while a bunch of guys in traditional costume whack away at rice. Who says New Jersey is not fun?
Mitsuwa doesn't have a fancy Sushi bar, but all you need to do is go into the sushi section of the supermarket, and then take your lunch out to the tables in the food court,
bento-box style. Most sushi selections are under five bucks...
After lunch, fumie goes a bit wild in the supermarket, picking up rotten soy bean
natto for breakfast and maybe some glow-in-the-dark purple eggplant pickles on the side. If you can get it in Tokyo, you can get it here, including Japanese toothbrushes and Japanese standard stationary.
so... all done with Mitsuwa, we can go into the city and head straight for the
takoyaki place on 9th avenue behind Astor Place in Greenwich Village. This is a little hole in the wall located on the main drag for hip Japanese twenty-somethings who are in New York for a few months studying English.
Fumie got all excited when she saw one of Japan's most famous graphic artists sipping coffee at the Starbucks on the corner here...
"And nobody even recognizes him here!" Nope. That's probably why he's here. There are a string of
izakaya bars and sushi places in this area, which is right near a couple of art schools, and so you need your fried sweet octopus balls when stumbling home from a night of drinking.
Now, I suspect that you have to have grown up in Japan to be a real
takoyaki freak. Basically, it's a fried dough ball with a little chewy bit of octopus in the center, covered in a sweet brown sauce and mayonnaise and topped with dried fish shavings. Kind of hot, gloopy, sweet, and then a little knot of cephalopod in the middle.
Mmmmm....
It's the beginning of a new year, and time to celebrate the simple fact that we have gotten this far without screwing up. Celebrating a year in which I was awarded the Hungarian Herzl Prize for being a Laudable and Admired New York Jew in Hungary... although I had to send Golan Tibi in my stead to the ceremony to pick up the prize, and there wasn't any money attached to it, and... I got to visit the Ukraine. I got to tour with the Eldridge street band. I got to play gigs with Muzsikas. And also, a year to celebrate 70 years of Spam!
For those of you who think Asian cuisine is all about healthy flavors and subtle ingredients, you missed the part about spam. Koreans love spam. The Japanese are well into it, particularly those from Okinawa. Spam is a standard part of the Hawaiian plate lunch, and writer Paul Theroux once wrote that spam seemed to be the main source of protein in modern Polynesia, a fact he attributed to it possiblely tasting like human flesh. This mountain of spam was sighted in our local Korean grocery...
Ecuadorians and Peruvians, on the other hand, like a nice fried cuy - that's guinea pig - for special occaisions - and our local ethno-vegetable market in Hackensack is happy to oblige, advertising it right in front of the frozen White Castle hamburgers in the frozen goods section. This is probably about as illegal as it gets, but when an Andino wants to chow down on Fluffy the Cute Pet for Christmas dinner, at least he doesn't have to poach the pet shop to do so.
Where else but New York would the Jews have their own Chosen Beer?
Mom and Dad celebrating New Year's Eve at midnight with a glass of champagne (thanks to my sister) and a snack of Hungarian goose liver and truffle pate squirreled away by Fumie for the occaision. Possibly the cutest couple on earth.
Just before Xmas we went with Bob Godfried up to Beacon, New York - about 50 miles north of the city - to a Cajun dance party and Solstice celebration at fiddler John Allen's house. A yearly local tradtion is the bonfire which is lit to remember all those who passed away during the year.
Bob G. slamming through some creole tunes on one row button cajun accordion. Bob is the guy who first turned me onto the joys of primitive, wheezy, narrow-scale diatonic button accordions, which are the most musically limiting instruments I play alongside the Romanian bagpipes and the Black Sea kemence fiddle. But when you need authentic chanky-chank, nothing will do the job like a real louisiana squeezebox.
This is the shape of the future, with cheese. Slow food franchises... probably inspired by the In-and-Out Burger chain out on the West Coast, which we New Yorkers have heard about but have yet to sample. Five Guys recently expanded into 
I miss places like this in Europe. Some day, I hope, burger chains such as Five Guys or In-and-Out will expand to Europe and then Europeans can learn that the usual franchise outlets like Micky D's and Burger Krap are not hamburgers but actually just beef garbage recycling centers. At Five Guys the staff were actual cooks... not just burger flipping automatons. And they got a big kick when Fumie started snapping their pictures. "Hey, we're gonna be famous!" 
No meal is complete without eating some invertabrate that would have made you squirm in your younger years. Soft shelled crab, for example. The one above is my first, and damn! What the hell was I thinking during that half century I spent turning up my nose at molting arthropodae. Basically, crabs gross me out, and given the amount of meat to shell/carapace/inedible lungs that you have to work through in order to get anything approaching a mouthfull, I usually passed on crabs. No more. When those babies shed their hard outer shells they are just begging to be battered and fried and delivered fresh and hot into my greedy digestive system. Sorry, crabs.
You have probably seen those packages of wrapped banana leaves for sale in chinese bakeries... well, they are 
Har gow... rememeber that name. Har gow. Har gow. Har gow. Now you have no excuse for not being able to ask for them at any Cantonese dim sum restaurant. Asking for "those little shrimp dumplings" could bring disaster - there are lots of such things on the menu. But har gow, encased in a rice flour wrapping that you can not really make at home, are the dim sum equivalent to heroin. Addictive. Addictive. Addictive.
Garlic sauce spare ribs with black beans. Life before black beans was unthinkable, a dark, undefined chaos demanding the Big Bang. Now all is right. We have black beans. The XO Kitchen has a menu that runs about the size of a phone book - hundreds of items written in small print, and unlike other dim sum houses, it doesn't use the cart-delivery service common to the banquet halls.
Fumie in awe of the world's biggest shiu-mai dumpling...Yes, I am fully aware of the effect these graphic dumpling images have on our friends in Budapest and in other dim-sum deprived regions of the world. I have been labeled a food pornographer, and yes, I admit there is some truth to that statement. And I understand that this may be considered a subtle form of torture, especially to those of you who come from New York but have had to spend the holiday season refusing yet another serving of carp head soup and beigli... and yet, oddly, I show no hint of empathy with your plight. These dumplings are all mine for another two weeks. We will continue eating them until we are so sick of quality dim sum that we won't be able to stand them anymore, and only then we will return to Hungary. "My name is 
After dinner a walk around the city, which is exploding with after christmas sales. The shops are stuffed with the dross of unwise Xmas marketing strategies - Penguin Poop obviously didn't sell well this season, go figure - and now is the time for wolfing down the Christmas overstock. Like Levi's jeans for $1.99 a pair. This is something you will never see in Europe - sales - and the shops along lower broadway were packed with French and Italian tourists drunk on their over-inflated Euro buying power. If we americans seem like puny ants to their superior purchasing power, that is because our President's economic policies has made us into puny ants. Thanks Georgie! And we look forward to 2008 - the year we will see the back of you once and for all! Happy New Year!
There are a lot of Dim Sum places around Chinatown but the most recent immigrant influx - mostly people from 
If you haven't eaten at a Dim Sum hall, the drill goes like this. You share tables, and women push carts around containing dishes or small bamboo steamers full of things that you would never have eaten when you were a kid. You point at a dish as the cart goes by, the woman stamps your bill, and when you are all done your waiter tallies up the bill. Fumie and I ate until we were stuffed - a huge and perhaps obscene feast even by our insane standards - and our bill came to $33 for two of us. Not bad for what was basically a twelve course meal.
At 88 Palace there is also a buffet table line for items like soy sauce chicken feet, stewed garlic and ginger tripe, blood jelly, and clams. Below is the dumpling lady, frying chinese chive dumplings alongside sweet lotus root jelly squares. You can tell that families have been developing little strategies to make sure they get the prime stuff from the buffet tables as soon as they arrive - lookouts, grandsons sent to stake out places in line. Nobody stands between me and my steamed duck feet!
These were some of our favorite chinese dumplings, packed with shrimp, pork, and chinese chives, crispy on one side, juicy on the other.
The next pass of the steamer carts brought tofu-skin wrapped spring rolls with meat and shrimp, some kind of giant fish ball - gefilte fish chinese style - and garlic pork ribs. Each serving here is $2. The stamps on our meal ticket shocked us into ordering more... more... always more...
The classic dim sum dish is siu mai, pork and shrimp dumplings. These were some of the best we ever tried. We will probably spend the winter in Budapest trying to recreate these at home... probably unsucessfully. Some things are simply best eaten when somebody else prepares them for you. Such as dim sum.
Another classic dim sum is har gow, shrimp dumplings in translucent rice wrappings. No sharing here - we each grabbed our own private steamer basket.
And here is the graceful Princess of Tokyo attacking the remains of a lotus root jelly cake... eyes closed, glasses on the table, determined to clear the plates before the next steam cart rolls by.
The Ultimate. Bacon-wrapped shrimp paste. Fried. This Hong Kong specialty goes against every religious and health teaching that has ever been invented to prevent me from biting into something. Deep fried bacon-wrapped shrimp balls are something that both Rabbi 
But damn... it tasted good. Fumie and I have decided we have to continue investigating 
After a belly stuffung dim sum lunch a walk around should help the digestion... what on Earth does this shop specialize in? Fumie translated the Chinese language sign, and yes, it offers exactly what it says in English... Was there a meeting of the business owners to agree on a name? "What do you want to call the business?" "How about Health Food Store" "No, sounds too boring. Hey, I have an idea!"
Almost made me feel the need to shell out for a bottle of this: