Restaurant Week

So, Staten Island Restaurant Week apparently started on Monday. In celebration, let me share with you the place with my friend Chorney and I unwittingly marked the occasion:

Taqueria El Gallo Azteca (yes, the Aztec Rooster)
75 Victory Boulevard
(718) 273-6404

I sorely miss "Taqueria y Fonda" at Amsterdam & 107th from my days at Columbia in White Harlem. While St. George's restaurante muy autentico lacks my old stomping ground's breadth of menu and cornucopia of fresh ingredients, it does have street cred. You're eating freshly made $2 tacos with grilled beef on corn tortillas with mucho cilantro and onions, topped with a homemade medium-spicy green sauce while rubbing elbows with blue-collar Mexican guys. There's Corona, Boing, Jarritos, and many other usual suspects to quench the thirst of La Raza or any pinche gabacho. Three cheers for the cook behind the counter who, while I was eating my tacos, methodically sliced a whole slab of [I think pigs'] brains that was easily three feet by four feet. That sounds like some nice, cholesterol-laden eatin'!

But the reason why I would come back again would be for the $6 tortas. At first, I thought I didn't want a sandwich for dinner, but these huge sandwiches filed an entire plate, were piled with grilled meat, peppers, and onions, and were topped with a globular, butter-glazed bun. DAMN, it looked good - I need to come back to try them.

Also along this beginning stretch of Victory Street - northeast Staten Island's commercial artery - is a Jamaican restaurant, a Polish restaurant and adjacent grocery, a pizzeria, and another [sketchier-looking] Mexican restaurant. Maybe they're too blue collar for Zagat's, but I'm excited at the prospects.

I get off work early on Friday, and will hopefully find a place to *actually* take advantage of Staten Island Restaurant Week, and the SINY Film Festival. They're offering "Dinner and a Movie" specials a-plenty.

Der Nürnberger Bierhaus

The City has been having beautiful, mild spring weather for some time now! Yesterday I met up with four buddies in Central Park for a fun, but kinda wonky game of touch-football. My vague familiarities with the rules (and how to throw the ball) didn't keep us from having a good time.

Five people is apparently not the best number of a game of football, but it was a good number of people for the day's dinner outing: taking the S46 bus down Castleton Avenue to West New Brighton's Nürnberger Bierhaus, a happenin' Bavarian-style beerhouse.  

The website's constant oom-pah-pah MIDI anthem is a little scary, but in person this is a charming neighborhood bar/restaurant. The bus ride there goes through past lot of residential area (my fellow travelers were reminded of dreamy Cleveland) and the outside the eatery looks like it's a storefront dental clinic or law office - because it's between a bunch of storefront dental clinics and law offices.

Once we got inside, though, we saw that it was packed (a good sign for a Sunday evening). Decor is simple but functional - wooden walls, floors, tables, chairs, servers. Maybe not the last.

"Bavaria, where the trees are made of wood!" - Monty Python.

The prices are very decent too. A half-liter glass of German-imported beer is $4.50 (a good dollar or two less than the Manhattan equivalent) and the overindulgent glass liter stein is $8 (presumably a good deal). My knowledge of alcohol is middling, but the hefeweizen I had was pleasant, and there were darker largers to be had as well.

The Bavarian cuisine resembles soul food in its lack of variety of ingredients and its ample, heartfelt slathering of fat and cholesterol, with homey, feel-good results. Take meat, potatoes, sauerkraut, and beer, vary the amounts and ratios, and you get German cuisine and a merrily clogging, fatty heart.

Impressed by the amount of consonants, I ordered the Kartoffelpfännchen (or "little potato pan") which is a hotplate of fried potatoes with an obscene amount of bacon bits. I also asked for the Jägerschnitzel, which turned out to be bland pork cutlets in muddy gravy, which in my citified ways made me yearn for katsu don. Ian asked for his potato pan with the Nürnberger bratwurst, 3 foot-long house-specialty sausages which tasted superb. I also sampled the Käsespätzle, a delicious noodley German take on macaroni and cheese.

Germans know how to use their fat. The desserts were superb. I accidentally ordered the German chocolate cake (say it with me kids, "Deutscher Schokoladenkuchen") in place of the Black Forest cake, but was rewarded with a moist, chewy, layered combo of mild chocolate and coconut with fudge-like frosting. I had bites of other friends' apple-involved concoctions, but I was most satisfied with my choice. 

The obligatory oom-pah-pah did play on the P.A., but in manageable decimals. Before we left, they even put on Swiss yodeling. The most bizarre turn came when someone at another table had a birthday. The lights turned off suddenly, there were five seconds of darkness, like the second coming of the Blitz. Then, on came an electric scarab turned on in the ceiling and shot out light beams of many colors, frightening disco spotlight that it was. A strange, belligerent song which is a form of German Happy Birthday came on the P.A. The birthboy blew out a giant candle planted in some dish (probably made of schnitzel, potatoes, and sauerkraut) and everyone in the room clapped to a frenzied beat from about three minutes. A strange form of celebration, but a celebration nonetheless.

As we left, we saw there was outdoor seating, so we'll come back some summer evening and take advantage of it.

Pictures that we took of that dinner will be posted eventually!