Months ago, back when we could go out of our homes and be among other humans, I was spent the better part of a whole Friday toiling at Evil Twin’s taproom in Ridgewood.
You might wonder how I could be productive sitting almost an entire day at a brewery. Yes, Evil Twin is a brewery but their taproom opened early to offer a coffee service by Bushwick’s Sey Coffee. I got there early, had coffee, worked on a couple of syllabi.
By the time I finished working, I was ready for beer.
At some point that evening, a DJ showed up and started spinning. One of the songs they played was a cover of The Doors’s “Light My Fire.” I wasn’t familiar with this cover, but I thought it would be easy to find.
It turns out… it was very hard to find.
The next day I told a couple of friends about it. I described it “as if Devo covered ‘Light My Fire.'” But it’s not Devo!
In the Age of the Virus, with more time spent at home and feeling nostalgic for that Friday at Evil Twin, I started searching for the song on Second Hand Songs. I remember this song being having percussive rhythm and some synthesizers—hence why I thought it might have been performed by Devo—so I figured it was from the late 1970s or early 1980s. As I skimmed through that list, I saw that Moebius had released a version in 1979. There was a link to the song on YouTube.
Within eight hours of landing at JFK Airport after spending a month in Southern California, I was in a car heading up to New Haven, Connecticut for a day trip. The last time I was in New Haven was a bit over five years ago on a bike ride from Greenpoint to New Haven. My experience of New Haven was a bit rushed. I had ridden with a group from the New York Cycle Club, and we had split up into two groups. By the time my group had arrived in New Haven, there was only one other person with me, and the two of us headed to BAR on Crown Street. Many locals insist that BAR is one of best pizza places in New Haven.
I have a bad joke about this: “I hear the pizza is so good, they don’t even need correct spelling.”
On yesterday’s trip to New Haven, we went the tourist route. Wooster Street in New Haven’s Little Italy has two of the oldest apizza places in town. Unlike BAR, which has a very contemporary decor, Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana and Sally’s Apizza, both on Wooster Street, predate World War II. Frank Pepe’s, for example, opened in 1925, and Sally’s, started by Frank’s nephew Sal, opened in 1938. Even Modern Apizza, on State Street, opened way back in 1934. BAR is by comparison an infant, having opened in 1991.
As is common with these touristy places, there’s going to be a wait. Fortunately, we arrived just before noon on Sunday, less than a half-hour after Sally’s opened and that queue appeared pretty short. As we drove by, I jumped out of the car to wait in line while my friends found a place to park the car.
We waited about thirty minutes in line, which may seem like a long time, but we lucked out in a couple of ways. First, it was a mild and sunny January day. The sun was shining on us while we waited so we weren’t shivering from the cold, as one would this time of year. Second, the party of eleven that was immediately in front us in line abandoned their place in line. I suspect they went to Frank Pepe’s instead, but no matter the reason, our party of four was seated promptly after they left.
Once inside, we debated what to order. The ringleader of the group wanted to recreate the clam pie from Frank Pepe’s, but as none of us had been to Sally’s we figured it would be best to get a classic pie and a specialty pie.
The classic pie was a fresh tomato pie.
This is the prototypical New Haven apizza. It is a charred crust topped only with tomato sauce, some herbs, and a bit of cheese—likely Parmesan. We requested that half the pie be topped with sausage and onions.
The specialty pie was something very novel for us accustomed to New York-style pizza: a white potato pie.
This was absolutely delicious. The potatoes were thinly sliced and baked in a cream sauce. It was like having potato-au-gratin on a pizza.
Last year, I made a sweet potato–au-gratin dish using Stephanie Izzard’s recipe that has been a hit every time I’ve brought it to a dinner party. I am tempted to experiment making a pizza pie using this recipe.
Multiple people, who never would dared called themselves vegan, have recently been echoing the talking points of the 2019 Netflix documentary The Game Changers. In this trending doc, a UFC fighter dispels the idea that you need meat to be a body builder. You can be an aggro, muscly bro on a plant-based diet, too.
Also, in 2018, the New York Times‘s Kim Severson anticipated that plant-based foods would be big in 2019. At the time, she foresaw:
substantial vegetable entrées will become a fixture on restaurant menus, in the way that alternatives to dairy creamers became standard at coffee bars a few years ago. Many diners have started to eat less red meat or abandon animal protein altogether, whether for health, environmental or ethical reasons.
Severson also predicted that plant-based diets would integrate with the other fashionable low-carb diets of the day to create an army of plant-based paleos—or pegans—on the eve of the 2020s.
The prediction about the plant-based food being trendy seems to have borne out, and yesterday, as part of spending time with my friend Jennifer, we visited what she called the “lettuce food truck.” When we arrived at the Lettuce Feast LA food truck, parked on the Fairfax District’s namesake thoroughfare, I was surprise to learn that they didn’t just serve lettuce.
Instead, the “Lettuce food truck” serves plant-based chick’n sandwiches, with an emphasis on a Nashville-style hot chick’n offering.
While I did initially scratch my head about the existence and viability of a food truck serving only leafy greens, I also would not have been surprised either. I vaguely remembered that, in the same 2018 report about 2019 food trends, Severson predicted that new kinds of lettuce would be on-trend. She writes, “expect to see little-known varieties showing up on menus, and an explosion in lettuces grown hydroponically, many of them in urban container farms.”
Apparently, lettuce is too 2019 for the plant-based connoisseurs at Lettuce Feast.
I posted an Instagram story summarizing my surprise that the Lettuce food truck actually serves chick’n sandwiches.
Because I tagged them in the story, they responded and mentioned my post in their story, sarcastically adding, “who knew? 🤣🤣🤣.”
I mentioned their story in a subsequent story of mine—a small Instastory vortex—labeling it “That time @lettucefeastla made fun of me for not knowing they sold chick’n sammies.”
About an hour later, a guy I know IRL messaged me to tell me, “you’re LA famous now, my dude! I saw their post before I saw yours hahahaha.”
Not just “LA famous,” I replied, but LA famous on plant-based Instagram.
Because their post was an Instagram story, it disappeared within a day. In the digital age, things move fast. My fifteen nanoseconds of fame were over.
A little over a week ago, a few of my beer-loving friends planned a trip to the Hudson Valley to visit some of the many breweries in the area. Our initial list was really impossibly long. We quickly figured out that we would have to make the list shorter—something like four breweries—to make the trip feasible.
I should point out a few notes:
I had almost nothing to do with the planning of the trip. The discussion was all done on What’s App, and I (in)famously don’t use this app. It’s for the best, I’m sure, since I either adopt early or not at all.
We did this whole trip by automobile. While in years past, I would have written about this trip because I bicycled there, this was not one of those trips. I really haven’t been on the bike as much as I’d like.
Hudson Valley Brewing in Beacon might be the best regarded of the breweries in the Hudson Valley, and we have all had the pleasure of going multiple times. We didn’t go on this trip, but it’s definitely one of the best… and easily the most crowded.
Plan Bee Farm Brewery
Our first stop was at Plan Bee Farm Brewery in Poughkeepsie. The brewery is located just a few miles east of downtown on a buculoic farm.
The tap room is decorated with many hexagons, evoking the shape of a honeycomb throughout the space. They have a bottle rack with hexagons and even the tile on the bathroom floor is a hexagonal mosiac. I feel like a fool for not having snapped any photos of the decorative motif.
Plan Bee says that their beers are all cultivated from ingredients sourced in the community. The yeast itself is cultivated in the honeycombs on the property. The beers were mostly wild ales, which I am happy to report gave them a very unique quality.
One beer that my friends ordered and let me try was a pickle beer. One person commented that tasted like the bagged pickle that you get with a sandwich from the diner. It wasn’t my favorite.
The brewery has a really big outdoor space with tables for seating, a stage inside of a gazebo, and a basketball hoop and a cornhole setup. The latter two pieces were instrumental in a video I shot of my friend Jackie shooting a basket—it became the basis of a wonderful song.
The taproom offers only small pours: four-ounce pours that allow you to taste most of their beers and still to find your way back to the car.
One thing I really like was how the label on the bottles depicts parts of the taproom.
Of the four brewery taprooms we visited on this day, Suarez Family was my overall favorite. Look for me to return on a bike after second winter passes us in in mid-May.
Sloop Brewing at The Factory
Sloop Brewing has become one of the largest breweries in the region. You can even find their beers at some Trader Joe’s stores in the city.
However, their scale doesn’t take away from the quality of their beers. Sloop had a taproom in Elizaville, which they called The Barn. Since then, they have moved to a much larger space in an industrial park campus—once used by IBM—in East Fishkill, known as The Factory.
The place is enormous and the taproom is one of the largest I can ever remember visiting. It is also really well lit.
Clearly, this is the place where a lot of their beer gets brewed and packaged for distribution.
Of all the breweries on this trip, this was the only one with a full service restaurant.
A favorite aspect of this brewery was how they sought to appease both younger drinkers and old timers like me. For example, there was an Instagram-ready photo booth—a “Selfie Station”—in one corner of the taproom.
And then directly opposite the photo booth was a flatscreen playing recorded episodes of MTV’s 120 Minutes, an early 1990s music video program on Sunday nights that more or less informed my musical tastes for the rest of the decade.
Speaking of the full-service food menu, the folks at Sloop went to great pains to pair every one of their food offerings with a beer from the menu. There were some appropriate pairings, such chasing down The Sloop Burger with their flagship Juice Bomb IPA. But there were other pairings that didn’t compute: I didn’t note them so I can’t describe them here.
Equilibrium Brewing
Note: Equilibrium Brewing has opened a large taproom that wasn’t yet opened during our visit in November 2019.
A couple of years ago, I tried to visit Equilibrium with some friends but there was no taproom, and the Equilibrium restaurant that is attached to the brewery didn’t let us stash our bikes inside. Instead, we rode to nearby Clemson Brothers, ordered food, and debated the impending tax bill. Good times.
Since then, the brewery opened a small taproom and has since opened a much larger space in central Middletown, next to the old passenger rail station that is sadly many miles from the current Middletown station on NJ Transit’s Port Jervis line.
The smaller taproom is really nice and certainly deserved a visit due to the intimacy. By the time we arrived at this fourth brewery, it was late and the beertender was extra surly: he’d rather go home than serve us after sampling three other breweries. Also, I swear that some of the other patrons were drunk-crying.
If Suarez Family was the nicest taproom to visit, the best beer was at Equilibrium. It was so good that a few of us stocked up on cans to take back home.
Afterword
As I said earlier, I didn’t have anything to do with planning this trip. It was all my friends Ian and Steve who plotted everything. I just had to show up and pay my share. In the event any of you read this site, thanks for handling it all, guys. It was a worthwhile escape from the city.
The tips included bringing a set of reusable utensils to keep at your work space, bringing a spoon/stirrer and a mug for your cups of coffee, keeping a tote bag around for shopping trips made during the workday, and getting a reusable water bottle to avoid using water bottles.
Not only did I find her suggestions useful, I noticed that I already have adopted the majority of her recommendations.
Like her, I work at an office that allows me to easily adopt these tips. Although I do the majority of my work at home, I do work at an office a couple of days a week. This office has a refrigerator and microwave oven, making it easy for me to bring in my lunch. It also has a kitchen sink where I can easily wash out my utensils and dishes.
Since I had already been exercising these recommendations, I wanted to share the tools I used for not only using less plastic but also for generating less trash.
Ms. Trent’s suggestions to bring from home a set of utensils is a good one. I have been using this spork as an two-in-one utensil for my lunches since 2014. It’s great because it works for most any kind of food that requires a fork or spoon. That’s why they call it a spork, right?
The ur-cup for the fussy coffee hipster crowd. I have had one of these since 2014, and I don’t know how I haven’t yet broken it. The price is a bit steep—a 12-ounce cup costs about $20, but it’s outlasted all the less expensive thermal mugs I’ve bought over the years. However, unlike most thermal mugs that vacuum seal, you can’t throw this cup into a bag and it not spill. Curiously, on more than one occasion, when I’ve brought the cup to a coffee shop for some drip coffee, it was on the house.
This too can seem expensive at first but compared to all the other water bottles I’ve bought and used over the years, this one has outlasted all of them. Of course, the different materials for bottles have different advantages and disadvantages. A glass bottle is both heavy and likely to break, compared to plastic and metal. These bottles come with a silicon sleeve that has protected the bottle from breaking when I’ve dropped it. By far the biggest advantage is that it won’t change the taste of your water and you can wash it forever. As long as you don’t break the bottle, it’s one that you won’t have to throw out. I can’t say the same about all those plastic and metal water bottles of the past.
Tom Bihn sells dedicated grocery bags, but since I regularly travel with a backpack, I just stash my purchases in my backpack.
I noticed that a lot of these items are pretty expensive. A $200 backpack, a $20 water bottle and coffee cup, and a $10 spork seem indulgent. But remember that the aim here is to reuse things, and I find it harder to throw away things that were costly, especially if I find them useful on a regular basis.
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Earlier this summer, 7-Eleven introduced their own cold-brewed iced coffee beverage and priced it at the aggressive price point of 99¢, plus tax. (This is an introductory price, and it will cost $1.69 when the promotion ends.) If you take the long-view, it shows how far cold-brew has come since it was appropriated by third-wave coffee shops to create a sweeter, less acidic iced beverage. Cold brew is now literally as ubiquitous as a Slupree.
I ordered a 7-Eleven Cold Brew last week at the Greenwich Village location, on West 3rd Street, and sipped it as I walked to Washington Square Park. In my mind, there was a poetic irony of having a mass-marketed beverage at a neighborhood associated with bohemian coffeehouse culture. However, I then noted that the coffee at those places wasn’t particularly very good and that the bohemian days were over a half-century ago.
The beverage itself comes in two variations: one black and one mixed with some type of milky, fatty liquid. I pour the black cold brew into a cup of ice, paid my $1.08 using Apple Pay and headed out towards Washington Square Park in the blistering 90°F heat.
My initial reaction to the beverage was the smell. Unlike what craft, third-wave coffee roasters use, 7-Eleven appears to be using a dark-roast coffee. I could smell the roast, and it was as strong and off-putting as opening a can of Maxwell House. I didn’t grab a lid or a straw—because I’m not an Earth-Killing, Straw-Sipping Monster—and drank it straight from the cup. However, I wanted to know what the coffee tasted like without the smell, so I held my breathe as I took a sip of the coffee. The result wasn’t too bad. There was some light chocolate flavor, but it lacked any real tartness—no cherry flavors—that good coffees, in my opinion, balance between those flavors. It was reasonably pleasant, although a bit overly bold, as it they were really trying to extract coffee flavor out of their coffee ground. It’s not traditional iced coffee, but it’s not especially Good Coffee, either.
I’m not going to bemoan this as a sign of the death of cold brew or Good Coffee or as some wide-ranging cultural landmark. This is unlikely to get a critical mass of coffee drinkers who pay $4 for a cold brew coffee from a tattooed barista to switch to getting one at 7-Eleven. The beverage available at 7-Eleven is different product than what is available at the local coffee roaster, but it’s nice to offer not-too-fussy coffee drinkers another option.
Living far from Southern California for almost twenty-years, I enjoyed reading Gold’s reviews and poring over his lists, especially his annual 101-restaurant lists, to keep updated on the unique nature of the LA-area. If you are not familiar with Gold, he was the subject of a recent documentary, released in 2015, that you can stream on Hulu, among other places I’m sure.
As has been noted elsewhere, Gold’s writing tried to bond the city and its various ethnic communities together through food. His wasn’t the adventurous explorations that were popularized by Anthony Bourdain. It was as if he was trying to make everyone comfortable and familiar with what Los Angeles and its environs had to offer.
In an era when a food connoisseur is one who posts a beautiful photo of a lovely plated dish bathed in warm light, optimized for an Instagram post, he will be missed.
Earlier this week on WNYC’s newish program, Midday on WNYC, Barbara Ehrenreich spoke with guest host Kai Wright about her new book Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer. (Buy through this link and I’ll get a commission, or get it from her website.)
There were a lot of great insights into this interview, especially her critiques of medical testing, wellness, fitness, and mindfulness that mirrored a lot of Michel Foucault’s work, particularly that which deals with surveillance, discipline and what he calls “discourse,” knowledge that is produced by a power structure. Here are a few takeaways from the interview:
Ehrenreich characterizes the escalation of medical testing to surveillance over the body, bringing to mind Foucault’s critical history of the panopticon as a technology of surveillance.
Ehrenreich describes the dedication to fitness as a kind of control one exercises (ha!) over the body. In an age when people feel powerless over various social and economic conditions, exercise acts as a mechanism to maintain a sense of power.
Ehrenreich argues that the contemporary obsession with wellness can function in two ways, largely dependent on economic class.
For the working class, it acts as a form of Taylorist surveillance for the employer to manage the employee’s health. This is done in the name of reducing health insurance payouts but in effect trains the employee to shape his or her behavior.
For the upper class, wellness is a form of conspicuous consumption, where rich people can show off their commitment to fitness through expensive workout regiments and pricey foods and nutritional practices. While Ehrenreich illustrates this trend with a wellness coach who advocates eating pearls to combat aging. I immediately thought of the boutique gyms that pepper affluent cities and communities that were the subject of a recent Washington Post article. The article describes a diversity problem—a disproportionate number of young, rich, and white people in an otherwise demographically diverse cities—at expensive, boutique gyms. However, I think that the diversity problem is largely due to the uneven distribution of wealth, especially among younger people who have ascended economically since the Great Recession of the last decade. Hence, these gyms function as a token of affluence and commitment to health.
Ehrenreich also critiques the recent surge of mindfulness as Silicon Valley’s solution to the problem they created with digital devices and their distracting platforms. What began as a spiritual ritual practiced by Buddhists has been emptied of any religious properties and reduced to an app on a smartphone or Apple Watch.
I do quibble with one of her suggestions: to Google your health questions and add a few keywords such as “controversy” or “evidence based.” I think one of the reasons that so many people have become followers and practitioners of junk science is because of this very practice. On the Internet, good information and quack-pot theories are almost indistinguishable, especially to many who lack the training or experience in doing research.
Overall, however, I do appreciate her larger message that I would paraphrase as this: life is too short to worry about death.
It’s because of Jack in the Box that I know how to pronounce gyro. It’s the first syllable that throws off most people. They pronounce gyro as in “shy” instead of pronouncing gyro like “jesus.” And, in the early 1990s, when the fast-food chain introduced their version of the venerable Greek sandwich to the Jumbo Jack faithful, they gave everyone a lesson on the proper pronunciation. A gyro is pronounced yeero.
Apparently, some New Yorkers didn’t get the same lesson from Jack. I saw the confusion firsthand and when a California friend came to visit me here in late-2002, he said, “I’m going to order a yeero.” I told him that he needs to order a chai-ro because nobody is going to know what he is trying to order. He didn’t believe me… until it happened to him. The confused guy at the counter didn’t understand what a yeero was until he changed his order to a chai-ro. He then got a gyro. With extra white sauce.
I hadn’t noticed until today that New Yorkers might be finally coming around to learning the proper pronunciation of gyro. A sign I spotted off Saint Mark’s Place today tried to explain that a yeero is a gyro.
No word if they’re going to each us how to pronounce white sauce.
It’s not just Americans that like American craft beer. The world has caught on, according to a recent PRI news item by Jason Margolis, and they want our tasty beer.
However, the growth of sales has been slowing because shipping beers across an ocean is complicated. As quoted in the Margolis’s story, Casey Kjolhede from New Belgium Brewery says:
The biggest challenge is quality. Our beer tastes best—all beer tastes best—fresh. So you’ve already got time against you going across the ocean.
The whole story is worth a listen, or you can read the transcript if you prefer silence. It’s also worth noting that “craft beer” refers to the “second wave” craft brews, those made by long-established breweries that have not yet been acquired by a global conglomerate. Those beers, I presume, are already available, as they were at this bar where Londoners watched the returns from the 2016 Brexit vote.
In the top left of Andrew Testa’s photograph for the New York Times, you’ll see a menu of American beers, most of which are of the “craft” variety that you might find at American airports: whatever “Kentucky Bourbon Barrel” beer is, Flying Dog, Goose Island, Rogue, and Blue Moon. I’m not sure what to think of Pabst being in this group. I guess it was “craft” when it earned its Blue Ribbons in 1882 and in 1916.
My takeaway from this story is a version of something I’ve said before on this site: enjoy this golden age of craft beer before it ends.
I’ll also add that you should definitely try beers from your local craft brewery rather than chasing down some exotic beer from a faraway, trendy brewery.
Sure, that beer that you’ve been “ISO” might be a better brew, but if it’s been traveling some distance for a significant amount of time, it might not taste like what the brewer intended.
That happened when a group of Australians drank a Brooklyn beer that was brewed in Australia, not one shipped across the North American continent and the Pacific Ocean. Eric Ottaway with Brooklyn responded to the Aussies’ criticisms, by informing them that “now it tastes like it actually should as opposed to beer that’s been sitting on the water for six weeks.”
