Learning to love food for what it is and not what you want it to be

Most people who love to travel are running away from something. I know this because that’s why I travel. That can be bad, when you’re avoiding persistent problems in your life, but it can also be good, when you ignore your preferences from back home and learn to accept things on their own terms.

In short, Argentinian pizza is quite good if you accept it for what it is. Not New York pizza. Not Neopolitan pizza. Not Chicago-style, nor New Haven. But Argentinian.

Our first pizza experience horrified Zizou,* and she didn’t even taste it. We had gone to Kentucky Pizza (what a name!) after lots of dancing to La Bomba de Tiempo at Ciudad Cultural KONEX with some new friends. I was so hungry I ate my pizza without comment or even consciousness, but Zizou could not forget it. “It was so thick and doughy! It looked disgusting!”

She wasn’t mollified when I ordered the above fugazetta, an onion-intense pizza at Bodegon, our favorite restaurant and local brewery in El Chalten. We had just come off five days of camping, where we ate nothing other than instant oatmeal, Frutigram cookies, and gummy Knorr-mix pasta. I was not going to complain about the crazy amount of cheese or the flatbread crust. It wasn’t the most delicious thing I had ever eaten, but it was good enough that I ate it cold for breakfast the next day.

When we got back to Buenos Aires, and I mentioned that my former boss’s grandmother had invited us to have pizza, Zizou looked scared. But it was she in the end who steered us, even before we went to dinner with Nilda, to El Cuartito, one of the oldest and most famous pizzerias in Buenos Aires.



The look of relief on her face when she bit into her slice! “It’s good!”



The cabresa was layered with cheese, many pieces of longaniza (essentially pepperoni), and a strongly tomato-flavored tomato sauce, which is not a redundant thing to say in Argentina. (For a country populated by Italian immigrants, they have sadly forgotten the taste of a true tomato.) The crust was crunchy, but not doughy. The famous faina, the thin chickpea flour pancakes Argentines like to eat literally on top of their pizza slice, was tasty, too. It must be a descendent of farinata, no? It wasn't like any pizza we'd ever had before, but it had everything right-cheese, bread, and sauce.

El Cuartito itself is wonderful. It proudly declares that it began in 1934, thanking its customers, their parents, and their grandparents for their patronage. The walls are covered with memorabilia, except unlike TGIF, the memorabilia has age. Marilyn Monroe sits next to Diego Maradona, as well as Muhammad Ali.

But the crowning moment for Argentine pizza came on our last night, at dinner with Nilda, an 84-year-old former human rights lawyer who I would call feisty if that word didn’t sound so inadequate when applied to a woman like that. Sitting at her kitchen table with her pale gold hair, she watched closely as she asked us, “What do you think of Fidel Castro?” This is a woman who said, “Of course I am not Communist, just in my thoughts!”

The pizza she served us, urged on by my former boss, was from the family’s favorite pizzeria, El Mazacote, a neighborhood place in Montserrat on the corner of calles Chile y Jose. It was a revelation. The dough was yeasty, chewy, flavorful. The sauce and cheese were sharp with salt. We loved it, the Argentinian pizza.

*Zizou, a pseudonym for my good friend who wishes to remain anonymous, and not an indication my good friend is Zinedine Zidane.

Har gow and tacos and chaat, oh my!

My friend Lina asked me recently if I’d gotten tired of my blog. I protested that I hadn’t, but I think I had, just a bit. But I recently spent a long weekend in San Francisco and got reinspired. I didn’t have any culinary epiphanies, despite the city’s reputation. In fact, I got seriously annoyed that my favorite bakery, Tartine, is no longer a place to have a quiet breakfast with a paper on a weekday morning. I think it was having an intense, packed weekend of opportunities to share good food with people I love, who I hadn’t seen in so long. One of those friends even ended up taking me on an all-afternoon eating tour of the East Bay.

"Zizou" (as she prefers to remain anonymous) did preliminary research, and as you can see, provided a full write-up as well. So I’m not going to repeat everything she said, just highlight my most lasting memories.

1) We went to eleven places!

2) We only ate at eight. The remaining three, we picked up food to eat later.

3) Zizou packed a cooler for stop #3, the meat counter at Café Rouge. She always carries a cooler, “just in case.”

4) I had ice cream that rivaled Il Laboratorio del Gelato and I do not say that lightly. The Catalan flavor at Ici, started by the pastry chef from Chez Panisse, was so good, I didn’t want it to end. It had a curious flavor that I didn’t recognize immediately, a mixture of anise, lemon, and something else that made it special and absolutely inimitable. I ordered it in a cup, to which Zizou said, “What! You want the cone. She’ll take the cone,” turning to the laughing ice cream scooper. She was right. The hand-rolled cone had a nugget of chocolate at the bottom.



5) Vik’s Chaat is as good as I’d hoped all that time I lived in San Francisco and never went there. I especially loved the chapati that came with the hyderabadi fish special—simple, flavorful, chewy, everything a flatbread should be.



6) Tao Yuen in Oakland’s Chinatown had crispy, not at all greasy, tofu skin rolls that I would never have believed could come out of a take-out dim sum place. I think they were 50 cents or something equally obscene.

7) We found at the Cheeseboard a bigger, pizza-only place next door to the cheese shop, with an elderly musical trio performing and young, happy Californians spilling out of the restaurant and just sitting on the grassy median in the middle of the busy two-way street. Pizza as excellent as ever. I love San Francisco when it just does its own thing and doesn’t worry whether its pizza crust lives up to some NY/New Haven ideal.



8) Taco trucks are the best, always.



I did eat dinner afterwards. I told Anne I had to eat vegetables, and she, former Midwestern carnivore, suggested we go to Greens, where I had a very simple and refreshing salad of greens, celery root, cheese, and butter beans. I was embarrassed that the waiter might think I was the kind of woman who only orders salad, but he praised my choice, saying, “Beautiful! That’s my favorite salad!” I was in such a good mood, I only giggled quietly and was thankful for all that the Bay Area had bestowed upon me that day.

New Haven Love-Fest

It's been 8 years since my friends and I graduated from Yale, but in the way of many Yalies, in those eight years, one of us has been in New Haven in one way or another. This year will mark probably the last Yale-related graduation for us, when Romy graduates from the Yale School of Art with a master's in graphic design. A group of us in New York headed north on Saturday to see her graduating class show and incidentally, to eat some good New Haven food.

Danica offered to drive, citing a need to get back to New York early Sunday morning. As we drove on I-95, however, it became clear that she had other motives for choosing her parents' car over Metro North.



In our four years as undergraduates, we were sadly unaware of Stowe's, just a short drive away on the shore in West Haven. It's easy to forget that New Haven is a coastal city, but Stowe's makes it deliciously obvious. Danica is good at taking every opportunity possible to make up for lost time.



Stowe's has your classics, like fried clams and lobster bisque, but their crowning glory is the lobster saute roll, a version of the lobster roll that Connecticut can be proud to claim as its own.



Unlike the usual lobster roll with mayonnaise, celery, and often unknown filler, the Connecticut version is just lobster meat and butter. "Just" lobster meat is probably the grossest understatement. Served on a soft, New England-style split-top hot dog bun, and offered for only $9.50, Stowe's lobster saute roll is...sublime.



This wasn't our dinner. On our agenda: New Haven pizza.

The best New Haven pizza is a hotly debated topic, with most people arguing vehemently about Sally's versus Pepe's in Wooster Square. I prefer to avoid the long lines at both places, because no pizza is worth waiting 2+ hours for, especially when all the locals know you can get fantastic pizza at Modern on State Street. But a good downtown alternative is the pizza at BAR, which despite being kind of a cheesy place and not even the best of New Haven's pizza establishments, makes a chewy, flavorful crust that blows many a NY pizza legend out of the water. It's also the only place I've ever been that serves pizza with mashed potatoes and bacon. It's best to eat it on a "white" pie (no tomato sauce). Don't knock it till you try it.



One summer day long long ago, Danica and I ate an entire large pizza for lunch, while a table of four middle-aged men looked on us with a mixture of awe and respect. This time, we couldn't quite do it. Four of us ended up leaving almost third of a pie.

The whole day was an exercise in remembering who we had been then and realizing how different we are now. We walked across the New Haven Green to our favorite coffee shop and then got past the locked gate at Timothy Dwight College to look at the home we had shared for four years. The dining hall was full of students eating dinner between finals, who barely noticed the 30-year-old alums wandering among them. I whispered as loudly as I dared, "Don't go to law school!", knowing they would never listen. We wondered where students sat to talk in the courtyard, now that the fence was gone. We mourned the loss of the beautiful tree that bloomed each year just as classes came to an end.

And then we went to Romy's show and presented her with her graduation gift, a Lithuanian coffee cake from Claire's with an obscene amount of buttercream frosting. Romy was the one who came up with our group motto, "FIAGO" or "Fuck it and go on." It was only appropriate to give her a cake declaring, "FIAGO 4-Ever."