A shout-out to Michael McCaulley of Tria for encouraging me to finally read M.F.K. Fisher. I still have lots more to read in the omnibus edition of The Art of Eating, but Consider the Oyster provided a good start for writing this article.

I can’t understate the great happy hour deal at Ansill: $1 oysters at the bar between 6-8 Monday through Friday, in addition to $5 prosecco, $3 house wine, and $3 draft of the day.

I had no idea Dungeoness Crab even existed until I moved into my present apartment.  Even with my current knowledge that it’s a large crab found in the Pacific, it still ranks nowhere near Beer and Breakfast on my list of necessities.

Not that I’ve ever had breakfast at the Garden Court Eatery either.  Let’s be honest- its sole value in my life is limited to purveying beer, slightly stale kaiser rolls, and the occasional pint of Häagen-Dazs.  That’s convenience.

Rick Nichols, of the Philadelphia Inquirer, also found the concept of Dollar Dog Night noteworthy. He also had the wherewithal to make it to the first such event of the season and was less than ecstatic with what he found:

Workers who make an average of about $70 for a seven-hour shift feverishly dumped boxes of dogs on the grill tops, quickly stuffed them in buns, and wrapped them in steamy death shrouds of foil.

The result – big, gummy roll, barely warm lunch-meat-like dog – wasn’t too pretty.

As the old adage goes: you get what you pay for. For the record, I did attend the day game following the Dollar Dog Night, and had an Italian sausage. The sausage, which was grilled and served with peppers and onions, proved to be respectable. At $5.25, it was steep, but not savagely overpriced. More importantly, the line moved swiftly enough that we were in our seats before the first pitch.

Posting has been slim in this space over the last week, thanks to the assumption of some new professional responsibilities.  Needless to say, I have a newfound respect for those who work in restaurants, now that I am one of them.

While I only handle the most basic of restaurant tasks in my new position of support/host at an establishment that will remain unidentified, I haven’t finished a training shift without being overcome with a feeling of utter incapability.  This sensation hits me like a cresting wave, and I move through my work as distracted as I would be if I were soaking wet.  Luckily, I have yet to douse myself, or others, with any liquids.  But my efforts at mastering carrying three plates at once did result in a portion of salad sliding onto my shirt last night, in an effort to keep the entire salad from landing on the floor.

I’ve been assured that it all gets easier.  I can only hope so.  Until then, I’ll be at home, practicing carrying plates.

Let’s go Phils!

Sure, it’s 45 degrees and misting outside. Still, I can’t lie: I have baseball fever. It’s opening day, and while I don’t have tickets to this afternoon’s game, that hasn’t stopped me from wearing my Chase Utley jersey for the first time since I received it for my birthday.Even though I’m not attending the game, I’m going to touch on the subject of ballpark food from afar. (A more in-depth overview will likely follow my first visit to a game, maybe as early as Thursday?)

First, it’s necessary to get one point of the way: going to the game with an empty stomach is like walking around with your open wallet in your hands, encouraging passers-by to help themselves. After an $8 roast pork sandwich from Tony Luke’s in Ashburn Alley, a $4 bucket of crab fries from Chickie & Pete’s, and a couple of $7 beers, I’ll be lucky if I have anything more than the subway token for the trip home left in my wallet.

Let no one think that I don’t heartily endorse any and all of the above items. But a hoagie from Planet Hoagie in Media or a roast pork from the original Tony Luke’s on Oregon Avenue are both cheaper than the ballpark equivalent, and you won’t necessarily miss an inning and a half of the action while waiting in line.

And with any rule, there are exceptions. While I’ve yet to attend one, the Dollar Dog Night promotion screams out affordability (almost as loudly as it does gluttony.) For someone who eats hotdogs very sporadically and selectively in real life, but frequently at the ballpark, I might have to put one of these events on the agenda. Sure, Phillies Franks might not “answer to a higher authority,” like my usual standby Hebrew National, they can’t taste too bad at the ballpark, especially for only one dollar.

This is someone else’s picture. Trust me, the one I cooked looked just as good.

Unlike other American cities like New York, Chicago, and even Ann Arbor, Michigan, Indo-Chinese cooking has apparently not yet caught on in Philadelphia. And that’s a shame.

What passes for Chinese food in North India would be largely unrecognizable to anyone from China (while the same can also be said for much Chinese food in America.) But authenticity aside, this “Chinese”, or Indo-Chinese, food is very popular in urban areas across North India as a form of “fast food.” (I’ve never traveled in South India, so I can’t speak for its footprint there).

Indo-Chinese cooking generally involves prolific use of both the deep-fryer and chilies. While neither of these elements are out of place in Chinese cooking, the Indian enthusiasm for chilies trumps most Chinese regional cuisines, with the exception of Szechwan. The key difference is the other spices and flavorings involved: in Indo-Chinese cooking, chicken or vegetables are also seasoned with ginger, garlic. Then, after deep-frying, they are doused in a spicy-sweet sauce, similar to ketchup. Here, the best option is Maggi chili sauce, available in Indian grocery stores here in U.S., but ketchup will do in a pinch. At the end, Indo-Chinese dishes are garnished with even more chiles, ginger, and cilantro, accoutrements rarely seen in traditional Chinese food.

Americans are slowly catching on to Indo-Chinese, as evidenced by its inclusion as #32 in Saveur Magazine’s 100 list. The issue included a recipe for Gobi Manchurian, an Indo-Chinese preparation for deep-fryer cauliflower that I had consumed frequently in India, though not as frequently as Chicken Manchurian. For a dish largely considered “fast food,” the preparation was complex when I made it a little over a month ago, as the deep-frying was preceded by pureeing, steaming, whisking, and plenty of chopping, while followed by the cooking of the sauce. Still, I was pleased with the outcome, and intend to make the dish again.

But because of the labor-intensive nature of the dish, I’m on the lookout for restaurants in the area that will do the work for me. On a walk in Upper Darby around the 69th Street Terminal this afternoon, I passed an Indo-Pakistani restaurant with a computer-printed sign in the window that read “We Have Indo-Chinese Food.” I went inside, looked at a menu, and didn’t see anything validating the sign.

I then asked the man behind the counter if they did serve any Indo-Chinese. He responded, “We have chicken fried rice…”

I interrupted him: “What about gobi manchurian, chicken manchurian, chicken chili…”

My inquiry was then turned over to the manager, who told me that they no longer have what I was looking for. “I would make six or seven, and only one or two get ordered,” he said. Stymied, I headed out the door. The search for real Indo-Chinese in Philly continues.

“Too much of one thing is good for nothing,” sang reggae artist Max Romeo, suggesting in the roots reggae anthem “Aily and Ailaloo” that a man shouldn’t work all the time and should smoke ganja to unwind.

Following his lead, I took a break from a steady course of home-prepared American food for a Jamaican meal at Caribbean Cuisine in West Philadelphia, where callaloo, but not ailaloo can be found on the menu. The former, a Caribbean leaf vegetable, is one of the multiple vegetable sides found at this unassuming restaurant in a former trolley station inside the loop at the end of the 34 trolley’s path down Baltimore Avenue.

Even without Romeo’s prescribed allotment of ganja, the menu at the unimaginatively named restaurant had a tempting list of dishes, even with the oxtail stew unavailable without a thirty minute wait. The Jamaican standard of jerk chicken was moist throughout, and delivered a healthy dose of jerk spice, even without the sauce on the side.

Jerk Chicken
The austere surroundings recalled the simplicity of small restaurants near the ocean in the south coast town of Treasure Beach, and the whole snapper in brown sauce tasted was prepared in a similar fashion to the fish I had at Winsome’s on the beach many years ago, even if this fish couldn’t possibly have been as fresh.

Snapper

The heaping sides of rice and peas, collard greens, and okra were also familiar from my trip to Jamaica, but the only way I could have emptied my plate was if I had followed Romeo’s advice.

Callaloo, Okra, Plantains, with Rice and Peas

But one thing I can’t get enough of is the “Ting,” a grapefruit soda also available at some of the Caribbean and soul food trucks around 30th Street Station. At 9.6 ounces, these bottles provide just enough mouth-puckering liquid to wash  the meal down properly. I just hope my man Max is willing to make an exception in this one case.

No- not this Jim’s- the West Philly one. The one without any google images.

I couldn’t start writing about food in Philadelphia without paying notice to one hoary standard, the item that people across the nation associate with the city, the cheesesteak. While many here, with justifiable cause, have recently asserted the roast pork sandwich to be the true champion on a soft Italian roll, I can’t entirely turn my back on thinly sliced grilled beef, provolone cheese and properly caramelized onions.

For one, the cheesesteak is largely unavoidable. Unlike the roast pork sandwich, requiring advanced preparation and thus the expectation of a certain number of customers, any neighborhood joint can pull some sliced steak out of the cooler and toss it on their grill to order. As a result, in the city or the suburbs, the cheesesteak is never more than a short walk or drive away.

But in addition to the neighborhood standbys, often pizzerias with a grill to the side, exists a separate category of establishment, the destination cheesesteak emporium. Here, at places with some guy’s first name on the big sign out front, the grill is first and foremost, and meat is almost always cooking on it.

Inspired by the efforts of one sports-talk radio host, and his efforts to sample forty cheesesteaks in forty days, I began thinking about my own personal cheesesteak checklist. With neither a bank account nor arteries equipped for forty in forty, I figured I should, at the very least, get familiar with the options in my own backyard. I jumped in the car and drove deeper into West Philadelphia to the original Jim’s Steaks.

While Jim’s has the name recognition (and signed celebrity promo photos) to match other big boys like Geno’s, Pat’s, and Tony Lukes, most of this recognition undoubtedly stems from the location of its black and white tiled, brightly lit, two level space at the corner of Fourth and South, in a neighborhood bustling with foot traffic on any given weekend night. So, I had no idea what to expect after parking my car down the street from the original Jim’s Steaks on a quiet and unremarkable residential street in the Haddington section of West Philadelphia. Here was a destination name in an unambiguously neighborhood setting. The familiar font on the sign out front reassured me it would be okay to step inside.

Inside was a long, narrow room, with a grill with a sizeable portion of beef and onions sizzling away to my immediate left. Farther along the left side stood the cashier, followed by hoagie making station to the end of the room. On the right side, lining the wall, a counter, with room for ten at the most. One doesn’t go to cheesesteak joints for frills.

Unassuming surroundings aside, the grilling pile of beef reaffirmed the status of Jim’s as a destination establishment, where a steady clientele can be counted upon to keep the beef steadily cooking. And during my mid-afternoon visit, several hours after standard lunchtime, business was indeed brisk. The line didn’t take long, but in twenty minutes of waiting and eating, about a dozen customers passed through the room.
So, how was the steak? In a word, admirable. Chopped to the proper degree of fineness, the meat was hot, not overly greasy, and well-distributed when it went into the long roll, ensuring that the provolone cheese laid at the bottom of the roll was slightly melted by the time I bit into the steak. Caramelized onions, taken from a heaping pile at the end of the grill, were nicely incorporated into the meat. And the classic Amoroso roll, an often underappreciated component of the sandwich, was fresh, soft, but not squishy; an agreeable vessel for the ample filling.

Heading out the door, content with my discovery, I reflected on my earlier dichotomy. Jim’s in West Philly felt like a neighborhood standby but worthy of a drive at the same time. This cheesesteak didn’t change my life, but it helped cut the connection between the product and the hype. Shed of the crowds, neon, and chrome, this was simply a fine, familiar sandwich.