Culinary Report: Delray Beach, Florida

My wife finally managed to get a couple free days off from graduate school so we took a brief vacation to Delray Beach, FL to visit some friends, and while there sampled some excellent food at the restaurants along Atlantic Ave.

• Friday lunch we ate at Lemongrass Thai (420 E Atlantic Ave); I'm well aware of the fact that Thai restaurants called 'Lemongrass' are a dime a dozen, but this one had exceptional Tom Yum soup (my favorite soup in the world) and spicy red curry. My wife, being vegan, also enjoyed a well-prepared dish of tofu and peppers marinated in Panang curry.
• Friday, Dinner - Yama Japanese Restaurant - 44 E. Atlantic Ave. Your basic Japanese place; good food but nothing to write home about.
• Saturday, Lunch - we ate at Lemongrass. Again. Did I mention their Tom Yum soup was exceptional?
• Saturday, Dinner - Walking down Atlantic we passed by Cheeburger Cheeburger, a burger joint w/ 50's interior decor. They are especially famous for their Pounder, actually a whopping 20 ounces of beef before cooking. If you finish it off, they'll take a polaroid of you and put it on their wall of heroes (populated, my wife noticed, by predominantly members of the male sex; "it's a guy thing", she mused) . . . Well, at $9.95 how could I possibly pass up a challenge like that?

  
  Here's me and The Pounder. Behind me is the wall of polaroids chronicling those who had won previous battles with The Pounder.
  
  Here's a close-up of the Pounder. It took two hands to lift it. Selected toppings: Lettuce, Tomato, Jalapeno Cheese, Roasted Red Peppers, A1 Steak Sauce and 20 ounces of succulent, well-done, utterly delicious BEEF. A carnivore's dream!
  
  Here's the photo of me on the wall, the battle won.
  
  Here's a close-up of the photo -- representin' NYC, yo.
  
  Having lapsed into a food-coma as a consequence of The Pounder. I'm suprised I made it home!

  Cheeburger pretty much set the standard for me, as far as burgers go -- replacing Checkers as the top dog. They're actually a franchise with multiple locations -- none even remotely near New York city, however. =(

• Sunday, Lunch - Our friends took us to Bamboo Club, an "Asian Bistro" staffed by a waiter who was missing his lower front teeth, which he initially attributed to being a hockey player up north and later to a circus accident. We're not sure which, if either, is the case, but he was nice. The food was good, too.
• Sunday, Dinner - Tuckered out from our outing with friends and an evening on the beach, my wife and I ordered in from Pizza Rustica (1155 E Atlantic Ave). Medium 14" pies turned out to be much larger than we anticipated -- very tasty but I will confess I've developed a bias towards the New York Slice! ;-)

All in all, a very satisfying excursion beyond New York city.

The Palate King

The Palate King's Booze & Grub survey offers opinionated reviews of neighborhood restaurants . . . or, rather, tasteless verbal abuse masquerading as "restaurant reviews" -- but hey, aren't New Yorker's known for their attitude? Anyway, some very humorous takedowns of local eateries and hole-in-the-walls.

Where are you, Ray?

There are at least 3,000 pizzerias in New York, and at least 30 of them use some form of “Ray’s” in their name including but not limited to Ray’s, Ray’s Pizza, Famous Original Ray’s Pizza, Ray’s Famous Original Pizza, World Famous Ray’s Pizza, Not Ray’s Pizza, and RayBari Pizza. A quick poll of Citysearch finds 2788 results on “pizza” and 45 results on “Ray’s pizza”. The thing is, there is no Ray.

So I discovered reading NYC Eat's two-part (One and Two) post on pizza in New York city. They also mention that the The Learning Channel, which is scheduled to air a show "Pizza Wars: New York vs. Chicago" this month.

They're already taking a poll.

Supersize Me, Baby.

In case you haven't heard already, Supersize Me is about some guy from New York who had the bright idea to consume a steady diet of McDonalds for 30 days straight and chronicle the deterioriation of his health. The film comes out this week, and judging from the overwhelmingly favorable reviews a lot of people are interested in the spectacle. John Anderson, writing for Newsday, isn't playing along:

So why not order everything once (which should have taken about a week) and then eat salads for the rest of the month? It's the kind of inconvenient question "Super Size Me" can't stand up to, as Spurlock goes on to gain 25 pounds and imperil his liver.

Maybe it's the director's inherently superior attitude that's makes the film so irritating: From his self-congratulatory physical (he's in great shape, he's told repeatedly), to the decidedly unwelcome shot of his rectal exam, to the repetitious, sneering shots of wide-bottomed Americans, we get the distinct impression that he's isn't in it for the public benefit.

Meanwhile, somebody named Soso Whaley over at the Competitive Enterprise Institute has vowed to eat McDonalds for 30 days as well to demonstrate that it will help you lose weight:

I, on the other hand, am motivated to eat at McDonalds for 30 days to show just how easy it is to skew results of any test to reflect your preconceived notions and come up with just exactly the results you want to see. In my case I’m going to use some of the same parameters Mr. Spurlock used but I would rather see results which show I can maintain a healthy lifestyle and actually lose weight at McDonalds, so I will not be scarfing down Double Quarter Pounders with cheese.

Speaking of the Golden Arches, NYMetro.com profiles Lee Dunham, a New York cop "who on March 23, 1973, opened the first McDonald’s on the island of Manhattan, at 215 West 125th Street" in Harlem. Mr. Dunham reminisces about the good old days:

. . . a McD franchise wasn’t a sure thing back then, Dunham says. Harlem was on the edge. Junkies were hanging out all day "putting twenty sugars in their hot chocolate," and Dunham had to hire moonlighting-cop buddies to keep rampaging gangs like the Savage Skulls and Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue Stompers out of the joint.

But there was no stopping the McD's Zeitgeist, which was to blow away New York burger chains like Wetson’s and consign White Castle’s funky square patties to the fast-food margins. "When I saw those limousines pulling up in front of the place with white kids from downtown, I knew I was in," Dunham recalls. Being down the street from the Apollo Theater didn’t hurt. 'I used to serve 2,200 customers a day . . . When James Brown was in town, it went to 3,200. James sold me a lot of hamburgers. They were round the block, rhinestones for days."

According to the article there are more McDonald’s franchises in New York City than in any other city in the country, more than 250 in the five boroughs, with 74 locations in Manhattan alone -- a fact which author Marc Jacobson takes none too lightly:

You might as well be Anywhere, USA. Except we are not anywhere, we are in New York, which is not supposed to be anywhere. What was wrong with just having a pizza parlor on every single block, a snarly, T-shirted dough-flinger hulking behind fingerprint-mottled counters—wasn’t that fast food enough? The notion of New York’s being home to more Ronald McDonald per square inch than anywhere else ranks as a grievous assault on cosmopolitan civic esteem.

To which I say -- whine all you want, Mr. Jacobson. If our city can host God-knows-how-many Italian pizzerias, Sushi bars and Chinese restaurants, it can certainly accomodate a couple hundred McDonalds, and have plenty of room to spare.

NYCTOGO Merchant Directory

Merchant Listing for NYCTOGO.com -- nice to see they're finally starting to expand into Brooklyn. Yes, contrary to the impression you recieve from their website, Manhattan is actually not the only burough in New York City (elitists!).

Queens? -- Any day now. *sigh*