Eli Zabar's E.A.T.

After dropping by the Russian embassy on the Upper East Side, I stopped by Eli Zabar's E.A.T. to grab lunch before heading back to work. I hadn't been and it was the closest thing I could think of in the area. Silly me didn't check the prices. Walked out with a container of the Tuscan Bread Salad and some grilled zucchini and eggplant. Kinda in a daze after having handed over my credit card and been charged $26.

$26 for that. As I sat at my desk back at work, I was careful not to waste a single piece of anything. It helped that both the bread salad and the veggies were delicious but come on - $26 for what amounts to 2 slices of bread, a slice of mozzarella, an under-ripe tomato and maybe half a zucchini and quarter of an eggplant? Biggest rip-off ever. Even if the food was good, I am never going back. EVER. So then I made my own panzanella a week later with greenmarket tomatoes, bread from Eataly and mozzarella from DiPaolo's. For a fraction of the price. Although I must say I'm impressed the man can charge that much. Then again, he got away for years with lobster salad sans lobster.

Smorgasburg

JP and I finally ventured over to Smorgasburg - the food-centric offshoot of the Brooklyn Flee, just one stop into Brooklyn on the L (if it was more, we might not have made it over...). It was the perfect day with the breeze from the water providing some welcome respite from the blazing sun. My plan? Sample as much as I can and hit up some spots that I'd read about and wanted to try. We succeeded for the most part - mostly because we came a little after noon while the market was still fairly slow.

We started with a pork cemita. What's a cemita? It's a sandwich originating in Puebla, Mexico. It's kinda like a regional version of a torta.

Unfortunately, we both found the bread to be too dry and neither the black bean spread nor the cheese made up for it. I wouldn't really recommend this to anyone. Plus, JP wasn't a fan of the papalo. We washed it down with some jalapeno limeaide from Tenpenny which I found to be a rip-off after I saw them pouring in Minute-Maid Limeaid and mixing it with other stuff (probably jalapeno-infused simple syrup). It wasn't that good either.

It started getting hot so we moved right along to the frozen desserts - Sweet Fusion which served small-batch ice cream enveloped in homemade mochi. We tried the watermelon one which was really good and refreshing, but a tad on the pricey side for what it was. I just remember thinking "if this was $1 less, I'd enjoy it more". But thats alright, we're supporting small producers and $1 for me isn't as much as $1 for them.

Still craving something to beat the heat, we hit up Rob & Anna's (hehe, say their name fast) for their soft-serve frozen bananas. I got it with some raw raspberry coulis which provided just the right amount of tang. This was one of the stands I wanted to try. I don't like bananas in smoothies but I do like other kinds of bananas. It was an interesting taste/texture combination and I'm glad I shared it with JP - I don't think I would've been able to finish this by myself. It's not that I didn't like it (I did), it was just...strange. 

We didn't try Nana's which sells frozen bananas dipped in chocolate that you customize with various toppings; in the hour or so after we first arrived at Smorgasburg, a ferry unloaded boat-load (ferry-load?) of passengers and huge lines formed. In other related news, I recently started freezing halves of baby bananas and coating them in chocolate. These are delicious.

While all those ferry people were waiting in lines, we sat around and enjoyed the views before making rounds for more edibles again. Round #2 started with JP getting a banh-mi style hot dog from AsiaDog, which I've written about before, topped with aioli, pate, cucumbers, pickled carrots and daikon, cilantro and jalapeno. 

We then moved on to the shave ice from People's Pops. I tried People's Pops once. I didn't like them. but their shave ice (yes, shave, not shaved) is SO RIDICULOUSLY GOOD AND REFRESHING. JP won this one - he got the sour cherry flavor, while I got the red plum version (they just pour homemade syrup on top of your ice). I could've eaten both of these. Note to self - get an ice shaver next time we're down in Mexico (the one the guy was using was Victoria, which is a Mexican brand).

And lastly, I couldn't pass up a doughnut from Dough. I'd heard a lot about them recently and having finally tried doughnuts from The Doughnut Plant, I couldn't pass these up to compare (took me a while even though the new location at the Chelsea Hotel is only a few blocks from my apartment...and I didn't even buy them, they were an apartment warming present/edible!). 

JP resisted. Why did I want a huge doughnut after already being a glutton and eating so much food? Plus it was pretty hot outside by then. But I just wanted it. We were debating between the blood orange and the hibiscus but finally went with the latter. I won this round. JP loved it. The doughnuts are light and fluffy and they're yeast doughnuts! That's my favorite kind - it reminds me of my childhood when I was in Communist Russia (we had surprisingly good baked goods over there!). I can't say I tasted much of the hibiscus, just a slight tang in the sweet glaze but whatever. This was a delicious way to end a delicious day. 

I'll definitely be back before summer is over - I missed out on some things I wanted to try, particularly Shorty Tang's cold sesame noodles, a delicious-looking chocolate crinkle cookie from Commerce Bakery and biscuits from King's Crumb. Next time. And another doughnut, or two.

Glorified ham and cheese

They say there are so many different types of cheeses in France that if you eat a different one each day for a full year, you still won't have tried all of them. You'd have 35 more days to go, at least. And so, during lunch, instead of getting St. Nectaire, which I've tried before (one of my coworkers said its too smelly thereby I deduct that I am more French than him), I got Cantal on my sandwich. And apparently, Cantal is made from milk from cows that feed on hay in the winter months in the Auverge region in France. You know what happens to the milk from those same cows when they feed on grass in the summer? It's made into a different cheese! That one is called Salers. Genius!

And so, the point of my story is that I had the most delicious sandwich today. Ham and cheese. But waaaaay glorified because the baguette was from Julien which is a somewhat famous bakery in Paris (it won best baguette a few times), and the ham was jambon de pays, which is a thicker, less salty but more intense prosciutto, and the Cantal cheese which has a mild flavor but the texture of butter that has been slightly softened and can barely be spread on bread. Oh, and it also had some butter on it. IT WAS SO GOOD. And huge. I ate a whole baguette for lunch. And then a salted butter caramel tiramisu from Kaiser. Oh gosh....

Update: Apparently this place (Le Petit Vendome) really does have some of the best sandwiches in Paris according to various internet sources. I even got the right combination! +1 pour moi!