eateryROW: forestHILLS

Brunch Report - OLD VIENNA CAFE

2012-01-21T23:27:00.000-05:00

Brunch Report

OLD VIENNA CAFE

108-22 Queens Boulevard

Forest Hills, NY 11375

(718) 268-8436

I have yet to dine at Old Vienna Cafe for dinner, so I've been hesitant to go there for brunch. Somehow, I thought it might spoil whatever experience I would have had come sundown. I admit that it was a silly notion, but it's the only one I've got. Anyway, I finally did go. Pike and I found ourselves seated just this morning, the night after the big (and so far, only) snowfall of the winter.

I am reluctant to say that Old Vienna was pretty sparsely populated because one might think that this has anything to do with the weather. In truth, I've walked past it dozens of times and have never seen very many people eating there. Meanwhile, just a few feet away, Cheeburger is standing room only. Naturally, getting a table was a breeze.

Pike and I ordered some coffees (very good coffee, by the way) and noticed that there isn't really much in the way of a brunch menu here. Mostly, it's lunch and even the brunchy options share a page with a selection of sandwiches. Bro would have been tickled pink to have eaten here though, as they have a large selection of crepes.

Pike and I had very different opinions on what we ordered this morning. I ordered the Classic Eggs Benedict, which were made the classic way. Poached eggs with ham on an English muffin under Hollandaise sauce. It came with a side salad which was very pleasant and the whole meal, in my opinion, was everything it was supposed to be. Pike, on the other hand, ordered Steak and Eggs and he was none too impressed. He specifically ordered the steak, a small NY strip, medium rare, but it came medium well and he left half of it on the plate. It came with a side of home fries, which he thought even less of than the steak. "I had three bites and that was enough" he told me. How about the eggs? I asked. "They're fine. They're scrambled. The coffee's good though." So I'd sum it up with: hir or miss. I'd like to return to try the crepes though. And they had a French toast that looked interesting.

The service was overall weak. There were too few people here to warrant having to wave our arms in the air to flag a waiter fifteen feet away, but that's a petty complaint. What isn't petty is that brunch didn't come with coffee or mimosas or juice. It's an a la cart extra. They aren't encouraging any more seats to fill up by having you pay for a brunch tradition. On the plus side, you'll never wait for a table.

Expect to pay between $8 and $13 for the food, plus coffee, plus juice, plus booze. Overall, everything included, we spent $40. Two brunch entrees, two coffees, and a mimosa, plus tax and tip.

KATSUNO

2012-01-17T02:32:00.004-05:00

KATSUNO

103-01 Metropolitan Avenue

Forest Hills, NY 11375

(718) 575-4033

Katsuno, which won 2010's Best New Japanese Restaurant by Time Out Magazine, despite its location in the heart of central Queens, does a mighty fine job of demonstrating to all of us* that Japanese food really is more than cold fish and white rice.

FULL REVIEW HERE.

*all of us who aren't Japanese. All of us who are Japanese probably already knew.

BROWNIES & CREAM

2011-11-04T15:02:00.002-04:00

BROWNIES & CREAM

72-40 Austin Street

Forest Hills, NY 11375

(718) 480-3849

The handful of specialty food shops in Forest Hills has grown in recent months. While we may not have a butcher shop (a crime), we did just add the kind of candy store that you might find in SoHo and now, a brownie shop. Actually, Brownies & Cream also sells macarons and ice cream, but... I like brownies.

Of the roughly dozen varieties I tried about all of them. Actually, I went up the girl behind the counter and just said, "I'll take one of each." Though, truth be told, I'd had one of each already earlier in the week. I just needed a reminder of each of the flavors (and something to have with my milk), which were: Plain (of course), Walnut, Coconut, Oreo, Dulce de Leche, S'Mores, Vanilla Cheesecake, and Raspberry. There's also a Lemon Square dusted with powdered sugar should you not be a chocolate person. I won't beat you to death with my thoughts on each of them, but as a generality, the overarching theme of Brownies and Cream is "soft". These might be the farthest from dry that any brownie could be, and they fight peanut butter for dominance in the stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth wars. This isn't to say that they seem goopy of undercooked. Not at all. But I was glad I had that milk handy. My favorite was the Dulce de Leche, which has a caramel layer and the Raspberry, which had a layer of raspberry syrup. My least favorite was the Vanilla Cheesecake, which is a plain brownie with a thick later of cheesecake on top. But baking the two drastically different cakes together meant that the cheesecake came out lacking any firmness, like a cheesecake cream. My mom's favorite was the Plain, interestingly. She said she would probably have preferred the Walnut or the Coconut (which is what I thought she would have chosen), but she wished that the walnuts and coconut shavings were baked in, rather than just as a topping. If Brownies and Cream really wants to satisfy her, they should make a brownie with both baked in.

As I said, in addition to the brownies, Brownies & Cream also sells ice cream and macarons. While I've seen macarons for sale here and there in various patisseries across the city, I've never bothered to actually buy one. So for my first experience, I tried three of them, and rated how good they were by the standard told to be via Serious Eats. So for those of you who, like me, haven't tried this French treat before, let me give you a brief description of them. They're sort of a sandwich cookie, except that instead of dough, they use a firm, but delicate meringue. Eggs and sugar. What are they like? Well, each flavor is very different. I tried (and liked) all three. Imagine biting into an Oreo Cookie while on an acid trip. Brownies and Cream had about a dozen flavors to choose from. My mom and I were both partial to the Espresso one.

Each brownie and each macaron costs about $1.50.

VENEZIA

2011-08-14T13:57:00.009-04:00

VENEZIA
Atlas Park Mall
80-60 Cooper Avenue
Glendale, NY 11385
(718) 326-1200

As I once up a time may have mentioned, Atlas Park needs customers. There needs to be some sort of a draw. In my line of thinking, such a draw could be its dining options. Venezia is the newest of these options and the latest restaurant to occupy the central green space by what used to be the fountain. The central area is both a blessing and a curse. First, the atmosphere of dining outside by the grass with the lights from the arches all around, is unmatched in the neighborhood. I love eating outside and the Forest Hills vicinity doesn't have nearly enough of it. But, come the rain and come winter, nobody wants to be outside, and the interior isn't too big.

Venezia is a quaint little Italian bistro serving up frills free comfort food. It's simple. It's cute. It won't win awards but it's far from bad... though they do have a penchant for excessively al-dente pastas (ie: undercooked), so if I were you, I'd suggest asking for them to boil those noodles a wee bit more. Service-wise, everyone was pleasant, but they're sloppy and tripping over each other. The left hand clearly doesn't know what the right hand is doing. At one point, Bro and I had three waiters ask to take our order.

I ate at Venezia twice recently. Once with Operagirl and once with Bro. Both times, we ordered the Fried Calamari. The first time, it was mediocre and doughy and salty. The second time it was impressive. The marinara sauce was very good and we asked for more of it. Operagirl ordered the Portobello Trifolato, a mushroom salad. She was impressed, especially since she only ordered it as a gag because "trifolato" doesn't mean anything in Italian.

For both of my meals, my entree was the Pappardelle Bolognese. What can I say? I like pappardelle. The meat sauce was perfectly fine, if not terribly inspiring, but, as I said, the pasta itself was undercooked. Five more minutes and it would have been al dente. Five less and it would have been in the box. And this was both times, so they need to update that recipe. Operagirl ordered the Penne Alla Vodka, which was more cooked, but they still should have let it sit in that water longer. She liked it, however. And despite a few hiccups, we left saying "actually, this place isn't bad!" When I went with Bro, he ordered the Chicken Francese, two chicken breasts in a sweet lemon pepper sauce with a side of sauteed vegetables and some potato. It's the kind of cafeteria-style Italian food that would make an Olive Garden line cook wince, but it was, I regret to admit, pretty tasty.

The food, by the way is super heavy and we never ordered desserts.

Operagirl and I split a pitcher of sangria and I recommend that you skip it. It was the weakest sangria I've ever had. Definitely not worth the $30-something it cost. The other cocktails that they serve are pretty good. Cutesy drinks, not the classic speakeasy types I typically get, but fun for when you're sitting outside at sunset.

Venezia, while not "expensive" isn't cheap. My meal with Operagirl (a pitcher of sangria, two appetizers, two entrees, tax and tip) cost over $100. My meal with Bro (a few drinks, a single appetizer, two entrees, tax and tip) cost $85.

So it's got a great atmosphere, not-too-bad grub, and it won't break the bank if you hold off on the booze. Is this enough to get people to go to Atlas Park? And can it inspire others to open up shop? Time will tell.

Atlas Park is melting in the dark...

2011-08-01T09:22:00.007-04:00

Atlas Park is melting in the dark...
...all its sweet green icing flowing down

With the death of Border's Books, one of the anchor stores at Atlas Park, yet another storefront bites the dust.

To be sure, Atlas Park seemed a long shot back when they were breaking champagne against its bow and lowering it into the sea a few years back. I had hope but I was realistic. Too few stores had signed on prior to the grand opening and its location seemed... ill advised. Creating a classy mall that dreams of one day housing Coach stores and Givenchy outlets requires quite a leap of faith when you stick that mall in working-class Glendale. (UPDATE: still no Givenchy outlet)

It's one thing to stick a fancy-pants mall in a neighborhood with zero intention of actually having the residents of that neighborhood shop there, but if that's the plan, then it requires drawing people TO that area from afar. Sure, Forest Hills proper has some spending power, but there has to be more than that. Atlas Park needed to pull people from Manhattan (but they have SoHo and Fifth Avenue) and it needed to pull people from Long Island (and they have Roosevelt Field). Hell, at the very least, it needed to pull teenage girls with daddy's credit card (and they all went to Queens Center because it at least has access to a subway line). Even if Glendale wasn't a terrible place for a shopping center, and everyone who lived there was an avid wearer of J. Crew polos, one side of Atlas Park borders a cemetery (and those residents don't shop for much) and another side is almost entirely industrial. In essence, even if it was the correct demographic for an upscale mall, the location still leaves much to be desired.

Making matters worse, they charge for parking(!) and they keep their overflow lot closed to everyone but Carnies. This is just flat-out stupid. Hey, I get it. The malls on Queens Boulevard all charge for parking, it doesn't seem fair. Maybe, I have heard, they fear that the lot will be used people commuting to work in the morning, but without a subway or LIRR station, this is clearly an unwarranted fear. Maybe, I have also heard, they're concerned that people will park there 24 hours a day, leaving shoppers without. The simple solution to that one is for the shops to validate the parking space with a purchase and then to have management run a tow truck through the garage after closing. And hey, maybe charge a monthly fee for people to park there overnight without getting towed.

Indeed, so few people are willing to pay for parking that the neighborhood is clogged with those cruising for a spot on the street. Yet, for all this traffic, once you get inside beyond the walls, the place is a ghost town. During the week, tumbleweeds might as well blow through it.

I write a restaurant blog and recognize that this post goes against the grain of my usual topic flow. But so far, half of the places I've reviewed at Atlas Park for y'all have gone under. How is that helpful to me? I'm just watching my money get sucked away. I'm sure that this has to do entirely with the fact that it's desolate. The restaurants are far from alone, though. Amish Market, the fancy supermarket, is gone. The Filene's Basement-style department store under the movie theater is gone. ArtWorld, which moved from Austin Street thinking that Atlas would be a boon to business, moved out and is now on Metropolitan. Stella Gialla, a cutesy boutique, moved out and is now on the opposite, ass-end of Metropolitan. Rosetta Wines is gone, moved to the Wall Street area. The rent may be fifty times as much, but people there actually go inside the store.

Sigh.

My advice to the Atlas Park owners is two-fold. First, you need to attract people. People aren't attracted to pay-parking, so shit-can that turd of an idea. I have literally driven back home after being unable to find street parking. Next, give people a reason to go there other than to see an abandoned mall. Call up Target. It fits the price-point for the neighborhood and doesn't feel cheap. Do not call Kmart. Give them a rent-free year if they seem iffy. Under no circumstances should a dollar store or nail salon be green-lit to come in. They're a slippery slope. Like broken window syndrome, you invite one, and then, the next thing you know, there's a check-cashing joint and a place wanting to sell phone cards scratching at the door. Instead, find a florist and entice students at FIT to open boutiques. There's plenty of space for a Crate & Barrel or a Pottery Barn and the borough doesn't have either of 'em. Talk to the people at Lillian August. As a furniture store, they rely more on single large purchases than on lots of small purchases. People plan out their furniture excursions in advance so a store like this does not require as much foot traffic.

Host a food truck festival. It got people to go to Staten Island last week. Think about that.

You want to really drive up sales? Sell that open parking lot that you don't let anyone use to a developer. I know, "developer" is a four-letter word 'round these parts, and the real estate market isn't what it used to be. But, well fuck it. You want to go into bankruptcy (for a third time)??? Have this developer put in a high-rise condo and now, all those tenants are guaranteed shoppers. The Lofts at Atlas Park, you could call it. They'll buy their clothes at the mall, go out to dinner at the mall, fix their bikes at the mall, see movies at the mall, park their cars in the (thus far unused) garages at the mall. And they'll bring friends.

LA BOULANGERIE

2011-07-20T16:56:00.006-04:00

LA BOULANGERIE
109-01 72nd Road
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(347) 644-5606

If any of you readers have ever asked yourself "why does Manhattan get all the Le Pain Quotidien's?" you need hunger for one no longer. Now, we have one. It may be called La Boulangerie, but it's basically the same thing. Or it will be once it's up and running to full capacity. Apparently, the owners figured that they'd have a slow start, what with being all hidden away down a nondescript street and without so much as a website to call their own. But if the woman behind the counter's tone of voice was any indication, they were dead wrong.

Silly. Didn't they know Forest Hills has been itching for a real upscale French bakery for years?

The hours are still limited. They close at 4pm. When I got there, they were wiped clean. I got the last sandwich, there were only a few breads and, when I asked to see the menu, I was told that it wasn't ready yet, but would eventually have, in addition to their breads, sandwiches, paninis and soups. So I bought that lonely sandwich, ordered a cappuccino, and grabbed a seat. Jazz music played pleasantly. The interior is bright, with light woods and high ceilings. The stroller set will appreciate the bookshelf of children's books and available high chairs. Forest Hills is beginning to feel a little more Park Slopey.

A large communal table, the kind you might be seated at should you go to that aforementioned Le Pain Quotidien, takes up a third of the small dining area. All told, you might seat twenty patrons in here. When, not if, La Boulangerie gets its ball rolling to speed, I expect that the brunch crowd will have quite the wait.

La Boulangerie is, first and foremost, a bakery. Large glass windows open the clean white kitchen to both diners and passers-by. It's a relaxing place where you can go, have an espresso, read the Times, and smile in the knowledge that Forest Hills is finally becoming a little more refined.

The cappuccino was $3.25. The sandwich, which was very good, was $6.50.

BARTINI'S

2011-07-09T22:13:00.008-04:00

BARTINI'S
1 Station Square
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 896-5445

I am struggling with how to properly review Bartini's, the bar at Station Square. If I wanted to be mean (though honest), I'd call it a laughable joke. A ghetto dump. A seedy pit. But there's no denying its potential. It could be simply amazing if it only wanted to.

Bartini's sits inside of the Forest Hills Inn building beyond the glowing pink neon sign. You'll show your ID to the black-clad bouncer at the door and walk down the steps towards the super-loud thumping club music. A DJ sits in the corner blasting rap and hip hop. Another bouncer watches the crowd (though I use the term "crowd" loosely).

Bartini's claim to fame used to be that they were a martini bar extraordinaire. There was allegedly a cocktail list with hundreds of different martinis to choose from and the bar had a solid ice top to keep drinks cold. Instead, we were given no such menu and the ice top was... gone. As you can see in the photo, tea lights are housed there now.

Purple neon glows along the ceiling. Mirrors line the walls. Red lamps, reminiscent of Amsterdam brothels, illuminate some tables. Instead of booths, a long series of heavily-stained velvet sofas wrap themselves from one wall to the next. What little carpet there is nearly black from old gum (or something). I don't even want to know what this place looks like with the lights on. The floor is tacky white tile, good for mopping up spills and puke. Bartini's feels like the kind of place that spends most of its time either being rented out for sex parties or closed by the health department.

The last time I was at Bartini's was a few years ago and I was literally served cocktails in plastic glasses. Flocks of cougars drunkenly danced and hit on every one of the (few) men in sight. To be blunt, I didn't really see myself ever returning. Not once I discovered a real underground bar in LIC anyway. Nevertheless, Girl Next Door wanted to go. We toyed with the idea for a few weeks and finally, camera in tow, we went. Her first stop was the bathroom. "Please," she said upon returning, "don't make me go back in there."

Most people crowded the bar; a few people sat along the wall, drunkenly dancing alone in their seats. The crowd was thin, especially for a Friday night. "The music is so loud in here!" Girl Next Door screamed. "What?!" I screamed back.

I think that what upsets me so much about Bartini's is the potential. It has so much of it. It's not some shit-pot sports bar throwing cheap beer at a bunch of middle aged dudes interested in watching the Mets lose again. It's a bar that's literally underground in a city currently experiencing a speakeasy revival in a neighborhood with a high income bracket. What the hell is it doing being some wannabe club when it could be a $12-a-drink high-end cocktail lounge?

Okay, here are my thoughts: Bartini's SHOULD be Forest Hills's cocktail lounge. And I don't mean cocktails based in store bought syrups with pussy names like velvet rouge or midnight's delight. I mean the real deal. Hire someone who worked at Employees Only or Rye or Clover Club to create the menu. Ditch the goddamn DJ and replace him with a jazz CD or, better yet, nothing at all. Rip up the tile floor. Put down hardwood. Tear out the mirrors. Clean the bathroom. Toss the ratty disgusting stained sofas. No more well-liquor. From now on, the cheap gin is Tanqueray. No vodka. Dying to have beer on the menu? Local micro-brews only. Go to "Beers of the World" in Sunnyside on Queens Boulevard if you need ideas. Shitcan "ladies night", "salsa night", "reggae night", "gay night", "karaoke night" and any other theme-night from the repertoire. Leather booths. Replace the bouncer outside with a hostess and the bouncer inside with a waiter. Bartini's should only attract people who want to surround themselves in class without compromise, so throw away the garish neon sign and replace it with nothing. Maybe etch the name on the window glass or make a tiny brass plaque, but that's it. Subtlety is key.

The bar, the actual physical bar, is great. Solid wood, huge, with two classic vintage registers. It's fantastic. Forest Hills is crying out for a place where guys like me can get a real drink. Not a mass-produced beer and not a vodka-cranberry (notice I didn't say a Cape Cod, because the bartenders wouldn't know what I'm talking about).

Girl Next Door and I ordered Cape Cods (even though we didn't call them that) at $8 a pop.

FUJI

2011-06-17T21:33:00.003-04:00

FUJI
113-27 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 263-3636

There are so many places to get sushi in Forest Hills that we tend to just stick with the first halfway decent place we can get our grubby hands on. My last attempt was at Chikurin and I was sorely let down. Naturally, heading back to Queens Boulevard for sushi made me think twice after such an experience, as it would with anyone. But this time, I was pleased with my selection.

Fuji is a full service Japanese restaurant a little east of the main drag, near the firehouse and the Pinnacle building. I arrived ahead of Pike and, with a few minutes to kill, immediately ordered a cold beer. Well, immediate is a relative term. As you can see by the photo, it was relatively empty, yet it took seemingly forever for a waitress to get to my table. A wait might not have been so bad in and of itself had Fuji bothered to add air conditioners to its list of things to buy. The place was a sauna and I was cooking in my seat. When I finally got a waitress, I ordered an Asahi. It was gone before Pike showed up.

At least the sushi was good. I ordered the Sashimi Regular plate which, unlike the same dish at Chickurin, came out unspoiled by the ravages of time. It was pretty good if I dare say. I also ordered an Eel Roll, since who but a complete nazi traitor doesn't like an eel roll? I was stuffed by the end, which I didn't see coming. Pike, meanwhile, ordered the Fuji Roll (shrimp tempura and avocado) along with something else I didn't write down (but did steal a piece of). Overall, we left pleased.

I like Fuji, but man oh man, please someone tell them to order an AC. I mean, Christ! PC Richard is right across the street! The standard rolls cost an average of $4. The more complex ones are in the $10 range. All you cheap-assed Chikurin people should walk the extra four blocks. Trust me.

AGORA TAVERNA

2011-05-17T14:19:00.008-04:00

AGORA TAVERNA
70-09 Austin Street
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 793-7900

We in FH have seen a near explosion of new restaurants as of late. There's the new Q, Marianella's Taqueria on 71st, Exo on Austin, La Boulangerie on the way, Wafa's has been replaced. But perhaps the most anticipated of them all is Agora Taverna, located where the original Piu Bello used to be. As a dining community, we wanted upscale and unique and most of all, not something done half-assed. Agora Taverna, a none-too-cheap Greek seafood restaurant managed to pull off two of those three. Could it deliver on the third? A few days ago I grabbed the 'Rents to find out.

From the outside, Agora Taverna, located in one of the Austin street mall buildings and under a glowing plastic blue sign, seems more like a chain restaurant than a place where you could easily drop over $60 per person on a meal. But inside it's crisp and white and clean and modern and feels incredibly comfortable and pleasant (albeit extremely loud), even when it's bustling. And bustling it was when we went. There lies its biggest fault. The staff is overwhelmed. Being told it was a twenty minute wait is one thing, but when it's actually 45, you get the feeling that they're told to keep the advertised wait low to prevent people from walking to one of the other myriad nearby restaurants. So a throng of people milled about, in front. So many, in fact, that extra chairs were lined up in three rows to seat them all. Plus the staff, while nice, wasn't terribly helpful over the phone. When I called earlier in the day someone clearly out of the loop picked up. Being evasive and giving unhelpfully useless answers is great for TV, but in real life tends to piss people off. When I asked to speak to the hostess, he said he didn't know where she was and that I should just stop by and ask my questions in person. A few hours after that pointless phone call, Shrink tried herself with the same exact result. "What an idiot" she muttered as she hung up the phone.

So that's the downside. But we were eventually seated and, having had plenty of time to look through the menu, promptly ordered. Agora Taverna gives every table timid French bread in olive oil with hummus and we wolfed it down. A quick side note, Agora does have food that isn't seafood, but nothing we ordered used to live on land. We figured that since this was supposed to be a seafood restaurant at its core, we would limit ourselves to sealife. Anyone whose meals breathed air is more than welcome to wax about their experiences in the comments.

Round one, appetizers, and they were worth the wait, despite a little frustration that they didn't all arrive at the same time. I ordered the Octopus, grilled to perfection, slightly and amazingly tender. It might have been the best octopus I've ever had. Don't trust me? Go order it. Shrink ordered the Loukaniko, a grilled sausage dish made with spices and orange. Also fantastic. Spiced without being spicy and you absolutely could not ask for more flavor hitting your palate all at one time without conflicts. Dudeman ordered the Stuffed Calamari, whole grilled calamari stuffed with a blend of feta, manouri and kefalograviera cheeses. I don't personally care for Greek cheeses. Never have. But if you do (and my parents do) then you'll love this. The only downside to the dish is that you can't really eat stuffed calamari without the stuffing squeezing out of it like toothpaste from a tube. So the stuffing is ultimately for show since, in about ten seconds, the squid and its filling will be next to each other on the plate.

Round two, entrees. These were less impressive and leave me saying the following to Agora Taverna: change and become a small plates restaurant! Seriously, I'd go there every week. Anyway, I ordered the Swordfish, marinated cubes of swordfish with vegetables and it was, while excellent, a step down from the near-crack-like experience of the apps. Dudeman and Shrink ordered from the whole fish menu. He chose the Branzini and she chose the Royal Dorado. There isn't any point in talking about them separately since they both looked and tasted like the same fish. Perfectly bland white fish with lemon, spices, capers and a whole mess o' bones. Whoever tried to de-bone these fish needs a refresher course. Anyway, they were fine for what they were, but I'm not about to stand on the table and shout praise to the masses. Each entree comes with the choice of a side dish and we tried three from the list. None were very good. The steamed Asparagus was cooked perfectly well, but for some reason they decided to dump half a ton of sea salt on top of it. The Lemon Roasted Potatoes were obviously boiled instead and were pretty bad as a result. If you're planning to boil a potato, don't serve it until you've mashed it smooth and injected it with butter. Finally, the Florta, a combo of steamed red chard, green chard escarole, spinach and chicory was the kind of side dish that public school lunches and soup kitchens would have rejected. I'm sure it's healthy, but still.

Round three, dessert. Myself and Shrink kept piling on the calories while Dudeman passed. and the food and drinks took an obscenely long time to arrive once we ordered. "How long does pouring a coffee take?" my parents Shrink asked. I ordered the Loukoumades, deep fried dough balls sprinkled with cinnamon. I was expecting something akin to a beignet (I love beignets) but these were fried for too long. As a result it was like biting into a searing hot golf ball. Less time in the fryer would have done wonders. Shrink chose the Ekmek, a cake that's the love child of a custard and a baklava with pistachio whipped cream to boot. This was very good but mind-numbingly heavy.

Three appetizers, three entrees, two desserts, two coffees and a few glasses of wine came to about $200 after tax and tip.

MARIANELLA'S TAQUERIA

2011-04-17T16:29:00.001-04:00

MARIANELLA'S TAQUERIA
106-11 71st Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 263-2008

11375 gets it's third Mexican restaurant with Marianella's Taqueria. "Great", some might argue,, sarcastic tone in hand. "We're up to our ears in Italian, Japanese and Thai. Now instead of something unique, we get more of the same, only Mexican." Ah. True, but false. Sgt. Garcia's is an actual restaurant with a more mature atmosphere... relatively. Five Boros is a cantina for twenty/thirty-somethings like me to get sloshed at at 2am when everything else is closed and you still need to get your drunk on. Marianella's is basically fast food. Cheap, Mexican, and in case you missed it the first time, cheap. It's the kind of food you get from a taco truck in Corona. So naturally, Marianella's is good. At least, in my experiences so far they have been.

There isn't any table service at Marianella's. You order off the big board and find a seat wherever you want. Turnover is pretty fast. You probably aren't going to wait more than five minutes to get through the line and they make almost everything right in front of you. Should you so desire, there is a FULL bar. Of course, you shall not desire. Almost no one will and it takes up space and it looks tacky... and weird. I mean, can anyone picture a scenario in which someone says to themselves "Man, this chicken taco would go great with a Rob Roy! Barkeep! Your finest blended Scotch, please." That said, I do think a chicken taco would go great with a Tecate.

The menu here is relatively simple, but varied. Tacos, burritos, quesadillas and your choice of a "protein". Ground beef, steak, chicken, etc. No tofu though. There are no vegetarians in Mexico. Marianella's also has a small empanada list and I've tried all of them. What can I say but that I love empanadas. My recommendation: skip them and go to Mama's Empanadas just off Queens Boulevard by the Queens Center Mall (Here's my review of the Northern Boulevard one). Curry Chicken, Ground Beef & Pea, Steak, Four Cheese are the ones you can try should you ignore my wisdom. The best one was the chicken curry followed by the cheese. Both beef options were pretty flat. Plus, they all suffered from far too much dough with far too little filling.

Everything else, though, was pretty good. I've gone twice. The first time, my friend Pike ordered a Beef Quesadilla which he thought was great. I did not try it, but I trust his word on whether or not unheathy food tastes anything less than par. My choice was a Steak Burrito, and I was mightily impressed. The set up is identical to what you would find at a Chipotle, so if you like Chipotle, you're likely to enjoy yourself here. If not, you'll at least know the system. Pick a meat, pick a rice, pick a bean, pick some veggies, maybe get some sour cream. That's it. Then they wrap it up and send you on your merry way. My second time I ordered a Shredded Chicken Hard Taco and a Ground Beef Hard Taco. As is normal for all hard tacos, they tend to crumble into tortilla chips by the time you're done.

I think that the biggest competition to Marianella's will be Pahal Zan for the lunch crowd during the day and McDonald's for the late night post-clubbers with the munchies.

Pricewise, just about everything floats around $7 or $8, plus tax and a drink. Three empanadas are $5.

EXO CAFE

2011-03-28T14:37:00.009-04:00

EXO CAFE

70-20 Austin Street

Forest Hills, NY 11375

(718) 261-6162

Once upon time, there was a Cajun restaurant called Mardi Gras. They served alligator. They had live jazz. One day, for no discernible reason, Mardi Gras became MG's and then MG's soon died, passing quietly to the great Austin Street in the sky, next to Wine Gallery and Rouge. Enter Exo Cafe (Cafe/Lounge/Grill). Goodbye beads, NOLA kitch and jambalaya. Hello mirrors, marble and sandwiches. Hello staff of hotties and hello best beer list in the neighborhood. Exo really could be a great place. It has the potential. But the follow-through has been weak at best. Gowing pains? Nah, that's a service issue and the service was fine. In fact, everyone there is great and my orders were never screwed up.

When I first looked at Exo's menu in their window, The Beatles were playing an apropos song on my iPod. Fun-looking and inexpensive, I was, overall, impressed. With decent-looking but admittedly girly cocktails and a list of impressive beers, this, I said to myself, might be just the kind of place Forest Hills needed to attract the crowds that might otherwise wind up in at the cocktail lounge/restaurants in Brooklyn. Sadly, Exo isn't even remotely threatening to attract young, hip, disposable income-earners on their way to Brooklyn. I kept wondering where the disco balls and strobe lights were. The music, which alternates between bubblegum-pop and techno, is oppressively loud, even at lunch. It's almost like the owners wanted to give Forest Hillians the experience of having dinner in the eastern-European charm of an Astoria nightclub.

I went to Exo with Pike the other day. The Belgian Fries we ordered as a side were somewhat soggy, plain-old french fries. They weren't terrible but were they Belgian? No. At least there should be mayo. Dipping sauces cost seventy-five cents and while they might be good, we didn't order any. The Beer Battered Onion Rings actually were pretty good (especially if you like batter more than you like onion). They were served with a not-too-bad dipping sauce that was half barbecue and half honey-mustard. Unfortunately, you get very few onion rings. Maybe a dozen or so. We ordered two sandwiches and traded halves. I got the New York Cheese Steak, not to be confused with that loud-mouthed Philly knock-off. It was okay. Strips of steak, some sauteed red bell pepper, and some but not much mozzarella with a hint of A-1 steak sauce. Pike nodded along with me. "Yeah, this is okay." He ordered the Chimichuri sandwich to split, which was far better. Garlicky steak, provolone, tomato and pesto. I recommend this one.

Since Exo devotes a healthy chunk of its menu to burgers, I returned to give their Kobe Beef Sliders a try at lunch (music thump-thump-thumping). Honestly, these were terrible. The bun had been exposed to the air long enough to begin getting stale and crumbly. The tomato slices were wilting. The burgers literally smelled bad. I never send food back, but man was I tempted. I returned once more to order their Hawaiian Hamburger, a teriyaki glazed beef patty with tomato, lettuce and a slice of pineapple. It was okay. Not amazing. The sugary glaze somewhat drowned out the taste.

Back to my dinner with Pike, we ordered coffee, which was pretty good, and skipped dessert. There was a moment of temptation when we noticed the Deep Fried Cheese Cake. I mean, if you're gonna kill yourself with food, cheesecake is one of the fastest and tastiest ways. And if cheesecake is how you've chosen to go, you might as well make it official by boiling it in oil, too. Next time.

So, in the end, what do I think? Exo could be a really cool place to go, god-awful shit sliders notwithstanding. But they should know is that, just like Common Space across the street, they aren't a club and, if they insist on calling themselves a "lounge" then there are certain rules that come with that distinction. First, lounges don't have half a dozen TVs over the bar. That glory goes to TGI-Fridays and Ruby Tuesdays. Second, part of the point of going to a lounge is to talk to your friends and that requires being able to hear them. It's not comfortable to have to scream across the table. So I advise them to nix blasting Beyonce and replace their CD collection with medium volume jazz and funk. I recommend investing in some low-vol Roy Ayers, RJD2 and Theivery Corporation. Get people's feet tapping and their heads swaying while they enjoy their sazeracs. That's a lounge. This is a lounge. If Exo could do this, I wouldn't even care about the take-it-or-leave-it food.

I'll give Exo kudos for being very reasonably priced. Especially their lunch specials, which are under ten bucks. Sandwiches and burgers float between $8 and $12. Beers are $7 per glass.

News...

2011-03-25T15:12:00.003-04:00

Esparks's flame goes out.

Esparks, the microchain coffee shop on the Corner of Metropolitan and Cooper is closed.

Esparks had a lot of pros and cons. They gave you a Starbucks atmosphere with cushy chairs and free wifi, but the coffee was pretty weak and the wifi was often out. The tables were too high for the chairs and benches and they frequently played Christian rock and folk music, which I could have personally done without. Very often the staff was missing and you'd stand there in silence waiting, ever waiting for someone to come out of the back room.

But still. They were a nice place overall. They were not too far out of the way that I couldn't walk there. The area was safe enough and they had a small parking lot so that on a drive out of town I could drive up, park with my roof down without fear, grab an iced coffee or a froyo and be on my way. The area Starbuckses are in areas too congested to be able to do that.

Besides, I like options and there are no independent coffee shops here. Remember my rant from way back when? It still rings true.

SANTA FE STEAKHOUSE

2011-03-10T21:48:00.000-05:00

SANTA FE STEAKHOUSE
107-18 70th Road
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 459-4040

Uno's, TGI Friday's, Sizzler. These three chain restaurants nestle themselves comfortably in the 11375 zip code. They serve decent, if not particularly impressive food, they don't cost a ton, and they're frequently crowded. I think we can add another chain to the list, even though it's only a chain of one. A single, lonely link. The Santa Fe Steakhouse. From the staff that wears embroidered Santa Fe polos to the Southwestern kitch theme, to the generic and patently unoriginal food, it's painfully clear that this was a franchise concept that never grew past this one location.

Service-wise, Santa Fe was great. Our waitress was very nice, very pleasant, very prompt. I can't say enough nice things about the service. The decor is straight out of Outback territory. Neon beer signs, wooden booths with tall backs, murals depicting the scenic vistas of the restaurant's namesake (the state, not the Hyundai), and so on. There's even a version of the Bloomin' Onion in the appetizers. Not being the world's largest trumpeters of the glory of mall food (go to Rego Park or Elmhurst if you are), I wasn't really expecting very much. ... Uh, to be honest, that's only partly true. I'd already eaten at Santa Fe a few times and I already wasn't impressed. But it had been a few years and I was wondering if they had, like a good steak, improved with some gentle aging. This would not, I would learn, be the case.

Pike and I arrived midweek and were promptly seated. The front was rather crowded; the rear was deserted. Come the weekends, I'm sure the place fills up. We ordered a couple of sodas while we scanned the menu. Good thing we drink diet soda because what you get here is literally a liter of cola. A pitcher with a straw in it is a single serving. If they do that with their beer, I'd be in heaven. In a sense, they do, come to think of it. You can get a bucket of five Coronas for $15. That's pretty good. But I digress.

We started with some Lobster Bisque. Here's the thing. We'd literally this past weekend been to Luke's Lobster and had lobster bisque there. Luke's Lobster makes a mighty amazing soup. So how did Santa Fe's stack up? Not well. It was thin, virtually tasteless, and almost devoid of any actual lobster. There was the smell of lobster, but when you sipped, your tongue would start accusing your nose of lying to it. "Bland" was the most often used word of the evening, as our entrees, soon to come, can attest.

The dinners come with a side dish and a salad. Some form of potato, be it baked or fried, or steamed vegetables. Pike and I, by sheer coincidence, are both on a low-carb kick so we stuck with steamed vegetables. Steamed broccoli and cauliflower are tasteless almost by design. It's hard to steam them just right to retain flavor and crunch. A good chef can, Santa Fe didn't, and most people can't anyway. My point is, I'm not complaining about the blandness of the steamed cauliflower. The salad is another story. A pitiful bowl of iceberg lettuce, a single slice of onion, a single slice of tomato, and a peppering of croutons does not a salad make. Now maybe you just soak your lettuce in a soup of French dressing and don't give a shit since you can't taste anything anyway with a mouth full of sugar and mayonnaise, but I'm not like that. Salads should stand on their own. If they can't, don't serve it.

I ordered the Rib Eye Steak, medium rare. It came medium rare but I don't know if I'd call it "steak". See, "steak" has flavor. This was more like a protein-delivery vehicle. One day, when robots make steak, they will make this steak. Soulless and artless, un-seasoned, un-crusted, perfectly designed to get 14 ounces of cow matter from a kitchen to a stomach with as little energy as possible. Santa Fe probably figures that their average customer is just going to slop a jar's worth of ketchup all over it anyway, so why bother. In that case, Santa Fe is forgiven and I shake my finger in shame at the customers. Tsk tsk. Pike ordered the Sagebrush Chicken, which Santa Fe describes as a "flame-broiled chicken breast smothered in mushrooms, bacon and jack and cheddar cheese". This is a bit of an exaggeration. Here's what it should have said: "a grilled chicken breast with two strips of bacon on top, with a few slices of Cracker Barrel melted on top. Then we take some mushrooms and put them next to it." This was marginally better than my steak, if for no reason other than because my steak didn't have bacon and melted cheese hugging it like a down jacket. Still, it was bland and somewhat pitiful to look at.

Calling Santa Fe a steakhouse when it's menu has all of six kinds of steak is a stretch. It's menu is a pretty good size with chicken dishes like the one we tried and burgers and fajitas and bar food and ribs. I imagine that it's great to take kids to since kids like theme restaurants and messy fingers and it's probably not bad if you're with some friends looking for a burger or nachos or the kind of food people in the suburbs like to be washed down with a bucket of beer or a pitcher of cola. But Santa Fe does call itself a steakhouse and it certainly isn't one. In fact, other than the sign outside, if my meal is any indication, I'd say it hardly even tries to be, save the price. My steak cost $24 and you can see what that got me.

2 sodas, 2 soups, 2 entrees, plus tax and tip came to $82. Yes. Eighty two dollars.

CHIKURIN

2011-03-01T11:12:00.004-05:00

CHIKURIN
110-72 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 263-9888

I'm not going to beat this review to death with flowery prose and lots of photos. Long story short, Pike and I went here for dinner. It stunk. If you want me to expound, read on.

Chikurin is a Japanese restaurant on Queens Boulevard and it was because it was so close to where my friend Pike lives that we decided to go here. (That and the mission of this blog is to go everywhere in the neighborhood.) The interior is plain but bright. The customers were all very young. College age. This is understandable. One of my memories of college include tipping the pizza guy in cigarettes because we ran out of money. At $3 or so a roll and plenty of inexpensive entrees, Chikurin is probably the flat-out cheapest place in the zip code to get sushi.

We were pointed to a table and we sat down. To call our waitress, a woman in her 40s-50s, temperamental would be kind. She was pissed. "Am I giving this woman an attitude and don't realize it?" Pike asked when we told her we needed a couple of more minutes to pick out what we wanted. "It's not you." I told him. "It's her. She's acting like a meanie." Though whether I called her a meanie or something else is hard to recall. My memory's fuzzy on the subject.

Pike ordered the Sashimi Regular, a plate of tuna, salmon and yellowtail. "This isn't good." He told me and left half of the plate untouched. Frankly, that half the plate was eaten was because he gave me some. I agreed. I may not have thought that it was spoiled, but it was tasteless and the pieces were so huge that one might legitimately wonder if they were trying to get rid of it. I ordered three rolls: The Philadelphia Roll, which I typically love but here was not good at all. Funky tasting; The Eel Cucumber Roll, which I also typically love but here was mediocre and boring; The Sweet Potato Roll, which was actually very good. Interesting that it was fishless... Speaking of fishless, we both ordered Miso Soup, which was also good. I guess the moral of the story here is that Chikurin is the sushi restaurant you shouldn't order fish in.

I intended to make this a two-trip review. But truth be told though, there are plenty of good Japanese/sushi places around and this meal was so disappointing that I decided not to spend the money. Let me know how your meals there have been. I'm curious about whether my experience is a common one.

TUSCAN HILLS

2011-02-11T17:45:00.000-05:00

TUSCAN HILLS
115-20 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 487-4500

So many of people wrote me emails or comments asking me to go to Tuscan Hills that I was almost afraid to for fear of not liking it and then getting stoned by an angry mob. But go I did, twice to cover more of the menu, and so here we go.

We denizens of Forest Hills are in no short supply of Italian restaurants. We are, lamentably, in dire need of some good ones. Red sauce slop can be had anywhere, but especially along Austin Street/Queens Boulevard. The last time I had good Italian in FH was at Il Poeta on Metropolitan and they finally appear to have, in my book, actual competition. Though there is some room for improvement, which I'll get into, Tuscan Hills is your best bet for Italian should Il Poeta be too inconvenient.

The interior, with its exposed brick walls, high, wood-beamed ceilings and open kitchen evoke a cooler more West Village vibe than Il Poeta's midtowny, table clothed old-fartiness. The wine list is a decent one with bottles averaging in the $30s and glasses around $7. The regular menu is nice and tight, not a voluminous tome trying to cover every range of taste and they don't have two hundred specials at a time. However, that menu is also laminated in plastic, something that feels tacky and cheap. Both times I went, Tuscan Hills was virtually deserted. This should not be. Not when Portofino is routinely filled (albeit with a very aged crowd).

As I said, I ate two meals here. One with my friend Speeds and one with my friend Lina. Speeds, ever a fan of all things calamari, ordered the Calamari Fritti, a relatively standard fried calamari dish which was very good. The breading wasn't too thick and the calamari wasn't chewy. I stole a good chunk and we both enjoyed it. I also ordered the Ribollita, a white bean soup with kale, tomato, Parmesan and an island of bread floating within. It was a nice, pleasant soup, good for a cold winter, but it was somewhat bland. Yeah, I know, it's a white bean soup. Still, a little bit of bacon would have done wonders. Upon my return with Lina, we ordered their Cozze in Tegame, mussels in a white wine and cream sauce. This was delicious and the mussels were quite large I was extremely impressed.

Speeds ordered the Pici alla Fondelli, a fettucini in a wild boar and olive meat sauce. It was okay. I like wild boar, but, and this is hard to explain, the sauce lacked much in the way of kick. It, like my soup, was somewhat vague and bland. Maybe some Parmesan would have helped, but I feel like it should be able to stand on its own. The pasta was, however, perfect and clearly freshly made, something I can't help but appreciate. I'm a huge gnocchi-lover so I chose the Gnocchi Gratinati, a potato gnocchi in a meat sauce under a big heaping of melted mozzarella. This was good, but not amazing. Hands down, the winner for best gnocchi in the area, if not the city, remains firmly in the grip of Uvarara. This version was like comfort-food gnocchi, not push-the-boundaries-of-what-gnocchi-can-be gnocchi.

When I returned with Lina, she ordered the Rigatoni Alla Norma, an eggplant, basil and mozzarella dish. Actually, she ordered the eggplant pizza but our waiter misheard her and lo came this. It may not have been what she ordered but it was actually extremely good. She especially liked the sauce, which she said tasted fresh, not like it was pizza sauce from a jar. "The thing about Italian food is the sauce. It can make or break the whole dish." She's Italian, so I'll take her word for it. My entree was the Selletta Al Pepe Verde, a skirt steak with green peppercorn and mashed potatoes under a creamy brandy sauce. This, by all rights, should have been perfect, and it could have been but for one problem. The sauce was delicious. The mashed potatoes were melt in your mouth smooth. The steak, though, was cheap, chewy and fatty. If this was a filet mignon or any other boneless cut, it would be fantastic. Alas, 'twas not.

Lina and I didn't order dessert, opting to grab some cupcakes at Martha's instead. But Speeds and I split a Tiramisu for dessert. Very good tiramisu. We were both impressed and wiped the plate clean.

While I may have made a few complaints here, I do legitimately think that Tuscan Hills is a good addition for our dining community and a good sign that Forest Hills restaurants are getting better. The food was solid, the pasta was fresh, the wine was filled to the brim in my glass, the service was good despite that one mistake and the mussels were fantastic. I've heard good things about the pizza but haven't tried it yet. I will certainly put Tuscan Hills on my short list of places that I would enjoy returning to. I just hope they swap out that flank steak by then.

Three appetizers, four entrees, five glasses of wine, two coffees and one dessert, plus tax and tip came to $168 (two meals at $93 and $75).

KITCHEN NIGHTMARES: PJ'S STEAKHOUSE

2011-02-07T11:48:00.005-05:00

Kitchen Nightmares finally recently aired their long-awaited Forest Hills episode, where Gordon Ramsay tries to turn Yellowstone Boulevard's PJ'S Steakhouse a success. Spoiler alert - he failed.

This is a Hulu embed. So, I can't control when they take it down.

MINT'S THAI KITCHEN

2011-02-03T08:22:00.005-05:00

MINT'S THAI KITCHEN

70-15A Austin Street
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 268-1470

Thai Austin has passed on to the Zagat Guide in the sky and, in its place is Mint's, another Thai restaurant with a very takeout-specific name. Is it better, worse, or merely a renaming? The menu is smaller than TA's is, and that's usually a good sign, but with so many Thai restaurants within walking distance, I can't help but think to myself that unless Mint's can fulfill some niche that Thai Austin could not, that this won't be a particularly profitable venture. Mint's, it must sadly be said, does not fill a new niche. I ate at Mint's twice recently and, both times, I left thinking that they were good, but not great.

Inside Mint's, the set up is virtually identical to Thai Austin's, but not quite so low-rent. The wicker chandelier lamps evoke a subtle hint of the tropics and are a nice touch. The white roses that pepper the dining area, meanwhile, feel out of place. Flower accents should always be small, but Mint's has, like, whole vases of them. The service was very good. Attentive and chipper. They aren't very busy so you can sit pretty much wherever you want. My friend Pike and I came here together and he liked it. Hidden under the sidewalk and behind a pillar, it's cozy and comfortable and not expensive. I could almost see the gears in his head whirring as he thought to himself "my girlfriend would like this place..."

Anyway, rather than create two separate storylines in which I recount tales of hoofing through the storm and snow, I'll just give you a rundown on what I/we ate. But yes, I did hoof it through the snow.

Appetizers: I ordered Mint's Mixed Appetizers (pictured), which comes with: Shrimp Parcels, wonton wrapped shrimp moose with sesame seed and lime curd sauce. They were not to my taste. The sauce helped but not by much. If you like fishy, room temperature shrimp and wrapped in filo dough, please get this. I'll pass.; Steamed Vegetable Dumplings, which is corn, mushroom, tofu, spinach, peanut and garlic all ground into a gritty paste and wrapped in dough. Soaking them in soy sauce didn't help much, so I couldn't recommend them.; Chicken Curry Puffs, a chicken potato pastry with a sweet cucumber sauce. Anyone who remembers anything I order at just about any Thai restaurant knows I loves me my curry puffs. And these were the best of the three by far. Sadly, they were a far cry from the best and a with so much of that aforementioned competition, why would I get them here?

Soups: I tried two soups. First, the Shrimp Lemon Grass Soup (Tom Yum Kung), a spicy clear soup with lime, lemongrass, mushroom, and shrimp. Very good. Definitely something worth having on either a cold winter day, where heat always feels good, or on a hot summer day, where sweating helps cool you down. Next up, the Chicken Galangal Soup (Tom Kha Gai), a coconut broth chicken soup with tomato, cabbage and mushroom. Not bad. Not as thick and heavy as other tom kha gai soups that I've had, and that thinness meant it wasn't as flavorful as it could have been. But it wasn't bad and if you want something to warm up with without spiciness, then this option isn't a bad one.

As with all Thai restaurants, regardless of the dish you order, be it curry or rice or noodles, you can choose your protein (tofu, chicken, beef, shrimp). Pike ordered the Pad See Ew with Shrimp, a flat rice noodle dish with vegetables and egg. Very good. I was thoroughly impressed. I wanted something with a spicy kick to it, so I ordered Mint's Drunken Noodles with Beef, and was considerably less impressed. First off, too much sauce and the sauce was too salty. Second, they used round wheat noodles, something I'd never seen before and frankly hope not to see again, given that they lacked anything in the way of flavor. If this was supposed to be some sort of nod to the health conscious, then I'd expect the rest of the menu to reflect that. Instead, it just seemed like they got the recipe wrong. Mind you, Pike didn't think it was nearly as regrettable a main dish as I. So perhaps I'm just harsh. That said, I offered to trade and he said no. From now on, my I'll get my drunken noodles from Bangkok Cuisine. I returned a few days later and ordered their Beef with Ginger and Garlic. A stir fry of beef, onion, scallion and pepper. Spicy. And tasty. A vast improvement over the drunken noodles. I also ordered two sides. First, the Sticky Rice, served wrapped in a palm leaf and pressed into a firm cube, it was an essential part of sponging up the sauce of my entree. By the way, never have I encountered a sticky rice so sticky. You practically need a knife to cut though it. Next, the Spicy Potatoes, sauteed potatoes in an almost too-sweet (and not at all spicy), syrupy glaze. They were like candy coated potatoes. I liked them, but I didn't love them. They were simply too intense.

Overall, my impression of Mint's is a positive one. It has good service and a cozy atmosphere, but is marred by hit or miss dishes. I wonder how well they can really hope to do in a nabe with so much Thai competition. But here, in a nutshell is my solution: Mints has no liquor license. Or, at the least, sells no liquor. Therefore, I think that the niche they could fill would be to become Forest Hills' BYOB restaurant. I'll bet that if they let everyone bring their own bottles of wine, they'd clean up. I haven't been to a single BYOB restaurant in NYC that didn't have a line. After all, everyone likes saving a few bucks, especially in this economy.

The average Mint's rice/noodle/curry entree is $10, though they have more fancy options for $17. Sides and apps were around $5-$7. Mint's is available through Seamlessweb.

News...

2011-01-21T08:57:00.005-05:00

Twin Donut is has covered its windows in free newspapers and plastered RENT signs on the door. I will lament the passing of one of our only places to eat 24 hours a day. So whether you loved it donuts or hated its hamburgers (I know, right? Hamburgers at a donut shop?), we're reduced to T-Bone and probably another mobile phone store.

*****

Also, one of our most recent arrivals, the Korean mini-restaurant Green Sky, is shuttered as well. This surprises me less, given that it was hidden underground, its menu was very small for a takeout place and it was next door to two other Asian restaurants, but I had hoped that it would survive the growing pains to teach Forest Hillians to enjoy bulgogi. Not so much. Pretty soon, Thai and Italian will be all we have left.
*****

But on that front, we might have one LESS Italian to worry about. Piu Bello, newly placed in the old Positano location, has been closed for weeks and a quick schlep past it last night around 8pm (prime dining out time) showed it closed with a buildup of flyers shoved into and under the door. Is Piu Bello finally dead? Is that location cursed?

*****

As for me, yes, I know, I've been negligent in getting more local reviews. Soon, my pretties.

News...

2010-12-27T12:34:00.004-05:00

Goodbye Q.

Courtesy of the Forest Hills Garden Blog, I am deeply saddened (and almost a little angry) to learn that Q will be closing. It had its detractors, but Q is (soon to be was) the best, classiest, most Manhattan-worthy restaurant on the Austin Street corridor. It was a little expensive, but not every restaurant in a neighborhood should be mid-priced and wallet-friendly. I've impressed many a date there and I will miss it. I hope that whatever replaces Q is worthy of doing so.

COMMON SPACE

2010-12-18T11:21:00.001-05:00

COMMON SPACE
70-15 Austin Street
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 263-2130

Common Space is one of the newest restaurants to open in the area and is trying to tap a market that few have bothered: the young and trendy. The interior itself is very nice, with stools for chairs, exposed brick, industrial lighting, a small clipboard menu, and a huge garage door/window that opens in warm weather. Add the rear patio to the mix and this is one of the few places with any serious outdoor space in the zip code. The music is pop and rap, which you'll either be totally into or seriously hate. I wasn't a big fan, but they played some seriously shitty rap with some seriously foul language and my guess is that this ain't the neighborhood for it. If Common Space wants my advice, they should stick with R&B and jazz.

Bro and I arrived on a recent, bitter cold day. I suppose it shouldn't have been much of a surprise that the place were deserted and the wait staff looked like they were dying of boredom. It was a bigger surprise when, about an hour into our meal, a group arrived from the Xhale hookah bar next door, hookah pipe in tow and sat down, puffing away(?!?).

Common Space calls itself a lounge, but it's not really loungey. It's a restaurant with loud music and Latin food. They have a fully stocked bar, and, if my $4 cola was any indication, it makes most of its money on the liquor. Bro and I had pre-partied elsewhere, so we didn't drink.

For our appetizers, Bro ordered the Bravas, fried casavas with a spicy cheese dipping sauce. They were good. A little overcooked, but good. I ordered the Tres Quesos Mac & Cheese, crispy-topped bow-tie pasta in a cheese sauce made from manchego, monterrey jack and mahon cheese. It was decent, didn't cost too much, and it was a good size. The biggest problem we encountered with our appetizers was with the poor timing. They took a solid twenty minutes plus to arrive and they arrived only about five minutes before our entrees.

The entrees were likewise not bad. Bro ordered the Lomo Saltiado, sauteed beef with onion, red pepper and cilantro, served on a bed of french fries and with a side of white rice. The beef was tender and tangy and moist, not tough, though being served over fries felt cheap. Not that this was an expensive dish to begin with ($13). I ordered the Chicharron de Pollo, a spicy crispy chicken dish with a side of red onions, lime-cilantro rice and a spicy cilantro dipping sauce. This wasn't a dish for the faint of tongue. Every part of it had some kick. But again, it was good (and cheap).

So. My verdict. It was good. Not amazing, but terrible playlist aside and the guys who were allowed to smoke their hookah aside, I liked it. I want to return when it's warmer for the rear patio for sure. The food was well priced and tasty (if not terribly unique), the service was friendly (though missing most of the time) and the decor was spot on what I've been hoping would open up around here. Do I want a place like Williamsburg's Rye or Park Slope's Rose Water, but this is a good start. Now I can just cross my fingers for a wine bar and an underground cocktail lounge.

Two appetizers, two entrees, two sodas, tax and tip came to about $53.

DINER SMACKDOWN!!!

2010-12-13T11:31:00.003-05:00

DINER SMACKDOWN!!!

Austin House
Forest Diner
Forest Hills Coffee Shop
Forest Hills Diner
T-Bone Diner
Tower Diner

Diners are the original American chain restaurant. They exist virtually everywhere, from the corners of big cities to the smallest of small towns. From I-95 rest stops to dusty desert backwaters. They may be cute tiny refurbished railroad cars, or they may be giant chrome and neon eyesores. Some serve porterhouse steak, others claim to have lobster on the menu. Some have Italian sections, some have Greek. Some have thirty varieties of hamburger, some have decided to ride the panini wave. But really, diners are the everything-restaurant, serving breakfast, lunch, dinner, appetizers, desserts, shakes, you name it. And regardless of where they are or who runs them or what they look like, the all serve basically the same food and they all seem to use the same menu: spiral bound, thickly laminated for quick ketchup cleanups.

Diners, in spite of a few that have pretended to go the fancy route with their surf-n-turf lobster steak combo, and in spite of a few that have pretended to go the healthy route by making salads more prominent on the menu, no one in the real world thinks that diners are fancy(*) or healthy. They're not called greasy spoons for nothing. As an aside, I always chuckle when I see the sometimes vast list of "specials", as though there was a chef experimenting back in the kitchen hand-scrubbing the last grains of soil off of the organic Swiss chard he plans to saute alongside a truffle oil rubbed Cornish hen, screaming at his staff for letting the filet mignons sit on the grill four seconds longer than he specifically said. In truth, most people regard the "specials" being offered as the "this stuff's going bad soon so use it up" list.

And that, in a large sense, is the problem with diners. The popular perception is that they're supposed to be mediocre, if not outright suck. It's their destiny. As a result, the bar for what diners can get away with is set so low that just about anything above "hey I didn't puke" status earns the joint a gold star, a smiley face and a positive Yelp review. Meanwhile, that same meal, served at Cousin Wanda's house would be cause for a family meeting. "We're never eating there again."

Luckily for us in Forest Hills, we have choices. Six diners that I know of. Of course, once that choice exists, what good does it do if we continue to patronize the ones that stink? And how do we know which ones are the ones to stick to?

I therefore decided to traverse the neighborhood to try a couple of simple meals. Most people order breakfast, so I did too. And most people order burgers, so I did too. I'm not under the delusion that any of these diners make their own pies or cakes or cookies, so I didn't bother with dessert. But, a couple of times I went with a friend and they ordered something I did not, or I had been there before or I eavesdropped on the neighboring tables. I think it would be helpful if every reader dropped a comment about their experience as well. After all, like I said, these menus are big and no one can really cover it all.

DING DING!!!

AUSTIN HOUSE RESTAURANT
72-04 Austin Street
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 544-2276

With the exception of T-Bone, right by the subway, Austin House probably has the most advantageous parcel of real estate. Smack on Austin Street where all of the shopping is. I have yet to ever go past and see it empty. I also have yet to ever see it full. The interior is shabby at best. There's wallpaper peeling off the walls and the Formica tables are chipped and in need of replacement. The space feels old, and while this isn't helped by the geriatric core-clientele, it's mostly due to the feeling that the space has been letting itself go for a while. It has potential though. The dining counter has a retro feel and the layout is very 1940s. I'm not suggesting that they ditch the diner motif and become a normal restaurant, but they could revamp the place and make it far more interesting. At least fix the radio, which was alternating between LiteFM and static. I order my eggs over easy, so they should bleed across the plate, but these were watery. In other words, the white wasn't fully cooked. I enjoyed the bacon, but the home fries, which were potato and nothing else, were forgettable and stuck to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter. The coffee was for diner coffee. My friend, Seth, who accompanied me this breakfast trip, ordered his eggs scrambled and his potatoes home fried. He cleaned his plate, so maybe that's the way to go with your eggs here. Breakfast cost: $7.90 plus tip, each.

I returned a week later for a meal with Bro. When I was there for breakfast the prior weekend, it was relatively full. This time, it was deserted. Bro and I were at one of the only tables with two people and the place was positively dead silent. A TV was on to kill the mortuary ambiance, but you could still hear your heart beating. Shhh! Quiet, Heart! You'll disturb the guy in the corner.

Bro ordered the gyro and onion rings. The gyro itself was standard but thoroughly mediocre. The taziki sauce may have been poor but at least the pickle was inedible. The onion rings rounded out his dinner by also avoiding being very good, too. So far, 0 for 4. Of course, I ordered the cheeseburger platter. The fries were fine, but the burger was worse than the gyro. It was clearly skillet fried and steamed to speed up cooking time, leaving that coagulated burger goop that grills don't leave. It looked unappetizing and tasted bland. Thank goodness for ketchup. I won't bother telling you what it cost since I advise those wanting hamburgers to look elsewhere.

*****

FOREST DINER
63-61 108th Street
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 896-5301

Located in what I think can best described as a truly decrepit Kosher mini-mall, north of the main Forest Hills drags of Austin/QB and Metropolitan, is the Forest Diner, the first of three diners with "Forest" in their title. Oh, for some imagination! Anyway. If the Department of Health rated the place a B (see photo), then the interior tried hard to live up to that standard. The chairs are old and torn with the foam coming out of them. The ceiling is stained. The windows are in need of soap. The atmosphere is so 1972 that I half expected them to maintain a smoking section. When I sat down for breakfast, the waitress plopped a NY Post on my table. When I said no thanks, she just shrugged and left it there. I get it, believe me. The Post is a terrible rag, but don't toss your garbage on my table. On the other hand, at least the breakfast was okay. The bacon (probably the only place on the block to get it) was thick, but not as flavorful as what other diners served. The eggs were well made and the coffee was surprisingly good, albeit too thin. The home fries stunk, but not a single diner in the entire Smackdown with the exception of the people at the Forest Hills Coffee Shop (up next), seemed to know how to make them. It was nice that I was able to sit and drink coffee, read a magazine and not be bothered or asked to leave. If the service was cold and impersonal (and it was) at least they left me alone.

The cheeseburger I ordered a few days later was thoroughly forgettable. It, along with it's accompanying fries, were squarely bland, cookie-cutter diner versions of food you can get just about anywhere else. But what my cheeseburger lacked in flavor, it made up for in raw meat. Despite ordering it medium, it wasn't yet cooked all the way through. As with so many diners, this is a common symptom of cooking still-frozen-solid burger patties. With all the ground beef recalls this past year, maybe I'll get a little surprise. After all, it is almost Christmas and my stocking is empty. Maybe this year, St. Nick will give me dysentery (instead of the habitual coal).

*****

FOREST HILLS COFFEE SHOP
96-07 Metropolitan Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 261-8705
note: CASH ONLY

The Forest Hills Coffee Shop on Metropolitan is the smallest and most truck-stoppy of the bunch. The shredded signage, and the sign on the window that says that approval from the health department is "pending", the cheap booths that shift when you get in and out of them and their eschewing of credit cards only add to the low-rent feel. Yet it's oddly the most inviting. It's warm and smells like grilled burgers and pancakes. I was intensely curious about the food.

The menu here is small. A third the size of the others. In fact, other than breakfast, all they serve are burgers and sandwiches. Good. The staff is extremely personable. And by personable I don't mean that they were nice, although they were nice too. I mean that they seemed to know everyone. It was like walking into the small town diner in a made-for-TV movie. Everyone waves at Joe the line cook, everyone gossips with Eileen the waitress (I made those names up. I don't know the names of the real staff). One customer showed up to give the diner a poinsettia plant for the holidays. It was a very nice gesture that one really never sees outside of the Lifetime channel. It's a family place, clearly. So they don't really have any outside help. In other words, the service is painfully slow. You're bound to be asked to sit at a dirty table until there's time to clean it between handing you the menu and taking your order. At least, this happened to me twice.

My breakfast, which cost about the same as the other guys ($9 with tip) may have been the best of the lot. The bacon was thick without being salty, the eggs were well made and the home fries, made with onions and peppers ad a little bit of tomato, easily bested everyone else's. The cheeseburger platter ($10 with soda and tip) was the cheapest of the bunch and was delicious. It was only slightly behind Tower Diner's burger. Good cole slaw, too. Meanwhile, the fries made everyone else's look like generic potato sticks. These were the only fries I bothered to eat all of. The South Beach people may frown in disappointment now.

*****

FOREST HILLS DINER
60-60 Austin Street
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 997-7744

This is the newest of all the diners in the area and its shows if for no other reason than it's the cleanest. No peeling wallpaper, no dusty tube TV in the corner playing Fox News, no missing floor tiles. Like Austin House, it's on Austin Street, but it's way down on the other end near the medical annexes and the police station. The staff was the most friendly of any of the diners by a wide margin and each time I was there no one gave me any issue when I popped out my laptop to do a little work. The eggs were almost perfect, but a tiny bit overcooked. They didn't run as much as I would have liked. Still, the bacon was good and I was impressed by the coffee. The home fries were much like the ones at Austin House though. Potato alone, no peppers, no onion and no discernible spices. Breakfast cost: $8.10 plus tip.

The burger at the Forest Hills Diner was decent. I asked for it cooked medium, and it came just that. Medium. Not well done. Not scary raw. It wasn't a spectacular burger. It's not the sort of burger one might make a trip for, the way I would for a burger at Five Napkin, or that anyone would stand on line an hour to get, the way thousands do at Shake Shack. But it was good. "The fries were okay, but nothing special. The service was still extraordinarily pleasant. It cost about $12 with a soda.

*****

T-BONE DINER
107-49 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 261-7744

Yes, I know. I've been to T-Bone before and they were such a barrel o' laughs that they were worth their own review . T-Bone is notorious for being terrible, and between consistently broken neon letters, ripped awnings and a generally dingy appearance, no one can say that they can't see the food following suit. And the staff! If my waiter told me that he was about to hang himself in the kitchen, I wouldn't have been very surprised. These guys look just miserable. I was tempted not to go back, but I felt that it was only fair to re-live the glory. And I was, for breakfast anyway, pleasantly surprised. The eggs were fine (seriously, they weren't bad), and the toast wasn't given to me on a plate that was on fire. So far so good. But the bacon, while cooked well enough, was extremely salty. Maybe you like it that way, but not me. The home fries were no better, but no worse, than the other diners' on the list. The real kicker was the coffee. I'd just seen Due Date the other day and, taking my first sip, was reminded of the scene where the ashes of Tremblay's father are accidentally used in the coffee machine. If T-Bone doesn't get the gold for the worst coffee I've ever had, it sure can't be faulted for trying.

My return to T-Bone was greeted by a packed audience. I haven't seen a diner this full since finals in college. You couldn't eat wings or smoke in the library, so everyone who wanted that little corner of life-draining decadence headed to that big chrome building across from the mall. This time, I was seated by the window and met by a chipper waitress. No final goodbye note in her pocket. I wondered "could the days of the old T-Bone be gone?" Thankfully, I was saved by the next table. Two ladies sat eating and talking. One poked at her plate. "These are cold" she said of her steamed vegetables. Since cold steamed vegetables is a scientific anachronism, what she was saying was code for , "they didn't microwave this frozen broccoli properly." Her friend was more blunt, calling the waiter to complain that, having tasted her fish, she could tell that it was obviously not fresh. She sent it back. Ahhh, this is the T-Bone I know. But what of MY meal? What if it's great? Well, fear not. The fries were fine, but because the meat was so cheap, biting into the cheeseburger itself was like sinking one's teeth into a grease sponge. A puddle had formed on my plate from the fat that had seeped through what was soon to be a worthless bun, and I found myself unable to let go of the burger for the simple reason that there was no clean place to put it down. I paid over $13 with tip for the privilege of writing that paragraph. Like a concrete floor, T-Bone has managed to retain it's place securely on the bottom.

*****

TOWER DINER
98-93 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11374
(718) 459-7000

The Tower Diner is just on the border of Forest Hills and Rego Park, and its 11374 zip code makes me think that there's a misprint on the business cards. Still, I love the Tower Diner. Always have. Sitting in what used to be a bank, not in a storefront hidden by scaffolding like some or with ripped awnings and broken signage like others, it's certainly the prettiest of the bunch. They're constantly busy and these trips were no exception. I find myself scratching my head at times wondering how it could be so busy in this part of town because, let's be honest, there ain't nothing there. Clearly, Tower is a draw.

Anyway, so breakfast. Again, I ordered two eggs over easy with bacon, home fries, toast and coffee. Again it cost about $9, plus tip. The waiter was... distant. Like a cross between someone bored and someone waiting for a hot date to show up. The eggs bled well, the bacon wasn't salty and the coffee, served in porcelain mugs so thick and heavy you could bash a mugger's face in without chipping it was decent enough for me to have had three or four refills. I used to have a rule. When I go to Tower for breakfast, I get the Alpine Omelet: bacon, swiss cheese, mushrooms and onions. Like I said, the eggs I ordered were fine. But I pined for that omelet. My friend Pike joined me and ordered the Pancakes Deluxe: pancakes, sausages, ham and bacon. Factor in the butter and the fakle syrup that naturally winds up sugar glazing it and this is basically a heart attack on a plate. He loved it. Said he'd definitely get it again.

I returned a few days later to order a hamburger. Walking in I took in the smell. It seemed... off. Almost weird. It smelled like... a real restaurant. I looked around, not seeing people eating diner food. I saw people eating what looked like real food. I felt almost like I was cheating myself getting a mere cheeseburger. I told myself that perhaps Tower deserved a standalone review. Regardless, chiding myself for ordering a "mere" hamburger was a chide made in error. The hamburger was simply fantastic. It was thick and it was juicy and having ordered it medium, it was bleeding. This wasn't, or didn't taste like, a once-frozen slab of grade-D-but-edible patty-shaped ground beef product. This was a real cheeseburger.

*****

So, the winner of the Diner Smackdown: Tower Diner. The best eats. The best atmosphere. The cleanest. A notable mention should go to the Forest Hills Coffee Shop, which really impressed me with what I got. The interior and exterior is a little shabby and they really need to hire a second waitress, but I will absolutely eat there again... especially once they start taking credit cards. Forest Hills Diner was pretty good too, with the best and friendliest service, and it's easily the most convenient to me. Alas, it was somewhat generic.

*****

(*) I readily admit that there is a fancy "diner" recently opened in Long Island City, Magasin Wells. But it's wears the diner name with irony, the way a hipster wears a smiley-face t-shirt. And yes, I will go there soon.

News...

2010-12-08T16:36:00.002-05:00

Thai Austin, the not-so-bad-but-not-gonna-win-any-awards Thai restaurant below the sidewalk on Austin Street, has closed down.

It is now Mint's Thai Kitchen. Is this a mere re-badge or a complete overhaul? It appears to be the latter. Yes, it's still Thai, but a comparison of the menus shows that it's not merely reprinting the same food in a new font.

R.I.Positano

2010-11-28T17:03:00.005-05:00

R.I.Positano

Yes, it seems that Positano (in my opinion, the worst restaurant that Forest Hills had to offer)... has passed away into the great beyond. Will it be missed? What a silly question. Only for for it's comedic value. In its place, Pui Bello has risen like Lazarus to roam the earth once more.

A quick peek at the menu outside shows that it will be much like the old Piu Bello. Mostly dinery plates and quick foods. Paninis, etc. Although they were closed as of the evening of November 28, they do have a dinner menu which, since you asked so politely, appears extremely similar to the old, horrible Positano one. In other words, drek on a plate. Hopefully, this was done in error and will vanish before any of us have to suffer through it. But if not, I promise to pay them a visit if for no other reason than for a good hearty chuckle.

News...

2010-10-07T18:18:00.004-04:00

DANNY BROWN GETS A STAR IN THE MICHELIN GUIDE

This is hardly news to most of you (I've gotten numerous emails from readers letting me in on the worst kept secret our dining scene has). It's been in New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and pretty much anywhere else that the guide's list is mentioned, but I felt like, what the hell, I'll hype it up too. Yep, Danny Brown Wine Bar & Kitchen (formerly of DB fame) got a much-deserved star in the latest Michelin Guide for NYC restaurants. As of right now, I consider it the best restaurant in the neighborhood, and one of the best in the city and it's nice to see that the international community agrees.

I'm sure ol' DB has received countless huzzahs since it became official, but add my congrats to the list!

Let's all hope that this sparks a trend that does not end here.

BALUCHI'S

2010-09-18T14:25:00.001-04:00

BALUCHI'S

113 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 520-8600

My experiences at Baluchi's in the past have been, in a word, zero. My only knowledge of Baluchi's has been through the experiences of others or the occasional message board commentary. Simply put, this particular NYC mini-chain has scored below average. Friends have called it forgettable and some message board comments have been less diplomatic. As a result, I've tended to avoid the place. This was a silly thing to do.

For the record, do I think that it's amazing Indian food? No. It's Indian food for the mild of palate. Nothing I tried was strong and even the spiciest dish was timid. That said nothing I ate was bad. Also for the record, I'm somewhat shocked that Forest Hills has so many Thai places to eat and only one Indian one. For a neighborhood whose residents seem (at least the ones who write to me) to be clamoring for new and different cuisines, it seems anachronistic for it to lack something as obvious as an Indian restaurant. But I digress.

I arrived with Dudeman and Shrink at about 9pm. It was later than we had wanted to eat, but scheduling was what it was and it was nice to find a place that still had customers in it (though by the time we got the check, they were shutting down). The music when we came in was like a death chant. Not exactly something that encourages lively banter at the table. But, the smells of curry and cumin were pleasant and we were led to a nice corner table (with a good camera angle, heh heh). The biggest downside to dinner here was the waiting. I waited quite a while for the Rents to figure out what to eat, and then once we ordered, we waited a looong time for anything to arrive.

Baluchi's has an impressively large vegetarian menu. Anyone who knows me or reads any of my blogs knows that I'm hardly a vegetarian. Nonetheless, it's good to know that the vegetarians out there have options, especially the eschew dining at Italian restaurants that serve veal (all of them).

My appetizer was the Chicken Malai Kabab, four pieces of charred chicken in a cream cheese and ginger sauce. It was super tender and everyone at the table thought it was great. The cream cheese sauce (is cream cheese an authentic Indian ingredient?) wasn't too thick or overpowering and the char added a little bit of extra flavor. Shrink chose the Aloo Tiki, a potato pancake in a chutney sauce. Ever culture, culinary evidence has shown, has some sort of potato pancake dish. The aloo tiki is the Indian one. It's very thick, like a hockey puck, but tastes basically just like any other potato pancake. Get rid of the chutney and replace it with apple sauce and you're eating Ukranian food. Dudeman rounded the appetizers out with Kachori, a cold lentil dumpling buried in chic peas and a cream sauce. Calling it a dumpling is somewhat disingenuous. The kachori is more like a dense pancake. It was good, albeit not amazing, and should be eaten with a spoon. If all of these appetizers can be summed up with one word, that word would be "mild". Indian without any real spice. Without any real kick. They were all good (especially the chicken), but I've had ramen soup with more muscle.

The entrees came out almost as soon as the table was cleared. Digestion be damned. Dudeman and Shrink went with lamb dishes. Dudeman got the Keema Matar, a ground lamb dish with spices and peas. It was the spiciest meal of the night, and that doesn't say much. Still, it was spicy enough for Shrink to put as her least favorite entree that we ordered. Maybe Baluchi's became successful because their audience prefers their Indian food muted. I liked it a lot, possibly because it had teeth. But it did have flavor, something that Dudeman's appetizer was in dire need of. Shrink ordered the Lamb Pasanda, cubes of lamb in a spiced yogurt sauce. Again, don't confuse spiced with spicy. It wasn't. The lamb was so tender that knives are overkill. Just looking at it could have cut it in half. It was my least favorite entree largely because it was somewhat bitter. My dinner choice was the vegetarian Navrattan Korma and was, in my opinion, and without a doubt, the best of the lot. The variety of vegetables and spices in the sauce made it the most complex of the dinners on the table.

All along, each of these dishes was being eaten off of our respective plates with Kashmiri Pulao, a saffron rice with almonds and raisins and Indian bread. We ordered the Bread Basket, a large basket with what we were told was a variety of bread, but which I think was actually just Naan and Poori. The basket was overkill. We only used a third of it and had to pack up the rest to go.

I thought we could do a dessert, but we were stuffed. Plus they were thirty seconds away from putting the chairs on top of the table.

Baluchi's gets a bad rap I think. It's good food, albeit not necessarily the most authentic. They would be far improved if they added some bite to their dishes. As a side note, I would very much like to see the area get another Indian restaurant or two so that when I crave nose-wateringly real Indian, I don't have to hoof it to the crazy mess of Jackson Heights.

Three appetizers, three entrees, a large bread order, a side of rice, two large beers, tax and tip totaled $130 even.

THE TAP HOUSE

2010-09-13T13:45:00.002-04:00

THE TAP HOUSE
72-07 Austin Street
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 997-0500

Along the busy Austin Street corridor, next to busy 5 Burros, is The Tap House. If you can't find it, it's the place with all the people smoking out in front. Before The Tap House came along, the space was occupied by Modus. Interestingly, before Modus came along, there was Modus. In fact, before that Modus was another Modus. The businesses died, but the name lived on through numerous incarnations. First, Modus was an upscale tea house that served lattes and cakes similar to Edgar's on the Upper West Side. It was the cutest spot in the neighborhood by miles; my girlfriend and I would spend hours there (though that has as much lot to do with its laughably slow service as with anything else). Then it became a half-coffee-shop-half-cocktail-lounge. Then a sushi bar. Or was it the other way around? Anyway, it couldn't seem to get its formula right, so now it's gone. In its place is The Tap House and I have a feeling that, barring either gross mismanagement or arson, they won't be going anywhere any time soon.

See, Tap House fills a hole in the Forest Hills going-out scene that, when you think about it, is shocking that it exists at all. It's... a bar.

Yup, a bar. A plain old bar. A place where normal can drink normal beer and eat normal bar food under the warm glow of a normal Coors Light neon sign. Other than Tap House, there are no other bars within walking distance of the subway. You have to head all the way towards either Rego Park or Kew Gardens, or go all the way to Metropolitan Avenue, which is hardly a short schlep. Sure there's always Dirty Pierre's and Irish Cottage. I like both, but Dirty Pierre's serves all-you-can-eat mussels and doesn't have a single beer on tap. Irish Cottage is closer, but not quite what I'm talking about. It's more of a pub than a bar. It has actual food. The difference is admittedly subtle on paper, but one step inside and you'll understand what I mean. You're probably never gonna hear Boom Boom Pow playing at Irish Cottage.

The Tap House calls itself a sports bar, but really that's because they only play sports on the TVs over the bar and because they want an excuse to have posters with cheerleaders on them. Really, Tap House is just your average gimme-a-Bud-bar. That's it. They serve wings by the ton and their burgers are decent. Other that... uh... their PBR in a can was delectable...? Yeah, this isn't a review about the food.

Tap House before 7pm.

If you miss a somewhat fratty, somewhat local, somewhat cheap-o, standard watering hole populated with a good mix of blue and white collar groups of twenty/thirty somethings packed three deep at the bar yelling conversations at each other over the thundering top-40 music, then this is where you want to be after seven (if you prefer your bars populated by extremely polite tattooed construction worker types, then this is where you want to be before seven). You can flirt and it won't feel like you're interrupting someone's dinner (they probably couldn't hear you anyway). The Tap House took me back to the kind of bars I'd play at in college where the Red Bulls and vodkas flow, ironically, like the wine they barely serve. Shit, Tap House has Jaegermeister on tap. And nobody over 20 drinks Jaegermeister.

There's no dress code. Come in after work wearing a tie or show up after your late afternoon nap in a t-shirt and pajama bottoms. No one'll care if they notice, but it's usually so crowded after dark (in front, the dining area is evacuated) that the odds are that no one will.

Tap House is, therefore, a love it or hate it place. Either you love the boisterous, fratty atmosphere or the "hey buddy what's happening?" regulars before the boisterous fratty types show up, or you hate it and its loud energy, in which case I suggest the far more mature bar scene down the block at Bonfire or around the corner at Network. I, for one, am glad that Tap House exists and I would enjoy some healthy competition. Preferably one with a large, microbrew-centric beer list, free popcorn to snack on, and a pool table.

MAZARA PIZZA

2010-08-15T17:51:00.007-04:00

MAZARA PIZZA
105-03 Metropolitan Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 544-0416

"Pizza by the slice." It's the Mazara tag line, and it implies that they might be alone in selling anything less than a whole pie. They forget that this is NYC, not the 'burbs (much to the chagrin of some denizens who will, in a short time, fade into dusty oblivion) and that pizza is almost always offered by the slice (Dee's and Nick's notwithstanding). Naturally, I had to try a slice of said pizza and moseyed on in one hot afternoon to do just that.

The average Mazara customer is a construction worker, and I waited in line behind about a half dozen of them while the staff tripped over itself in confusion. Pizzas were being handed out that no one ordered, people were bumping into each other, and there was the occasional snarky comment. The soda machine didn't work, forcing everyone to shell out twice as much for a bottle of the same soda. How coincidental.

I ended up ordering a Regular Cheese Slice, a Chicken Tomato Garlic Slice, and a Chicken Roll. Never have I had a more soggy slice of pizza than that plain slice. It drooped like a soggy rag as though it never saw the inside of an oven. Plus, it bled grease like nobody's business. The sad thing is, it actually could have been decent if the cheese wasn't so cheap and the crust had been cooked. The chicken slice was actually not bad, but I wasn't wowed by it. Meanwhile, the chicken roll was just flat out mediocre. The sauce tasted different from the sauce used on the pizza (a mistake in my book), and there was about as much flavor as I'd expect from eating a cardboard box with cheese in it. Sorry about the lack of photos, but my camera battery died once I got inside. Still, pizza on a paper plate looks pretty much the same everywhere.

So in short, do I see myself craving Mazara again? No, probably not.

Mazaracard.jpg

CHALET ALPINA

2010-08-03T14:17:00.009-04:00

CHALET ALPINA
9835 Metropolitan Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 793-3774

Once upon a time, the legends say, Forest Hills was a pretty German neighborhood. For a long time, holding fort for the Germans, surrounded by a seemingly endless onslaught of Italian and Japanese food has been Chalet Alpina on Metropolitan Avenue. It has company now in the form of Manor Oktoberfest nearby on Yellowstone. My experience at Chalet Alpina was solidly middle-of-the-road up until the very end when I took a turn for the awkward.

Chalet Alpina is relatively large inside, and pretty dark, like dining in a ski lodge. There's no warmth there in any romantic sense. I'd never take a date there. This is more the kind of place where I can go with a bunch of friends, eat some food, drink some beer, and BS for a while. The thing is, Manor Oktoberfest is the same kind of place, but I would take a date there. Chalet Alpina's crowd is a decidedly older set who have found their spot where they can become regulars.

Okay, the food. Before I go further, the food here was all decent. Nothing was bad. But nothing wowed me in any way, except in size. You'll get portions so heart-cloggingly large, you'll swear you were south of the Mason Dixon Line.

To be blunt, the appetizer list was very disappointing. Unless choices like fried zucchini, friend calamari and shrimp cocktail are German in origin, it seemed rather similar to what I could get at a diner. Still, there were a few options for someone seeking something that they don't serve at IHOP. Bro ordered the Potato Pancake. It came with apple sauce to dip it in and was about the size of his head. It was good. Not too dense, not too greasy. But still, it weighed as much as the plate it was on. My appetizer was the Herring in Sour Cream with onion. It's exactly what it sounds like. Herring. Onions. Sour cream liberally covering everything. Again, good. But Jesus, I was so full by the end of the appetizers alone that the thought that my entree was about to arrive made me queasy. "After all that food, I need a nap." Bro said.

When the entrees arrived, I nearly fainted. My dinner, the Pork Schnitzel, was massive. At least it was pounded paper thin though. It came with an entirely forgettable baked potato and not-very-good creamed spinach (in my opinion, since Bro says he liked it). The pork itself was enjoyable though, especially with lemon juice and sour cream. Bro's meal was the Munchner Sauerbraten, a pot roast in a dark sweet sauce. While he thought the meal was fine (at least the meat part), I didn't care for it. Though to be be fair, I don't like pot roast. I tend to find the texture heavy and dry. It requires being eaten with a glass of beer or drowned in sauce, which this was. It came with a bowl of pickled cabbage and potato dumplings, which as you can see in the picture are the two things that look like white tennis balls. They were tasteless and had the consistency of Play-Doh, though Bro says that they were better the next day when he re-heated his leftovers. As for the cabbage... well, I'm almost certain that this was invented on a dare.

There was no way in Himmel we would survive dessert without exploding.

So the food was decent without being exceptional and the atmosphere was fine, too. I'd probably be willing to return, except that someone (the owner I assume, but maybe the manager, not that it really matters) decided to come by as we were getting ready to leave. He literally leaned over the booth so we couldn't get up and, after the perfunctory "did you enjoy the meal?" banter, decided to tell us two or three stories about death, about cholera killing thousands of people in China, about mass graves, and about how his grandfather got the shit kicked out of him for some reason or other and how he had all of his bones broken. We smiled politely, but really, how does one respond to that? Eventually, he let us leave.

Two beers, two appetizers, two dinners, plus tax and tip. $81.25.

NEW YORK FALAFEL BAR

2010-07-01T14:28:00.001-04:00

THE NEW YORK FALAFEL BAR IS CLOSED.

NEW YORK FALAFEL BAR

72-32-B Austin Street
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 268-9500

If Wafa's was too far away from Pahal Zan to be much of a threat to its dominance, then here's the NY Falafel Bar, just a few blocks away on Austin Street. It's Kosher, it's newer and has more space, it's got a TV playing bone-jarringly irritating Hebrew-language TV shows and it's already packed with people chatting to the guy behind the counter about how their mom used to make this, that and the other. "She'd put garlic and onions in everything!" Even if my experience finally did end with Pahal Zan winning in terms of taste, NYFB is mind-numbingly faster. You walk in, you order and you're out the door before you know it. Its speed has already curried the favor of the maintenance guys from National Grid, who can't afford to spend twenty minutes waiting for their lunch while their truck sits by a fire hydrant with its blinkers on.

The first time I went, I pulled up a seat by the window and chowed down on the Falafel Haim sandwich in a pita with everything. You can also get the sandwiches serve in a wrap the way Wafa's serves them, or in a baguette roll... like Subway. The first thing that went through my head as my mouth hit the food: "oh man, this is good!" This was a damn good falafel sandwich. There were just the right amount of toppings to add flavor without diluting the presence of the falafel balls. The pita was much thicker than I'm used to, but I liked it that way. It didn't shred as I was eating, spilling cucumber and tomato and hummus across my lap. The hot sauce was extremely timid however. They need to crank that up a notch or three.

I would have gotten something with lamb for round two, but NYFB doesn't serve lamb. They do serve schnitzel (Israeli, Spanish or Chinese (?) style), but I decided to leave my schnitzeling to Manor Oktoberfest and chose to try out the Shawarma. This was far less impressive. Not serving lamb, NYFB serves chicken roasted on a spit "Israeli Style" - which happens to be the exact same style used by the Greeks and the Turks and the Lebanese (and the list goes on) for roasting big cylinders of meat to be used in pita-wrapped sandwiches. Anyway, unlike my experience with the falafel, the flavor of the chicken was entirely drowned out by the toppings. Weirdly, after eating most of those toppings, the flavor of the chicken was again drowned out by the spices that were used on it. Maybe chicken isn't the way to go? I might return to give their Shakshuka sandwich a whirl.

Becuse NYFB is Kosher, don't expect to chow down Friday nights (after 4pm as of this posting) or Saturdays at all.

POSITANO

2010-06-16T10:21:00.003-04:00

POSITANO HAS CLOSED.

POSITANO
107-02 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718)-520-1778

The other night, I dined at Positano, the large Italian restaurant on Queens Boulevard by the post office, reaffirming my opinion that, so far, Il Poeta is the only Italian restaurant in Forest Hills worth anything. The. Only. One. Admittedly, the neighborhood is awash in Italian, and I still have 75 more to go, give or take. Quite literally, Positano was a laugh riot. Of course, other than laugh, what else is there to do when you’ve just spent good money on food you’d be embarrassed to serve at home?

I won't lie. I had absolutely no expectations that Positano would be a good meal. None. It bore every mark of mediocrity. It's a large Italian restaurant with a tacky Italian flag logo (if that's not like a buzzing neon sign blinking "eat somewhere else" then I don't know what what is.). It’s always mostly empty. It’s been changing ownership like underwear. Quite frankly, this new alleged partnership with the old Piu Bello people does not make me think that much change is in the air (at least they seem to have their own area in the greenhouse out back; the restaurant part remains unchanged). If anything, it seems like just another gimmick. And boy oh boy does Positano love trying out new gimmicks to drum up new business.

A couple of weeks ago, Positano put a postcard flyer under the windshield wiper of my car calling itself the “Positano Bar and Lounge” and featuring bikini girls advertising happy hour, ladies night, complimentary bottles of vodka, half priced drinks, and hookahs. “Ladies 18 to party, 21 to let loose.” Guys, 21 and up only. Shit, if I knew Positano was a club packed with stacked drunk hoochies, I'd have gone there a long time ago.

And how, you’re bound to ask, does the above ad square with the reality of that which Positano actually is? Hmmm...

Bro and I walked in only to find Positano virtually deserted. A musty odor of decrepitude permeating the restaurant that made it smell like a hospital waiting room. We nearly left. Sitting down by the window, I looked through the menu, but it was hard to pay attention. “My God, this muzak is blasting.” “Dude,” Bro replied. “That ain’t muzak” and he raised an eyebrow and cocked his head to the far wall. My eyes roamed past the two other occupied tables. There, in the dark bopped a guy in his late forties with a big microphone and bigger hair crooning karaoke machine versions of old pop songs, complete with a disco ball and fake backup singers. As Elvis's Can't Help Falling In Love transitioned to Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive I couldn’t imagine that this could possibly be attracting more people than it was repelling.

Positano’s appetizer menu is a joke. Mozzarella sticks, fried calamari, Buffalo wings. This is what they serve at bars and pizza places. We skipped them.

What’s so amazing is that they dare to charge as much as they do for their entrees. $17 to $26. Entrees that average $22 demand a certain level of quality that Positano simply doesn't even try to live up to. We decided what to get as we noshed on supermarket squishy Italian bread coated in butter from a gold-foil packet a la some diner. Bro ordered the Pollo Positano, thin cuts of chicken breast with potato, red pepper and mushrooms in a white wine sauce. It came with a side of sad-looking steamed broccoli. Before I say it was "bad", let me say that it wasn’t. But as Bro put it “this won’t win any awards.” If you’ve familiar with Chicken Tonight, the chicken-dinner-in-a-jar popular back when I was in school, then you’ve probably already eaten this meal hundred times from when mom got home late and wasn't interested in making a complicated meal. Bland, wine sauce-esque, cheap, seemingly canned vegetables, somewhat dry chicken. Not only won’t it win any awards, I don’t think the judges will even remember that it was in the contest.

My dinner? The Lamb Chops served with mashed sweet potatoes, mixed greens and a garlic crouton in a ruby port sauce. First, when asked how I wanted my chops cooked, I said medium. I got well-to-the-point-of-no-return. I did not get a “garlic crouton”, something I can only assume to be the equivalent of a piece of toasted garlic bread. The mixed greens were essentially a small side salad soaking in vinegar. The mashed sweet potatoes were straight out of a Gerber baby food jar. I shit you not, I could have eaten them with a straw. They drained through the cracks of my fork. The ruby port sauce was pretty good though.

This was $24 and I didn't even get my garlic crouton... :(

Surprise, surprise, we also skipped dessert. I mean really, what would've been the point?

Here’s the real kicker. This meal: two entrees and three beers, with tax and tip, cost us SEVENTY SEVEN DOLLARS! That's the equivalent of 25 gallons of gas.

If Positano wants to be anything more than a joke we can all laugh about, if it wants to be anything other than just another bad Italian restaurant in a neighborhood drowning in bad Italian, if it wants to have more than three tables occupied at 8pm, then I recommend dropping the bullshit gimmicks. Drop the karaoke singers and the Latin Night, and the ladies night “must be over 18 to party” dance club crap. Drop the Tex Mex brunch (yeah, you read right, an Italian restaurant with a Tex Mex brunch) and drop the tacky signage. Focus on the food. Hire a chef. A real one with a culinary degree. They should design a menu from scratch with five appetizers, ten entrees, three desserts and one special and start making meals that people talk about for days later because they're so good, not because they're so embarrassing.

Alternatively, they could close, which would be fine, too.

R.I.Piu Bello

2010-06-10T13:45:00.005-04:00

R.I.Piu Bello

Piu Bello is gone. At least the American one. The Forest Hills one.

I, for one, will miss it. It was a nice go-to place for ice cream and outside lounging in the summer. While the rest of the neighborhood was shuttered like a ghost town at midnight, Piu Bello still had a crowd.

THEN

Of course, it had its detractors. The food was admittedly mediocre diner stuff. The service was somewhat lazy. But it was a relaxing place to be and it was the only place in the vicinity that had lots of outdoor seating where you could just hang out for hours without spending money on more than a coffee. Try doing that at any of the 70th restaurant row places. And enjoy your forty minute hike to Metropolitan to sit at Theater Cafe.

NOW

Ooh, maybe L'arte de Gelato will open there and carry on the tradition of summer ice creamerying? Nah, who am I kidding? Remind me to get an unlimited MetroCard. I have a feeling that I'll spending a lot of time this summer in Manhattan and Brooklyn again.

Ciao Bello.

UPDATE: 6/12/10

According to the Queens Central Forums rumor mill, Piu Bello will be co-running Positano. Positano, the Italian restaurant on Queens Boulevard that sticks bikini-girl flyers under your windshield wiper blades, will apparently not keep the Piu Bello name and there are even questions about whether or not the Piu Bello gelato will even be served there.

I guess we'll see in a few months, but as for now, it would seem that reports of Piu Bello's death are not quite yet greatly exaggerated.

WOODHAVEN HOUSE

2010-06-09T13:45:00.000-04:00

WOODHAVEN HOUSE

63-98 Woodhaven Boulevard

Rego Park, NY

(718) 894-5400

Woodhaven House on the boulevard of Woodhaven, is a shmanced out pub that I wish was closer to home. Although the cuisine wasn't inspired or especially unique, it was very good. The old-style exterior, interior and vibe take one to a time when dining was less about art and more about taste. I happen to think that the two do (and should) go hand in hand, but sometimes it nice to just get food and enjoy yourself.

Read the full review HERE.

I'd like to buy the world a Coke...

2010-05-20T11:32:00.006-04:00

I'd like to buy the world a Coke...*

*Political commentary is not this blog's forte. So this is a departure from the norm. But hey, at least it's food related, right?

Recently, bills have been floating around various levels of government proposing a tax on soda that will jump the cost of a serving by a few cents. Or there were bills floating around. The soda industry spent millions courting Congress and Albany and got them either knocked out or back-burnered. We'll see how well they fare in NYC, as Governor Patterson tries for round two upstate.

Some of you reading this might think that the industry's opposition pressure is a good thing; that a tax on sugary sweet deliciousness is a tax on hard-working families, a tax on the poor, a tax on kids' fun, a tax on childhood itself. Some of you might think that, hey, if you're fat it's not the government's job to convince you to eat right. A la Parks And Recreation's Ron Swanson: "The whole point of this country is if you want to eat garbage, balloon up to 600 pounds and die of a heart attack at 43, you can! You are free to do so. To me, that's beautiful." After all, personal responsibility built America. But of course, that's a simplistic fantasy and is about as accurate as saying that we went to the moon "because it was there" as though the Soviets weren't a factor at all. No, personal responsibility, while important, has always been coupled in America with a strong sense of civic responsibility.

I, for the record, am solidly pro-soda tax. I'm sure that this might give stress headaches and twisting gas pains to some folks out there who ride the Any-tax-is-a-bad-tax-and-the-government-is-bad train (next stop, Frankfort, Kentucky), but let's not play bullshit with each other. We're too fat. We are. Period. This is a non-debatable issue. And obesity costs the government money, which in turn costs us money, which in turn costs me money. And I likes me my money and this tax revenue will go towards health programs which will prop up clinics so that those of us who don't need triple bypasses won't have to fund as much of the financial burden of this weight crisis. Plus, the higher prices are bound to reduce soda consumption, just the way cigarette taxes reduced smoking. Thus, fewer obese people --> fewer people in the hospital --> tax dollars go farther --> burden on the medical system reduced --> emergency room congestion reduced --> shorter wait time for you when your Chinatown bus catches on fire. Plus, those who still insist on getting their annual heart attack will have been subsidizing their visit, a few cans of Mountain Dew at a time.

I do NOT, it must be said, advocate banning soda. I think that if you really really want full sugar soda, go nuts. Drink away. In fact, I encourage it. But, like cigarettes, Hummers, Louis Vuitton purses and getting kicked squarely in the balls by someone with nipple rings wearing a leather bustier and holding a cat-o-nine-tails, soda is a luxury, albeit an admittedly inexpensive one. Unless there's some rare disease I don't know about, no one needs to inhale a gallon of soda or quasi-juice sugar water like Hi-C every day. If you want it, go get it. I just think you should have to pay for it and I don't think it's fair that society should have to foot the bill for your diabetes medication.

The beverage lobby made a series of ads decrying the tax. They, actually more than almost anything else, cemented my opinion to be pro-soda tax. Here they are, and here's why they suck:

Bad acting aside, these are offensive to our collective intelligence on so many levels. Mom implies that the 70 cents extra she pays on soda might be the straw that will break her camel's financial back and send her attractive suburban family into foreclosure, but then she walks into a large home on a not-so-poor block. Still, other than her condescending tone of voice, this one isn't terrible. The others are. Mom decries a tax on full-sugar soda at a supermarket fancy enough to have a video game section (GameStop & Shop?), then fills her cart up with fruits and vegetables and doesn't buy any soda!?! After fishing and setting up a campsite, Dad tells us that "taxes never made anybody healthy". I know some former smokers who might disagree with that statement, and if your grandmother is on Medicare or Uncle Lou is getting treated at the VA, then you're related to some people whose health is linked squarely to taxes. Still, the worst ad is a NYC-centered one.

This ad highlights two groups of potential victim. First victim, the poor. The majority of his customers, Mr. Pioneer Supermarket Guy tells us, bring notepads and calculators to figure out their food budget. It makes the inference that poor inner city folks will be unfairly hit by this tax. But this requires the viewer to conclude that these poor inner city folks must buy soda. They have to! Soda, like rent and car payments, are part of a household's non-discretionary spending budget. My God, what kind of sick, twisted animal would expect their children to drink milk or... heaven forbid, water, instead of Fanta? The second victim is our concerned narrator, Mr. Pioneer Supermarket Guy, representing the hanging on by his teeth small businessman. See, if his customers are forced by Big Brother to spend more money on their non-discretionary soda, then they will either not purchase other items because their budget ran dry, or they'll stop buying soda and replace it with... nothing... and either way he'll suffer from a loss of revenue. and presumably have to fire his entire staff and live on the food stamps his customers are paying with anyway. But again, this requires that we leap to conclude that the soda purchase is inevitable and that soda/sweet drinks have nothing that they can possibly be replaced with. We have to conclude that those ladies on line had no choice whatsoever but to buy three gallons of Sunny D. Of course, this makes no sense unless one also makes the assertion that the poor are addicted to junk food like it's crack. But really, they don't have to buy a juice-like orange-tic-tac flavored sugar water beverage. They can get something else. If they bought water or milk, then then the Supermarket Guy will simply adjust around the customers the way he would with any new product line phase-in or phase-out and give more shelf space to the other drinks. Remember Cosmopolitan Magazine's yogurt? Neither does the dairy aisle. Market economics at work.

Anyway, Bloomberg & Co. is pro tax and in response to the industry's opposition, NYC ran it's own ad. It's definitely more slick, but somewhat more... nauseating.

Naturally, the best video of the bunch, the ad that says the most with the least amount bullshit, is also the most boring.

I was at Stop & Shop the other week. Ahead of me on line was a family, two kids and two adult women, doing their weekly or bi-weekly grocery trip. These people seemed like nice people, but they clearly weren't shopping with any sense of health in mind whatsoever. Or if they were, it was a warped sense of what healthy is. They were obese. Mom was obese, her sister was obese, her kids were obese. As they unloaded their cart I looked at what they were unloading onto the belt. Chips, regular sodas, Entenmann's cakes, frozen pizza, bags of frozen french fries. The cart was filled to capacity but they managed to avoid any healthy food. I thought maybe there might be something hidden under the Doritos, but I was fooled. There were no vegetables, not even frozen ones. Forget buying water or orange juice, they didn't even have diet soda. It was all high calorie, high fat, high carbohydrate, processed junk food. They were buying Fruit Loops but I didn't see any milk. These are the very people that need this law and need it badly. It's no longer a matter of self control, because they aren't trying and failing. This family wasn't buying some healthy stuff and then negating the benefits with a years supply of frozen burritos. They weren't buying organic food under the misconception that organic food means you'll lose weight. This family just had no clue. They're going to die young and sooner than they should and that's their business. But before they kick, they're going to have a myriad of health problems that are likely to be a burden on the hospitals and doctors that the system pays for and then it's my business. Then it's our business. This is about prevention.

Think of it the mathematical way. If the average person drinks two (2) cans of soda per day (sometimes less, sometimes more), then they're drinking 730 cans per year. With 39 grams of sugar per can, that's 28,470 grams of sugar. Convert that to pounds and the average person is taking in 62.8 pounds of sugar, just by drinking soda, all without those burdensome vitamins.

For that, you need Diet Coke Plus, which actually isn't so bad...

So I'm not saying get rid of junk food (God knows I love it), just price it unattractively. I'll bet that if McDonalds hamburgers cost as much as a hamburger at DBGB, you'd see far fewer people ordering six of them at a time. If a bottle of regular 7-Up cost as much as a bottle of Absolut Citron, I'll bet you'll see far fewer people drinking it straight out of the bottle during Stargate marathons. Some people argue that diet soda tastes bad and that people won't make the switch for that reason. But that's total crap and I'm proof. I grew up on regular soda, so allow me to assure you that your taste buds shift within a few weeks and you learn to enjoy the diet stuff in pretty short order. In fact, regular Coke will start to exist solely to pour rum into.

If the tax fails, and I hope it doesn't, alternatively I propose that one way to get people to drink fewer sugary drinks is to mandate that the beverage industry only use ads from the 50s.

After watching that on TV for a while, I promise no one will ever drink Kool-Aid again.

I encourage comments. But because political issues fire up the blood, be civil. I have no desire to delete what people say. But I also won't hesitate to do so. Unlike Queens Central, I moderate.

Also, I apologize for the videos getting cut in half. They didn't embed properly from YouTube. Maybe someone knows what I did wrong. Alas...

MIKE'S PIZZERIA

2010-05-12T09:22:00.002-04:00

MIKE'S PIZZERIA
71-75 Yellowstone Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 793-3464

I realize now that I should have done for pizza what I did with the Chinese food takeout smackdown. But I didn't. Don't ask me why. I failed you. I failed my blog. I failed the neighborhood. I failed America. But enough about me and let's move on to Mike's.

Mike's Pizzeria rests Yellowstone boulevard across the street from what used to be a C-Town and down the block from what still is a Dunkin Donuts. It's not without it's competition. Lillian's is only a couple of blocks away in one direction and Capolinea is a couple of blocks away in another. We in Forest Hills can't stand being more than a few blocks from a pizza place even, it would seem, if that pizza isn't really worth being that close to anyway.

And therein lies my opinion of Mike's. It's nothing special. The interior is large and rather upscale for a pizza place with what look like new tables and plenty of them. They have a decent variety of pies under the glass, but you've seen them all before. This isn't some haute, Artichoke-esque place churning out Gruyere pies with a topping of pesto and mushroom. Mike's makes normal pizza. If only they made it better.

The Plain Cheese slice was way too greasy, most likely from cheap cheese. Bright orange cheese grease seemed to coat both my plate and the back of my hand. Meanwhile the Vegetable slice, which was loaded with mushroom, zucchini and broccoli was as dry as a bone and so top heavy from its cargo that half the toppings fell onto the tray. Neither pie had much in the way of sauce, either, which compounded the problems of these ultimately disappointing triangles.

Slices cost the average or maybe a bit above it. The two slices above and a Diet Pepsi came out to $9.

IL POETA

2010-05-02T12:01:00.003-04:00

IL POETA

98-04 Metropolitan Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 544-4223

Il Poeta is the latest Italian to open its doors on Metropolitan Avenue. To say it has competition is like saying that Honda has competition in the minivan market. There are seven Italian places on Metropolitan Avenue alone, with at least a half dozen more on Austin and Queens Boulevard. We here in Forest Hills are drowning in Italian food, and my experience thus far, as you've no doubt read, has been severely wanting. I suffer from Italian restaurant fatigue. I just want to throw my hand to the sky and say "That's it! I'm getting Boston Market!"

But I had high hopes. The guys who run the best liquor store in the area, The Wine Room of Forest Hills, on 69th Avenue, spent about five solid minutes touting the place. I was sure it was because they supplied Il Poeta their vino, but hey, that's a good thing. I'll say this, Il Poeta has a decent wine list. It's not quite at the level of Danny Brown, but you won't find any Ecco Domani bulk crap either. The menu is also atypical for Italian in the area. The menu is small, instead of being a twelve page long book. There's no red sauce slop that came from an expired Ragu jar and no soft noodles that may lead your mind to wonder if the last place the chef plied his trade was at an institutional soup kitchen.

Il Poeta is very much an Italian bistro. It's small, it's decorations aren't ostentatious, the music is dim, and most importantly, they don't play Frank Sinatra or any of the other Rat Packers. Indeed, playing Rat Packer songs virtually guarantees that you'll ruin my meal. Il Poeta's crowd ran the gamut from old to young, families to couples, people out with their work friends to me and Bro. It's an intimate place, but not overly romantic. Perhaps the lights are too bright. The worst thing about the interior are the curtains over the windows. On at least three occasions I passed up eating here for another restaurant because I couldn't see inside and didn't want to be at the only occupied table. I understand that the view from inside is of a McDonalds drive-through, but I seriously think that blocking passers-by from seeing how popular you are is a huge mistake, financially.

Bro and I ate here twice in the span of a week. Both meals were very good without being fantastic. Still, of all the Italian restaurants I've reviewed in Forest Hills so far, Il Poeta is the best by miles. Fresh bread was placed on the table with a tapenade spread to smear atop it. Day one was mushroom spread, day two was a bean version. The bean one was insanely good. No cheapo foil butter packets are offered.

Of the starters, bro ordered a salad, something I'll never do. The Insalata Tricolore Con Formaggio Di Capra, a simple simple simple salad of arugula, endive and radicchio with crusted goat cheese. There was no dressing or vinaigrette, which bro felt it could have used, but only because there just wasn't enough of the goat cheese. The cheese worked well with the salad, but they should have given it three times as much. I decided to try some soups. On the first trip, I ordered their Potato Leek Soup. It was quite good, albeit a bit heavy on the salt. Unlike most potato leek soups, this was a puree and looked exactly the way a split pea soup would look. There were no chunks of potato or shreds of leek, but there were a few croutons for some added texture. As someone who doesn't really care for croutons one way or the other, these were fantastic. My second soup was the Pasta Fagioli, a pasta-bean soup. Like the Potato Leek soup, it was bisque styled with a thick and rich, smooth texture. This time, however, pasta and beans added some depth that the potato leek lacked. The soup was extremely good.

Bro and I ended up trying three pastas and one meat entree. This was mostly because of Il Poeta's expense. First, the Garganelli Al Ragu D'Anatra, a simple pasta dish in a sauce of mushroom and shredded duck. The pasta was quite al dente. Those used to the soggy soup-kitchen pasta of the Family Restaurant ilk may be disappointed, but I was taught that this is pretty much the way pasta's supposed to be served. If you can't pick the noodle up with a chopstick without it being squeezed out back onto the plate or fired like a bullet across the table, then it's overcooked. However, I did feel that the duck itself was on the bland side. A few more spices would have made a world of difference. We also tried the Penne Al Salmone Affunicato, penne pasta with smoked salmon and asparagus in a light pink (vodka) sauce. Again, the pasta was al dente. I preferred this dish over the previous one, but since Bro ordered it, I was only able to steal so much. I'm not much one for pasta with salmon, and think that chicken or thin strips of beef would have been better, but this worked well, too.

The Gnocchi Di Patate In Salsa Leggera Di Gorgonzola E Rugola Selvatica is Il Poeta's gnocchi dish. As a guy who loves his gnocchi, it's hard for me to pass up a chance to order new renditions of it. Il Poeta makes their gnocchi like small little oval balls, unlike Uvarara's ginormous ones. The Gorgonzola cheese is very smokey and bitter, like blue or Roquefort, so if you don't like that flavor, you won't like this. It came topped with walnuts (but could use more walnuts) and arugula. Bro was a huge fan, but in spite of what looks like a small amount, it's very heavy and about a third of it had to be taken home. The only meat entree we tried was the Petto Di Pollo In Crosta Di Parmigiano, a tender chicken dish with a Parmesan coating under a lemon white wine sauce with a side of the smoothest mashed potatoes I've ever had. Was the chicken good? Yeah. Was it great? No. The sauce was too tart for me and there was too much of it. I also think that the plate was in desperate need of some dark greens like spinach or Swiss chard. Something rough to help soak up the sauce. Still, I can't avoid recommending it.

For dessert, Bro ordered the Napoleon Cake, a crisp filo dough sandwich filled with strawberries and cream and topped with more powdered sugar than a beignet. My choice was the Panna Cotta. I really like panna cotta and Il Poeta's was no exception, with a strong "but". It was very good BUT they needlessly drowned it in chocolate syrup. It was fine on its own. If you order it, ask for it with a swirl of chocolate (if any) next to the strawberry syrup underneath it and leave it topped with nothing more than a sliced strawberry. Then it would have been perfect. We also ordered a handful of coffees before proceeding to Manor Oktoberfest for a couple liters of beer.

Appetizers are average $10, pasta dishes average $17, and entrees average $22. So expect to spend no less than $50 per person when you factor in tax and tip.

UPDATE - Brunch Report - AGED

2010-04-25T17:32:00.003-04:00

I returned to Aged for Brunch. Went with Bro this time.

Click ---> HERE

Then scroll all the way to the bottom.

DUMPLING CAFE

2010-04-23T07:00:00.001-04:00

DUMPLING CAFE
71-60 Yellowstone Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 268-2099

Dumpling Cafe, the relatively new Chinese/Thai place on Yellowstone where Munch used to be, has been on my map for a while. Before it opened, during the renovation, I stopped in and was given the impression that it was going to be a real restaurant. And it is, sort of. You can sit down and there's table service, but the "waitress" also works behind the counter taking phone calls for takeout and you'll be served on paper plates or from takeout containers.

Deep down, this is another takeout place, and it's pretty much why I became more hesitant to bother reviewing it once it opened. After all, I've already done my Takeout Smackdown and honestly had no interest in reviewing their version of fast food lo mein. Indeed, they're right across the street from Red House Kitchen, the Smackdown winner, and I'll be up front about questioning the financial wisdom of that decision. But it's done and I suppose that Dumpling Cafe's niche could be being the takeout place you don't itch to leave as soon as the food shows up. In other words, it would bank on being "classier". And let's be honest, that doesn't take much effort. Most takeout restaurants have about as much class as wrestling fan after hopping up on an eight ball of Aunt Hazel.

With a name like "Dumpling Cafe" I somewhat expected (indeed I was enthusiastic about) a large dumpling menu. In my head, I kinda thought that they'd be the dumpling specialists. Alas, 'twas not to be. They do serve dumplings, to be sure, but only about a half dozen, and the rest of the menu is pretty much what you'd get just about everywhere else, just with some Thai food thrown in.

Back in the fall, I ventured over and tried their Wonton Soup and the fall special, the Steamed Pumpkin Dumplings. The wonton soup was very good, with scallions, Asian greens and shallots. The wontons were firm, the broth was flavorful. It may well have been the best wonton soup in the area, especially on the cold afternoon that I was eating there. The pumpkin dumplings were considerably less wonderful. They definitely tasted like pumpkin, but they were soggy and drained water like sponges resting in a sink.

Recently, I returned to try Dumpling Cafe again. Again, I didn't try their main dishes, but I did try their Pork Dumplings and Beef Dumplings. I recalled the sogginess of the pumpkin from months ago and, this time, ordered both dumplings fried. But they were only fried to a point. They were still soggy. The pork dumplings were better than the beef by a wide margin. Indeed, the beef dumplings tasted like dumpling with hamburger inside and, for my palate, the combo just tasted didn't work.

Given that Dumpling Cafe serves way fewer dumpling dishes than not, I ordered two staples of any takeout menu: on the Thai side, I ordered Chicken Pad Thai. Mediocre, too tangy, too limp. It felt uninspired even for takeout pad thai. From the Chinese side, Beef With Broccoli. Very very good. Very good. Fresh, crisp broccoli. Lots of beef. A sweet sauce that wasn't gloppy or salty or oily. Truly excellent beef with broccoli.

I also ordered the Scallion Pancakes which were completely forgettable, and a plate of the humongous dumplings pictured below. I liked these but can't for the life of me remember what was in them... spinach I think. They were the best of the lot, albeit I will grant you that such a feat wouldn't be hard to accomplish.

Dumpling Cafe is hit or miss. Some of you will go and find something you really like and will probably order from them constantly. Others will order a couple of times and go back to the tried and true method of ordering from the first menu you pull randomly out of your kitchen drawer. Dumpling Cafe will be my go-to place for beef with broccoli and its ilk, but for dumplings I'll cross the street.

eateryPOLL

2010-04-21T22:14:00.003-04:00

The (first) poll has closed! Almost 50 people chimed in (is that a lot?) and the consensus seems pretty evenly split. In fact, there's no clear winner. Most people aren't total cheapskates (the $15-20 lot), but of those willing to hand out a couple more Jacksons, there's a near even split between them.

So let's do a calculation based on the people willing to spend over $20+ for an entree, in the interest of getting restaurateurs to move here. They can expect that people will be willing to spend $24.77 for an entree at their establishment. I'll round that to $25 for the sake of the math.

Dinner for two.
Entrees: $25 x 2 = $50.00
Appetizers at half entree cost: $12.50 x 2 = $25.00
Desserts at one-third the entree cost: $8 x 2 = $16.00
Decent quality glass of Montepulciano (because I like it): $10 x 2 = $20.00
Coffee/Tea with dessert: $2.50 x 2 = $5.00
TOTAL for two: $116 plus tax and tip.

So for those willing to open up something great here in Forest Hills are, we're willing to drop $116+. We just have one small rule.

Don't suck.

eateryPOLL

2010-04-07T15:56:00.004-04:00

See the right hand column? I'm trying out a poll. If I get enough responses, maybe it'll become a regular part of the eateryROW routine. If not, well, I can't say I didn't try.

Poll #1: How much is it worth to you for your fantasy restaurant to open here in Forest Hills?

EAST OCEAN PALACE

2010-04-01T01:18:00.006-04:00

EAST OCEAN PALACE
113-09 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 268-1668

If you want real and real good Chinese food, not the basic, find-it-on-every-corner fast food stuff, then Flushing's where you need to be. The trouble is, unless you drive, Flushing's real pain in the ass to get to. The bus takes forever. The Roosevelt Avenue subway station, as you make your way to the 7, is so crowded that it's like wading up to your neck in a swamp. You... just... can't... move... Even if you do drive, good luck parking. That's where East Ocean Palace comes in. It's a Chinese restaurant that's a Flushing ex-pat.

Walking inside it's immediately different from anywhere else in the neighborhood. It's super bright. Brighter than McDonalds. The dining room is massive and the least intimate one I've eaten in in years. The smallest table is for four people and about half of the tables there are for groups of eight or more. Decorations are sparse, as though their interior budget was spent only on lighting. The high-backed chairs and large tables make it feel like eating dinner in either a banquet hall without the wedding band or a college cafeteria with tablecloths. English isn't the wait staff's first language (or second), so expect to point a lot if your Chinese is rusty. That said, Bro and I were one of very few white folks here. I took this as a good sign. I don't like my food fake unless that's the point. Romantic, no. Fun, maybe. Group spot for people who like to share lots of food, yeah.

Bro and I started off with dim sum. Fried Bacon-wrapped Shrimp Rolls were the first to arrive and they were just that. Steamed shrimp wrapped in bacon which they deep fry and then serve with a dish of mayonnaise for dipping. My initial thought was bacon and shrimp! I love those. Well, not everything goes together like peanut butter and jelly. It's an acquired taste, to be sure. But hey, you might acquire it. In contrast, the Pan Fried Leek Dumplings were fantastic. Crispy, leeky, tangy. You should definitely get this.

We ordered the Steamed Watercress Su Mai, but they gave us the Steamed Vegetarian Dumplings instead by mistake. I didn't notice until I bit in and found mushroom where watercress should be. It was okay, not amazing, and I was really looking forward to the watercress. Sitting in a wooden steamer tray beneath the vegetarian dumplings (by the way, East Ocean Palace has a huge vegetarian-only menu) were the Royal Steamed Pork Su Mai, Both it and the Hot and Sour Soup were pretty good, but neither blew me away. I still say the best hot and sour soup I've ever had was at Vegetarian Dim Sum House in Chinatown.

For dinner Bro and I ordered two meals to split between us. First, the Fresh Squid with Garlic and Ginger. The squid was very stir fried with dark greens and was very tender. There's always a risk that the squid you will be like chewing on a rubber band and that didn't happen.. It was delicious. We alternated between the squid and the Sauteed Frogs with Vegetables. I must not fit the frog-ordering profile. The waiter's eyebrows went way up. "The frogs? You sure?" I'm sure. Hit me. Actually, I eat frog whenever I see it on a menu. There are two things one needs to know about frog. First, there ain't much meat, so you're usually eating with your fingers to suck on bone. Second, they don't taste like anything you've already had. Or, better described, they tasted like a combo of two things. Like a hybrid of chicken and fish. But unlike bacon-wrapped shrimp, this is one instance where the peanut butter and the jelly go well together.

Dessert isn't even offered, unless you count the orange slices that came with the bill, so have a place in mind when you leave. This meal ended costing $72. Oh, and no tacky fortune cookies, thankfully.

News...

2010-03-26T19:26:00.005-04:00

A couple of closings. First, it was brought to my attention (thanks, Vinny) that Frankie & Joey's is gone. I liked them. You'd think that a pizza place right next to a movie theater would do well. Maybe the landlords were too greedy. Maybe the managers were fiscally sloppy. Maybe there was to much competition in this already pizza-saturated locale.

And, of course, Latin Cubanita, who's been gone for a while. But I walked past for the first time today and grabbed a pic. I think their Queens Center Mall location is still around though.

Ciao, Frankie & Joey. Adios, Latin Cubanita.

News...

2010-03-21T16:32:00.001-04:00

It would appear that Metro Cafe's renovations are complete... in a manner of speaking.

Hopefully, someone will read my wine bar rant and turn this location into a place with a sweet rear garden. And hopefully, that sweet place will have a thoroughly unique menu, a kick-ass wine list, and not be Italian. Thanks, but we have plety of those already.

News...

2010-03-02T16:31:00.002-05:00

This isn't NEW news, but I'm way behind and found this interesting. 5 Burros will be expanding into Red Hook with outdoor space and an improved menu. Why an improved menu? See, Brooklynites have a more refined palate than you plebians.

Click HERE, for the Grub Street mini-article.

UVARARA

2010-03-01T10:00:00.002-05:00

UVARARA
79-28 Metropolitan Avenue
Middle Village, NY 11379
(718) 894-0052

Normally, I'd be hard pressed to post a review on this blog from beyond the bounds of the 11375 zip code, but Uvarara's so good and so close that leaving it out would be as big a crime as your not eating there.

READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE.

CHIC & GREEN CAFE

2010-02-16T09:07:00.001-05:00

CHIC & GREEN CAFE HAS CLOSED.

CHIC & GREEN CAFE
109-23 72nd Road
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(347) 475-0569

If you work in Midtown or FiDi, then you know how the salad cafe has grown into a venomous beast dominating the lunch scene. Pax, Chop't, Hale & Hearty, Cafe Europa, Pret A Manger... and those are just the ones I can name off the top of my head. They all sell salads, soups, sandwiches. Lunch zones where you can get your custom salad with everything. Pax will even take that salad and shred it into an inedible baby-food-like mush if you're so inclined to try drinking your salad through a straw.

Forest Hills has long anticipated its own Midtownesque lunch spot with EuroPan on the corner of Austin and 70th. But as of this writing it's progress is comparable to that of a stranded and dehydrated Bedouin crawling helplessly through the desert in search of water as the cruel Arabian sun saps his energy with each lethargic step. No one seems to have noticed Chic & Green, tucked between Austin and QB on 72nd next door to Best 1 Sushi.

Chic & Green is like a cute, Park Slopey version of the cold salad giants. It sports a bright white interior with light blue tables, and no sodas except the high brow Izzys. I'm not a salad person, but I can attest that the variety of toppings is comparable to the big boys. If memory serves, there are 26. They also serve sandwiches and soups and a handful of desserts. I tried their Mushroom Soup and was impressed. Creamy, not too salty, and with plenty of big chunks of mushroom.

Since salads aren't really my thing, I'll leave to everyone else to critique the place in their comments.

My soup and a water was about $7. Salads start at $6.50 The wi-fi is free.

Brunch Report - NETWORK CAFE

2010-02-09T10:29:00.009-05:00

Brunch Report

NETWORK CAFE & LOUNGE

108-02 72nd Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 263-5700

When I wrote about Network last Spring, I placed it squarely in the mediocre-but-there's-hope category of FH cuisine., but that was before brunch there. Now... who knows...

As many of you are all too painfully aware, getting someone visit you from another borough can be difficult. So I considered myself lucky that FF agreed to shoot on over. I am also lucky that she has a good sense of humor.

We entered Network a somewhere between 12 and 1230. It was dark and deserted. "Are you open?" I asked. Confirmation followed. I grabbed a seat in the corner to get a good camera angle while FF headed downstairs for the bathroom. Her return was prophetic. "How married to getting brunch here are you?" Pretty married. Why? "It's gross downstairs. It smells like sewage, among other bouquets." Luckily for us, up here we can only smell their overpowering use of heavy-duty floor cleaner. "Great. I'm not ordering the fish."

Service was extremely slow. It took so long to get us coffee that I can only guess that we were the first customers of the day and that they had yet to make any. "It's pretty clear that this place hasn't seen capital investment in a decade." FF noted. "I mean, the mirrors behind you are duct taped to the wall. No one's here. How can they possibly afford to stay in business?" Yeah. The shabby-chic look only works if there's some chic to it. I tried defending it, but I could only delude myself for so long. "You've been seduced by the big, red French windows." I'll admit it. They are kinda nice.

So it's grungy and smelly downstairs and dark, dank and broken upstairs. So that's the set-up; let's get to the follow-through. I ordered the Challah French Toast. I don't know what they think challah is, but this wasn't challah. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was the same type of bread they put on the table when we sat down. Shock of shocks, it was awful. FF requested the Eggs Benedict. "And how would you like your eggs?" she was asked. We looked at each other quizzically. How many answers are there to this question? "Benedicted. Benedict the shit outta them" was just about to escape my lips when FF said "Poached? Like it says on the menu?" Ah, the menu. Here's the quote from the it: "Classic two poached eggs served over Canadian bacon with Hollandaise sauce on a toasted English muffin with herb roasted potatoes". Now here's the what was placed in front of her. Take a peek and meet me below the pic.

Okay, so let's start at the beginning. Two poached eggs. So far so good. Served over Canadian bacon. No, she got regular bacon. Okay, no biggie. Personally, I like regular bacon more anyway. But the bacon was cold. So how long was it sitting around waiting for someone to order it? With Hollandaise sauce. Again, no. Hollandaise sauce is egg yolk, lemon juice, and a whole lot o' butter. It's practically florescent. This was some basil pesto concoction. On a toasted English muffin. Another no. The same bread that they confused with Challah was also, apparently, confused with an English muffin. This is the bread of all trades, master of none. With herb roasted potatoes. Uh, French fries. One outta five. ONE. Did they even read their own menu? I mean, the ingredients are literally written right there.

Both meals came with a small salad which, to Network's credit, wasn't bad.

Our two meals cost $37 with tax and tip. We left having not eaten most of our meals and were thinking about going around the corner for something else, but our appetite was gone and we got coffee at Starbucks instead.

THE FAMILY RESTAURANT

2010-02-05T13:00:00.003-05:00

THE FAMILY RESTAURANT
110-80 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 520-1123

I was not looking forward to dinner. "Come on," said Bro. "It's time. Suck it up." See, we had plans to finally sup at The Family Restaurant. The Family Restaurant on Queens Boulevard, for those who don't know, is one of a half dozen or so large Italian restaurants that pepper the dining corridors of Forest Hills. Thus far, my large Forest Hills Italian restaurant experiences have been less than stellar. Pasta Del Giorno. Portofino. They tend to charge far more than any other restaurant would dare to for what you get, and the food has been, and I'm being diplomatic here, a joke. So being 0 for 2, Bro and I sauntered off for Round 3. Will The Family Restaurant resurrect my opinions of these red sauce havens? On our walk, given that the first page of reviews on CitySearch included phrases like "Never ever eat there!!!!!", "pasta out of a box would be better than this!" and "even if I paid $5, I'd feel disappointed." I was predicting that this would be yet another loss.

Walking into TFR is a somewhat interesting affair. For starters, the first person to meet us scowled as though we pushed his kid down to get in. Everyone after this first guy though was very nice. In fact, our Wal Mart greeter aside, if TFR served service instead of food, they'd get high marks. The interior, with its white tablecloths and white cloth napkins, high-backed chairs, bow-tied waiters and lots of reds and browns is extremely old-school. This restaurant exudes the feeling that it's been around for a long time and hasn't changed an iota.

But let's not beat around the bush. Eating in TFR is like having dinner in a retirement home. Save one table of a family with kids running around clanging their forks on their glasses, for most of the meal Bro and I were the youngest people here by thirty years. You can't see them in the pic, but about eight dark still life paintings line the opposite wall, which couldn't help but remind me of Ms. Havisham's inevitable impending doom. If only there was a wedding cake up there...

Still, taste in decorations (or the lack thereof) have nothing to do with the food. Bro ordered the Prosciutto and Melon, which was literally that. Slices of melon that they draped prosciutto on top of like a blanket. If there was an award out there for laziness in presentation, then this would win. Am I being unfair saying that they used a cheap cut of prosciutto? And yet, this might have been the best tasting dish of the night. In all honesty it wasn't that bad. But, come on. They could have at least tried to make the plates look good. Barnes & Noble even sells books on creating garnishes. I opted for the Stuffed Mushrooms appetizer. Not terrible, to be fair, but bland in every sense of the word. The stuffing was a mush of powdered Parmesan cheese and 4C breadcrumbs. The sauce was generic. At least the mushrooms were larger than the tiny insults that I was served Portofino. But again, no presentation. They didn't even wipe the drops from the rim of the plate. (Seriously, do I expect too much? Let me know.)

Both of our entrees came with a choice of salad or pasta on the side, and Bro and I both chose the salad. The salad arrived before the appetizers did and was an interesting mix of lettuce, carrots, one sprig of steamed (or old) cauliflower, one tomato wedge, one black olive, one green olive, a piece of red bell pepper and a jalapeno. This was a diner salad from 1975. I ended up eating the jalapeno and the tomato and then focused on buttering my roll with the gold foil butter pack those same diners give you with your pancakes. But back to dinner. Bro ordered the Filet of Sole Francaise ($17). It was just awful. Francaise sauce is a lemon-butter sauce. There are variations on it, of course, but this one really liked its lemon. It was beyond sour. And the fish was so fishy I found it difficult to take it down. Bro didn't mind it as much as me, which is surprising because he won't eat food that fell on the floor and I will. I ordered the Chicken Cacciatore ($18). It's not small. It's half of a chicken. That's way too big for any normal person and I'm not the type to be wooed by quantity over quality. I'd rather have a fraction of the food, made perfectly, for the price. Alas, this dish was far from perfect. It was greasy and the tomato sauce was cheap. They baked the chicken, skin and all under a large helping of tomato sauce. When the fat melted away it did so right into the sauce*. So while the chicken was so tender I could have cut it with a spoon, it was so greasy that the chicken would have have slid right off from said spoon. If TFR wanted to keep the skin so badly, then what they should have done was blast the chicken (on a rack for drainage) in the oven at 500 degrees for ten minutes to melt the fat off, discard that fat and THEN bake it. This way it wouldn't be sitting in grease. It would also help if they used a better sauce (the same sauce, by the way, as covered the stuffed mushrooms).

* If you look at the pic, you can even see the color shift where the grease becomes tomato sauce.

For dessert, Bro ordered the Home Made Cheesecake, which instead of being smooth like cream cheese, was crumbly like a sand castle. It tasted okay, but the texture was terrible. My dessert was the Home Made Canoli. This wasn't bad, actually, except that the shell was very brittle, like a fortune cookie that never gave me my lucky numbers. Plus, and I'm no accountant, should our two $6.50 desserts and my $2 coffee have totaled $16 and change?

0 for 3.

While The Family Restaurant isn't Balthazar expensive, it's not cheap and it's grossly overpriced. Our meal of two appetizers, two entrees, two glasses of house white, two desserts, one coffee, tax and tip was $103 and change. My advice is to spend your Social Security money HERE or HERE instead.

CHEEBURGER CHEEBURGER vs. JOHNNY ROCKETS

2010-02-01T11:00:00.002-05:00

CHEEBURGER CHEEBURGER VS. JOHNNY ROCKETS

CHEEBURGER CHEEBURGER
108-50 Queens Blvd
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 997-8600

JOHNNY ROCKETS
70-28 Austin Street
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 793-8882

Cheeburger Cheeburger & Johnny Rockets are, at least on paper, the same thing. Burger chains playing homage to the 1950s. Chrome, neon, rock-n-roll, doo-wop, Coca-Cola deification, pink Cadillacs and a commie around every corner. Our particular nook of Queens has both. So who wins? Which chain makes the better burger? Where should we go to spend our hard-earned money when the craving for bun-enclosed grilled beef hits us?

To find out, click HERE for my comparison of Cheeburger Cheeburger and Johnny Rockets (along with Checkers) in Part Six of my eateryROW burger series. Those of you familiar with this series know that I eat at three burger joints per post, tirelessly searching for the best hamburgers NYC has to offer at the expense of both my cholesterol and clothes size. I've come across some real gems in sampling the independent burger joints of the city. This time though, I decided to try the chains.

Brunch Report - BONFIRE GRILL

2010-01-24T13:22:00.005-05:00

Brunch Report
BONFIRE GRILL
72-27 Austin Street
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 268-0707

Unlike dinner, I don't mind eating brunch by myself. It gives me a chance to go through my stack of GQs and work on the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. It does force me, unfortunately, to eavesdrop. Sure, we're all voyeurs. But can't we peek in on lives a bit more interesting? Luckily Megan Fox kept me company.

I arrived at Bonfire this past Sunday for what was my second solo brunch here and was seated at the exact same table as I sat the first time. Bonfire at brunch is loud and lively. Music plays and people enjoy themselves (even the boring ones). The first time I was here, I ordered the Salmon Benedict, an eggs Benedict with salmon instead of bacon, served with sauteed potatoes and onions. Not bad. Not at the same level as the eggs Benedict with filet mignon I got at Q, but pretty good. I ordered a coffee and the meal came with a complimentary screwdriver, which I needed to calm my stomach after nearly drowning myself in Ri 1 at a Brooklyn whiskey bar the night before. On visit two, I ordered the Uptown Pancakes with Chocolate Chips, three or four wide pancakes, dusted with sugar and served with berries. I also asked for a (complimentary) grapefruit juice and a coffee. These, while not bad, were somewhat disappointing. They were chewier than they were fluffy. It would be an exaggeration to describe it as somewhat like cutting into a rubbery yoga mat, but you get the idea. Next time, I'm sticking with Bonfire's Benedict options.

Both of my visits cost the same, with tax and tip: $19.

eateryROW: flickr

2010-01-21T14:49:00.001-05:00

eateryROW: flickr

Unless I have no choice, I always use my own photos here on eateryROW. So I've literally taken thousands of photos over the years just thanks to eating out. I use very few of them. Just ask Mr. Dogz, who constantly picks at me for me for being too picky with the pics. But recently, in a fit of bored pretension, I decided that I'd put the ones I like the best in their very own flickr gallery. Some of the photos have never made it into the blog, though most have. Some of the restaurants have yet to be reviewed; some of them no longer even exist.

They were fun to take, so I hope you like 'em. And if you don't, feel free to curse me out.

Though if you do like 'em, friend me or something on flickr and Facebook and Twitter. The more the merrier.

MANOR OKTOBERFEST

2010-01-17T18:51:00.001-05:00

MANOR OKTOBERFEST

73-11 Yellowstone Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375

(718) 544-2400

Forest Hills may not have a beer garden the likes of which Astoria does, but with the arrival of Manor Oktoberfest, we're slightly closer. Manor Oktoberfest easily has the most unique beer selection in the neighborhood and, with the available sizes ranging from your everyday bottle to a 2-liter "boot", you can get happily sauced.

Manor Oktoberfest originally began as a small bar/cafe at the Atlas Park shopping complex. I asked the manager there if they were planning to close that one now that the larger Yellowstone site has opened. He told me that the small space will remain despite the expansion.

Despite Manor Oktoberfest trying to make its mark as a beer hall, and despite being one of the few bars in the neighborhood without a giant Bud Light logo glowing in the window, you should read this more as a review of the restaurant than of the bar. I'll merely mention that, from my point of view, I'd prefer going here to hang out and have a beer than almost anywhere else in the neighborhood.

Bro and I showed up at 10pm on a hungry Friday night. It was admittedly late for dinner, but the kitchen doesn't close until 11, thank goodness. Manor Oktoberfest is not small. The bar area, which has its own little loungey section by the windows, was fairly crowded, but the dining area, with its exposed brick walls and countless beer steins on display, was relatively quiet. In keeping with its attempt to be a beer hall, the booths are huge. Bro and I were led to one that could easily seat 8 people. Manor Oktoberfest, unlike almost any other bar (or even restaurant) in recent memory, is inordinately bright. It's not as bright as a fast food restaurant, but it's brighter than my apartment. Anyway, I ordered a liter of an unpronounceable (to me) dark ale and we proceeded to figure out our dinner.

We began with a hearty helping of carbohydrates. Bro ordered Pierogies. For those of you who don't know what they are, first, for shame. Go order some. They're a fried dough stuffed with mashed potatoes and served with sour cream (I like mine with both sour cream and apple sauce). These were smaller than the ones I'm used to having, but they were very good nonetheless. My appetizer was Potato Pancakes, served with apple sauce. Watch the roof of your mouth. These things, while tasty (of course), will scald you.

They make no pretense about this being a fancy place, as the pics of the food can attest. There is no art here, just German comfort food. Bro ordered the Jaegerschnitzel, a breaded pork cutlet that's been pounded as flat as a pancake, fried, and then served under a mushroom sauce over fried potatoes. I liked this a lot, and so did he. But it's heavy and half of it was taken home to be eaten the next day. My choice was the Sauerbraten, thin strips of beef, covered in gravy and served on a bed of spaetzle with a small side of pickled cabbage. Not a bad dish per se, but I preferred Bro's dinner over mine. It was also unfinishable.

Bro and I had been to Manor Oktoberfest one weekend recently for lunch and grabbed some sausages. Bro tried the Kielbasa, serve on a bun with sauerkraut and potato salad. I tried the Oktoberfest Bratwurst, also on a jumbo hot dog bun and with a small side of potato salad. Both were great, though I preferred the Bratwurst. Similar in shape to a giant hot dog but with a smooth spiciness that hotdogs don't have. Hot dogs are boring by comparison.

Entrees ran us somewhere in the upper teens, but there's also a large sandwich, hamburger and salad menu to choose from that's slightly less pricey. Appetizers are between $6 and $10. We stumbled out of Manor Oktoberfest so full that dessert didn't even cross our minds.

Manor Oktoberfest is closed Mondays.

GREEN SKY

2010-01-07T15:05:00.002-05:00

GREEN SKY HAS CLOSED

GREEN SKY
70-11 Austin Street
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 575-0560

Forest Hills has a new ethnicity of cuisine for the first time in a long time. Italian, Japanese and Thai restaurants seem to breed like mice. Every time we turn around, there's another one. Suddenly along comes Green Sky, a small Korean restaurant in the subterranean level of the black, evil-looking sovietesque office/retail plaza on Austin Street.

Green Sky operates heavily, if not almost exclusively, on takeout. This is rammed home by the fact that even as an eat-in customer, I was served in takeout containers, just without the lid. Each time I've been there, I've been the only diner. But there isn't that much seating anyway. Save for a few tables at the front and one large one in the back, most of the chairs are face-the-wall bar-style. Thus, unlike most restaurants, and certainly unlike most restaurants in this particular neighborhood, Green Sky is a good place to dine alone.

Green Sky's menu is matched in size to its physical space. They don't play around trying to fill a hundred tastes and instead focus on about ten dishes. So the four dishes I tried cover a huge chunk of the menu. From the top photo to the bottom, I've tried the following: The Bibimbap, a rice dish with beef, bamboo shoots, carrots, egg, lettuce, cucumber and a hoisin-style sauce that you can add for a little tang. It's more sweet than hot and I'd recommend it. It came with a thin but good miso soup. If you like your dishes with the contrasts of hots and colds, then you will like the bibimbap. Next, I tried the Bulgogi Burrito, a Korean homage to Tex-Mex. Beef with Asian veggies and cheese, wrapped in a burrito shell. I was impressed. It might have been the best dish of the ones I tried.

In contrast, the Mandu Dumplings were the worst. The ground chicken inside them was grainy and powdery-dry, the vegetables weren't too plentiful, and the shell was too fragile to pick up without shredding. I squeezed plain-old soy sauce from a disposable packet over them, but it didn't help and I tossed them before I finished. Finally, the Bulgogi Deopbap, a beef and vegetable stir-fry with a side of rice and a miso soup. The beef was sweet and quite good with the very sticky rice, but there could have been a bit more sauce. By the end, it was getting dry. Still, it was filling and worth all of its seven or eight bucks.

The prices range from about $5 to $12. Sodas cost $1.25. Green Sky offers free ($0) coffee and free green tea to its customers, which is a nice perk. They also have a computer available so you can browse the web or check your email. I know that this kind of thing is popular in Europe and Asia, but here and in the age of smartphones, it just seems gimmicky. There are, unfortunately, no Korean desserts, and no one should confuse Green Sky with a full-on, regular Korean restaurant. But if you want a cheap, decent meal or perhaps haven't ever had Korean food before, Green Sky should definitely be on your list of places to hit up.

NICK'S BISTRO

2010-01-01T15:06:00.000-05:00

NICK'S BISTRO
104-20 Metropolitan Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 544-NICK

For quite some time, I'd been hoping that a new restaurant would venture forth into the neighborhood which would impress me enough to want to leave and start bragging. Nick's Bistro is pretty new and it's in the neighborhood, but I don't think the brags are gonna commence any time soon. The truth is, it's a downright disappointment.

In case you fail to notice the signage as you wander by (or as you sit in a traffic jam), Nick's is the Greek restaurant on Metropolitan Avenue with the multicolor lamps fading from white to green to purple to yellow, shooting up the facade of the building. Seemingly a fun and trendy place, Bro and I were determined to check out the fare here and so, just after the plows managed to clear enough snow to permit egress from our toasty warm apartments, we slogged south and ambled in, pleasantly surprised at how many people were already there. Other diners is a welcome sign, but lest I not remember my lesson from the Portofino fiasco, I kept an open mind. Nick's is well-lit, but not oppressively so. There's an overall feeling that, if they played their cards right, the restaurant could be a great go-to place for just about any occasion (dates, hanging with friends, etc.).

But, and I'm not trying to be mean here, they did a lot wrong.

First, our waitress, while otherwise nice, spent more time flirting with the people at the bar than almost anything else. Trying to get her attention to pay the check, I was literally waving my arms at her for a few minutes. And she was facing me. The HDTV playing ESPN or whatever over the bar is fine for a TGIFriday's, but it sucks class out of the room like a vacuum. Danny Brown isn't losing any sleep. Of course, TV or no TV, it wasn't the ritziest move of all time to send a guy around with a broom to sweep the floors and under the tables while everyone was eating. Sure, I know Nick's isn't trying to be Le Cirque, and it's better than him wandering around with a mop and one of those wheeled buckets, but having someone do the cleanup up while you're eating makes you feel like they want to close ASAP and can't wait to kick you out.

The menu is burger, bar snacks, and salad heavy. But there are real Greek appetizers and entrees. In fact, I liked that the menu was relatively small. Large menus are always a bad sign. When a restaurant has to cover fifty dishes, it's a good bet that none of them will be very good. But then Nick's fooled me by having almost as many specials as they did regular items on the menu. It was flabbergasting. So, true to form, the volume of dishes translated into relative mediocrity across the board.

Bro and I started with the Grilled Octopus and the Greek Vegetable Chips appetizers. The grilled octopus was extremely tender with no rubberiness whatsoever. I was impressed with the texture, but the aftertaste was decidedly too fishy. The vegetable chips were essentially batter-fried zucchini with a tzatziki sauce to dip them in. They tasted fine, but there isn't much else to say about them beyond their being a more healthy version of french fries.

For dinner, Bro ordered the Lobster Ravioli, not the most Greek thing on the menu, but I wasn't about to argue with him. Especially since I ordered the Grilled Swordfish. The ravioli was okay. Nothing special, really. He found them somewhat bland, but didn't complain about them beyond that. I tried it and also found it lacking, but it wasn't bad. My dinner was somewhat less awe-inspiring. Look at the picture below. Does that look like $24? For that kind of money, I'd like something more impressive than a virtually flavorless slab of fish with some asparagus and a lemon wedge. I chose the asparagus over a potato or rice and viewed this as another bad sign. If the restaurant offers you a choice of sides, it's because the chef doesn't know which one should go with it. This is a typical chain restaurant move, but I don't usually spend $24 on an entree at a chain restaurant. I expected more.

By this point, Bro was pretty much done spending his money, but I'm a sucker. I wanted to try the desserts. There's no menu, just a verbal list. I ordered the Baklava. And I was pleasantly surprised! So was Bro. Dessert was easily the best part of the meal.

Two appetizers, two entrees, one beer, one soda, one dessert, one coffee, one tea, tax and tip totaled $88.

Brunch Report - AGED

2009-12-13T16:22:00.002-05:00

Brunch Report

AGED
107-04 70th Road
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 544-2433

Other than Q, Aged is arguably the most upscale restaurant we have this side of Danny Brown and their brunch, while not unreasonably priced, wasn't cheap. You get either a coffee or a juice with your meal, but not both, and no complimentary bloody mary, either. There weren't too many patrons during my meal, but the ones that were there reflected that the management has been quite successful in drawing in those who would be right at home on the Upper East Side.

It was raining out this particular late-morning and the interior was dimly lit. In fact, it wasn't bright when I walked in, and they actually dimmed the lights further about halfway through my first cup of coffee. I have no idea why. It was dark on the inside and bleak on the out, and this made me feel as though it was somewhere around 5 in the evening instead of 11:30 in the morning.

Aged's serves the standard brunch options one would find on any self-respecting brunch menu. French toast, waffles, omelette's, a burger, steak and eggs, pancakes, some wraps, eggs benedict, etc. In other words, it's a real brunch menu. I chose the French Toast with Raspberry. Rather than serve two thick slabs of the egg-batter drenched squishy fried bread, they serve six thin whole-grain ones, laid out simply, without any garnish, on a long plate with a dusting of powdered sugar and a hearty drizzling of raspberry preserve syrup. While the meal itself tasted just fine, unfortunately, by making the toast so thin, the preserves soaked through quite easily and it was overly tart. Good thing they gave me butter. My advice, thicken up that toast. As for the garnish, given that Aged is dying to be seen as a Manhattan establishment that just happens to be in Queens, a half dozen raspberries on my raspberry french toast would have been appreciated.

I also ordered a large grapefruit juice and a cup of coffee. One nice touch was that when the cup ranneth dry, I was given a little silver coffee carafe to refill it with at my leisure. Bonus points there. And gone were the cheapo butter packets from my last review. Is it only a brunch thing? I'm sure that someone out there who's eaten at Aged in the last month or so can leave a comment letting us all know.

Regarding the service, I have zero complaints. My waiter was seemed like a very nice guy and was neither AWOL nor routinely bothering me with "how's your meal, sir?" It's nice to be able to read your magazine in peace. So, although the food I ordered certainly had a some room for improvement, it wasn't bad and I can certainly see myself returning to try their other options.

The french toast, grapefruit juice, and coffee, with tax and tip came in just shy of $20.

UPDATE: 4/25/10:

I returned for brunch with Bro today. We got there around 11:45 and they were pretty empty, but packed by 12:30. Despite having three waiters, they were overworked and getting their attention required firing flares into the sky. I ordered the Classic Eggs Benedict, with spinach. Not bad, as far as eggs benedict go. I was pleased. The home fries that came with it were pretty good too. No complaints except the price, which was $17. A little steep in my book. Bro ordered the Omelet, but that's code for "three eggs with bacon". He ordered them scrambled, so hardly an omelet. And again, $12 for three eggs? But who in their right mind would order scrambled eggs for $12?

I know that many among you have been disappointed in the Aged brunch, but I wonder if that disappointment would die down if the prices did too. Bro had never been there before and he was impressed with the interior. He said that it was nice to have a place that felt like more than a ho-hum diner to eat in. He also liked that as the afternoon got older, the crowd got younger. It's a sign of the change, he noted.

Brunch Report - Q

2009-12-07T00:24:00.001-05:00

Brunch Report
Q

108-25 Ascan Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 261-6599

I got home Saturday night at about 8am Sunday morning. Waking from my sleep, all three hours of it, I felt... used up. I was still wearing the now-way-more-wrinkled clothes from the night before, my mouth tasted like the business side of a construction site and I was so dehydrated that my knuckles started to crack and bleed. At least I don't get hangovers. Okay, I told myself, shaking off the grogginess, time for food. I stood outside Q, the neighborhood's upscale Thai restaurant, until they opened at the late-for-brunch hour of noon killing time by alternating between the Kings of Leon and talking on the phone.

I was the only customer at Q, which alleges to have a brunch menu. I say "alleges" because it isn't really true unless pad thai counts as a brunch dish (it doesn't). So I ordered the Eggs Benedict (the only brunch option other than mango pancakes). The eggs benedict were served with a small side salad and a hash brown. You can get it made one of three ways: with Canadian bacon, smoked salmon, or filet mignon. Naturally I chose filet mignon... I mean, like, come on. And they were fantastic. Perfect runny eggs, perfect steak, perfect sauce. The perfect brunch.

But great dish aside, Q doesn't seem to really want your brunch business. They open too late, so everyone leaving the 10am church services won't go there, their menu is geared for lunch with the aforementioned exceptions, and it's all a la carte. So my eggs did not come with coffee, or juice, or a mimosa or bread basket. At least the coffee refills were free this time.

This ambivalence is a definite shame. Clearly Q can make a great brunch, and the atmosphere, with its wicker sofas, jazzy lounge music and upscale decor is everything that great bruncheterias should have in my fantasy-laden stereotype-heavy mind.

The eggs benedict, a coffee, a large orange juice, tax and tip cost about $23.

crazy little thing called brunch...

2009-12-01T14:51:00.000-05:00

crazy little thing called brunch...

I moved to Forest Hills after returning from the Victorian dorms and Gothic cathedral libraries and Latin crests of college. At the time, brunch wasn't on the radar. But in the span of mere months, brunch suddenly became important. Brunch! It was rising up, little sister, turning on the light when I was still exhausted. It was breakfast with liquor. It was eggs benedict and espresso. It was waffles that didn't come out of a toaster. It was dating. It was friends. It was flirting with the hostess at Alice's Tea Cup to avoid the two-hour long waits. It was the East Village, where people line up down the block. It was Park Slope, where you can't walk ten feet on a late Sunday morning without someone sticking a mimosa in your face. It was the Meatpacking District eating between celebrities and their tourist gawkers. It was, my MetroCard refills kept telling me, not Forest Hills.

Brunch. Half breakfast, half lunch, it seems, defines the dining character of a neighborhood. The better the brunch options, the better the dinner options. Maybe this is because brunch neighborhoods are foodie neighborhoods and foodie neighborhoods demand a certain level of goodtasteitude that other places are ambivalent about. Maybe its because foodies who need to fight their hangover with a prescription-strength mimosa don't want to walk very far to the pharmacy in the morning and, like tortoises, all magically find their way to living in certain key parts of town.

I lament the lack of brunch options our neck of the woods. See, it's not about being open at the same time as brunch, or about even having a menu with the word "brunch" on top. One lazy day in the not-too-distant past, Bro pointed at one of the sections in the menu of the Forest Hills Diner, "See? Brunch." I just shook my head sadly. Sorry, man. Calling your breakfast menu brunch, or calling your lunch menu brunch just because you offer a complimentary bloody mary with it... Not the same thing. A diner doing brunch is like Miley Cyrus singing Portishead. It's just a foolish waste of time. Brunch requires a certain je nais se quoi.

Speaking of je nais se quoi, there once was a French restaurant on 70th Road called Rouge that had a great brunch. The rest of their food was solidly forgettable, but not so with the brunch. Alas, they passed on to the great MenuPages listing in the sky. Aged now has a brunch, which I vow to try. In fact, I'm going to try to do 'em all. Bonfire, Just Like Mother's, Network, Danny Brown... I'll skip La Terrazza, which does its brunch "buffet style" for those just dying for breakfast to remind them of their stay in a cheap Las Vegas hotel. But I think it's time to start encouraging brunch again. Wake up, get out of bed, drag a comb across your head.

Brunch. It's the most important meal of your Sunday afternoon.

KNISH NOSH

2009-11-15T15:22:00.000-05:00

KNISH NOSH
100-30 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 897-5554

Knish Nosh, here on the corner of Queens Boulevard and 67th, is like stepping back in time to 1971. If Gene Hackman pulled up in a dented Plymouth sporting a porkpie and sat down next to me, I might not have batted an eye. You almost feel like there needs to be an automat down the block.

The blue and white interior, with its faded-to-brown newspaper reviews on the windows, the pale glows from their neon, and their polished aluminum tables and chairs hearken back to a time when diners and delis couldn't care less about decor and the only flavor coffee came in was wet. If Knish Nosh was in Williamsburg, hipsters would flood the place for its retro, purposefully un-modern feeling and Time Out New York would set up a satellite office there. But damn it if Forest Hills ain't Billyburg.

Knish Nosh's knishes might be Forest Hills' most famous culinary export, and since they'll deliver wherever you want them to, exporting isn't just a phrase. I had 50 shipped to my office last year. Each knish probably weighs about a pound and is larger than your average sized fist. You can get them in over a dozen flavors beyond the original potato. Mushroom, ground beef, spinach...

Each of the Knishes I've had here over the years have all been good, with a crispy shell and piping hot filling. But you have to like, or not mind, getting a week's worth of carbs in one meal, and I won't gloss over the extreme guilt I feel whenever I eat here... my poor waistline. I debated describing every knish I've tried, but I've decided that doing such a thing would be overkill. You either like giant potato/meat/cheese/veggie filled baked pies or you don't. I do, especially the beef one (see photo, left side). As for their Matzo Ball Soup, which I tried on my most recent excursion, skip it. Fatty broth and timid matzo balls.

The average knish is $3.50. The board is only about half the menu.

THAI AUSTIN

2009-11-06T15:17:00.003-05:00

THAI AUSTIN HAS CLOSED.

THAI AUSTIN

70-15 Austin Street
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 268-1470

Thai restaurants come in two basic varieties. Variety one is, or tries to be, trendy. Variety two is plain-Jane. Thai Austin is a plain-Jane Thai restaurant that, if the number of pickups is any indication, makes most of its money on takeout. Buried in the basement of the black architectural nightmare across from Lucille Roberts, Thai Austin is almost hidden from the bustle of the shoppers above.

Once inside, Thai Austin is dark, but not in a romantic way. Some Thai-esque things line the wall, and a Buddha statue fountain with a glowing blue ball in his hands sits between the tables for two and the tables for four. I feel that Thai Austin could have a certain fun kitchiness to it if it were crowded all the time. Instead, its usually empty dining room gives off a lonely aura. It feels like the kind of place Philip Marlowe would eat Thai food in while thunderstorms pounded the city beyond the window...

But for those New Yorkers who do venture into this little hole of a restaurant, some surprises may await within. The Thai Spring Rolls and the Chicken Dumplings are not among them however. The spring rolls are totally generic and the dumplings were soggy and saturated. The Thai Hoo Tod, a fried tofu appetizer, was decent, but depended very heavily on the sweet peanut dipping sauce that came with it. And you don't get nearly enough. However, there is a soup there, a Chicken Vegetable Soup that I failed to get the name of, which is absolutely fantastic. Chicken, Asian greens, garlic and scallions served boiling hot, but packed to the brim with flavor.

Where this restaurant really shines is in its entrees. Nothing that I ordered here recently has been greasy or bland. The Salmon Penang, a broiled salmon fillet in a penang curry sauce with bell peppers, onions, carrots and bok choi was delicious. No fishy taste, nicely spicy, perfectly flaky without being dry at all, I can't recommend this enough. The Chicken Thai Classic with Basil Sauce, chicken in a basil sauce, served with chili, onion, fresh basil and bell pepper was similarly good. To embrace my inner vegetarian, I also tried the Mussamun Curry with Tofu Duck, served with potato, peanuts, onion and coconut. This curry is not terribly hot, but the sweet and spicy flavors mingle well together. And while no one who has had the real thing will ever be fooled by the tofu duck, they actually do a pretty good job and it's a nice distraction from the same meats/protein alternatives over and over, again and again. Give it a try, I think you'll like it.

The average appetizer at Thai Austin is $5 and the entrees range from $10 to $20.

SAHARA HALAL

2009-10-30T13:12:00.000-04:00

SAHARA HALAL

Continental Avenue East
Forest Hills, NY 11375
Phone? This is a cart.

When the Halal cart appeared on Continental a couple years back, there was a mixed bag of emotions. Occupying the pro-cart side were those who felt that the availability of a five dollar lunch was a.) about time and b.) simply FH taking its place as a part of the city, a sign that we weren't some forgotten quasi-suburb. On the anti-cart side were those who felt that it cheapened the neighborhood. I remember people pressuring (or talking about pressuring) the city counsel to get rid of the carts, the Nuts4Nuts guys, the fruit stands. This wasn't midtown Manhattan, some argued. The sidewalks are too narrow, came others. I don't like smelling the food when I walk by, was another complaint.

I stood then, as I stand now, squarely on the "pro-carts" side of the debate. The sidewalk argument just isn't accurate, as it's plenty wide (see photo); the we're-not-midtown argument is irrelevant, neither is Roosevelt Avenue and one of the cart guys there wins awards for his food; the smell argument is just plain grasping at straws. I like warm peanuts and can't complain about getting produce for less with no line. As for the cart, given the economy, I'll never complain about lunch or dinner for $5 ($6 with a Diet Coke).

So how is the food? First, this is cart food. I won't lie and say it looks appetizing. It's like getting fast food takeout only way faster and looks like slop. But if you're looking for gourmet from a cart, you really need to get out more (or try Bistro Truck). The cart offers gyros and platters of chicken or lamb with rice and a "salad" of lettuce and tomato. They stopped selling falafel and french fries. I'm not sure why, but my guess is a broken fryer. Most recently, I went for the lamb platter. Lamb with rice and the salad I mentioned. Hot sauce and white sauce, please, and don't skimp on the hot. The lamb was far less greasy than some of the carts that I've tried in Manhattan (and I've tried a lot of them) and came with onion, which is an important addition from my culinary point of view. It alters the flavor profile dramatically and in a good way.

Long story short. For a quick, cheap bite at any time of the day or night, our local version of the Halal cart does its job pretty damn well.

...actually, this should read "the only 1 in Town"... don'tcha' think?

BANGKOK CUISINE

2009-10-27T14:02:00.000-04:00

BANGKOK CUISINE

107-18 70th Road
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 261-4005

Bangkok Cuisine, a laid-back and hip-esque restaurant with a decidedly un-hip name, occupies the far end of Forest Hills' restaurant lane on 70th Road, right next to the new, trendy-to-a-fault MoCA. There are so many Thai restaurants in the neighborhood that they seem to blend into each other to the point that it's hard to pick one real winner, and such is the case here. Bangkok Cuisine is just as good as the others, maybe slightly better. So because the food of Thai restaurant X is pretty much on par with Thai restaurant Y, I usually decide where to go based on what kind of mood I'm in at the time.

Bangkok Cuisine has a modern interior, like a wannabe Spice but without the budget, so I tend to go there with newcomers to the area. I like the vibe and so do they. Plus, the chef, who sometimes delivers the food to your table, is dressed like he used to be a member of the Hell's Angels, chain and all, which is just plain awesome.

Let's talk about Bangkok Cuisine's cons and then work our way into the food. Bangkok Cuisine is more expensive than most of its competition, and sodas are in those cutesy mini-Coke bottles, so you don't get much and can't get a free refill. The name is laughable. No one calls their restaurant "French Restaurant". If they named it "Thai Food Here" it would at least have attitude. The dragon logo is awful. Awful, awful, awful. The modern theme of the physical space should be carried out across the whole of the business, not forgotten when the time came to printing business cards and menus and napkins (which even has a typo!). And turn off the bubblegum pop music. It's hideous and distracting. Play technopop or something other than the Pussycat Dolls and the entire Michael Jackson library.

But at the end of the day, most of the food is in fact good. And I'll be honest, I eat here more than any of the other Thai restaurants put together.

As I've said, I've been to Bangkok Cuisine numerous times, and most of the time, I don't bother bringing a camera or notepad. Thank goodness for paper napkins. The Golden Curry Puffs, a potato, chicken, curry pastry served with a sweet cucumber dipping sauce is flat-out incredible. They might be the best I've ever had. Certainly, they're the best I've had in the past few months. Likewise was the Rom Yum Koong, a hot and sour soup with lemongrass, galaga, lime leaves, and mushroom. Delicious, especially if you like it when your soup clears your sinuses. The Thai Spring Rolls, a deep fried cabbage cigar, served with a plum sauce was a very good, standard dish. Crisp, but not burned or greasy.

Bangkok Cuisine's entrees, while good, are a bit more spotty than their appetizers. On the one hand there is the Beef Pad Se Ew, a stir fry of flat noodles with egg, vegetables and beef. The egg was overly pungent, the beef too chewy, and the dish overall too oily. The Beef with Cashews were okay, but not great. It was also a stir fry of pineapple, carrots, peppers, zucchini, onion, but they skimped on the cashews in favor of loading the dish up with veggies. I suppose that this is healthier, but the cashews lend the dish a ton of flavor and, given that they're in the name of the entree, you'd figure there'd be more of them.

On the other hand, the Pad Ke Maow, Bangkok Cuisine's drunken noodle dish of stir fried onion, pepper, basil and roast Peking duck, is possibly the best drunken noodle I've ever had. It's hard for me to order other things when I'm here. The Masaman Beef Curry is also excellent. Chic peas, sweet onion, zucchini, peppers, potato. It is a little bit liquidy, so don't pass on dumping that rice in to sponge up the sauce.

Appetizers average $8, entrees average $15, lunch averages $10.

it's wine bar time people...

2009-10-17T15:39:00.000-04:00

it's wine bar time, people....

It's fall, and fall is wine season. This begs the question: Why don't we have any wine bars in Forest Hills?

Let me repeat that, because it may have been confusing. WHY DON'T WE HAVE ANY WINE BARS IN FOREST HILLS?

Feel free to fill the comments section with your speculations and postulations. But don't be confused. While technically Q and Danny Brown (and the nearby Uvarara) call themselves "wine bars", they are, in reality, restaurants with good wine lists. Don't get me wrong, a good wine list is a damn sure step in the right direction, but it's not the same thing. A wine bar survives by selling you wine. Having a kitchen is a perk. A restaurant survives by having a menu. Having a part of that menu devoted to wine is its perk.

So why would Forest Hills lack a wine bar? Park Slope has them, Williamsburg has them, Astoria has them. What do they have that we don't? And so I wake in the morning and I step outside and I take a deep breath and I get real high and I scream from the top of my lungs, "What's going on?!?"

The Wine Bars Ain't Cheap Argument: Good wine bars will sell good wine (cough, not Yellow Tail, cough, not Berenger, cough) and good wine typically gets sold for $30 and up per bottle. Maybe wine bars are just too expensive for our poor 'hood? Wait a sec. I saw a Bentley, a Ferrari and a Maserati all on the same day here last week, and those things ain't free. Plus, with the Gardens mansions, the Windsor luxocondos, and the disgusting, gargantuan "homes" north of QB that are so horrendously ugly that I can't decide whether to laugh at them or cry at their existence (seriously, those things are basically architectural litter. Someone should do something about them.), this argument doesn't seem to hold water.

The Wine Bars Are Too Young And Trendy Argument: Wine bars are, apparently, for cool people. Specifically young cool people. Forest Hills, while inching younger, is no Williamsburg or Astoria. There just isn't a customer base. The old would rather eat bad Italian food and the middle aged don't want to hang around with the 20/30-somethings that would make up the bulk of the soon-to-be-tipsy. This makes some sense, but we have two (2!) hookah lounges here. I sure didn't see that coming, but there they are. Someone has to be supporting them and what better atmosphere is there than having a bottle of Cabernet followed up with a little apple smoke?

The Wine Bars Are Kinda Gay Argument: There are, naturally, those who associate wine bars with being gay (apparently gay people like wine more than straight people... and this whole time I would have gone with cosmos ). "Shit, a wine bar? How girly is that? Give me a dive bar with cheerleader posters, an MGD neon sign and a condom machine in the bathroom." While dive bars have their place (rarely) and while I'm the last guy to badmouth a hot cheerleader, I'm way too secure in being straight to concern myself with whether or not some guy who thinks $3 silver bullets are a great way to spend a Friday night thinks I'm gay. Aside from that fact that I happen to think that silver bullets are pretty girly, the "What am I, a homo?" argument is probably coming from the mouth a someone who fantasizes about getting a happy ending from a tranny hooker in Queensbridge. So let's all join hands and disregard this phobic crap. Kumbaya.

The Forest Hills Loves Beer Instead Argument: Maybe Forest Hillians are beer people. Maybe we love pints over pinots, kegs over legs, stouts over syrahs. But wait. Queens used to be famous for beer gardens. But do we have a single one? Shit, there isn't even one bar with an impressive micro-brews or craft-brew menu (and I don't count Bud Light Lime). What we have are a half dozen bars with the same ten mega-breweries on tap and maybe a special here or there. I've been to bars with fifty or sixty beers available, none of which you've ever heard of but where the bartenders can explain the nuances of each one. Belgian, French, German, Czech, British. Upstate NY, Michigan, Washington, Oregon. Chocolate, Cherry, Honey, Blueberry. We seem to have a dearth of places that will serve us what we could get at the supermarket, and that ain't love in my book.

So... why?

Okay, reasons why aside, where would it go? Sure, there are about half a dozen empty storefronts of varying sizes along Austin Street, and they're fine, but if you're gonna rant like me, you should try to think outside of the box. So here are three locations that I think would work:

One: Station Square. It's got the perfect atmosphere for what a wine bar should be. The cobblestone, the trees, the proximity to the subway, the proximity to shopping., the proximity to my apartment. If only the Christian Science Reading Room would move... I mean, I've never seen anyone actually inside. A prime location that's one step away from being abandoned is enough to make me tear up.

Two: Burns Street. There used to be a convenience store called Bobby O's Stadium Market, run by a chronic-talker and who scared away most of his customers. He'd lurk outside the store and stop people as they walked by. God help you if you had a dog or a stroller. Babies and dogs were like catnip to this guy. If you ever went inside, he wouldn't let you leave. I know. I tried to buy milk once. It took twenty-five minutes and I was the only guy in the store. But anyway, Burns is a quiet street with trees and limited traffic. It's convenient to Austin Street, but being on the other side of the country club, it's somewhat invisible. It would be a perfect spot for a local, hidden gem wine bar. And since wine bars are quiet places, more about talking and jazz than about hooking up and dancing, I don't predict problems with the locals. Plus, it's just a few blocks from The Wine Room of Forest Hills, so delivery would be a snap. Note. This would also be a great coffee shop location...

Three: A renovated Metro Cafe: Metro Cafe, on Metropolitan Avenue, recently changed ownership so I won't review them for a little while. They could turn themselves into a wine bar with minimal effort. Already there are the exposed brick walls, the cushioned chairs, the small tables, the candles, the cutesy wall sconces, the bar. They have a large outdoor seating area that reminds me of the places I've been to in Cobble Hill. Finally, they have a menu that, having eaten there recently, can be easily thrown away. I mean, it's all diner food and bulk wine. If they can talk to a wine store about getting real wine, revamp the menu (ahem, no fried food), throw away the big-screen TV sitting in the corner (wine bars don't host Superbowl parties), and hire a real chef (not a cook) to come up with some small plates dishes, they could be very impressive. But I won't kid myself, this isn't likely to happen. Metro has a ton of loyal folks who go there and hang out for hours smoking and drinking and eating chicken fingers. They spend money there and I'll bet won't like to see their clubhouse shift gears. Let's be honest, I don't blame them. This is a risk, for sure. Will the owner want to take a risk when he's already making money with the status quo?

In the meantime, we will all just have to wait until someone comes along to start something that, if done right, would have, quite literally, no competition whatsoever. But I think it would be successful. Look at Martha's Country Bakery. They have no meaningful competition and are packed late even in the middle of the week.

DIRTY PIERRE'S

2009-10-08T21:48:00.000-04:00

UPDATE: Sadly, Dirty Pierre's no longer does the AYCE mussel Tuesdays.

DIRTY PIERRE'S
15 Continental Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 830-9698

Dirty Pierre's has... changed. It's a lot less dirty these days.

I used to be unable to qualify it. What was it? Was it a dive bar or a bistro? Was it cute and quaint, or a pit?

It used to be that, sitting on the cobblestones of Station Square, amongst the trees, and often with a Porsche or Corvette or Ferrari parked out front, it was the perfect place for the upscale Gardens residents and their accessory-dogs to go sit outside for all-you-can-eat mussels and a glass of white. But if they went inside, they might melt. The bar was one of the dankest and darkest available in the zip code with tables so sticky that they might have held your plate steady in an earthquake. And that stickiness might have been the only thing holding them together, as each one looked to be in worse condition than the one next to it. It was a dive bar that made other dive bars feel clean.

But now it's clean. And there are tablecloths (or at least that white paper that pretends to be a tablecloth) and there are even little tea lamps. God help me, it's gone from dive to faux-dive. Luckily, there's still no beer available on tap and you can still be served horrible, paper thin Bud Light by an aging biker in a leather vest and a beard that would make ZZ Top proud.

Dirty Pierre's is locals heavy, so folks with thick Queens accents and smoking cigarettes while cursing like sailors during discussions about sports and construction equipment are common. At the same time, Dirty Pierre's is also locals heavy, so little old ladies and thirty-somethings with strollers talking about where in the Hamptons this year's timeshare will be are common as well.

What Dirty Pierre's is famous for, around here anyway, is their hamburger, and with good reason. It's a burger would give JG Melon a run for his money and punch him in the face if he tried to skip on the bill. When Seth needed a place to crash while he was in town for a day, and said he wanted to grab a burger, the DP Bistro Burger was the first thing on my mind. A burger, a beer, and some BSing. What more could you want at dinner? He ordered his with cheddar, I got mine with bacon and pepper jack. It comes with fries. Served on an oversized English muffin and topped with arugula instead of lettuce, weighing about a six pounds and with almost no grease, it's the one of the only hamburgers I actually have found myself missing when I go too long without one. Still with the cheese and the bacon as extra toppings, will wind up running you about $15. Dirty Pierre's is clearly not some cheap dive bar that wealthy people go to to slum it up. It's an expensive dive bar that wealthy people go to slum it up.

Prior to this meal, I'd tried their French Steak Sandwich (medium rare, thank you), which was so heavy that I could barely breath by the time I got halfway through it. It could have been better, but the bun was very thick and over-toasted, so the roof of my mouth got good and sliced up. Dirty Pierre's has all-you-can-eat Mussels (which they're also quasi-famous for) every Tuesday (no sharing) and if this was a Tuesday, I'd have ordered more than just one round. But it wasn't so I didn't. As the only location in the entire neighborhood that serves mussels so far as I know, I'm glad they're so good. If you can only have one option, at least let that option be the one you'd have chosen anyway. The Thai Wings I've had, while good, were overcooked. They should have been great. I could tell they would have been had they been taken out earlier. But they were in for too long and showed up on the table dried out.

So what's the final deal here? The burgers are great. Period. As are the mussels. Other things on the menu are more hit or miss. If it makes anyone feel any better, plan to return and check out some more items for an update later.

TAKEOUT SMACKDOWN!!! - CHINESE

2009-10-01T12:44:00.000-04:00

TAKEOUT SMACKDOWN!!! - CHINESE

Feng's Garden
Great Wall
Hang Shing Kitchen
King Wok
Oriental Palace
Panda
Red House Kitchen
Wing Wah

Forest Hills doesn't get SeamlessWeb, and Takeout Connection is a limited resource. Luckily (maybe?) what we do have are takeout menus a-plenty.

Nary a day has passed where the Golden Orb of Ra has descended beneath the horizon without my return home to be greeted, like an enthusiastic puppy, by a new menu; hardly a week has evolved from caffeinated weekstart to sauced weekend without finding my lobby carpeted by free delivery (minimum $15) options. So many menus. Who's to know which ones to trust over the others? Who's good, who's bad? Who's slow, who's fast? These are the necessary questions that need answering for game nights, poker nights, Blockbuster nights, hangovers, double-shifts, PMS, Dr. Who marathons, sheer laziness or any other time when you and cooking don't mix.

And thus have I decided to take the closest Chinese takeout places to my abode in a no-holds-barred cage match to the death. Each takeoutery will be graded (A to F, like in school) by the taste of their dishes. Delivery time, cost, and snarkiness on the phone will be noted. None of them are more than a five minute moped ride away. The food will all be generic and popular dishes and I will attempt to order the exact same thing from each restaurant. Nothing fancy, so don't go asking about the pan seared octopus dumplings or the whole red bass fillets grilled Cantonese style.

DING DING!!!

FENG'S GARDEN
110-54 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 268-5536
Visa/MC

Delivery Time: 54 minutes... don't be hungry when ordering.
Attitude: Sleepy. I'm almost positive that the girl answering the phone passed out from boredom while taking my order.
Cost: $20.05 plus tip.

Wonton Soup: B (6)
Egg Roll: B+ (7)
Sesame Chicken: A (9)
Beef with String Beans: B (6)
Pork Fried Rice: A (9)
Chicken Lo Mein: B+ (7)

Score: 44/60

Overall Thoughts: I've never ordered from Feng's Garden before this experiment and was pleasantly surprised. The soup was too salty and the wontons were too doughy, but I liked the smokeyness of the lo mein and the fried rice was incredible. The beef was... meh.

***

GREAT WALL
104-37 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 275-2255
Visa/MC

Delivery Time: 32 minutes.
Attitude: Snappy. Every second that I was on the phone was a potential other customer who would hear a busy signal.
Cost: $19.55 plus tip.

Wonton Soup: D (1)
Egg Roll: B (6)
Sesame Chicken: A- (8)
Chicken with Snow Peas: B+ (7)... But I ordered beef (-5).
Pork Fried Rice: B (6)
Chicken Lo Mein: B (6)

Score: 29/60

Overall Thoughts: The soup was just awful. I forced it down because I paid for it. They screwed up my order, so they're losing points there. Beyond that, most of the dishes were pretty mediocre. The wonton soup, especially, which tasted like it was in a beef broth. The sesame chicken was good though. The chicken with snow peas was also not bad, I just didn't order it. They take credit cards, which is nice.

***

HANG SHING KITCHEN
104-09 Metropolitan Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 793-1550
cash only

Delivery Time: 19 minutes... for when you need your food before you knew you were hungry for it.
Attitude: Pleasant woman, but she had very bad English.
Cost: $17.80 plus tip.

Wonton Soup: C+ (4)
Egg Roll: C+ (4)
Sesame Chicken: B (6)
Beef with String Beans: B (6)
Pork Fried Rice: B (6)
Chicken Lo Mein: C- (2)

Score: 28/60

Overall Thoughts: Is it HANG Shing, or HING Shing? The signage says one thing, the menu another. They're damn fast, so if you've got your 420 on and need some food to arrive yesterday, this place should be on your short list. Hang/Hing is also among the cheapest of the bunch and have the best special: any $15 order gets you dumplings or General Tso's Chicken or... I got the dumplings, which weren't bad. Too bad I can' t say the same for the rest of the meal. The entire meal tasted like it was burned to a degree, like it was picking up the char from meals past. I swear I tasted fish in the lo mein.

***

KING WOK
108-29 Ascan Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 263-3900
Cash Only

Delivery Time: 40 minutes on a rainy night.
Attitude: Not bad.
Cost: $19.44 plus tip.

Wonton Soup: A- (8)
Egg Roll: B (6) Sesame Chicken: B (6)
Beef with Snow Peas: A- (8)
Pork Fried Rice: B (6)
Chicken Lo Mein: B+ (7)

Score: 41/60

Overall Thoughts: A solid contender. No individual dish stands out as great or awful. Everything was thoroughly pleasant to eat, but nothing wowed me.

***

ORIENTAL PALACE
103-35 Queens Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 275-2288
Cash Only

Delivery Time: 25 minutes... very quick
Attitude: Pissy. Seriously, this woman was not in a good mood.
Cost: $16.93 plus tip

Wonton Soup: A (9)
Egg Roll: B- (5)
Sesame Chicken: A (9)
Beef with Snow Peas: B- (5)
Pork Fried Rice: C- (2)
Chicken Lo Mein: B+ (7)

Score: 37/60

Overall Thoughts: Oriental Palace is hit-or-miss. The soup was very good, but the egg roll was a waste of food. The sesame chicken was excellent, but I almost didn't even bother keeping the fried rice that it came with for leftovers. Ordering from these guys will be a crapshoot. Maybe you'll like it, maybe you won't.

***

PANDA
73-03 Yellowstone Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 268-8899/8998
cash only

Delivery Time: 38 minutes.
Attitude: Very nice guy on phone.
Cost: $18.34 plus tip.

Wonton Soup: B (6)
Egg Roll: B+ (7)
Sesame Chicken: B+ (7)
Beef with String Beans: B- (5)
Pork Fried Rice: B- (5)
Chicken Lo Mein: B+ (7)

Score: 37/60

Overall Thoughts: Well, nothing stood out as being great, but at least nothing stood out as being bad either. Bland seemed to be the theme of the meal, from the thin soup to the thin sauce in the beef, to the needs-more-taste fried rice. You won't go wrong ordering from Panda, but you won't be craving it either.

***

RED HOUSE KITCHEN
71-47 Yellowstone Boulevard
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 261-5601/2497
Visa/MC

Delivery Time: 33 minutes
Attitude: Pleasant and chipper.
Cost: $19.10 plus tip

Wonton Soup: B (6) Broth meh, wontons good
Egg Roll: A (9)
Sesame Chicken: A (9)
Beef with Snow Peas: B- (5)
Pork Fried Rice: A (9)
Chicken Lo Mein: A (9)

Score: 47/60

Overall Thoughts: Red House did just about everything right except the beef, which was nothing to write home about. Had they scored better there, they would have flat-out owned this competition, because there are a lot of As on that list.

***

WING WAH
98-12 Metropolitan Avenue
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 261-5154/5319
cash only

Delivery Time: 41 minutes.
Attitude: Deaf. Can you hear me now?!?
Cost: $18.40 plus tip.

Wonton Soup: A (9)
Egg Roll: B (6)
Sesame Chicken: A (9)
Beef with Snow Peas: A (9)
Pork Fried Rice: B (6)
Chicken Lo Mein: B (6)

Score: 45/60

Overall Thoughts: Terrible phone connection, so I'm yelling into the handset, and they wouldn't come into the building, which is a first. I'd never ordered from Wing Wah before and they were a definite surprise. The soup was everything a wonton soup should be, though the egg rolls were a disappointment. The rice was rice, but the sesame chicken was excellent. I spent enough money to get free fried wontons, which I did not grade. Good thing, too.

***

So there it is! Eight of the closest Chinese takeout establishments. Red House Kitchen WINS by a short margin that could have been much larger. Wing Wah took the silver after a vicious and bloody bout with Feng's Garden, who came in a very thin hair behind in third.

See my map for a better idea of each takeout place's location.

LATIN CUBANITA

2009-09-14T11:21:00.002-04:00

LATIN CUBANITA HAS CLOSED

LATIN CUBANITA
72-34 Austin Street
Forest Hills, NY 11375
(718) 261-8700

Latin Cubanita has been growing in Queens. They in fact just opened an outpost in the Queens Center Mall food court. Still, why go there when we have one of the first of them right down the block? And so I decided to try this poquito place for lunch over the course of a couple weeks. I can't say that I was terribly blown away. Yelp reviews are hit or miss, but lean toward the miss. I will be the first to say that no one should rely on this post for too much info since I did not get to try as much of the food as I had wanted to.

Latin Cubanita is so small that eating here is actually worse that eating outside. Take my advice and schlep over to Station Square and sit on the benches under the trees. At least there's fresh air and no one will trip over your bag. But space aside, the food here is pretty good. Or at least halfway decent, given the price. At its heart, Cubanita is a sandwich/to-go place, but they do have entree dishes like pork chops, steak and onions, and chicken, with traditional rice, beans, and plantain sides. Just my luck I couldn't try them.

I've only been here for lunch thus far and when I tried to get an actual meal, I was denied the privilege. The first time I went, I tried the Cuban, a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. Ham, cheese, toasted bread. This was not a complex lunch, but it seemed that the prep time was inordinately long. Like a solid fifteen minutes. On trip number two, I ordered the Media Noche Sandwich, which, it turns out, is the same thing as a Cuban, just on different bread. Don't ask me what kind of bread, I really didn't pay that much attention. Both sandwiches were quite tasty.

So far, I had had two Cubans. I wanted something different. So I ordered Chuletas Fritas, a fried pork-chop dish, but was told that they were out of pork. Okay, how about the Bisec Empanizado? Nope, nothing fried today is available, I was told. That killed half the menu. Can I have the Croquetas Preparadas, the grilled ham croquetes? My ignorance became apparent when I was informed that even this grilled ham dish was also fried. Ultimately, I found myself eating the Lechon, a roast pork sandwich. This is a pork lover's delight. No veggies or mayo to get in the way. Just pork and bread. For the record, and maybe this is my being raised on Subway, I like my sandwiches a bit more complex. Still, the pork was very tender and juicy and the bread wasn't too hard or too soft. I guess it was good since I ate the whole thing, but I think that Quiznos is more likely to get my sandwich money next time.

Expect to spend $5-$8 per sandwich and $10-$13 per entree. And if you ever get to try the entrees, let me know what they're like.

we need coffee bars...

2009-08-31T01:23:00.001-04:00

we need coffee bars...

If you're a coffee person, as I pretend to be, then Forest Hills is severely lacking. The pickings are slim, folks. Coffee, in it's most Sanka form, can be had anywhere. But there's a difference between a restaurant that sells coffee and a real coffee bar. And sure, I can always grab a cup of joe to go at a diner but that's just giving up.

Sadly, as of my writing this, there is no independent coffee bar in Forest Hills. Not that I know of. No place like THIS, where you can go in and sit for hours and read the paper, chat with friends, listen to Asobi Seksu playing dimly overhead, and being able to relax and forget the stress of the day. Park Slope has 'em. Williamsburg has 'em. But we don't? It shouldn't be the kind of thing to royally piss me off. And yet...

Coffee bars rarely open here, and when they do, bad luck or a bad follow-through seems to bring them down. When I first moved in, there was a shmancy and impressive place with dozens of loose teas, coffees, desserts and truly horrid service called Modus. Then came Munch; more casual, free wifi, a loyal fanbase, cushy chairs and, apparently, a landlord they fought with all the time. The latest was Sonoma Coffee Cafe, a chain with locations in 12 states. It opened last year on Queens Boulevard and was so underwhelming that that I wasn't surprised in the slightest when they shuttered this year.

Starbucks is the closest thing we've got, and I'm not Starbucks-hater. I just really really really like variety. We have four and it's not enough. The one on Continental is so small that someone should put an "express" sign under the logo. You can forget about trying to get a seat at the others. Say a prayer, cross yourself, burn some incense; only God himself can grant you one if you aren't willing to wait a half hour. I even went so far as to email the district manager of Queens asking her why the seats and tables that have been taken away aren't being replaced. The Austin Street one loses a table every four or five months, it seems. She very pleasantly told that there are a lot of bureaucratic loops to go through that have to be considered... of course there are. How silly of me.

Further away is the Seattle's Best Cafe (which is owned by Starbucks) at the Borders at Atlas Park, or Esparks on the corner of Metropolitan and Cooper. But they're quite a shlep by anyone's standards unless you drive, which you shouldn't have to do.

Some people might be thinking right now "what about Dunkin Donuts?" Well, that coffee is awful. America only runs on Dunkin because it's probably half diesel fuel. As for those of you about to suggest McDonalds, I want you to sit in the corner and think about that in silence. Shame on you.

So what are we gonna do? Well, I'm going to write a letter to Caribou Coffee and tell them that their first NY location should be us. And if any of you were thinking of opening a real coffee bar, with hipster baristas, custom espressos, good music (better yet, no music), old sofas, local artwork for sale on the wall, and a menu that doesn't overextend itself by going beyond offering cakes, muffins and cookies, then please please please do so. You have at least one guaranteed customer.