Posted in Cannoli, Sweets at 10:26 pm by Administrator
Yesterday was my 28th birthday. It was sometime around my 14th birthday that I went to visit my brother at Amherst College and went out to eat at an Italian restaurant called Carmelina’s. There, for the first time in my young life, I discovered what cannoli was. Josh and his roommates ordered them, and I watched as the waiter squeezed fresh ricotta from the tube into the waiting shell. I had one bite and I LOVED it. But I didn’t really start eating cannoli seriously until a couple years later at the Giaquinta household of Potomac, Maryland.
Number 28 isn’t really a big deal aside from the fact that it means I survived 27 which Jimi, Janis, Curt, Tupac, Valentino, and a few others didn’t. Still, this birthday is momentous in a way. It marks the 14th year since I first laid eyes on cannoli, meaning that cannoli have been a part of my life for half of its duration. For the rest of my life, I will have known of cannoli for the better part of it.
And recently I recieved an incredibly heart-warming email from a reader whose love of cannoli seems to have sprung from my own:
Hi Dave,
I've been a long-time reader of your blog, and have to say I've become
secretly addicted to your reviews. Though I seriously loved your
"three burgers in a day" entry, my favorite has been your cannoli
saga, and it has stuck out as the pinnacle of NYC eating to this
California girl.
Alas, I didn't have the time nor funds to go on your full tour when I
was visiting Manhattan last month, but I did have Rocco's on the top
of my foodie list...though of course...I forgot the address at home.
Dejected, I was convinced I would have to leave the city without
having tasted my first cannoli ever...until lo and behold I stumbled
upon it when I was on a mission to Bleeker St. Records. It was
seriously one of those serendipitous moments where you know you're at
the right place at the right time! Needless to say, the cannoli was
amazing, better than I ever could have imagined it to be: crispy
shell, thick, sweet cream, little pistachios for nuttiness...well, I
don't need to tell you, do I?
I just wanted to thank you for introducing me to Rocco's, and
consequently, one of the most heavenly foodie experiences of my life
to date. Keep up the great work with blog and your reviews in NFT and
Gothamist, and I hope one day to partake in a Wheels of Steel Tour
myself!
All the best,
Zhaddi
(Zhaddi’s cannoli: she is clearly a better photographer than I am)
That letter warms my heart to no end. It makes me as proud a Sicilian. And it is exactly why I do what I do. If I were a chef, I’d watch with pride as people eat the food I cook them. But I’m just an eater. Thus my satisfaction comes from watching people’s eyes light up when I introduce them to the foods I love.
So yesterday, on an otherwise unimportant 28th birthday, Melissa knew exactly what I would love the most. She sneaked out to Rocco’s on the pretense that she was going to the deli. I had no clue what she was up to. But she came back to surprise me with a black and white, a strawberry shortcake, and TWO beautiful, fresh-made, hand-piped cannoli.
I hope you’ve been checking in to Not For Tourist Guidebook every day. If you haven’t, may I suggest you do so today. Both the New York page (Randazzo’s Seafood in The Bronx) and the DC page (Roger’s Produce in Potomac, Maryland) have blurbs written by some crazy cabbie.
Also, I’ve missed a couple opportunities to link to my blurbs in the past few weeks, so you can belatedly click below for those as well.
I hear YouTube.Com just changed hands for a billion and half dollars. I’m betting that at least a buck of that was because I posted a 17-minute Famous Fat Dave’s Faves Tour this summer. Even though we shot it in my Maxima rather than a yellow cab and we only hit two boroughs, you’ll get a pretty good feel for how a Famous Fat Dave tour goes down.
Josh Ozersky, also known as Mr. Cutlets, listed the clip as one of “America’s Amusingest Food Videos” in New York Magazine’s Grub Street. My cousin, Jeremy Weinstein, also known as Joe Hollywood, edited it, and rumors are already flying about a long-awaited nod from the Academy for his work.
A little more than one year ago, I took a fare that seems to have damaged my diet irreparably. I didn’t take him far, and he was certainly not the type of person I would normally want to emulate. But since he rode in my cab, I can’t quite shake his influence.
I picked him up on 8th Street and 5th Avenue in the middle of day. He told me he was heading to the Cherry Street Projects deep into the Lower East Side. He spoke very quickly, and before we covered a long block, I knew half his life story. He’d just returned from L.A. where he’d spent the bulk of the last decade “making it big,” although he retained his thick New York accent. He was going back home to visit with his family who he’d barely seen since he’d left. Rocking the leather jacket, the tall black boots, and long Andre-from-Real-World-One hair, I figured he was some kind of Sunset Strip thrasher. And he confirmed my suspicions by telling me the name of his band by the next block.
I couldn’t tell if he was on coke or he just had the sort of personality that makes a guy seem like he’s on coke all the time. He acted as though he was genuinely excited to tell me everything that was going on in his life. And I was listening intently until he stopped mid-sentence to shout at the top of his lounges, “STOP!!! STOP THE CAR!!! STOP STOP STOP STOP.”
I slammed on the breaks, thinking something was terribly wrong either inside or just outside of the cab. Even after we came to a halt, I could hear him saying, “stop stop stop stop stop” under his breath, and I saw him staring hard at someone on the sidewalk. “WHAT!?!?” I asked him. “Oh. . . Oh, never mind dude, never mind. I just thought that chick right there was the hooker I was with last night. I wanted to stop and say ‘hi.’. . . But it isn’t. . . Let’s roll.”
“Alllllllll right,” I responded as I turned my head back toward the road in front of us. Now I was pretty sure he was on coke. “I promise I won’t do that again,” he told me. He did do something similar ten minutes later, but I ignored him. He didn’t seem to mind.
As we headed down Bowery just a few blocks from his parents’ project, he pleaded with me to change course and take a right onto Kenmare. “Why?” I demanded, thinking he was having another episode with a vaguely familiar figure on the street. “No, no dude. I need a drink,” he said firmly. “Why not stop at a deli on Bowery or Cherry Street, rather than go out of the way?” I asked. “Because this deli sells Yoohoo in cans,” he responded, as though that was reason enough.
He assured me he’d make it worth my while, so I took the right and waited outside while he ran in. Sure enough, out he came with an ice cold six pack of Yoohoo dangling from his finger. While he knocked back what appeared to be an entire can in one gulp, I simply said, “Yoohoo, huh,” as I eyed him in the rear view mirror.
That’s all it took for him to go OFF about Yoohoo. He sounded like a spokesman for the company, though he assured me that he wasn’t. “It’s so frosty and delicious. It’s so cold and refreshing. And you gotta get the can. YOU GOTTA. Don’t mess with the bottles or the cartons. Cans keep Yoohoo the coldest. And Yoohoo is best when it’s at its coldest. When’s the last time you had a Yoohoo?” he asked, as he cracked open his second can.
It’d been a while. I must have been a kid. “Long time,” I said. Before I knew it, he’d pushed an icy can through the window in the divider and let it drop to the seat below. “Taste it again for the first time,” he said, eyes wide with authentic excitement. The moment I stopped at the light and picked up the can, he dropped another one down to the seat. “You’re gonna love it so much you’ll want two,” he assured me.
I cracked it open and put it too my lips. “NOOOOO,” he screamed, as though he was Stephen Colbert and I was Helen Thomas. I didn’t say a word. I just lowered the can from my lips slowly and stared at him in the mirror. “You gotta shake dude. SHAKE IT. It says right there on the can. SHAKE IIIIT. Give that can back to me, because you can’t shake it right now that it’s open. Shake your other one up.”
I did his bidding. I shook it up hard, popped the top, and watched the milky beverage foam up around the lip. Some distant childhood memories trickled back, but nothing too nostalgic. I knew I’d had Yoohoo before. Then I tasted it.
AMAZING. PHENOMENAL. It was everything I love about milk, sugar, and cold beverages combined. It seemed to quench my thirst, though I know dairy products don’t do that. However, Yoohoo is so chemically it’s barely a dairy product anymore. It really did hit the spot. As far as I was concerned, that Yoohoo was the perfect drink at that moment. I’ve gone on Gatorade kicks, I’ve built a 365 can cokamid out of coke cans I binged on, and I’ve sucked on ice cubes all my life. But when that Yoohoo passed my lips, it was the perfect beverage.
“Am I right or am I right?” my fare asked as he gathered his things to get out of the cab. “You’re right,” I said, looking at my empty can. He gave me a sizeable tip, more than necessary. But what I loved most about this guy was that before he left, he pushed one last can of Yoohoo through the divider. Now, he’d given me half of his six pack. He really wanted me to have TWO cans of Yoohoo.
I downed that one too, but I assumed I wouldn’t really get into the habit of drinking Yoohoo. Still, I wasn’t surprised when, a couple days later, I saw a can of Yoohoo at the deli and couldn’t resist buying it. I wondered if that guy really was a spokesman for Yoohoo, because he’d done a good job selling me. But I ‘m pretty sure he just wanted me to enjoy a delicious chocolate milk beverage because he felt like sharing his obsession. He clearly had an addictive personality as evidenced by the hookers and the coke.
What surprised me is that I am now fully hooked on Yoohoo. A year has gone by, and I haven’t kicked it yet. There may be something addictive in the formula, but I think I can’t stop drinking them simply because they taste really, really good. I know they’re terrible for me. I can feel it about 10 minutes after I finish each can. But tonight I got it in my head to drink a can of Yoohoo. Before it even crossed my mind not to, I was driving out of my way to go to the deli that sells cans of Yoohoo.
My two favorite minorities in the world are the Kurds and fat people. Although I’ve never picked up a Kurd, I’ve been hailed by many, many fat people. Some cabbies have told me that they refuse to pick up obese people on the grounds that they take too long to get into and out of the cab. My response is that it is just as immoral to refuse fat fares as it is to refuse black fares. But I’ve found that those weak-minded cabbies who won’t take the big ‘uns, generally don’t take black people either.
I, of course, jump at every opportunity to take both obese and black fares. My reasoning is simple. Both groups tend to take eating seriously. I’ve had a lot of luck matching taste buds with both fat people and black people. So when I saw a 300-pound black woman in front of Barnard College recently, I swerved across two lanes of Broadway to grab her.
Once she’d gotten inside my taxi, she told me to go to 137th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. PERFECT, I thought. Who better to ask where to find good soul food in Harlem? But it was a delicate subject, and I couldn’t decide exactly how I would bring it up.
We made small talk about traffic and the yellow cab business. “Used to be, just a few years ago, yellow cabs wouldn’t come to Harlem,” she pointed out. “Yeah, things are changing. Bill Clinton’s had his office on 125th Street for years now. There’s money to made up here these days,” I replied pleasantly. “Rents are going up. Black people can’t afford to live in Harlem anymore,” she said. The chit chat came to a halt, and we both just stared out the window as we sat at a red light on 132nd Street.
We were ignoring the fact that we’d both witnessed two or three empty yellow cabs pass her by before I swooped in to pick her up. We were also ignoring the fact that there wasn’t a single face on the street that wasn’t black.
Now we were fast approaching her house. I felt the opportunity slipping away. We caught some lights, and, before I knew it, we were there. She was paying me. She was slinging her bags over her shoulder. She was scooting to the curb side. We hadn’t really been totally honest with each other the entire conversation, so I didn’t know how to broach the soul food topic without sounding offensive.
I was worried that it would seem presumptuous. But I could tell she had the kind of body you get from eating fried foods and way too much butter, not Twinkies and Ho-Hos. Plus I’d run out of time. So I just went for it. “Where do you get your soul food?”
She stopped gathering herself, looked me in the eyes through the rear view, and stated very authoritatively, “The only place I go out for soul food is Londel’s.” JACKPOT. I’d never heard of it.
My friend Nate has been living in Harlem for a few months and told me he’d always be up for an eating expedition. I went off duty, picked him up, and sat down at Londel’s within the half hour.
I hadn’t asked my fare the price range, so I was a little thrown off when I saw that they charged more than $10 for the entrees. But it was the type of place at which the waiters wear tuxedos, so it made sense. Even though we were the only people in there at 5:45pm, we felt underdressed.
But the waiters, even the busboys, were so friendly that we felt right at home before our food even came. And when it did, we felt even better. I went with the fried chicken and waffles because I had a good feeling about the place.
I love the concept of chicken and waffles, but I’d never had a really great dish of it. I’ve eaten at Pan Pan, the old chicken and waffle lunch counter on 135th and Lenox, and I wanted to think it was delicious. But I couldn’t get past the fact that it tasted as if I was eating two things that didn’t naturally go together. Like peanut butter and hot dogs (I’ve had that too: Hagerstown, Maryland minor league game circa 1995), the fried chicken just doesn’t seem to go with the waffles, whether taken in the same or separate bites. I had been considering flying out west specifically for Rosco’s. And then I ate my first bite at Londel’s.
The taste sent me straight to the moon. The flavors and textures blended like I’d always wished they had. It made me reevaluate my whole worldview. If chicken and waffles could be this good, what else have I been missing? There must be so much else out there that I don’t understand.
Likewise, Nate fell head over heals for his mac n’ cheese and collard greens. I was right there with him once I stole my first fork-full. His cornmeal-dusted fried whiting was good too, though both of us had tasted better.
We didn’t really have room for dessert, but our waiter was giving us the hard sell. We almost went with the sweet potato pie, but Nate is a semi-professional pie chef and he nixed the order when the waiter admitted that the crust wasn’t homemade.
We went with the bread pudding instead, and it might be the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I’m not even a dessert person, but I went absolutely bonkers for the bread pudding. The consistency was like something from another planet. The sweetness would explode into every corner of my mouth with each bite. It was classic comfort food cooked in truly gourmet fashion. Nate and I sat in silence, occasionally shooting each other wild-eyed looks, until the plate looked like it came right out of the dish washer.
(notice the rum and caramel sauce expertly drizzled)
I knew that restaurant tip was going to pay off. I could tell how wise my 300 pound fare was. She clearly had a handle on good eating. But she also had a grasp on the subtleties of life.
After she’d gotten herself out of the cab, she leaned back in the window. With more than a bit of suspicion in her voice, she asked, “Why are you so interested.”
“Well, I love soul food. But I also take people on eating tours of the five boroughs,” I told her. “I call myself Famous Fat Dave.”
She sized me up with her eyes, looked down at her own body, and said, “Well Famous Fat Dave. . . Everything’s relative.”
Londel’s, 2620 Frederick Douglass Blvd. btwn 139th and 140th, Harlem
Visit FamousFatDave.com for five borough eating tours and we can hit Londel’s on a Sweet Tooth Tour, a Fried New York Tour, or a Famous Fat Dave’s Faves Tour
Everyone who has the means gets out of New York City for as much of August as possible. The city empties. Traffic lets up. Business is slow. New Yorkers generally head out to the Hamptons in Long Island or down the shore in Jersey. Cab drivers often head back to the old country to see the family they left behind in Senegal or Bangladesh or Hungary.
But I am not a typical New Yorker. Nor am I a typical cab driver. My family hails from Chicago, but I spent my formative years in Maryland. And, like a good Marylander, I vacation in Delmarva (the DELaware MARyland VArginia peninsula).
When I was a kid, it was Ocean City, Maryland. But the family has moved on up to Bethany Beach in Delaware. So Melissa and I drove the five plus hours down through gnarly traffic last week, and we hit the beach. Melissa isn’t the one who dubbed the Freedenberg family “The FEEDenbergs,” but she knew what she was in for.
We aren’t the kind of family that sits on the beach drinking beer all day and then goes in for a sandwich or orders a pizza. We spend most of our beach time discussing what to eat next. In fact, we spend most of our eating time discussing what to eat next.
And being Marylanders for the three decades, a crab feast was the first thing on the list. For the past few years at the beach, we’ve dined at Mickey’s:
Mickey’s is officially north of the Maryland border, but it’s basically identical to a real Maryland crab shack. The only difference is that they don’t have Old Bay Seasoning on the table. However, that’s easily remedied by sneaking in a contraband container of Old Bay in my mom’s purse. The crabs are always steamed just right.
They’ve been getting smaller and smaller every year thanks to environmental degradation in the Chesapeake Bay and over-crabbing, but the meat is delicious no matter what the size. It just means even more work picking the meat during the only meal you can starve while eating:
Here, mother of Famous Fat Dave models some crabs and fried shrimp for the camera. Notice the open-mouthed pose at the right. You can see where I get it from. She’s the Hungry Mommy:
Not to be outdone, father of FFD tries his hand at some fried shrimp spokes modeling. A real crab feast always has a little fried chicken thrown in. My dad manages to model it without it actually being in his own hand.
I know they come out of waters a long way from the Chesapeake, but we ordered some King Crab Legs too. They are mentioned in the Famous Fat Dave theme song. Also, I just finished watching the second season of Deadliest Catch, so I considered it my civic duty to eat a few so that these crazy fishermen shall not have died in vain:
When the meal was done, this is what just one end of the table looked like:
Afterward, we were all ready to go into Ocean City for some frozen treats to wash the spicy Old Bay off our tickled tongues:
Now that she’s got the hang of it, my mom can’t stop modeling food. Although she didn’t realize that she was on camera in the photo on the right. While I was taking a picture of my mint chocolate chip scoop, you can see her in the back cheersing with her spoonful of ice cream:
We did spend a lot of time at the beach house though. The next night we decided to bring home a lobster dinner. Again, I know Maine is nowhere near Delaware, but we were all in the mood for seafood. Melissa was apparently in the mood to dance with hers:
She’s a Marylander, it’s true, but she’s also Thai. So she knows her way around a lobster. That, and she likes to eat the eggs. You can see her on the right searching for the tasty Eastern delicacies. Her dad would be proud:
Then she realizes she’s on camera so she decides to stop eating lobster eggs and just act cute, though I don’t think there’s anything cuter than eating lobster eggs:
Tracy, my sister-in-law, is originally from Massachusetts so we were hoping she’d bring some extra crustacean expertise into the family. She brings a lot to the table, but a knowledge of shellfish is not one of them. My mom, being a mom, picked Tracy’s lobster meat for her:
Alas, Tracy is not a fan of crabs. She tried gallantly to aquire a taste knowing she was marrying into a Maryland family, but she’s since given up. Still, we couldn’t resist having another crab feast:
Tracy got a filet of sole to eat as well as the spiced shrimp (we ate some of those too), and the rest of us had the pile of blue crabs and Old Bay:
My mom, being a mom, was in charge of handing out the crabs:
Tracy and Josh’s pride and joy Milo isn’t old enough to pick his own crab quite yet, but he seemed to like the little bits his dad Josh gave him (although he seems to like everything, including blue cheese). He is old enough to play with the hammer though. Looks like he’s going to grow up to be another crab-loving FEEDenberg:
Go to www.famousfatdave.com for fried whiting and king crab legs, egg cream ice cream and deviled eggs
What kind of son would I be if I posted those photos of my mom with all sorts of food in front of her face, called her The Hungry Mommy, and I didn’t put up at least one shot of her looking like herself
As if you needed another excuse to go for that heavenly slice of sausage pizza in The Bronx at Louie and Ernie’s. Next door, Teresa’s sells great homemade ices:
I just wanted to thank you for introducing me to Rocco's, and consequently, one of the most heavenly foodie experiences of my life to date. Keep up the great work with blog and your reviews in NFT and Gothamist, and I hope one day to partake in a Wheels of Steel Tour myself! All the best, Zhaddi
