e a t e r y R O W

WILDWOOD BBQ

225 Park Avenue South

New York, NY 10003

(212) 533-2500

Blue states and barbecue don't exactly go hand in hand. Sure, the city hosts a barbecue festival out of Madison Square Park every year, and Dinosaur up in Harlem is alleged to be able to give the NASCARites a run for their money, but overall barbecue in New York City is like pizza in Omaha. Half the time, you have to ask why we bother. 

And such it was at Wildwood BBQ, BRGuest's Park Avenue foray into low-class food. Sports played on large TVs over the bar. Raw, aged wood beams lined the ceiling. The menu was plastered across chalk boards in the back. You almost expect the waitress to say "hi y'all!" and hand you Old Milwaukee in a glass jug just for showing up. Of course, at the end of the day you're still on Park Avenue and on the other side of the window a limo just dropped off a gaggle of girls who look like escorts on their way to a corporate party. I guess what I'm saying is that the illusion only runs so deep.

Anyway, Seth and I showed up the other evening and decided to put on fifty pounds. I don't know what was going through our heads to eat so much food. We started with the Wildwood Nachos. On the plate, it looked pretty small, but at a certain point, as you're carving through the mountain of chips, chili,  cheddar cheese and sour cream, you realize that you're full and can barely move. All you can really do is drink more beer in the hopes that the liquid will aid your stomach in digesting it all.

Wildwood is a family style restaurant so your side dishes are extra. This adds to the bill and, despite pretending to be being blue-collar food, Wildwood isn't cheap. We ordered the Corn Bread, which was fine, the Cole Slaw, which was also fine, and the Carrot Raisin Slaw, which was, again, fine. None of them can I say a negative syllable about, though I also don't know that any of them were particularly amazing. 

I ordered, because my eyes were clearly far bigger than my stomach, the Spicy Fried Chicken, which came with mashed potatoes, a biscuit and gravy. Uh, it was fantastic. The mashed potatoes were creamy, the biscuit was flakey, and the fried chicken had just enough crisp and tenderness to make me wonder why we also ordered a round of ribs. Plus, they were hot enough to clear your nose. This I can recommend! But then there were ribs also. Not just ribs, two racks of ribs. Seth and I got the Kansas City Baby Back Ribs, which come in a spicy chipotle barbecue sauce and the Sticky Ribs, which come in Wildwood's own sauce, which they describe as "sweet and tangy". Truth is that the main difference in taste was that the sticky ribs seemed to have more sauce than the Kansas City ones. Beyond that, both had a smokey sweet taste and were pretty much indistinguishable. Taste-wise I liked them. They were good. But hey. Meat grilled within an inch of its life covered in a sugar-based smoke sauce can hardly be bad. Mostly I was disappointed by the texture. I wanted the meat to run from the rib as though it thought the rib was having an affair. Boning someone else, as it were. But instead, meat and rib stood together like a good southern God-fearing couple. Sadly, this left for a somewhat dry meal. I spent more time than I care to admit fighting my food.

TOBY'S ESTATE

125 North 6th Street

Brooklyn, NY 11211

(347) 457-6160

Toby's Estate is a micro-chain of coffee shops/roasters from Australia that's opened their first American shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Of course, no one in Brooklyn would know that it's an international corporation because no one's ever heard of it here. So it has a little extra caché on the anti-chain north-Brooklyn coast. Of course, it helps that Toby's Estate fits in perfectly with the Williamsburg aesthetic. The staff are all super nice, bowler-wearing, tattoo-sporting, pierced hipsters who just also happen to really have a thing for coffee.

The physical space is large, in what appears to be a renovated industrial loading bay and is so meticulously designed that it almost seems forced. Giant windows let in reams of light. Bookshelves filled with purposefully chosen bric-a-brac (like old copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica) rise to meet the twenty foot ceiling, twenty square feet in the corner is devoted to huge sacks of coffee beans. There's even a large, glass windowed roasting room (an "espresso lab") behind the counter that we can all gaze into. Toby's Estate does claim to roast on site and they supposedly hold some coffee classes there, but there was never anyone in it and every item in the room was posed for public viewing like it was being filmed for a Pottery Barn catalog. 

I ordered three things on my trip here, two coffees and a sandwich. The sandwich was grilled ham and Gruyere cheese with pickles. It was soft, gooey, buttery and delicious. They cooked it up right there and brought it to my spot at the communal table I shared with six other people. Every customer here was young, attractive, hip, and looked like they be right at home in a Vespa ad. We (and I include myself here) were all reading or studying or clacking away on our MacBooks. 

My latte was heavy and rich and thick. In spite of the foamy cream, it maintained its strength, bordering on bitter without actually becoming bitter. If you're the kind of person to sugar your coffee (something I refuse to do) then you'll have plenty of little paper wrappers littering your table space. For the rest of us, this is a sipping latte, not the kind you chug while rushing to commute to work in the morning. You roll it around on your tongue while engaged in conversation or reading a lengthy report. This latte will take about twenty minutes to get through. I also tried an espresso and was recommended the "single batch roast" (served with a glass of sparkling water). It was so dense that the closest thing I can compare it to is eating extra-dark chocolate. Imagine the 90% dark bar you might find at a specialty chocolate shop or down the snob candy aisle at Whole Foods. Dark, like the smell of cigar smoke at midnight, like a peaty Laphroaig 15 single malt, like a hearty soil after a light morning rain. And you only get about an ounce, so pace yourself, chief.

Toby's Estate isn't for everyone. It's not a jazzy relaxation chamber that some coffee shops like Tea Lounge have tried to be, nor is it the quaint and cute neighborhood place, a la Joe The Art Of Coffee. Save a large sofa along one wall, the seats aren't very comfortable. Actually, they're pretty awful. There aren't any huge chairs you can sink into and not get up for weeks from. I didn't see any outlets. Some people will find it overpriced (it's not cheap). Some people will note that there's no room for a stroller, or that they aren't in the right age bracket to fully fit in, and some people have a bias against hipsters. Some people will find the place pretentious (it is) and silly. But if you like the conceit of a coffee shop created for and staffed by coffee connoisseurs and if you appreciate the specific sort of over-designed atmosphere that Toby's Estate created, then this might be right up your alley. 

 [ Copyright eateryROW 2012 ]

UPDATE 4/12/12: The PR peeps at Toby's Estate emailed me today to explain that they do indeed roast on site, forcing a poor slob named Deaton to slave away at an oven for five hours and that they do indeed host various classes in the Espresso Lab four times a week. It was also assured to me that Toby's Estate is not a vast international coffee conglomerate with tentacles reaching into three continents, led by a Bond-esque villain living in an undersea base that you can only get to by submarine with dreams to either dominate the world's coffee market or destroy it. It's just a company run by a guy. A nice guy named Toby who's got a little scruff, who likes coffee, who just so happens to travel the world by dirigible, who owns shops on three continents in a half-dozen cities and who lives in an undersea base patrolled by bikini-clad women with spear guns. 

2 BROS PIZZA

1015 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10018

(212) 575-1216

This past Saturday, The New York Times ran an interesting and hilarious article about a "pizza war" in midtown between 2 Bros Pizza and a neighboring Indian lunch joint that also sells pizza (I've put a link to the article on my Facebook page). Since 2 Bros Pizza has been on my radar for a few months as a place to for a quick and cheap posting, now was a great time spend a few minutes to schlep across town to Sixth Avenue and see the war for myself.

If you work in Midtown then you know that dollar-per-slice pizza joints have been sprouting like weeds. 2 Bros Pizza, which pioneered this trend from its home in the East Village, where poor college students live and frequent has been expanding lately. One such expansion was right next door to Bombay Fast Food, and, before you know it, the price was no longer one meager dollar, but 75 cents. Yup seventy five cents. Three quarters. With the average slice these days hovering around $2.50, one might think that you can't go wrong. Not so.

With prices so cheap that a homeless drunk can afford to eat here, you know what you're in for. Walking into the 2 Bros Pizza on 38th Street is like walking into the Port Authority Bus Terminal in 1989. Dirty, gray, and tiled like a public men's bathroom. The prices are so cheap that there's a line of people twenty deep shuffling along the counter to get their slices, so it's also kind of like being in a church basement soup kitchen. The workers hurry to place the orders, making three pies at a time. 

2 Bros slices are only two-thirds the size of the average NYC slice, but at one-third the cost, you should theoretically still be getting a bargain. This math only works out, though, if you end up wanting to eat what you just paid for. And that's not likely.

What you see above is the slice they gave me. Gloppy, uneven cheese, not fully cooked, and not even fully covered. It's the kind of slice that even looks like it cost seventy-five cents too much. With the speed at which 2 Bros Pizza is cranking out pies, this was about as fresh a slice as one can get. And even though I waited a few minutes to pay and snap a picture before biting in, 2 Bros uses cheese so cheap that it was like wrapping my lips around an oily lava flow. I still have the burn. The lady standing at the tall table next to me was using up her stack of napkins dabbing up the grease (along with most of her sauce), a disgusted grimace planted firmly across her face. Meanwhile, the pizza sauce is so sweet, so over-sugared, that it was like tomato frosting. And the crust, which actually was not terrible, was too soft and undercooked. I got through half the slice and left. It just wasn't worth being there any longer.

Leaving and going next door to Bombay Fast Food wasn't impressive either. Bombay is basically a bodega that sells pizza and Indian food along with beer and lotto tickets. India isn't known for its pizza chefs and Bombay isn't going out of its way to prove the conventional wisdom wrong. Their pizza has a dry, grainy crust, absolutely flavorless sauce and cheese, and their slice was somehow even smaller than the 2 Bros slice. But I'll give them this. It actually looked like pizza instead of triangular-shaped vomit. Still... I donated it to the landfill and went to Starbucks.

So who wins? Neither. They're both awful and I'll never return. The only difference between giving your 75 cents to either of these establishments and giving it to a panhandler is that the panhandler doesn't hand you something you end up throwing out.

My advice is to walk a few blocks further and spend a few bucks more. It'll be $2 well spent.

DAVID BURKE AT BLOOMINGDALE'S

1000 Third Avenue

New York, NY 10022

(212) 813-2195

I always tell people that if Bloomingdale's cost half as much, I'd shop there twice as often. I far prefer it over Macy's. Though that might be because I truly loathe Herald Square. In any event, a day of wandering midtown's tourist spots with Shrink (from Times Square to Rockefeller Center to 59th Street) led us to Bloomingdale's. Side note, people who call it "Bloomies" are seriously annoying. David Burke, of occasional Food Network fame, whose name adorns all of his restaurants except Hawaiian Tropic Zone (I can't imagine why), has set up this small eatery for weary shoppers.

David Burke at Bloomingdale's serves haute comfort food (burgers, fried chicken, meatloaf, surf & turf) at a decent price. The atmosphere is a schizophrenic mix of trendy cool and un-trendy diner. The floor is tile and the beers are common, but there are cocktails and dance music and Viking wine coolers line the wall. The menu doesn't really break any new ground, so one might argue that it's overpriced. True, you could probably find the same food for a few bucks less five blocks south on Second Avenue, but then you wouldn't be eating in Bloomingdale's. The atmosphere would be gone. 

The first thing we got, instead of a bread basket was a Cheddar Cheese Popover pastry. While Shrink liked it, I can't agree. It was overcooked and brittle. While it was free with the meal, if they offer you something else, consider yourself lucky. Shrink ordered the Lobster Bisque and I can attest to it being the worst lobster bisque that I've ever had. Visually, it was almost brown, which for a dish normally served a pale pink can be off-putting. But that aside, it included shrimp and green apple. Shrimp tastes close enough to lobster that it hardly altered the taste, so I have to assume that it's a cost cutting measure. Rather than have a some big chunks of expensive lobster, they tossed in some shrimp. Meanwhile, the apple added a sourness to the soup that was wholly unwelcome. What should have been a mellow, relaxing soup instead was this funkified tangy mess. Thankfully, my griping ends there. I ordered the Cali Style Crispy Fish Tacos, and they were absolutely great. Fried battered fish, avocado, pineapple, some kind of mildly spicy sauce, and some lettuce in a semi-soft shell. Blew me away. Loved it. I would literally stop by again just for this.

 The couple at the table next to us came only for wine and dessert and the desserts looked pretty good so I had initially intended to get them. But by the time we finished (and we could not, in fact, finish) we were too stuffed to eat anything else.