No Heroes, or Disillusionment for Dinner

"Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials."
        - Gerald W. Johnson

I can't even post a photo of last night's take-dinner.  Trust me, you don't need to see it.

Wednesday is my late teaching night this semester, when I don't get home till around eight and I start falling asleep at about 9:30 from sheer exhaustion.  So it's generally not a cooking night -- and I'm not even inclined to heat up leftovers.  I want it done for me.  Sometimes G makes pasta, or we have something that can be thrown together quickly, but there come those times when Wednesday is take-out night at our house. 

The trouble is finding take-out that we like, that we don't get bored with too quickly, and that delivers to our East Harlem home.  You'd be surprised; there are restaurants only 12 blocks away, on the Upper East Side, that will not allow their delivery people to cross the 96th street line of demarcation into Spanish Harlem.  It is a puzzle, isn't it.  My money's just as green as everyone else's; the streets around us are safe and relatively quiet, different only cosmetically from our monied neighbors to the south. 

On our relatively infrequent take-out nights we make do with excellent Puerto Rican food from the restaurant next door, or sometimes Mexican from down the street. We did feel that we'd lucked out with an Indian restaurant about 13 blocks away.  Their food is good and the only time they refused to deliver to us was in the snowstorm a couple of  weeks ago.   What I miss about our old Brooklyn neighborhood is good Italian-American food.  We had an Italian butcher shop in Windsor Terrace  run by two brothers where we bought the best red sauce (made by the butcher brothers' mom), fantastic chicken parmigiana, ravioli, and all kinds of other goodies.  I keep ordering chicken parm sandwiches on take-out night, hoping for my ultimate hero to come rescue me.  So far, we have one mediocre place.  Then there's the famous East Harlem Patsy's, which I'm sure has a great chicken parm hero -- but they don't deliver. 

Last night we tried a new place.  I had such high hopes.   It's only a few blocks away from us, in a sort of up and coming little pocket to the East, not far from Patsy's and the good French bakery.  We passed it one night, and it looked cute from the outside, with little white lights strung around the window, and an Italian name -- Piatto d'Oro.  I took a paper take-out menu as we strolled by, and suggested to G that we might try it next time we wanted take-out.   He was amenable, although he mumbled something about "yuppie f*cko places".  But the prices weren't elevated, and they had what seemed like fairly authentic Italian dishes on the menu as well as the standard Italian-American fare.   When I called last night, the woman on the phone had an Italian accent.  I felt very hopeful, knowing the standards for food in Italy, where I've never had a bad meal.   

Imagine my disappointment.  The chicken in my parmigiana sandwich had been pounded until the chicken itself was but a memory lost in the breading.  The toughness of it would indicate that it had also spent an unseemly period of time in a freezer before being resurrected for my sandwich.  My suspicions were aroused -- it looked kind of like terrible mass-market frozen breaded chicken, which had been flash-fried and then unhappily covered in lackluster sauce and nondescript cheese before being buried in a quite good Italian roll.  Yes, the bread was good.  How strange.  Despite that, I abandoned my sandwich after a few bites.  G's mozzarella sticks had a bizarre stale smell -- the combination once again of lots of freezer time and then a sizzling bath in cheap oil.   He finished his sad meatball hero, and started in on our chicken caesar salad, which was drowned in bottled dressing.  G's comment about the salad was that he couldn't tell the difference between the chicken and the croutons.  Since the latter were soggy and the former were tough, they possessed approximately the same texture and lack of flavor.  He kept eating, though -- the kind of eating you do when something is thoroughly unsatisfying and even though you're full, you're looking for something to give you the sensation of satiety, of being replete, of having eaten well. 

Not last night, not during the dinner portion of the evening.  Fortunately, however, we still had cupcakes left from last week's baking, so that saved the situation somewhat.  But the quest for my hero continues...    

Comments

[Bakerina]

Ahhhh, gosh, that's a shame. I'm sorry, Julie. The ironic thing -- well, maybe it's not ironic but it's damn curious -- is that your neighborhood used to be one of the major Italian-American enclaves in Manhattan, along with Little Italy and the West Village. As recently as 10 years ago, I remember reading an interview Molly O'Neill did with the owner of Andy's Colonial Tavern on 125th Street and (I think) 1st Avenue, Salvatore "Mr. Wab" Medici. I don't know if Andy's is still open, or even if Mr. Wab is still alive. I know he loves the nabe, and he stuck with it long after his neighbors headed east to Long Island and north to Yonkers.

It sounds like you have the same problem with deliveries that I had when I moved to New York 16 years ago (arrrrgh! has it really been 16 years? I am older than God! arrrrgh!). The second year I lived here, I moved to a place on East 4th St. and Avenue B. This is before the East Village had become uniformly fabulous, and restaurants wouldn't let their delivery people cross 1st Ave. Plus ca change, etc., etc.

Good luck finding that hero. I'll let you know if I hear of anything.

[Julie]

Bakerina, I've read a fair amount about the Italian history of East Harlem. There's a wonderful little book called "Teacher with a Heart" about the school principal Leonard Covello, who taught and led at that school that you can see from the FDR drive near 116th St.(in my other life I'm an NYC public schools functionary, god help me). In the 30s and 40s, the whole gang struggle in this neighborhood was between the Italian kids and the rapidly growing Puerto Rican community -- Sharks and Jets, anyone? Anyway, it seems as if all that's left are Patsy's, Rao's (where no one unfamous can ever get in) and Morrone Bakery on 116th, which we haven't yet tried. The last time we ate at Patsy's, the bread was delicious, so we asked if they made it in-house, as many pizzerias do. Turns out it's from Morrone's, which apparently has many other old-style Italian goodies, so we're going to have to check that out...