Quest for Food

Two days prior to this Saturday, one of my wife's best friends came out to visit. Today, the three of us went on a food-tasting tour of Greenwich Village, also known as "The Village".

Manhattan is split up into several areas and Greenwich Village is one of the more well-known neighborhoods, primarily as an artistic haven. Many people moved to this Bohemian area, rents went up, and now no starving artist can afford to live here anymore. Despite that, it's one of my favorite places in the city.

The Village's traditional boundaries are south of W 14th St, west of Broadway, and north of Houston. (Note: Houston mispronounced "HOUSE-ton" by New Yorkers. As a misplaced Texan, I always have to remember not to correctly pronounce it like the city in Texas [HUES-ton].) The area south of Houston is called SoHo. The area of Greenwich Village directly north of Houston Street is sometimes called NoHo. Can you guess why?

(Another note, primarily for Elly and her sister: This is the area where NYU's main campus is.)

We started at Zito's, on Bleecker between 6th and 7th. Zito's is one of the oldest bakeries still operating in the area. There's a few pictures of Frank Sinatra with old Mr. Zito adorning the walls. Like all shops in the area, Zito's probably had enough space to fit a dozen customers at a time in the store. The store is about ten or twelve feet wide. The baking is done below the store, in huge cast iron stoves that date back to the American Civil War. In the morning, the cellar door is opened and...

I haven't mentioned how you get access to basements in Manhattan yet.

As you walk along almost any sidewalk in Manhattan, you'll notice that right by the stores and shops, there is usually a metal trap door in the ground, jutting out into the sidewalk. These are the accesses to the basement. You'll often see several of these open -- they almost always have two hinged doors that open outward. These doors come up to knee height. Theoretically, they should prevent you from walking into a gaping hole in the ground.

Looking in the rabbit hole (this is what our tour guide called them, but she was a bit insane), you'll see the Steps of Peril. They're set at a 12/12 pitch, or at a 45-degree angle for those of you who weren't architecture majors. If the store has the money, you'll also see a narrow conveyor belt system.

At Zito's, all the bread comes up in baskets on the conveyor belt. Someone stands at the top of the hole and carries a basket of bread into the store. The staff at the bakery stocks the two display cases, the bread shelf behind the counter, and the window with that morning's breads. Many of the restaurants in the area buy bread from Zito's.

At the bakery, we were treated to prosciutto bread. That's a white loaf, shaped into a ring. Bits of cooked prosciutto are baked right into the loaf. Very tasty. A loaf of this speciality bread runs about $10.50. I have no idea how they make a profit on that -- a pound of prosciutto runs around $11 and it tastes as if they used at least that much in the bread!

Right next door is Murray's Cheese Shop. (Look Gromit -- Cheese!) Again, about the size of Zito's, but full of cheese. Did I say full of cheese? I meant full of over a hundred different cheeses. All the cheeses, including the ones you've never heard of before, all of them have little signs describing the taste and texture. "This is a stinky little cheese with a sharp bite." "This cheese is creamy with a hint of garlic." "This goat cheese goes well with a dry white wine." "A little runny, reminiscent of a fresh Brie."

After the wonderful aromas of the cheese shop, we crossed the street to a pork shop whose name I can't recall. Yummy hand-made sausage was there for us to sample. The wife loved the hot sausage even though it contained her most-hated spice, fennel. Oh! If you're ever here, get a rice ball. Very tasty.

Restaurants

All these stores are located at the corner of Bleecker and Cornelia, a difficult to spot little side street. If you can find Cornelia Street around lunchtime, you're in for a treat. Six different restaurants are hidden on the street and they all have reasonable lunch menus. (Po, Cornelia Street Tavern, Home, and three others whose names I can't recall are all along here.) All the restaurants are small (anywhere from four to twelve tables, the standard for small restaurants in the area) and all have about a two to three week wait for dinner reservations.

Speakeasy

During Prohibition, there were over 400 speakeasies in Manhattan. Or perhaps that was in Greenwich Village alone.

(A brief history of Prohibition in the United States by someone who didn't pay that much attention in history class, but has seen _The Untouchables_ a few times: In the 1920's, the government thought alcohol was bad so they amended the US Constitution to say America is a no-drinking zone. This didn't work as everyone drank anyway, just in secret bars called "speakeasies". The cops would raid a Speakeasy, but most of them (the cops)were on Al Capone's payroll. Eventually, Kevin Costner wound up pushing Billy Drago, who also played John Bly in "The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.", off a roof. Prohibition was repealed and people were able to booze it up in the streets. Here ends the history lesion. [sic])

Our tour took us to a speakeasy the wife and I have been to a few times before, Chumleys. (Perhaps it's called Chumbley's. They served beer and we drank. After a while, we didn't care if it was spelled with a B or not.) Chumley's is located at 86 Bedford. There is no sign out front. You could enter through the front door, go up some steps, turn, go down some steps, turn and you're in the bar. Or you could enter the fun way.

The fun way is one of the many exits the speakeasy had. If you go around the corner onto Barrow Street, there's a gate which leads to a courtyard where you could enter an apartment. One of these doors opens into Chumley's.

There were many exits from the speakeasy. There's a bookshelf on one of the walls that's really a door to an alley! In the ladies room, there was a dumbwaiter that could take two people to the roof -- then a dash across the block to a ladder and out onto the street. When the police would raid the speakeasy, they'd trip on the aforementioned stairs and tumble around like the Keystone Cops. That would be the signal to run.

Another item of note -- this speakeasy claims the term "86 it" originates here.

Yet another item of note -- Chumley's bar staff are firemen. The pictures and paintings of the firemen on the walls are firefighters who died in the line of duty.

Chocolate

Oooooo.... Chocolate. Our next stop of note was the twin confectionery shops of Rocco's and That Other Place Right Next Door. These stores were a bit larger than Zito's/Murray's. If you ever want to gain a couple of pounds, stop in here. We had delightful mini-cannolis from Rocco's. Later on, we picked up some sugar-chocolate-cream-flaky-goodness things. Both stores are on Bleecker, just west of Sixth Ave.

Just before our tour ate the mini-cannolis, we sampled a slice of New York style pizza, witnessed a drug transaction, and saw a homeless guy throw a garbage can at another homeless guy. Ah, New York.

NoHo

Crossing Sixth Ave, we enter the area of the Village I'm most familiar with. However, our only eating stop was for a falafel shop. There's a huge cone of meat, a good three feet in diameter at the top, about a foot across at the bottom. It is about four feet tall. Our insane tour guide tells us that it's made of layers of beef and lamb. The guy behind the stand slowly spins the meat cone and shaves off thin slices. The side of the meat cone that is away from him his being cooked by heat coils. This is called a doner kabob ("spinning" kabob). They go through one of these meat cones each day.

Here, we each take a half-pita shell and fill it with some of the doner meat. We also try a falafel ball -- ground spiced chickpeas formed into a ball and quickly deep-fried. I've had them before and just hated them. However, the falafel at Zoyakel (over on MacDougal, just north of Bleecker) was fantastic.

SoHo

Then we went South of Houston street to another bakery. At this bakery (just about a half-block from Houston), there were some really nice bookshelves filled with huge paper bags (like thirteen-gallon garbage bags, but paper). We found out that these bags contained bread, bread, and more bread, destined for various restaurants. Between this bakery and Zito's, they've cornered the area's bread market.

After that, we went to an impressive wine store and sampled their horrid house wine. It was so bad, I'm not even going to mention the name of the store or where in SoHo they're located.

End of Tour

There is where the tour ended, and we went back to some of the stores that were pointed out to us -- The Costa Rica Coffee Company was one such shop. About eighty different types of coffee beans were available, all sitting in huge burlap bags. You decided what you wanted, got in line, and the staff would go to fill your order. They'd scoop perfect half-pounds of coffee into the sealable bags. There were several espresso and coffee cup sets for sale here. One set with an alien motif was designed by David Byrne of Talking Heads fame. Another six-cup set was designed by Francis Ford Coppola. They also had about sixty teas.

Back in the area of Murray's, Zito's, and the pork store who's name I can't recall, we went to Aromathery (or a similarly-named shop). That shop has spices, spices, grains, spices, soaps, spices, potpourri, and spices. It also has a cat that lives in the shop. Oddly, the cat hair didn't bother me. Even with the amount of smelly stuff, there wasn't an overpowering smell in the store. I've been in "Everything's a Dollar" stores that smelt stronger.

Then we went home.

-Faux "now I'm ready for lunch" Pas