BZ Grill – 11.04.2009

BZ Grill
27-02 Astoria Blvd.
Astoria, NY 11102

The best gyro this side of the Aegean located where else but in Astoria Queens.  Gyros are everywhere from suspect midnight street cart vendors to Jersey diners to greasy late night pizza shops; I’ve tried them all.  BZ Grill’s gyro is the closest thing to what you will find in Athens without the $800 plane ticket.  While the gyro is the star of the show, everything else on the menu just adds to the glorious (and affordable) meal.

Fries Greek style with crumbled feta and oregano

A proper Greek salad (Horiatiki ensalada)

How great can a salad be you ask?  Despite it’s simple ingredients, it is not easy to get right.  The freshness and crisp texture of a good Greek salad only complements the rest of the meal of  bread, grilled meats, fish, etc.  The horiatiki ensalada is very good:  fresh vegetables with ripe tomatoes, a good feta that isn’t too salty, and a smooth red vinegar without too much bite.  Notice there is no lettuce.  Yes sir, this salad is well balanced and should always accompany whatever you order.

Ponder Pork Perfection

“That don’t look like no gyro,” you might say but this is how a gyro is made in Greece.  Layers of marinated pork are stacked on a spit and cooked on a vertical rotisserie until charred and and then shaved off.  Saying the greenish brown “lamb cylinder” normally seen here in the States is a gyro (pronounced yee-roh) is like calling Spam an aged prime porter house.  Like the salad dressing, the tzatziki (yogurt sauce) tastes dead on.  Thick cool greek yogurt with garlic that is not too heavy. Order at least two pork gyros, one for now and one for the road.

BZ salad (not on the menu)

The Good
The gyro and BZ mixed grill, a platter of grilled meats and Cypriot sausage.
Good sized portions at a reasonable price.

The Bad
It’s all the way in Astoria, not good for the pilgrims from Jersey.

The Ugly
The food coma that follows after eating all that salad, fries, and grilled meat.  Bring a tic-tac or two.

All smiles after a great lunch

Greeks unite!

Sugar Sweet Sunshine 10-31-09

Sugar Sweet Sunshine
126 Rivington St.
New York, NY 10002

I’ll make this short and sweet and say Sugar Sweet was okay. I always measure a cupcake shop by its Red Velvet and their “Sexy Red Velvet” just wasn’t. Maybe I just have a problem with their “moose” frosting which tastes like butter. I did however, like their “Ooey Gooey” and thought it was better than their other chocolate cupcake, the “Bob”, which has a hint of almond in the frosting.

But at $1.50, these cupcakes are probably the most bang for your buck anywhere. I heard the pistachio cupcake and banana pudding are good and I’d like to try their pumpkin cupcake with cream cheese frosting next time.

Good: They’re not overpriced and it is a cute little cozy shop that almost makes you want to sit on their retro sofa chair and sing, “Won’t you be my neighbor?”, as you take off your shoes one at a time.

Bad: The “moose” frosting which is what they use on most cupcakes, is too buttery for my taste.

Ugly: Nothing, if you like wallpaper from the 60s and 70s.

-teeth

Intelligentsia Coffee Cupping

Intelligentsia NY Coffee Lab
594 Broadway, Suite 909A
New York, NY 10012

IntelligentsiaCoffee

By cupping, I don’t mean that ancient Chinese practice of applying heating cups on your back to heal your ailments. Coffee cupping is like wine tasting, but with coffee.  After visiting the Intelligentsia cafe by Millennium Park during the Taste of Chicago Food Festival, I was eager to visit their NY Lab.

I dragged myself to the $10, one-hour cupping class on Halloween morning to see what it had to offer. It had eight spots open but my date and I were the only ones who came since I suppose everyone else in the city was prepping for Halloween.   It made for a much more cozy atmosphere where we asked all the questions we wanted and I took the liberty to take just as many photos.

Our barista/professor was Ramine (spelling?!), a pretty laid-back guy who owns a coffee shop in Brooklyn. After some small talk over coffee, he laid out four cups of different coffee grinds for each of us and our first step was to smell each cup and write down our thoughts about the aromas on a chart.   I used mostly generic adjectives such as “rich”, “dark”,  or “sweet” to describe what I smelled.  I haven’t gotten to the point of training my nose to detect a hint of lemon, blackberry or persimmon that others may catch with their snobby olfactory senses.  But who says a common coffee lover can’t enjoy smelling coffee? I took the pleasure of taking it all in by putting the brim of the cup over my nose as if it was an oxygen mask that dropped out from the ceiling of a plane and I was inhaling for my life.

Next Ramine poured water into each cup so we could describe the wet aroma by breaking the foam in the coffee. It definitely brings out other flavors you can’t smell with the dry aroma but for whatever reason, I liked the dry aroma better.

Wet aroma

Finally Ramine took all the foam out and we took a spoonful of each coffee and slurped the coffee to check for flavor, body, acidity and finish. There were definitely coffees I didn’t like (#2, #3,) because they were too dark or bitter for my taste.  I like #1 and #4 better; particularly #4 because it was “fruity,” “sweet,” and “clean.”

Turns out that #1 was “La Maravilla,” a coffee from Guatemala, and #4 was “Kenya Gichathaini.”  My date gravitated toward the #2 which was from Zambia and the #3, the “Pacamara Peaberry,” which was from Nicaragua.

Ramine was really sweet to give us all four coffee bags to take home with us, even though it doesn’t say on the Web site that that would be part of the deal.   It’ll be our little secret.

Good:

I forgot to mention Intelligentsia is a do-gooder and participates in direct trade with the coffee farmers and buys seasonally. As for the cupping class, taking the time to smell the dry aroma of the coffee grinds and talking about what we all smelled was fun; it’s comical to see how everyone smells different things from the same cup.  But the best part was getting four bags of coffee which I  wasn’t expecting and which I unfortunately can’t guarantee for you.

Bad:

If anything, waking up early on Saturday morning to do this. (If you can consider 9:00 “early” for a weekend.) For you non-early birds, they offer noon classes on Wednesdays until the end of this year.

Ugly:

Not having the coffee grinder to grind the free coffee beans.

-teeth