Manhattan Food Frenzy

Yesterday was diet-break day ("Breakdiet"?), and I did it in style.

Big discovery. Tamales Lupita is a little side-street joint at 154 E 112th St hailing from Guerrero, a rare Mexican state for immigrants hereabouts. I had my first-ever goat tamales (they're on the left; pork on the right):

Very nice server told me they make a rare sour soup, purely vegetarian, on "Wednesdays or Thursdays", usually by 5pm. He himself didn't know the name in Spanish. I have no idea (I'm more of a Mexico City/Juarez/Puebla/Veracruz/Oaxaca guy; Guerrero is like Mars to me).

Then on to PQR, the new Roman pizza place on the Upper East Side which I'd heard great things about. I got a portobello slice. Beautiful work, unlike anything else local (fwiw I did recently try an interesting, under-radar, good-not-great Neapolitan pizza place in Franklin Square, Long Island).

Problem: the pizza is copiously dosed with olive oil, and properly so, but when they reheat the slice, it cooks the oil into the bread, creating an unpleasant twice-fried effect. Even so, still very good. And while everyone complains about slices costing circa $7, I was served two for the price. Not sure if that was a special treat or normal procedure.

A bit later, pork-and-chive dumplings from Shu Jiao Fu Zhou Cuisine , the down-home Fu Zhou place on Eldridge Street in Chinatown. Right on the money, as always, and convenient to the Milton Resnick/Pat Passlof foundation, which opens its gallery next weekend (Resnick is my favorite painter and his wife Pat Passlof was fantastic, too). I didn't get a dumpling photo, but stole this one from Adjanie T on Yelp:

Then a reference-quality slice of coconut custard pie from Petee’s Pie Company on Delancey, which I hadn't previously noticed. It's better if you click to expand (kindly note the striation).

I followed with one beer each at Top Hops and One Mile House Bar. I took an interesting photo at the latter - a normally impossible angle made workable by shooting through the connecting passage between their double-sided bars:

This hardly constituted a full-out bender, but I think I scored well in quality/diversity with a few far-flung bites.


See this update/reappraisal of the pizza