Oblivion Tour: Paterson, NJ Turkish/Arab Wonder Zone

Welcome to Jim's Oblivion Food Tour, where, homelessly awaiting my visa, I amuse myself by driving aimlessly in a rented car, half-heartedly seeking out interesting eats (my cruise idea crashed when I learned I'd need a passport - no good, because Portugal's been holding mine for 3-1/2 months).

I already did a similar tour back in 2006, but that time my bills were paid by a corporation.

I won't be doing lots of glossy reporting here, as I'm still post-traumatic from that previous Chow Tour. But this is too surprising not to mention.

Paterson, NJ has always been an intriguing food town, just off-the-beaten-track enough to host little gems and pockets of surprising immigrants. I haven't been here in years, and, my god, it's now turned into a Turkish/Arabic metropolis nearly as teeming with restaurants, cafes, and bakeries as Dearborn, Michigan.

Most prominent is their Turkish community, very welcome since most Turkish places in the five boroughs have had the life sucked out of them. New Jersey Turkish boomtown was exactly what we all needed, and Allah provides.

I got a little obsessed with Taskin bakery. Like all Turkish bakeries, there's as much savory as sweet, and I drastically over-ordered on two consecutive breakfasts.

Sorry for the hasty photos. I am not your dancing monkey.

Note that they heated that stuff up for me (in an oven, certainly not a microwave).

Under the Taskin sun

Day one breakfast:

Front row(!) left to right: Lahmacun (mouth-melting), Taskin borek filled with meat (unimaginably crusty), Bazlama potato (home fries stuffed into a pancake). Second row: chocolate thingee, sarma pistachio (done properly with slightly rancid butter), Turkish coffee with a generous free lokma (fried dough ball)

Day two breakfast:

Front row: Cut-up su böregi (noodles and cheese; more on this below), UFO roll thingee, meat pie. Second row: Turkish coffee and kadayif.

I'd like to call special attention to su böregi, which I rediscover every few years, always making the same astonished connection to Jewish lokshin (noodle) kugel, which is the exact same dish. Here's the slab plus a close-up:

Some Jews make this dish sweet, and even add (yeeeeech) raisins. These are dangerous, unhinged Jews known as Litvaks, and you must avoid them and their kugel at all costs.

Moving on, this shot gives you a sense of the splendid local restaurant density:

Driving around, my dawning intuition bloomed into a conviction that Palestinians are here, and that they are making kunafeh. Palestinian kunafeh bears no relationship to the Lebanese or Turkish versions. This is cheese-based, and, as I wrote in my smart-phone app "Eat Everywhere", it's "one of mankind's most triumphant creations." I honestly believe it's the world's greatest dessert.

Problem is I'd just consumed a boatload of Turkish sweet and savory baked goods (not everything in the photos in single sittings; but close to it). So when, while driving around looking for a pharmacy, Nablus Sweets cropped up in my peripheral vision, and a buried connection linked it to Jordan, which linked it to Palestinians, which linked it to Palestinian kunafeh, I groaned. But facing the inevitability, I parked, and entered a bakery as vacant as a salt marsh and filled with treasure.

The photos are way way better if you click to expand them:

So many versions of basbousa that it made me a little dizzy:

The baklava, while obviously crazy-fresh, seemed to shimmer in a sepia haze from a distant century. It's not a photography trick. It really looked like this:

And here's the blessed kunafeh:

And a close-up:

So great. And no rosewater. The owner, a cool dude who speaks perfect English and immigrated in the 70s, told me that kunafeh from Nablus, Jordan never has rosewater. He was amazed I'd ever had it that way. But I have, in Palestinian kunafehs in Astoria, Brooklyn, Austin, and Dearborn.

We got into a long discussion of this, and of the world, and of human imperfection, and of politics, and I didn't agree with much of what he said, but I could see - as is often true - that opinions are like stick-on labels, completely arbitrary and not self-defining. I've lost the ability to confuse people with their stick-on labels. Opinions are flimsy and cartoonish, while individual people are neither.

The words coming out of his mouth were not my words, and included some phrases I'd normally deem disqualifying (though I'm no roaring progressive), but we were friends by the end. Actually, from the beginning. We agree on the big picture stuff that's what matters. He latches onto certain "takes" in his bewilderment, while I latch on to certain others. But we're both bewildered. Brothers in bewilderment.

He would not allow me to pay for my kunafeh. Which broke my heart because there should have been thousands of customers vying to get in, but there was only me. And even I wasn't a paying customer.

The moment when I earned my free kunafeh was when he explained how money interests had ravaged Syria, Sudan, and other places. Behind the authoritarianism, t's all about the money. Like most/all Palestinians, the guy was freely loquacious, but I stopped him cold in his tracks when I asked, with enormous sincerity, "But what's so great about money?"

He froze. He considered it. And he melted into a recognition as soft as his kunafeh. 

"Your beautiful baking makes people happy. I never saw a rich person get anywhere near as happy from an extra few bucks."

He couldn't argue.