Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [49]
Good as the smoked fish platters are, the single best dish in the house is the one known as eggs-and-novie. If you come in the morning, especially on a weekend, you will smell plates of it being carried from the kitchen to customers as soon as you enter. It is eggs scrambled with plush morsels of Nova Scotia salmon and onions nearly caramelized by frying. The combination is salty and sweet, and the textural range from the eggs’ soft curds to the firm nuggets of fish they enfold to the slippery bits of onion is perfection. The aroma of this omelet, as well as smells of freshly toasted bagels and of cold cuts, salamis, and garlic pickles from the takeout side of the restaurant, makes walking into Barney Greengrass one of the most appetizing experiences New York City has to offer.
Café Edison
228 W. 47th St.
212–840–5000
New York, NY
BLD | $$
Known to regulars as the Polish Tea Room, Café Edison offers a delicious taste of old New York that seems utterly unaffected by the corporate takeover of Times Square. Prices are moderate, the food is good, and the experience is unforgettable. In particular, we highly recommend ordering borscht, matzoh ball soup, braised brisket, kasha varnishkes (bowtie pasta and kasha groats), and homemade gefilte fish. Experts consider the cheese blintzes among the city’s best, and we think the matzoh brie is superb.
Way back in the 1920s, this used to be a ritzy spot. Today, while it’s no flophouse, the Edison Hotel is far from ultraluxurious. The café, which used to be the hotel’s grand ballroom, still shows evidence of the glamour that once was, including bas-relief salmon-colored walls and elegant chandeliers. But now the walls are taped with signs advertising daily specials and the staff of weary waiters and waitresses will give any crabby deli help a run for their money in an angst-on-a-tray contest.
Carnegie Deli
854 Seventh Ave.
212–757–2245
New York, NY 10019
BLD | $$
Expensive, rude, loud, uncomfortable, and overrun with tourists, the Carnegie Deli is one of the great restaurants of New York City. Its pastrami and corned beef are among the best anywhere; the kaleidoscopic menu of sandwiches, coffee shop hot lunch, and Jewish comfort food is definitive. Merely walking in from Seventh Avenue is a gastronomic blast as the aroma of cured deli meats and sour pickles assaults your nose. A host points you to the back, and as you walk toward the tables, you pass a counter full of meats and smoked-fish salads behind which sandwiches are made. Salamis hang like a curtain over the counter, adding their garlicky perfume to the air. At the back of the restaurant, or in the adjoining dining room, you will be directed to a place at a table where you sit elbow-to-elbow with strangers.
The Carnegie is best known for immense sandwiches made of cured meat, brisket, turkey, chopped liver, and triple-decker combinations of ingredients. Beyond sandwiches, culinary highlights include blintzes and potato pancakes, gefilte fish and pickled herring, borscht and kreplach soup.
Although purists gripe that the meat is no longer available hand-sliced, we have no complaints about the Carnegie’s machine-sliced pastrami. It is mellow and not too zesty, utterly tender and infused with fatty savor. It is ridiculously large—so tall that the top piece of rye bread appears to be merely an afterthought applied to the tower of meat. In fact, it is difficult to eat the ordinary way, by picking it up in your hands and taking a bite. Many customers go at it by piece-by-shred, directly from the plate. To accompany the monumental sandwiches, the Carnegie supplies perfect puckery accouterments—half-sour and sour dill pickles arrayed in metal bowls along the tables.