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Vietnamese summer rolls are in my pantheon of “most refreshing snacks” to eat in this summer’s suffocating heat. Yet, summer rolls have always seemed the product of a magic act.
Is that a hint of a breeze I felt in the dank air, too? The weather was supposed to be changing. I felt hopeful in the garden. And I decided there was a culinary pleasure that would finish the job of pulling me out of my funk: a pistachio biscotti at Cousin John’s Bakery in Park Slope.
Where can you get a glass terrine full of duck rillettes—enough pour deux—for only $6.00? At Cafe du Soleil’s Happy Hour. I wrote about this bistro bar in 2017, and it continues to become ever more popular.
It’s like a spiffed up Korean Sausage McMuffin, and you don’t have to swim across the Hudson River to eat one. But I did, and I would again,
Fortunately, I’d just heard tell of a LIC Gringo-inflected Mexican restaurant attached to a comedy club, The Creek and the Cave where we could grab dinner first. My source said the chicken taco was “the bomb,” and “totally packed with chicken” for a mere $3.50. We had a plan.
While the Chef effortlessly turns out three course meals, he's flummoxed by picnic fair. In contrast, I’m a dab hand at picnics…
I have good news. Our lady of the tamales is in front of West Side Market (Broadway btw 110th and 111th St.s) on weekdays from 12:30 (ish) to 1:15 (ish) every weekday, and on Saturdays she is there from 11:00 AM to 12:30. Small windows of time, true, but long enough to grab lunch.
As soon as we checked into our small two-star hotel in Rome, I asked the young girl at the desk, “Where is the best pizza in Trastevere?” She wrote a word that looked like “Venenzio” on a hot pink Post-it.