Dos Caminos

I met Elizabeth at her office on a muggy July day and we walked around for a bit in search of food. I had not thought of getting Mexican - to be honest it had never occurred to me that there would be Mexican food in this area, it seemed like every restaurant we walked by was European - but the large patio at Dos Caminos looked like a nice place to sit.

If I liked guacamole, I would have sprung for the crab-chipotle version, as I love both those flavors. Even at eighteen dollars. 

As I mentioned, it was a muggy day. The service was great - our waiter constantly filled my iced tea and chatted with us. He encouraged us to try a margarita, but neither of us could bring ourselves to do it in the middle of a weekday. I drank at least a half-dozen glasses of iced tea.

I had planned to get the smoked brisket enchiladas, but the "mar y tierra" tacos sounded too good to pass up: marinated skirt steak, Tecate-battered shrimp, and Sriracha aioli. (And also bacon guacamole, which I asked be removed.)

The shrimp were tasty, I could have eaten an entire bucket of them. Half of the bites of skirt steak were good, half were much too chewy. (Perhaps whoever sliced it got a little careless in parts.) The Sriracho aioli was delicious, though as nicely as it complemented the shrimp, it distracted from the steak. There was roughly twice as much aioli as was necessary and it unfortunately overpowered each bite of the tacos.


My rice was tasty. I'm not qualified to comment on the beans, as I am not a big fan. I tried these and thought they were okay, which is as big a compliment as I can give.


When I asked for my tacos without the bacon guacamole, the waiter asked Elizabeth if she likes guacamole. When she answered affirmatively, he said to me: "I'll just bring it on the side so she can have it." Like I said, the service was great. Elizabeth said the guacamole was really good.

Elizabeth had the carnitas tacos. She thought they were "okay" but wished the pieces of meat had been smaller. One of the tacos contained large hunks of fat.

I don't have any regrets about visiting Dos Caminos, but I won't be going back. You may have noticed the prices: my three little tacos were nineteen dollars. (Elizabeth's carnitas tacos were sixteen.) Even by New York standards this seems silly. At the table next to us were a couple of guys on an expense account, and if I were in their place (or if our tacos had been great) I would probably feel differently. But there is zero doubt in my mind that I will find cheaper and better tacos in New York.

Texas Champagne & My Little Pizzeria

Since the night in April that we arrived in Brooklyn and had My Little Pizzeria for dinner, I've been thinking about how well Texas Champagne would taste slathered across a slice. Texas Champagne is not my favorite hot sauce, but I've found that it's the one I like best on pizza. I used to buy it at Whole Foods in Pasadena, but I went to two Whole Foods in Manhattan - and at least a dozen markets - to see if I could find it. I decided that maybe they just don't carry it on this side of the country.

But the other day I was out walking and passed by a different Whole Foods. Sure enough, they had it. So on our next trip to My Little Pizzeria I brought along the bottle and used it generously on my slices. It was awesome. 

A Very Bacon Cheeseburger

I do not pretend there is anything unique about this. It's been more than half a decade since the whole let's-put-bacon-on-anything trend started. Bacon & chocolate candy bars were the first thing I remember seeing, and it only got more ridiculous from there. Bacon ice cream. Bacon floss. Bacon-flavored condoms. A national fast-food chain came out with a "bacon milkshake" that, in what I thought both summed up the craze and would serve as its epitaph, contained no bacon.

So I admit there is nothing clever about what I'm doing here. It just sounded like fun. It all started this way:

I was at Paisanos, trying to decided what to do for dinner, when I saw they have a blend of Angus beef and applewood-smoked bacon. A bacon-cheeseburger sounds good for dinner, I thought. And I'll get some extra bacon to go along with it. I snapped a picture with my cell phone.

Last Christmas I received this burger press in my stocking and I put it to use here: you can turn out nice-sized burger patties, about a half-pound each.

Some neighbors of mine, in a building across the courtyard, have an outdoor deck, and on the weekends you can smell the charcoal grill firing up. I can't say I don't like it, because it smells like summer... but it makes me a little sad. I miss my old grill tremendously. I've only cooked on an outdoor grill twice in four months. I'd almost rather give up baseball. (Almost.)

But my indoor grill works quite nicely for what it is, and I grilled these burgers in the kitchen.

To complement the beef/bacon mix, I picked up a bacon-horseradish cheese. Once my burger came off the grill I put a glop of the cheese on top and wrapped the burger in foil for a few minutes.

So that the burger could rest and the cheese could melt down a little. I placed the patty on a brioche bun.

I slowly cooked a few slices of Paisanos thick, applewood-smoked bacon in a pan, to a crispy, dark brown. 

Two slices of bacon went onto my burger. 

Baconnaise. Why not? While I find the slogan - "Everything should taste like bacon" - to be ridiculous (Should beer taste like bacon? Pizza? Lobster?), I certainly wanted this burger to taste like bacon.

And so a scoop of the Baconnaise went on to the burger.

I cooked the burger a little longer than I usually do, so it wasn't the glorious dark pink in the center. I figured with pork already mixed in with the beef, it would have plenty of fat to add flavor, not to mention that medium-rare pork isn't as appetizing as medium-rare beef. But I still left some pink to it. "I don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble."

It was a wonderful burger. I had thought there was a chance - a good chance, actually - that this whole ordeal would be going overboard. But the blend of the bacon into the beef was really quite subtle. Elizabeth's dad didn't even realize there was bacon in the patty until I mentioned it to him. He also, by the way, gave me the thumbs-up sign three times while eating. I've never received more than one from him during a meal. (Except when he gives me two in quick succession, indicating that I need to turn up the volume during Jeopardy. But that doesn't really count.)

Would I make it the exact same way again? No. The Baconnaise was too much. I can see the appeal of adding it to a BLT, or perhaps dipping onion rings into the sauce, but there was no need for it here. The patty, bacon slices, and especially the bacon-horseradish cheese all played off each other quite well. The mayo asserted itself instead of playing well with the others. If I were to do this again (and I doubt I will - the brisket/short rib burger patties are better) the baconnaise would not be welcome.

I sent a photo of the burger to some good friends, asking if it was too much. One of them responded "Holy heart attack, hombre."

But my favorite response was this: "Last night I dreamed that my bed was made out of bacon, so no, I don't think so."

Have a great weekend.

Great Wall Chinese Restaurant

A few blocks away from me, on pleasant stretch of Henry Street, is Great Wall Chinese Restaurant. It's not much to look at from the outside, though this knock should mean nothing: some of the greatest food I have ever eaten has been from little holes-in-the-wall looking very much like this. (I once ate the second-best potsticker of my life from a storefront in the Bay Area that was no larger than the back of a van - and in my mind afterwards, I wondered if maybe it was a van that shut its doors and drove off like in Raiders of the Lost Ark.)

So it took me a while to make it in, but eventually I did. 

Great Wall appears to do quite a brisk take-out business during lunch time, but it wasn't too crowded inside, so I placed an order for a lunch special and took a seat.

The "chicken with garlic sauce" lunch special - costing just over five dollars - was outstanding. Tender chicken in a spicy, very garlicky sauce with an ample amount of veggies. (Often such "garlic" specials barely taste of garlic.) There was a generous amount of the protein. I've been to a half-dozen Chinese take-out joints since moving to Brooklyn, and this entree was unquestionably the best I have had.

You get your choice of soup or soda with the lunch special and I opted for the former, getting wonton soup. It was average. The wontons were big but on the tough side and devoid of any real flavor.

I've never been a pork fried rice fan, but this was pretty good, with big chunks of lean pork. I didn't eat more than two or three forkfuls, but I liked it.

I don't really care about the soup or rice when getting a Chinese lunch special, all I really care about is the main dish, and my garlic chicken was outstanding. So I decided to return to Great Wall a couple of weeks later. 

This time I got the General Tso's Chicken lunch special, with a soda. It was not very good. The dark meat chicken was stringy and tough, the batter was overcooked and the sauce was much too sweet. The pork fried rice contained almost no pork this time around.

But I liked the garlic chicken on my first visit so much that I will give Great Wall one more try - probably staying away from the battered and fried chicken dishes - in the future.

Chili Cheeseburgers

Every once in a while I make a burger at home that is even better than a McDonald's burger. Let me tell you about one of them.

I'm not sure how one would go about making a bad burger from the Paisanos brisket/short rib blend. I suppose it's possible - you could put avocado or some other nasty s**t on it - but I have yet to have one that was anything but fantastic.  I've cooked quite a few of them over the last four months, and at this point I feel comfortable in saying that they are the best pre-made burger patties I have ever tasted.

Can you guess what's going on the photo above? Elizabeth likes her burgers much more well done than I (or her dad, who was having dinner with us) do, so hers goes on the grill several minutes before mine does.

The brioche buns from Caputo's Bake Shop are my burger bun of choice at the moment, so I picked some up for this evening's burgers.

I placed two slices of American cheese on my burger and topped it with several spoons of chili. I forgot to take a picture of the chili while it was cooking, so I'll just tell you what I did: one pound of Paisanos ground beef (already cooked and drained of fat) mixed with Sir Kensington's Gourmet Scooping Ketchup, a tiny can of tomato sauce, and chili spices. I let it simmer for about thirty minutes.  

I often add different things to my chili. Sometimes sour cream, sometimes pepperjack cheese, sometimes Fritos, sometimes red onion, sometimes hot sauce.... but for this burger I wanted mustard and pickles. I used Sierra Nevada "Stout & Stoneground" mustard and Brooklyn Brine Company's "Spicy Maple Bourbon" pickles.

Yep, it was even better than McDonald's. I promise.