Pommes Frites, Wow

One more posting about New York as I found it in late October 2006. My friend Geof Huth, who knows many good places to eat in the city, gave me some good recommendations this time around. I was able to visit a couple of them, and also found a couple of other places that I can recommend to him and everyone else.

Geof’s Recommendations. Zerza, a Moroccan restaurant on East 6th St. near New York University, gives away free postcards that promise “Belly Dance, Hookah, Exotic Drinks” but all I got on a Sunday night was fine fava bean soup and a tasty chicken bastilla (a kind of pot pie) served by a fetching but fully clothed waitress. Probably the belly dancing is on special occasions, the hookah might be unlawful in public places in New York by now, and I didn't want to spend money on any exotic drinks, though I did order a Casablanca, a Moroccan beer.

I visited, but didn’t eat at, another recommendation: Molyvos, a well-appointed Greek restaurant on Seventh Ave. near Central Park. It so happened that the office of an editor I was visiting was around the corner from it, and he suggested, independently of Geof’s suggestion, that we go there. It was too early to eat, but not too early for a glass of Greek wine, a red whose name I didn’t write down, at the brilliant copper-colored bar (just the top, the rest was dark wood).

My recommendations. Gene’s Coffee Shop on East 60th St., where I had a hearty breakfast. A narrow deli-restaurant with all the right details, including a Greek proprietor in black pants, a white shirt and a redish tie.

Dervish, a Turkish restaurant on West 47th St. in a space that had probably been a saloon at one time, with a large bar and tiled floors. I had a lunch meeting with some other editors there and enjoyed the lamb and okra (etli bamya) lunch special.

En route to Zerza, I went down St. Mark’s Place (a block of East 8th St.) and headed down Second Ave. There are all sorts of places along that stretch, including the off-putting Hip Hop Grub – no one was in there – and a few doors down, a hole in the wall that sold Belgian-style French fries in paper cones. It was called, aptly, Pommes Frites.

I didn’t stop there that night, but remembered it a few nights later when we decided to eat something as the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade wound down. We walked a number of blocks to get there, the streets swarming with more people than usual, many in costume, including one fellow dressed as Space Ghost who walked behind us for a few seconds, loudly proclaiming that some other Space Ghost he’d seen wasn’t the real Space Ghost, he was.

When we got to Pommes Frites there was a line out the door, but it moved quickly. For $4, you get a “regular” cone of fries – which is pretty large – and for a little more, one from among a selection of many sauces. Just like in Belgium. We ate them on the sidewalk just outside the place. I had Vietnamese pineapple sauce, which doesn’t sound like it would go with fried potatoes, but it does, because these were no ordinary spuds. Cyrus, member of the Alexander who was with nephew Dees and me, said they were the best fries he’d ever eaten, and I would have agreed, except that none could beat the memory of the cone I had in Belgium years ago. But these were very close.