New York needs frozen custard.
On the evening of Memorial Day, I called my parents as I walked along Central Park West and lamented that “there is no good food in New York.” The people who usually say this, I imagine, follow it up with something like, “and that is why Winthrop and I are flying to Paris for dinner tomorrow — even though it is such a pain since they grounded the Concorde.”
My mother, though, knew exactly what I meant and shot back with “Well, why don’t you see if you can find a five-year-old’s birthday party? I’m sure they would have something you like.” This is offensive, but not incorrect.
The idea of a perfect meal is very clear to me: good chicken strips with a generous helping of barbecue sauce for not more than ten dollars. The price is right and the food is safe. Chicken strips are different from other five-year-old birthday party food in that they do not allow the space for creativity that pizza does or the possibility of chewy, sharp bread afforded by grilled cheese. Chicken strips are everything that food should be: consistent, inexpensive, and good enough.
I have so far found three New York restaurants that I enjoy. One serves exactly five varieties of pasta and has a lasagna special on Sunday, one deals exclusively in French fries, and one is the bodega near my apartment with excellent cheeseburgers (though the bodega used a harder bun than usual on my last visit and has been moved to the watchlist).
There is still a chicken strip void in my life here, and not for my lack of trying to fill it. All of the chicken strips in New York, it seems, are terrible. The fryer oil is wrong. The breading is too dry. The chef — as so often seems to be the case on coasts — overthinks what a chicken strip ought to be and deconstructs it in some way. The closest I have come to a proper chicken strip is a restaurant in Brooklyn that is seemingly Midwest-themed. Even then, the breading was off and the theme was tiresome. Good chicken strips come from restaurants where the theme is “restaurant” or “the vague concept of Greece” (and even that is pushing it).
There was on the radio a few weeks ago a segment about a restaurant that I have not visited and have no intention of visiting. The restaurant, which is somewhere in Manhattan, is very expensive and it is, by all reports, very difficult to get a table there. This does not appeal to me. If there is anything that I hate more than spending money, it is waiting in line to spend money.
The radio segment was devoted to the news of the restaurant’s post-pandemic reinvention of itself as a fully vegan establishment. If chicken strips were an option at this restaurant before, they are not now. The apparent effect of this is that the only animal suffering involved is that of the patrons, who wait months for a table and pay hundreds of dollars for the pleasure of eating quinoa. (The fancy restaurant people are the same ones that, looking at an ingredient list on food packaging, are liable to say that people should only eat things that they can pronounce, as if “monosodium glutamate” is such a challenge compared to “quinoa” or “foie gras.”)
Naturally, the restaurant earned some fabulous Michelin Star ranking, great critical acclaim, and a comfortable spot on WNYC between the traffic report and the latest on the horrors of the mayoral race.
Of course, it is a Very New York Thing to eat at fancy restaurants and enjoy them, but it is also a Very New York Thing to throw coins at rats on the subway, and I have to save my coins for the laundromat.
If I was handing out Michelin Stars, I would start with Olympic Coney Island at West and Telegraph in Brownstown Township, Michigan. The chicken strips at Olympic are perfect. The service is impeccable and speedy. The menu is vast — not that it matters beyond the chicken strips. Soup is ninety cents extra, which makes the meal two courses for under ten dollars. This seems so simple, and yet a city of eight million is unable to replicate the phenomenon.
Similarly absent is frozen custard. It was frozen custard that prompted the call I made to my parents last week. “Of course they have it there!” my mother insisted. After a few moments of searching on the internet, she, too, capitulated to the horrible truth. There are a few frozen custard places, but they are chains. Shake Shack claims to have it, but it is available only in shake form, which is unnatural.
By my best estimate, the ratio of frozen custard facilities to people in New York is 1:1,000,000. In many Michigan communities, that number is 1:15,000.
This alone ought to disqualify New York from any sort of culinary title. With such a lack of frozen custard, I would be hesitant to call the place the food capital of the Lower Hudson, let alone the whole country. If it were up to me, I would give the title of food capital to the Downriver suburbs of Detroit, where the frozen custard is plentiful and the chicken strips are done properly.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“Legendary Waitress, Landmark Downriver Restaurant Survive COVID-19 Pandemic” by Jamie L. LaReau in the Detroit Free Press.
If Downriver is the culinary capital of the nation (as I suggest it ought to be), Sibley Gardens is the exact epicenter. This article, in what my grandfather calls, “the best thing I have ever read about Downriver in the Free Press,” explains the place perfectly. It is excellent (even though they do not have chicken strips).
The whole of Seinfeld.
I watch television with a laser focus. I do not switch between shows as I stream, which means that I remember entire eras of my life by what I was watching in my off-hours at the time. Because I do not watch much television, this means that the Mad Men era, for example, lasted the better part of a year. This week, with two episodes left, the Seinfeld epoch will draw to a close.
I was not old enough/even born when most of Seinfeld aired for the first time, which means that it took until I had a proper streaming subscription to finally get a hand on the show. I now feel that I have finally had some long-overdue orientation to my own culture. When a woman tripped over her own suitcase on a train last week and cried out, “Serenity Now!” it was all I could do to stop from yelling out, “I finally get it!”