The halal cart phenomenon continues unabated in NYC, and with good reason.
Forget about hotdogs, for several decades now, the New York City street food par excellence has been halal fare. Originally referring to the types of foods permitted for Muslims – think Kosher but far less strict -, halal carts are understood to serve food of Mediterranean origins, mainly shawarmas and kababs, either served on pita or as part of a rice bowl. Halal carts broke into the NYC street scene in the 1980’s, when Greek carts were still a thing, but really blew up in the 1990’s. By the end of the millennium, there were over 500 halal carts in NYC, and their numbers have only grown since then.
Perhaps the most famous halal cart, and one of the first, is Halal Guys. Over the decades, they have not only expanded throughout the city but nationwide, operating both carts and brick and mortar restaurants. Like many of the current carts, it was operated by Egyptian immigrants. They are famous for their white and red sauces – the former apparently a mint yogurt sauce and the latter apparently shattah, a peppery sauce. -, something which other carts seem to have imitated. In addition to Egyptians, many halal carts are operated by Bangladeshi and Afghan immigrants/refugees, and the menus of their specific carts may reflect these interests.
Getting food from a halal cart was one of my “NYC must do’s” and we were lucky that one of the two halal carts located immediately across the street from our hotel – there were probably a dozen or so within a couple of blocks -, got very good reviews. Thus on our second night in the City, after attending a taping of the Colbert show, we got halal take out at Mama Halal Food and ate it in our hotel.
I went with the lamb gyro ($8.50) and I was very happy. The lamb cubes were impossible tender and flavorful, and after I removed some lettuce, the pita sandwich was well balanced. I had it just with the white sauce. The gyro was perhaps a tad small, but fortunately I wasn’t terribly hungry. I’d definitely order it again if I was in the area.
Mike had the chicken tikka masala bowl ($10.50), with both white and red sauces, and he was very happy with it. I, personally, didn’t think it tasted much like tikka masala, and the red sauce had made it too spicy for my taste, but I appreciated how tender the chicken was. He’d order it again, I wouldn’t.
Drinks were cheap, just $2 for cans, if I recall correctly. There was almost no wait on that cold February Monday night, and service was friendly and efficient. In addition to the W 51st location that we visited, Mama Halal Food has carts at W54st/8Ave, W50st/9Ave and 121st/LibertyAve (Queens).
Mama Halal Food
W 51st St. & 7th Ave.
NYC
(347) 207-5804
M-Su 10 AM - 3 AM
Have I been dethroned? Empanada Mama does make a great empanada.
Everyone who knows me, knows that I love to cook. And anyone that knows me well, knows that my specialty are beef empanadas. It’s what I take to potlucks when I’m feeling generous (it’s pretty time consuming to close them) and I’ve been known to even auction them off at charity events. Empanadas – pastry shells filled with meats and/or vegetables and then folded in half into half-moon shapes – are a specialty of Argentina, my home country. I grew up eating them at least once a week, and you can find them in almost every restaurant, café and bakery in Argentina. Indeed, during our last trip my husband managed to find a café where they weren’t in the menu – he just assumed they were so he ordered them – and the waiter just went around the corner to a bakery and picked one up for him.
But empanadas, made with an endless variety of fillings, are eaten, to a greater or lesser extent, throughout Latin America, and South America in particular. They came to the continent with the Spaniards, who are presumed to have inherited them from the Moors – beyond that, we find filled pastries under different names throughout much of the world. And it’s no wonder. Empanadas and their cousins are convenient, as you can eat them on the go without need of silverware, they are relatively cheap, in addition to delicious. Even within Latin American countries, there are a myriad of varieties of empanadas, differing both on the pastry and the fillings used.
It’s thus not surprising that New York City, a town where immigrants and descendants of immigrants from the world over congregate, would have restaurants specializing on empanadas. Empanada Mama is a Colombian restaurant, but among the 40 empanadas they offer, they have flavors from all over the world. While fried corn flour empanadas are most common in Colombia, Empanada Mama’s menu mostly emphasizes fried wheat flour empanadas, though they have a few fried corn flour and baked wheat flour ones. At home, I always bake my empanadas. I don’t have a deep fryer and I do not like deep frying on a pan. In addition, baked empanadas keep longer and you can eat those with meat fillings at room temperature and microwave those with cheese or sweet fillings. But I do believe fried empanadas are tastier, and that’s what I always order at restaurants. At Empanada Mama, they did not disappoint.
While Empanada Mama serves other dishes in addition to empanadas – their nachos and arepas were tempting – we were there to eat empanadas, so we stuck to those. We weren’t terribly hungry after that morning’s breakfast at La Grande Boucherie, so we shared three savory empanadas and two sweet ones.
The El Toro empanada (braised oxtail with Jamaican pepper, chipotle, red wine, onion, carrot, thyme, and maduros – $4.80) was probably my favorite. It had the intensity of flavor I like to find in empanadas, without being particularly spicy. I’d definitely order it again.
Mike wanted to try a traditional Colombian empanada (albeit with a wheat shell), so he went for the Shredded Beef empanada (slow-cooked beef marinated in traditional Colombian spices with onion – $4.80). He was quite happy with it. He claims he still prefers the flavor of my empanadas, but he really liked the texture of the shredded beef. I’m now thinking perhaps I should try making a ropa vieja empanada and see how that works.
My memories of the Cuban empanada (slow-roasted pork and ham with Mozzarella cheese and a touch of sofrito sauce – $4.50) are less vivid, but I do remember liking it quite a bit. The picture I took of it, however, came out very blurry, so I’m not posting it.
I’m a huge fan of cheese and fruits together – pineapple is one of my favorite toppings for pizza, and I love the cheese-and-plum soufflé empanadas at El Ladrillo, in my home city of La Plata -, so I was intrigued by both the Romeo & Juliet empanada (guava & Mozzarella cheese – $4.50) and the Caramel & Cheese Empanada ($4.50). I finally decided on the latter, and I was happy to confirm my suspicions that it would be a wonderful combination. The caramel was really dulce de leche, and it went great with the light flavored, slightly salty Mozzarella cheese. Whenever I’ve tried to make empanadas with Mozzarella, the cheese has been swallowed by the pastry and they’ve ended up hollow. Here, however, the cheese was fully present. I’m not sure if this was because of the type of pastry dough they used, because they were fried, rather than baked, or simply because the dulce de leche did something to prevent the dough from absorbing the cheese. Hoping it’s the latter, I’m going to try making them. I’ll report later on how they worked.
Mike ordered the Belgian (chocolate) & Banana Empanada ($4.50) and he wasn’t as pleased. The dark chocolate was just too intense, and I don’t think chocolate works that well with empanada pastry. Of everything we ordered that day, it’s the one thing we wouldn’t get again. While the empanadas themselves were the traditional size, they were almost overfilled, so two empanadas should satisfy a typical appetite.
We visited the Hell Kitchen’s branch of Empanada Mama, but they have three other locations in Manhattan – all open 24 hours, so no matter when you get the munchies, you’ll be able to get one. While some of the locations seem like take out spots, the Hell Kitchen restaurant offers ample seating in the back and waiter service. Their menus are, annoyingly, online through a QR code, but they do have printed menus if you ask for them. Service was friendly and efficient, and while the restaurant lacks much of an ambiance, it’s comfortable enough. If we ever go back to NYC, I’d be happy to hit Empanada Mama again.
Empanada Mama 765 9th Ave, New York City, NY 10010 (212) 698-9008
La Grande Boucherie had the fortune of being located about half way between our hotel and the Museum of Modern Art, the first stop in our NYC itinerary. I usually don’t eat breakfast – and that Monday morning was no exception – but I figured my husband might want something solid before tackling the museum. Given how long we spent checking out the exhibits, this was a good call.
La Grande Boucherie serves breakfast, weekend brunch, lunch and dinner in an attractive art nouveau setting that immediately made me feel as if I was in the NYC of yore. The stained glass ceilings were gorgeous, as were the ceramic floors, the central bar was impressive and while the dining rooms, located at both sides of the bar, were more austere, they made me feel very much at home. The Paris, New York City and Buenos Aires of the early 20th century were, perhaps, more similar than not.
Perhaps the prettiest room in the restaurant is its outdoors, covered patio, open to a pedestrian passageway – “6 1/2 Avenue”- that connects W 53rd from W54th streets. That patio is filled with potted plants – you can see them on the bar mirror in the picture above – and was quite enticing, though closed that cold February morning.
The breakfast menu at La Grande Boucherie was, surprisingly, brief. It included several egg dishes, a few sandwiches and a nice variety of coffees, teas and breakfast cocktails, but not very many sweet dishes. It was just as well, as I wasn’t particularly hungry. I enjoyed a couple of pretty average cappuccinos ($6) and an also pretty-average almond croissant ($6), while my husband had the omelette au jambon & gruyère ($30)
The omelet was definitely not as fluffy as we had expected based on the reviews – but it was just as good. It turns out that gruyere and good quality ham make a huge difference as far as taste goes. My husband thoroughly enjoyed it. The potatoes were OK, good but nothing to write home about.
Service was competent and friendly. In all, we enjoyed out time there.
La Grande Boucherie
145 W 53rd St.
New York City
+1 (212) 510 7714
Monday – Friday 08:00 AM - 12:00 AM
Saturday – Sunday 10:00 AM - 12:00 AM
I love cheesecake. My guess is that most people who have tried cheesecake, love cheesecake. But I was a relatively late convert to cheesecake. My first real experience with it did not come until after college. Before, I had been reluctant to try it. In my childhood, my mother made a frozen ricotta cake which I wasn’t terribly fond of, so when Sara Lee frozen cheesecakes hit the Argentine market, I’m going to guess around 1980, the time of a cheap dollar and lots of imports, I refused to even try them. I loved the Sara Lee strawberry shortcake (no longer produced), but the idea of cheesecake seemed, to me, to be an abomination. After that, cheesecake just went into my long last of things I knew I wouldn’t like, so I didn’t.
It wasn’t until I was doing my junior-cum-senior year abroad in Egypt that my interest in cheesecake was awoken. It was all because of Lola, another foreign student at the American University in Cairo who would quickly become my best friend. She craved cheesecake. She talked about it incessantly. So much so, that we spent a fair amount of time looking for cheesecakes in Cairo – never to be found. So when we returned, I had to try it. I actually can’t remember the first time I did, but soon enough I became, like practically everyone else, a cheesecake aficionado. Over the years and decades, I have eaten and baked many a cheesecake. To be honest, most of them taste pretty close to each other. They are made with sweetened Philadelphia-style cream cheese, flour, sugar and eggs. Variations come on the crust – graham cracker is traditional, but I’ve preferred it with vanilla wafers -, and on the toppings. These can be anything: chocolate, fruit, caramel, peanut butter; you name it. But, I keep going back to plain New York cheesecake. Sometimes simpler is better.
It should thus not be surprising that for my first stop in New York City, I chose Junior’s for dinner. Among the myriad of restaurants and bakeries serving cheesecake in NYC, the two most often mentioned as having the best cheesecake in town (and therefore, the world) are Junior’s and Eileen’s Special Cheesecake. Junior’s, which started as a coffee shop-style restaurant in Brooklyn back in 1950, has since opened two other locations in Manhattan (and one in Connecticut), one of which was just a couple of shorts blocks away from our hotel.
There was no wait to be seated, on that Sunday evening in February – but Junior’s offers an online waitlist for those times when it’s busy. The 49th St. & Broadway location where we dined looks like an old-fashioned coffee shop; there are booths, tables and lots of waiters buzzing around. The immense menu has everything you’d expect in a restaurant of that kind and more: burgers, soups and salads, lots of different sandwiches – including four different Reubens -, seafood prepared in a myriad of ways, roasted or fried seafood and meats, BBQ (?!) and a couple of odes to its Eastern European cultural origins: Hungarian beef goulash and Romanian steak. In addition to a myriad of cheesecakes, Junior’s serves other desserts, ice cream sodas, malts and shakes. If you are looking for that 1950’s diner-style experience from so many Hollywood movies, you’ll find it here. Most of the crowd were foreign tourists, however, judged by the myriad of mostly European languages we heard spoke and the location near Times Square.
We weren’t particularly hungry, however – I’d brought us a sandwich to share in the plane – so we decided to split a pastrami burger ($23) and two slices of cheesecake. The burger was impressive as far as size went, but not particularly great. It wasn’t as juicy or flavorful as I’d had hoped for. The pastrami itself was very tasty, the slices were fairly thick and had a pleasant smoky flavor. Ordering a pastrami sandwich might be a better call here. The burger was served with steak fries and onion rings, which were remarkably under-seasoned. Their ranch dressing was superb, however.
The cheesecakes, fortunately, were much better. I just loved their “famous No1 original cheesecake,” aka New York cheesecake ($9/slice). It was light and very creamy, and most importantly, had a very different flavor from most cheesecakes. It tasted like it was made from some type of farmer’s cheese, it had a more savory, aged? flavor and was less sweet that most cheesecakes I’ve had. Perhaps they use neufchatel, the French cheese American cream cheese is set to imitate? I don’t think I would have liked it as a kid, but as an older adult, it hit the spot. The cheesecake is made with a thin sponge cake crust, rather than a graham cracker one, which improves the whole experience. In all, I was quite happy and considered bringing one back with me. However, that might have been a disaster and Junior’s ships them country-wide, so I might order one for Thanksgiving or another holiday meal. I think I will also try to recreate it, and I’ll blog about my tries when the time comes.
The “brownie explosion cheesecake” slice ($9.25) we ordered was much less successful. I was envisioning a cheesecake with little pieces of brownie baked in, but instead it consisted of two layers of brownie with some cheesecake in the middle. The brownie was good, but very dense, and too rich a dessert for this stage in my life. Plus, flavor wise, the brownie overwhelmed the cheesecake.
Service was good but hurried. The experience in general was quite positive. I’d go back.
I’m a big fan of Filipino food, a very successful fusion of Asian and Spanish/Latin American cuisine, but we seldom get it because Filipino restaurants don’t really cater to vegetarians or vegans, and one of my daughters is one. So when we were kidless a few nights ago, it was a great opportunity to try one of the local Filipino restaurants. It was a wonderful night, so we figured we’d get take out and eat it in the patio, and Tapsilog Express seemed best suited for an easy take out experience. It was.
Tapsilog Express has some indoor seating, in a pleasant though not particularly alluring room, but it’s mostly a take out place. They have a simplified menu of meat mains served with rice and a fried egg, as well as some appetizers, drinks and a couple of desserts. We got two orders of lumpia, the tosilog and the chorizosilog . I also got the pineapple cooler and flan for dessert. The food came out very quickly, about 10 minutes after ordering.
The lumpia ($7.50 per order) were small, 1 1/2″ pieces, but there was a good amount of them per order (the picture shows two). They were tasty by themselves, which is a good thing as the sweet and sour sauce they came with was overwhelmingly sour and not very tasty. I’d only get these again if I had sauce at home.
Tosilog ($11) is described as Filipino bacon, but it’s more like pork strips marinated in a sweet sauce. It lacks the crispiness of bacon. It was pretty good, though I felt it lacked “umph”. Still, I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed mixing the egg yolk with the rice.
My husband similarly enjoyed his chorizo ($11). It was slightly sweet and very tasty. He’d get it again.
The flan itself was pretty standard, but the caramel sauce was tastier than usual – probably because it was cooked to perfection. I’m a big flan fan and I’d have it again.I seldom get juices/fountain drinks at restaurants (other than soda), but their pineapple cooler ($3) had good reviews so I decided to give it a try. It was actually very good, a great proportion of pineapple juice to water, so that it had a nice pineapple taste but it wasn’t overwhelmingly sweet or heavy. I’d have it again.
Tapsilog Express
14843 Washington Ave.
San Leandro, California
(510) 878-1232
M-Su 11:30 am – 07:30 pm
After spending most of the summer with non-COVID related health problems, I’ve been suffering from cabin fever, so I decided that we should treat ourselves to a dinner out. I was hankering for Italian, and Buon Appetito showed up as having outdoor dining. Coincidentally, as my daughter reminded us, this was the last restaurant where we ate indoors, before the pandemic. She remembered my telling her that it would probably be out last visit to a restaurant for a while. I was right.
Since then, Buon Appetito has built a small deck on their parking lot. It’s a pretty simple affair, and it could be much enhanced with some plants, particular if positioned to block the view and noises from the adjacent street. But it was pleasant enough for a casual dinner.
Buon Appetito serves classic-modern Italian-American cuisine, by which I mean the sort of dishes you expect to find at Italian restaurants in America in the 21st century. Nothing too exotic, nothing too authentic, nothing too marvelous but stuff that is competently cooked and generally satisfies. It’s the sort of restaurant you expect to find in middle class suburbs.
We started by splitting an appetizer of Mozzarella alla Caprese ($10), which was underwhelming. This was a thick slice of tomato topped with a thick slice of fresh mozarella and large basil leaves – so traditional caprese. It was fine, but I prefer it with slightly riper tomatoes and soft mozarella balls.
As my main dish, I had the gnocchi which was on special that night, which came with a rich, creamy tomato (and I think sausage) sauce. The gnocchi had the right consistency and the dish tasted exactly like I expected it to taste. It was very good without being extraordinary. I enjoyed the leftovers the next day.
My husband had the Costolette di Maiale all’ Arancia ($21), a grilled pork chop in an orange/marsala sauce, which came with mashed potatoes and veggies. He was quite happy with it.
My daughter had the Ravioli con Pomodoro e Limonee ($18). the large ravioli are filled with “spinach, swiss chard, pine nuts & ricotta cheese” and you get your choice of a tomato and artichoke or a lemon cream sauce. She went for the lemon cream, and while both the ravioli and the sauce were very good, the combination of the two really didn’t work. Next time, she’ll try the tomato sauce.
Service was competent, and in all we had a very pleasant dinner.
Buon Appetito
917 A Street
HAYWARD, CA
510-247-0120
M-Su 11:30am - 9:00pm
We were in Santa Cruz visiting our college-student, and I decided to check out Malabar for the simple reason that I couldn’t ever recall having had Sri Lankan food. That turned out to not be true, I did cook Ceylonese food a couple of decades ago as part of my international food project, but I don’t think I’ve ever been to an actual Sri Lankan restaurant.
Malabar’s menu is pretty short – though that may be as a result of the COVID pandemic and the current labor shortage (they’re hiring, btw) -, and features a few dishes from India and Malaysia/Singapore, in addition to Sri Lankan ones. Mains tend to average about $20. The restaurant seems to have a nice, if generic, dining room but also has a couple of tables on the sidewalk, and that’s where we ate.
We started by sharing an appetizer of vegetable roti ($9.50). This was similar to a stuffed dosa, with a filling made from leeks, potatoes and cabbage. It was pretty tasty, even if the curry sauce it came with was not as delicious as the yellow curries you often get with rotis at Thai restaurants. It also came with a spicy tomato sauce that carried a lot of heat.
For our mains, my daughter had the mixed vegetable curry (“Mixed vegetables in a Sri Lankan style coconut curry”, $17.50) and I had the Sri Lankan Yellow Curry ($19.50). Both dishes turned out to be the same yellow curry. While my daughter’s was served with large pieces of broccoli, carrots, peppers, cabbage and kale, mine had a snapper filet as the base (you can substitute for chicken or salmon at an extra cost). Unlike other curries I’ve had in the US, the filet was served whole, rather than in chunks. The curry itself was very thin (a feature it shared with the Ceylonese curry I made myself), with a pretty mild flavor. It was tasty but it lacked both the consistency and layers of flavor you get in a Thai curry, for example. Perhaps it’s best to see it as a curry soup. I’m not 100% sure that it worked that well with the snapper, but it was a pleasant enough dish to eat, even if not one I’d rush to order again. My daughter felt pretty much the same. Both dishes were served with rice, which seemed like a medium grain type, a little on the sticky side. I don’t know that I loved it.
My husband ordered the Devil Lanka with snapper ($21.50), a dish consisting of fish cooked with “cardamom, cinnamon, clove, Anaheim papers, cucumber, pineapple, curry leaves, carrots, tomato, red onion” and “served in a sweet sour and spicy tomato sauce”. He was quite happy with his dish. It wasn’t like anything he’d had before, and he liked the flavors.
Service was very good, our servers were very attentive and friendly. They do ask you to use your phone to scan a QR code to look at the menu (which is also posted outside), but when I mentioned that I didn’t have a smart phone, they brought us a paper menu. My daughter who did have a smart phone with her felt looking at the menu on the small phone screen was very difficult, so she used the paper one instead.
In all we had a very nice time, the street wasn’t very busy (though there was a fair amount of people coming in and out of the restaurant, it’s obviously popular for take out) and we felt safe eating there.
I didn't take any pictures, however (that lack of smart phone and all).
Malabar Restaurant
514 Front St
Santa Cruz, CA
(831) 201 4438
T-Th 5pm - 9:00 pm, F 5pm - 9:30 pm, Sa-Su 12 pm - 2:30 pm and 5pm - 9:30 pm
I’ve eaten tacos for years, decades really. Not too many tacos, though, because I never quite got the point of them. Often, I wasn’t fond of the toppings, or the taco sauce and the tortilla-to-meat ratio never seemed to make sense to me. Plus I’m not a huge fan of corn tortillas in the first place. So, for me, it’s been all about burritos. Until a few nights ago, that is, when my daughter had a taco hankering herself and decided to drive to Tacos Los Amigos in East Oakland to get some. I asked her to bring a single beef taco and boy!, it was love at first bite. I finally get tacos.
I can’t tell you what it actually is, but the combination of beef, diced onion, cilantro and whatever else was on those tiny tortillas just did it for me. I don’think it was the sauce because when I got them again, they had a white sauce (it was a more orange one that first night). But both sauces worked. The tacos just tasted fresh and authentic (though I think I don’t know that I’ve ever eaten tacos in Mexico, my travel adventures there are limited to the Yucatan, the land of salbutes and panuchos, which are delicious, but not really tacos). I actually appreciated, for once, the flavor of the corn tortilla. They were tiny, mind you, but they were gooood.
Al Pastor Tacos
I was just as happy with the two al pastor tacos I got during my second visit (or rather, the second time I sent my daughter to get them). The slightly sweet pork was tasty and went very well with the other standard toppings. I might have even liked them more than the carne asada ones.
There are several problems with Los Amigos, however. One is that as it’s located in East Oakland, I don’t feel very safe sending my teen daughter to get me some (though she does), plus the truck is not really close to my house. Second, they are not cheap – at around $3.50 for pretty small tacos (think 4 tacos for a normal dinner). Third, Los Amigos seems to have eclectic hours – they weren’t there last Sunday evening when I sent my daughter to get more tacos (but they were Monday night). But the biggest problem is that I’ve been left wanting more tacos now.
Plank is a Fun & Relaxing Place for a Weekend Lunch
For the third day of my Birthday Week Extravaganza (TM) I decided to go shopping at Cost Plus and then grab lunch somewhere in Jack London Sq. We came across Plank and it seemed like the perfect place for a relaxed and yet fun lunch. I’m happy to say it was. Indeed, I wish the place had been around (or I had known about it) when the kids were younger, as it seems like the perfect place for a family day. In addition to an outdoor bar with food and an indoor restaurant, Plank offers bowling, boche and an arcade. Alas, not my thing now that the kids are grown, so we didn’t check them out.
The outdoor patio/deck at Plank overlooks a little bit of the marina as well as Jack London Sq in general. There is a roofed area with a large bar, tables and chairs and then a larger patio with more tables/chairs/umbrellas and some sofa-height seats with coffee tables. They have music blasting – but not loud enough that you can’t talk to each other, at least from the further away tables -, there are birds visiting the nearby water fountain and it feels convivial but still relaxing. This is an informal space, as you’d expect.
You seat yourself in the patio and hope a server sees you – it happened pretty immediately for us. It doesn’t seem like they have paper menus – at least we didn’t see any – so you need to pull it out on your smart phone. You might as well do that as you wait for the server to come by. You then place your order with the server who brings you the food. Our server asked us for a credit card when we placed the order, but as my husband was taking it out he told her he would rather pay cash and she then brought the bill at the end of the meal without requiring pre-payment (it might have helped that the cash was visible in his wallet). I hope they haven’t had to implement this practice because they have too many eat-and-flee people, with an open space as that it certainly would be easy to do.
The menu is standard pub fare at pretty standard prices – what passes for low/affordable now that inflation has hit us so hard (I finally know what it means to be an old woman, shocked at the price of everything). They have burgers and sandwiches, pizzas and salads, some appetizers and a few others things. I decided on the baby back ribs ($21 half slab/$27 full slab), and given how little more a full slab is than half, I convinced Mike to share a full slab with me. They come with 3 sides, but they only have 4 to chose from (fries, sweet potato fries, tater tots and salad).
The ribs were perfectly fine, perfectly acceptable it not something to write home about. They were tender and meaty without being falling-off-the-bone (a good thing when you are eating in public), and they were pretty tasty. We enjoyed them both there and as left overs. The sides were also fine but unremarkable. I actually enjoyed the tater tots, I don’t think I’d had them in decades (I don’t remember them being something I served my kids) and as I’ve lost my taste for French fries, these were a good substitution. The sweet potato fries were on the thin side and therefore also on the dry side, but they were nicely spiced. The Caesar salad was also unremarkably good. All the sides were a really good size, plenty to share.
My daughter had the veggie burger ($17) which came with a beyond burger patty, pepperjack, baby arugula, tomatoes, grilled onions and pesto aioli in a whole wheat bun and French fries on the side.
Service was competent, but in such a loud environment it’s hard to ask for more.
In all, I’d return to Plank for lunch if I was in the area.
Plank
98 Broadway
Oakland, CA
510-817-0980
M-Th 11:30 AM - 10 PM, F-Sa 11:30 AM - 11 PM, Su 10 AM - 9 PM
Capacity limited, 21+ after 8 PM
The first time I went to Zachary’s – at its Solano Ave. location, I was a freshman in college. I think my college friend Gina took me, she was an upper classman and had a car, pretty rare for Cal students. I fell in love. I’d never been to Chicago and had never experienced deep-dish pizza, much less stuffed pizza. I fell in love – and I’ve been in love ever since.
Zachary’s, for my husband and I, has been a place for special occasion dinners. We lived fairly close to the Solano location when we were first married, but we couldn’t afford the expensive pizzas very often. Later, the Rockridge location became the closest one to our house, but finding parking anywhere near was a pain. The San Ramon location, which came with a larger dining room and the ability to make reservations, opened up around the time our kids started to eat pizza, and we have gone there many times over the years – but it’s 20 miles from our house, so it’s not an every-week sort of thing. This is all to say, that Zachary’s continues to be a special occasion place for us, which is why I chose it to celebrate the start of my Birthday Week Extravaganza (TM).
This was my first visit to the Pleasanton location, which has replaced the now-closed San Ramon location. It’s located in the middle of downtown, and has a large parking lot in the back so parking is easy. In addition to the indoors dining room, this Zachary’s has a fenced-in sidewalk patio at the front (but you enter the restaurant through a side door), with a view of other downtown businesses and restaurants and, of course, the street. This was nice, except for one particularly super-loud car which decided to cruise back and forth and annoy everyone.
Servers wore masks and though the tables are fairly close together, the entire patio is outdoors so it felt quite safe.
The menu is pretty much the same as all other Zachary’s, consisting of stuffed pizzas, thin pizzas and salads. The stuffed pizzas are just as great as ever – I have to give it to Zachary’s, they’ve been wonderfully consistent since my first visit almost 35 years ago. In all of these years I’ve never had their thin pizza, so I can’t comment on those ones. Stuffed pizzas have abundant cheese and the toppings of your choice stuffed between two layers of pizza dough, the top layer melts into the cheese when cooked and it’s topped with stewed tomatoes. The results are just incredible. I, personally, prefer a plain pizza (with extra cheese, but my kids don’t like that) and we usually get one of these for the kids (and me, as leftovers), but my husband likes toppings. We have both found the carne pizza (sausage, pepperoni, salami & bacon) to be too salty (though he still likes it), but we are both big fans of the chorizo pizza (chorizo, green chilies & Monterey Jack), though at some locations – Pleasanton included – this is a special rather than a regular part of the menu. This time, as often, we went for the Zachary’s special (sausage, green pepper, onion & mushroom), which was very good. There was a time when the San Ramon location added very thick slices of green pepper which I didn’t like, but this wasn’t the case this time.
The Pleasanton location serves “signature cocktails” and I had a Rico Rico (aka piña colada). It was quite good, as piña coladas usually are. Nothing exceptional.
Service was efficient and friendly and we had a great time.
Zachary’s Chicago Pizza
337 Main St, Suite B.
Pleasanton
925.600.0089
M-Th 11 AM - 9 PM, F-Sa 11 AM - 9:30 PM
