Tag Archives: new york

Donut, doughnut: however you spell it, it’s delicious

It seems like all roads lead to New York, because several people have asked me for NYC food recommendations. I’m more than happy to oblige.

Doughnut Plant
(Lower East Side)

This place opens early, and that’s when you need to get there to beat the crowds. There are cake doughnuts and yeast doughnuts.  While I usually prefer cake doughnuts, the yeast doughnuts here kick some serious cake doughnut ass. They’re fluffy, warm pillows of yeasty goodness. And then they’re drenched in sugar glaze.

With his shop’s proximity to Chinatown, Chef Mark Israel goes for a walk each morning to buy the freshest produce to come up with his daily offerings. The tres leche cake doughnut is legendary (if a little bit sweet) but I was more impressed by two unusually flavoured yeast doughnuts: mango and lavender.

The mango doughnut was actually juicy, if you can believe it. Take the best qualities of a perfectly summer-ripe mango, transpose those qualities into a warm, yeasty doughnut, and you might begin to understand how delicious it was. The lavender doughnut was subtle, delicate and refined. A refined doughnut, how about that?

I tried my very best to try all the flavours while I was there, but I didn’t make it. There’s a peanut butter and jelly doughnut that sounds amazing. Someone needs to try it and let me know.

Doughnut Plant
379 Grand St
New York, NY
212-505-3700

Jerk this, mon.

One of my favourite memories of New York was when Nrinder, my lovely host, took me to a hole-in-the-wall Caribbean restaurant called Taste of the Islands. I don’t have a hope in hell of finding it again, much less telling you where it is, but I know that it’s within a few blocks of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, there’s no sign outside, and I probably would have walked right by it had Nrinder not gone inside.

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I met Jacques Pepin! OMG!

While in New York, I posed as a perspective student and got a tour of the French Culinary Institute, which is a huge school (much bigger than Le Cordon Bleu). It is, however, typically American in that all the countertops are stainless steel (pastry countertops are, in the European tradition anyway, granite or marble). Tuition is twice that of where i attend, but the possibilities for internships are absolutely amazing.

During the course of my tour, we visited the storeroom, where JACQUES PEPIN just happened to be hanging out. This is a man whose biography I read three times, scrawling notes in the margins and dog-earing more than a few pages, standing right in front of me (shorter than I expected), wearing a chef’s jacket and grey striped pants. I tried to play it cool, but I almost wish I hadn’t so that I could have gotten a photograph.

New York goodies, day three

I was in New York for five days. This is what I ate on day three.

-A ginormous sandwich from Salumeria Biellese, which smokes and cures all its own meats. Four bucks gets you a foot-long, 6-inch high sandwich stuffed full of meat and provolone.
-Two mini-eclairs from Fauchon, one coconut (delicious and creamy) and one coffee (yum). The eclairs cost more than my giant sandwich. In an attempt to combat the ridiculous rainstorm outside, I also had a French hot chocolate. I don’t know what made it so French, aside from it being made at Fauchon, but it was pretty tasty.
-Shanghainese noodles from Shanghai Cafe.
-Vegan coconut layer cake from Atlas, which was almost passable. That is, as cake it was just okay, but as vegan cake it was pretty good.

New York goodies, day two

I was in New York for five days. This is what I ate on day two.

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