The Mango Lassie

My friend Kebab and I went to the Jim Henson exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria last weekend. While Kermit and Miss Piggy would have been enough to lure me out to Queens on a sunny Saturday afternoon, the promise of a post-museum Greek feast added extra incentive. Kebab lives in Jackson Heights and had scoped out the scene in Astoria, so I left the restaurant selection in his hands. Based on the 15-minute wait at 4 pm at the seafood-focused Taverna Kyclades, it appeared that his pick was a winner. But when someone said my name while I was waiting near the door and I turned to see Imperial Stout, I knew for sure that we had come to the right place. An Astoria resident, Imperial Stout was just stopping by to pick up a loaf of bread, but he assured us that we would not be disappointed.

Half of the tables here are under a tent whose sides are open in the summer and sealed and heated in the winter. We were seated in the other half–the normal indoor restaurant. Servers carrying plates of lemon wedges and loaves of crusty, oiled and herbed bread bustle in between the jumble of wooden tables and chairs packed with hungry patrons. Above them, the ceiling is lined in Aegean blue. Apart from the people speaking Spanish at the table next to us, it felt a lot like Greece. Our first dish was a plate of grilled octopus–tender with a perfect edge of char–sitting in a shallow pool of deeply flavorful olive oil inflected with dried herbs and scattered with cucumber slices. I topped each bite with a squirt of lemon and could almost feel myself back at the water’s edge in the Peloponnese.

Even though I am typically against the consumption of fresh tomatoes during the wintertime, I couldn’t resist the look of the Greek salad that sat on so many tables while we were waiting to be seated. Filled with vibrant chunks of tomatoes, cucumbers, peperoncini and slivers of red onion, the salad came topped with a thick slice of feta dusted with herbs. I ordered a small one (which turned out to be huge) and was not disappointed. The cheese was fresh and not too salty, and the salad had great texture. Granted, summer tomatoes would have been brighter and sweeter, but these were the best that January had to offer.

For our main course, Kebab had his heart set on the grilled sardines. And I am certainly not one to say no to a fresh sardine. These arrived, eight to a plate, headless, skin striped with grill market and drizzled with olive oil. There was nothing fancy about the way they were cooked, but the fish was obviously of high quality. We pulled the rich and deeply flavorful meat off the skeletons, leaving only the tails on our plates. On the side, we ordered potatoes peeled, cut into chunks and infused with lemon and olive oil before being cooked to tenderness. After our plates were cleared, our server returned to see if we wanted dessert. As I quickly learned, there is no dessert menu at Taverna Kyclades. In fact, there is only one dessert served: galaktoboureko, a custard made with semolina and topped with a phyllo crust. It is like the Greek version of flan. We asked for coffee to go with our meal, but they don’t serve coffee here. It makes sense because people tend to linger over coffee, and Taverna Kyclades doesn’t like a lingerer. Indeed, when our desserts arrived, they were accompanied by the bill, a not-so-subtle hint (and a prime example of the characteristic Greek pushiness) that we were on the verge of overstaying our welcome.

Taverna Kyclades
33-07 Ditmars Blvd.
Queens, NY 11105
718.545.8666

I am part Greek. One-eighth, to be exact. I’m not sure whether I’ve mentioned it here, but it’s the only part of me that’s not Jewish. I went to Greece when I was in college and visited some relatives who took me to Medea, my ancestral homeland in the Peloponnessus, and to other parts of that region. I also spent some time traveling to the Ionian islands of Kefalonia and Ithaca. The food I ate in Greece was fresher, more vibrant and more distilled to its glorious essence than almost any cuisine I have tasted, and I have been looking for those flavors at Greek restaurants in the States ever since. Most of the time, of course, I am severely disappointed. So often meat is overcooked, salads lack acidity or fish is not as fresh. And sometimes there is just something indescribable (the breeze off the Mediterranean, perhaps?) missing that causes the meal to fall short. I had high hopes for Agnanti, one of the few authentic remnants of what was once a solidly Greek community in Astoria, Queens. The restaurant was listed at #17 on New York Magazine’s list of the top 20 cheap eats destinations in Queens. My friend Oyster had asked if I wanted to join him for dinner in Queens before a show he was going to in Astoria, so I seized on the opportunity to bring my total to four out of 20— pretty weak, but starting to approach respectability.

Empanada Boy decided to join in, and we met up with Oyster about a half hour after we had initially planned. He had to stay longer at work than initially planned, but as Oyster jokingly chided me, I also happened to pick a restaurant that’s far away from pretty much everything. It was already becoming clear that Oyster would have trouble making it to the show. Still, he had come this far, and he wasn’t turning back. The restaurant was packed, with both indoor and outdoor tables filled. We waited in a disorganized jumble with other patrons for about 10 minutes until our server—who somehow remembered who had arrived when—came to seat us. We sat inside the restaurant, which looked like you might imagine a quaint cafe in a fishing village might look: simple wooden tables, thatched chairs, white walls with a few antique-looking tchotchkes on them and a little wooden hutch where the servers congregated.

The first step was to order wine. I have tasted a fair number of Greek wines, and while most of those available here are pretty mediocre, there are a few really great ones. Those weren’t on the list, and I didn’t recognize any of the ones that were. I asked our server about a wine from Santorini made with the varietal Assyrtiko. She said they didn’t have the one on the menu, but they had another one by a different producer. “Which producer?” I asked. She scurried off to find out. “Does it really matter? I mean, are you even going to recognize it anyway?” Oyster asked with his typical candor. He was (of course) right. I didn’t. But we ordered the bottle anyway. It was fine, not great, just as I expected. My expectations were higher for the food. We started with ntakos, a dish make with a cardboard-like Cretan cracker called a rusk topped with fresh tomatoes, feta cheese, olives, capers, oregano and olive oil. The tangy tomato juice and fruity olive oil soaked into the blank slate of the rusks, imbuing them with flavor. This was probably my favorite dish of the night. It was incredibly simple, yet pristine in its definition and very satisfying.

Next came the Greek sausages, which could be ordered with oranges or leeks cooked into them. I opted for leeks, and Oyster and EB went along with it. These charred knobs of sausage were beautifully spiced and juicy enough to deliver a burst of savory depth with each bite. From the portion of the menu somewhat distressingly headed “seafood creations” we ordered sardines, called sardeles in Greek. These were snappy little fish with bones still in, simply seasoned with salt, lemon juice, olive oil and rosemary. EB maintained that the bones were good to eat, but Oyster and I opted to remove ours. I did, however, eat the tails, which were crispy and salty like a potato chip from the sea. Our final selection was apparently the house specialty: a rooster cooked until tender in a tomato sauce and topped with little squares of pasta. EB thought that at least one of the large pieces of rooster wasn’t tender enough. I liked the rooster for its richness and slightly gamey chewiness, but I found the rest of the dish a little underwhelming. The pasta squares were buttery and al dente, but the sauce was pretty one-note and the dish as a whole could have been more lively with some fresh herbs or spices.

At this point, we might have ordered dessert, but our server was nowhere to be found. She eventually showed up carrying a complimentary plate with three pieces of halva politiko, the Greek version of halva. This is a semolina-almond cake, soaked in butter and orange syrup. It was served with yogurt topped with stewed cherries. The cake was not very sweet and perhaps a bit too hearty after a full meal, but it was a fittingly distinctive ending. We managed to flag down our server to pay the bill. Then we began the walk back to the subway, our mouths a bit salty from the food and the irregular water refills. The food hadn’t quite lived up to my Ionian taste memories, but it came close at certain points. By that time, it was past 10:30 pm, and Oyster had clearly missed his chance to see the show. I apologized again for keeping him from it with my hard-to-reach restaurant selection, but I was glad the show had motivated us to hike out to Astoria for a taste of Agnanti.

Agnanti
19-06 Ditmars Blvd.
Queens, NY 11105
718.545.4554

When Anthony Bourdain did an episode of his Travel Channel show “No Reservations” in his home town of New York, New York, it seemed like a good time to pay attention to his recommendations. I was still living in Chicago, but I dutifully took note for the next time I made it East. Then I promptly forgot. Luckily, Empanada Boy watched a re-run of the episode recently and was smart enough to write down the names of the restaurants that sounded good. At the top of his list was Kabab Cafe in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens.

Kabab Cafe is the domain of Ali El Sayed, a Northern Egyptian chef, philosopher and savant. Soon after we walked in to the a tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant, he turned his black-bereted head toward us to ask how we were doing, jovially assuring us that a table would be ready soon. With a kitchen the size of a ship’s galley and very few tables, Ali can work and talk to nearly all of his guests simultaneously. The walls of the restaurant are hung with Egyptian artwork and posters, pictures and maps that Ali has acquired over his multiple decades in the space. Each table and chair is different from the next.

After sitting down, we soon found out that there are not really menus. Ali walked away from his burner (which looked like a Coleman camp stove) to give us the run down of the dishes he was offering that night. The list was lenghty: baba ghanoush, salads, pumpkin dumplings, lamb chops, lamb brains, lamb testicles, goat, venison, beef, chicken, sweetbreads, liver… He could have continued, but we stopped him when we heard “lamb brains.” This was one of the dishes Bourdain had tried, and EB was intrigued. I had tried lamb brains at a Lebanese place but hadn’t been impressed. These were beautifully browned on the outside with a delicious tender interior that wasn’t at all clammy. The sauce was bright, fresh and beautifully seasoned with lemon and capers.

We also ordered tender venison with sweet figs and halawi, a kind of meat pie made with layers of pita bread. At some point I realized that we had completely omitted all vegetables or salads, but by then it was too late to turn back. Having eaten all of this, along with a basket of pit, bantering back and forth a bit with Ali, I was beginning to feel full. But EB had a distant look in his eye.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, getting up from the table.

He walked the three steps over to where Ali was cooking and said: “I think I’d like to order the testicles.” Perhaps EB thought he was being discreet, but I heard him clearly. In many cultures, eating testicles is supposed to increase virility. I don’t know if that’s true for the Alexandrians, but there is no doubt that men feel more manly when they order testicles. Still, based on Ali’s incredible performance up until that point, I had no reason to doubt that the testicles would be as good as the other offal we had tried and seen on TV. Indeed, they were delicious. They were served cut into small, smooth, rich pieces, cooked with savory vegetables and spices. We polished them off and were the last table to leave the restaurant that night.

As we were leaving, we told Ali we had come all the way from Washington Heights. He was unimpressed. He had visitors from Washington Heights all the time. But it had taken us so long to get there on the train, we protested. “You should have taken the M60,” he said, describing how to catch the bus home. “It’s not far at all that way. Now you know, so you can come back soon.”

Kabab Cafe
2512 Steinway St.
Queens, NY 11103
718.728.9858