The New Jersey Foodhound™

Hand pulled noodles are bangin', slammin', crackin', they're the bees knees, the cream of the crop and also top of the class. There are a number of places around the city where hand pulled noodles can be found, and a lot of them are very good. One of my personal favorites is located off the beaten path, just north of the N line in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. Wong Good Hand Pull Noodle is exactly as the name suggests, good, hand-pulled, noodles. Duh. The Grub: Now, if you ask me what they serve here, I'd have to answer that question with a question by saying "Did you not hear their name?" If that somehow doesn't clear things up, or you just want a bit more specificity, let me elaborate. Wong has a long list of dishes that use either their fried, or boiled hand pulled noodles as a base and adds some trimmings. These could be veggies, pork, beef, fish, duck and even some of the offal bits. You can also have their noodles in soup if yo...

Growing up, one of my favorite things to drink was orange juice. Honestly, I may have had a bit of a problem as I would often choose OJ over water 90% of the time. Probably lucky to still be alive. After solidifying what could charitably be called an addiction to citrus flavors, I rarely drank anything that didn't feature the sweet-and-sour flavor I had come to love. Then one day, I found what many (mainly myself) have come to call the king of all citrus drinks, the rare and ever sought after - Five Alive . Like a fruit-drink ghost, it has appeared in my life a number of times and vanished as quickly as it came. Bodegas, small grocery stores, the one off chain while on vacation - it has been spotted in a number of places but, the moments are fleeting. For those not in the know, Five Alive is a blend of 5 citrus juices created by Minute Maid under the Coca-Cola corporation. It combines orange, grapefruit, lemon, lime and tangerine into one of the best god-damn ...

New Jersey is a pretty great place to grow up, a little tough a times, but you wont hear anyone complain about a lack of things to do, see, and eat. Emphasis on the eat part. Contrary to popular belief, it’s a very diverse state both from an ethnic point of view and a culinary one. One very present diaspora around the NYC area especially, is that of the Italian-American. It is important to note that the Italian American is not exactly an Italian. Furthermore, if you ask a European Italian, they will claim Italian-Americans bare very little, if any, resemblance to their name sake back home. I will go ahead and say, the latter could best be explained as egocentric posturing on behalf of a group afraid of tainting their very carefully guarded legacy. That said, I feel it may be best to describe them as two sides of the same coin. With the presence of so many Italian-Americans, one becomes keenly aware of the practice, nay, the skill, of debate and argument within t...