I'm writing this to Bob Dylan as we listened to a lot of Bob on holiday in NYC and the Hamptons, and he reminds me of all that's best about the US, though I can't quite shake the feeling that it's better to be listening to him in London than over there. I say this partly because being there made me realise just how different our societies are and quite how incredibly market-oriented and blindly nationalist America is as compared with Britain. None of this came across in the wonderful places and people with whom I stayed, but as I sat like a zombie in JFK airport last night reading the New York Times and watching CNN report on the 'surge' in Iraq I realised that even a small child exposed to a free media in Europe would be able to punch holes in the naive jingoism of coverage that majored on video-game style shots of American troops running between buildings and which, in the case of both paper and TV, evaded Iraqi suffering and the queer logic and morality of the whole enterprise.
Anyhow, now I've got that off my chest I'll move on to the food, which was damn fine. I'll start with the absolute culinary highlight of the trip which, realistically, was featured one of the best bitefuls of my life and merits a trip to NYC in and of itself I should say. The venue was a doughnut joint called Doughnut Plant, which I had seen recommended on egullet and given that it was tipped by donut lovers in a city with very high standards in that department, my expectations were pretty high. Now my love of doighnuts has been something of a running thread across this blog, but I's got's to tell ya that you can forget your Krispy Kremes, your Dunkins, Greggs, the whole lot, because this place is the real doughnut promised land. They're made without any kind of artificial crap and there are a limited number of flavours, many of which I hope to try across a long life that is based on general healthiness so that i might stuff my face with doughnuts every time I'm in America. Another key thing to point out about them is that they are big, perhaps 50-70% bigger than most doughnuts and that ain't no bad thing as far as I'm concerned. This time around I eschewed their famous peach donut, the chocolate offerings and the regular styles, to go for Sunflower and Coconut Cream. The former was a regular style donut covered in a sunflower-seed encrusted sugar glaze and it had a truly wonderful soft savouriness to its inside which worked perfectly with the suga rush of the outer casing. Having eaten this, I struggled to see how the coconut cream donut could compete, but let me tell you this was quite an epiphanal moment because you know you sometimes smell something like a sun-tan cream and think 'wow, that smells so good I could eat it'? Well, once I bit into the ring of the doughhnut and encountered the filling, I realised I was eating a comestible version of the most beautiful, haunting coconut suntan cream in the world: it had a pleasing saltiness to it as though some of the coconut milk was there as well as the flesh of the fruit, and it was without doubt one of the most fun things I've ever eaten. At the moment, they have just one branch in the Big Apple and a series of franchises in Japan. In some ways I hope they stay small because it's pretty clear from the shop that they are totally crazy about what they do and you'd have to suspect that it'd all become a bit more blah if they went global, but in other ways I think that everyone deserves the chance to sample their coconut cream.
After that, nothing else could compete, but I ate very well in America, not least because I went on holiday with some terrific cooks who rustled up some fantastic barbecues, risotti, plum tarte tatins, and so on and on and on. We didn't actually eat out a great deal but the quality of groceries (especially the bread, bagels and cakes) in the Hamptons was pretty bloody high.
In NY I did also visit one of my fave places, Gus's Pickles on the Lower East Side, which is a very cool pickling joint where all their stuff is served from giant barrels on the street. New Yorkers take their pickles pretty seriously and one of the things I like most about food there is its Jewish/East Europeanness and Gus's is justly famous, so much so that it seems there are pickles out there which claim to be made by Gus that just ain't. Anyhow, I picked up a little selection to eat as a pre-doughnut appetiser and was as impressed with the pickled tomato as before and marvelled at the fact that you could buy pickled gherkins in 'fresh', 'sour', 'semi-sour' and 'hot' varieties, of which the latter was my fave, though it really packed some heat.
The mozarella is damned good in NY too and if you order a mozzie salad, what you'll get is cheese of the kind of calibre that is available here at Borough: a tender-tough membrane covering a pillowy-soft, salty, luscious, creamy inside. The fries weren't bad either, though the next time I visit I want to take my interest in both chips and pizza a bit more seriously because this was the visit that convinced me both that I'd struggle to live in America and I've led a richer life for having eaten some of the best of its street food.
For more info on DP and its founder, Mark Israel, described by Saveur as a "doughnut Don Quixote" for his wild visions of what doughnuts can be, see here: http://www.doughnutplant.com/
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