By Caitlin Hawke

The "Hyper Local Eats" feature is not intended as a place for restaurant reviews, per se.  Our quarterly newsletter does a great job of that (see here and here for examples).

But rather, it's meant to sing praise to one special dish or delicacy found nearby.  Writing this, I realize that one day, I should sing a Proustian song to delicacies lost to time:  the cucumber salad once sold at PicNic's market, or Jean-Luc and Jennifer's peppery celery remoulade for that matter, would top the list.  But so would the normal-sized buttery blueberry muffin with a lacy, crunchy edge from Positively 104th Street (now Café du Soleil), or the café con leche from La Casita with flattened toast when that restaurant sat at the corner of Broadway and West 106th Street (now a KFC).  Maybe someone around here remembers the deliciousness that was Hudes deli going back 70 years? But probably not the even older "Old Vienna" and the "New Vienna" featured in the photo of a prior Throwback Thursday post?

So what's so good about this place?  Let me encapsulate that in one special dish for you: crispy lamb filets with chili cumin.  You'll find thin slices of lamb dredged in a flour, cumin, salt mixture and flash fried and tossed with dry scallions and an equal volume of chili peppers, which you'll literally have to eat around.  Add mala-making sichuan peppercorns and you've got yourself a scrumptious main course.  Mala (numbingly spicy or spicily numbing -- I never know which) is a sort of tongue-taming, almost paralyzing, flavor-sensation that when first experienced can be disconcerting.  Think of it as white-hot versus red-hot, if that makes any sense.  Once your tongue recovers, your brain converts the experience into a pleasure center.

But I don't want to scare you away with all this talk of spicy. It's not mild, don't get me wrong. But there is umami aplenty in this dish.  That juicy lamb, crispy on the outside, squirts its savory flavor through the cumin-salt coating.  They also make a beef version of this traditional Sichuanese dish. However, the lamb meat must be less moist because it crisps up better.  The beef tends to be softer and is good in its own way.

Top this off with a plate of garlic-sauteed greens or spicy cucumber salad and it's a perfect meal.

There must be a dozen other great eats here -- mostly spicy.  But you'll come back to the lamb time and again.  Also, it seems best to stay away from the Americanized versions and go for the authentic dishes.

I am determined to have the mapo tofu in the new year.  King of mala.  It will be another barometer of how good it gets here on W. 105th Street.  I'll let you know if it is post-worthy!

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And a lagniappe -- or hidden track -- for those aware of my Dylan admiration.  No, not his polka-infused rendition of "Must Be Santa."  But rather a dramatic reading of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's wistful Civil War era Christmas poem reminding us that hate may mock the song of "peace on earth, good-will to men," that "wrong" shall fail, that "right" shall prevail.

Hear that 2017? I am looking at you.

By Caitlin Hawke

The Foster Mansion sat on the northeast corner of Riverside Drive and W. 102nd Street prior to the construction of what is now 300 Riverside Drive.

Thanks to an old Block Association newsletter, I can tell you something more about this beauty in a post that is a mash-up of "One from the Vault" and "Throwback Thursday."

Ginger Lief, a valued neighborhood archive-lover and historian presented information about the home here in our 2002 newsletter:

[For some forty years],  a fine residence stood on the northeast corner of Riverside Drive and W. 102nd Street.  It was built from 1887 to 1888 for William F. Foster who lived there with his wife, Bertha. The architect of the brick mansion was Halstead Parker Fowler (1859-1911).  It was demolished in 1922 and replaced by today’s fourteen story and basement apartment building for which the architect was George Frederick Pelham (1866- 1937). Our early neighborhood home builder, Foster, was born in Taunton, England, October 11, 1841, and came to America in 1856. He invented the Foster glove fastening which he introduced to New York City in 1876, and then went on to develop a large and successful business.  Earlier, he was in the glove business in Chicago but was financially ruined there by the fire of 1871.  Foster died from cancer at the age of 54 at his Riverside Drive home on December 3, 1895.”

A big h/t to Ginger for that history. Another h/t to neighbor Gary Dennis who flagged the building in our Fall newsletter here where you'll also see links to Gary's history blogs.

And now for the Throwback photo (taken according to Gary just before the mansion was demolished in 1922), I give you the Foster mansion which sat squarely in the Block Association's catchment just 130 years ago. You can see it in the upper left corner of the 1891 Bromley map below.

People! Let us remember the winter solistice is but a handful of hours occuring around December 21st, the official first day of the new season. And let us mark that not with petroglyphs but with joyous singing.  Because if Wednesdays are humpdays of the work week, the winter solstice is humpday of the sun's year. The days get longer from here on out.  And we are golden.

And that's something to sing about!

Join in the Block Association's solstitial singing on Wednesday at 7 p.m.  Grab the kids, the spouse or a friend.  Or come make a new one on your way over to 865 West End Avenue.  Join the roaming chorus.  And fete the returning light.

More information in the poster below.  Download the songsheet right here.

Note: if images do not load, visit the blog here.

By Caitlin Hawke

Neighbor Bob Lejeune once again strikes paydirt with photos of NYC, and in particular our neck of the woods. On Sunday, he captured our first of what I fear will be many snows this season.
If you are like me, you won't be able to get enough of getting behind Bob's viewfinder and into his mind's eye.  His is like no other I know.  And he is a neighborhood treasure.
In Bob's footsteps, a message for us all from another Bob:

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you

Photo reproduced with permission. Credit: Robert Lejeune

See Bob Lejeune's gallery here.

By Caitlin Hawke

It's time for our Winter newsletter which is being slid gently under doors as we speak.  It will be up in our newsletter archive shortly, but I wanted to feature the page that Julia Spring compiles each issue featuring upcoming offerings from talented neighbors since there are events this weekend.

(Also in some copies of the newsletter, the number 5 morphed into the letter E, rendering some information challenging to understand unless you are a hacker or codebreaker).

If you, too, are a Talented Neighbor and have a show coming up, contact us.  We'll get your information into the next newsletter.

By Caitlin Hawke

This weekend marked the 36th anniversary of John Lennon's assassination outside the Dakota at the age of 40. Had he lived, he would have turned 76 in October. And who can say what else he would have gifted to his family, his friends, and to the world in those decades he never got.

The memory of hearing the news will take you back to precisely where you were the way news of JFK's death seared those in my parents' generation.  I was still up and working on a homework assignment in my childhood kitchen. Part of the report entailed baking Danish cookies. And there I was cramming to get it done when the news came in over the radio. I was stunned and remember processing it with my mother and siblings at the counter. The next day at school, Aisling, a sophisticated classmate -- who struck me as someone who thought for herself -- was devastated.  It wasn't until then that I fully realized this was a cataclysm.

Since I moved to New York in 1988, I've never passed the Dakota without thinking of Lennon.  His ashes were scattered in Central Park after all.

If you have any doubts left, read Dylan's remarks delivered by our Ambassador to Sweden at the Nobel banquet.

I felt inspired to write today in memory of one genius who chose the Upper West Side as his home leaving an eternal mark on our city.  And I had to stop and contemplate another one-time New Yorker who burns bright still.

Roll on and on and on, boys.

Above, I've embedded a video tribute to John Lennon that I found online. It is set to Bob Dylan's "Roll on, John" from the 2012 album Tempest.  If you receive blog posts by email, the video will not appear.  Click here to see the post on the blog and view the video.

 

By Caitlin Hawke

This is just the best kind of "throwback" picture.  Something entirely reminiscent of its era.  In the two photos below, Mayor Ed Koch is shown encountering Bloomingdalers on a July 13 walking tour in 1983.  In the top photo, note "hair design" where Henry's restaurant is now.  The woman to Koch's right is Fay Leeper, who headed the Broadway Merchants Development Corporation, and advocated for safety.  Fay is still around from what I can tell.  She had a kid's store back then but has became a restauranteur, in business with her daughter Ivette.

To her right is Gregory Tredanari, son of Cheri and Len, who owned "Gregory's" -- a gourmet food shop at 2725 Broadway.  In the bottom photo, we get a glimpse across Broadway to the east, with an old city bus and the Silver Moon building, same as it ever was.  This might be my favorite Throwback Thursday post yet.  And is it just me, or is it incredibly quaint to see a big city mayor walking the avenue mixing it up with residents and listening to concerns of the mom-and-pop shop owners?