Eating In Translation

What's Eating In Translation?

This website began as a collection of field notes on interesting food I'd tried, or planned to try, in and around New York. Since its launch, in January 2005, I've visited thousands of venues, from white-linen restaurants to elbows-on-the-table eateries, as well as street vendors, fairs, festivals, grocers, and greenmarkets — and my "to eat" list is longer than ever.

Sisters Cuisine

At this Caribbean café in East Harlem, curry chicken (above, with callaloo plus rice and beans) is prepared in the Guyanese bunjal style. Cooked down till it clings, this is no "dry curry." For a recent breakfast of sautéed codfish and boiled provisions, or root vegetables (below), the cassava was particularly creamy. A freshly griddled roti (bottom) was wrapped around curry goat — as with many Caribbean goat dishes, beware the occasional bone — with potato and chickpeas. My plate also sported sweet potato and callaloo, which in this rendition was sparing with okra, brightened by spinach.

I enjoyed that roti during research for my first article in The New York Times, "Grab a Bite If You Don't Have to Run," a guide to 26.2 places to eat along the route of the 2008 New York City Marathon. To evoke the diversity of marathon competitors, each entry offered the cuisine of a different country; the "point-two" was for a relative novelty at the time, a food truck. In the dozen years since publication, the interactive map and my photos have been withdrawn from the newspaper's online archive; alas, a dozen or so of the venues have vanished, too.

Sisters Cuisine
47 East 124th St. (Madison-Park Aves.), Manhattan
212-410-3000
www.SistersCuisineHarlem.com

TastYork

An after-lunch, after-nosh perro caliente Venezolano — a loaded Venezuelan hot dog — compliments of Jesús. Other menu items are so massive I'd need to make TastYork my first stop.

TastYork ("Tasty York")
8516 Roosevelt Ave. (Forley-Elbertson Sts.), Jackson Heights, Queens
929-312-7107
www.Instagram.com/TastYork

Elmhurst Community Fridge 2

Outside the Woodside Deli & Grocery — Woodside Ave., that is, beside a rack of coin-op prize and gumball machines on 77th St. — Elmhurst, Queens

Haitian sweets table

The lady who prepared this tablet noix, Haitian cashew brittle, says she is on hand "every day" (by afternoon and only in clement weather, I imagine). Her tiny sidewalk table also affords room, just barely, for similar confections featuring peanut and coconut.

Haitian sweets table
South side of Church Ave. near East 19th St., Prospect Park South, Brooklyn

Hunan Suofen

The server mentioned twice, with a question in her eyes, that these hot and sour green beans with minced pork were "spicy," and twice I reassured her that this was fine. The sourness, in fact, was much more pronounced; a one-to-one ratio of main dish to white rice was about right. Note that the wall menu (shown below) offers the translation "hot & sour chicken giblets rice"; the characters 酸豆角肉末盖饭 more readily identify this classic dish.

Hunan Suofen (branded, on the premises, only as 湖南嗦粉)
13621 Roosevelt Ave. (Main-Union Sts., inside the Landmark Quest Mall, "the same place as Joe's Steam Rice Roll"), Flushing, Queens
929-391-4633
www.Instagram.com/HunanSuofen