Eating In Translation

Mi Lindo Ecuador

Businesses that operate at thrift-minded price points often reuse old signage rather than start from scratch.

Dickie Dee's

The pizza oven in the back corner sees action, too, but the glassed-in fry station by the door gets all the hungry looks.

JJ's Hot Dogs

The all-beef Sabrett's dogs are the smallish sort, perhaps 10 or 12 to the pound; they're boiled, but probably not kept on a full simmer; and the cheese echoes the startling yellow of the truck. This so-called belly buster ($2.35) is also dressed with kraut, hot onions, and a particularly hot chili — hot enough that you'll snap to and take notice, whatever the hour.

JJ's Hot Dogs
Truck parked on Bloomfield Ave. near Lake St., Newark, New Jersey
Open every day, except on major holidays, till late
www.JJsHotDogs.com

Tulcingo Restaurant & Bakery

Atoles (ah-Toll-ays) are an extended family of beverages, usually cornmeal-based, of various consistencies, that are common in Latin America. This particular Mexican atol (small, $1.50) is thin, with a faint tropical-fruit flavor. Fail to take note of the handwritten sign on the front door, and you might furrow your brow for a moment or two before you identify guayaba — guava.

Tulcingo Restaurant & Bakery
40-11 82nd St. (Roosevelt Ave.-Ithaca St.), Elmhurst, Queens
718-205-3134

"Housewives! Save waste fats for explosives!"

"Take them to your meat dealer," concludes the poster, one in a series of four. Originally, some posters also included a take-one pad of instructions that housewives could hang up in the kitchen.

"Housewives! Save waste fats for explosives!"
Walter DuBois Richards, 1943
From the exhibit "Designing Modern Women: 1890-1990"
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd St. (Fifth-Sixth Aves.), Manhattan
www.MoMA.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1397
On view October 5, 2013-October 19, 2014

D'Angelos Italian Sausage

My first Italian knish, earlier this month at Ferragosto, traced its origins to Brownsville, Brooklyn. Back in the day, when "Brownsville was a veritable melting pot of many ethnicities," a neighbor's shared knish recipe was modified with Italian fillings. I've since learned of at least one current New York pizzeria that does much the same.

For this street-food version, a standard knish is sliced open, then dressed with griddled onions and peppers ($3) and an optional segment of sausage, hot or sweet ($2 more). In other words, here the knish itself stays the same; a familiar Italian sandwich is transformed by dispensing with the bread.

D'Angelos Italian Sausage
Encountered most recently at Viva La Comida!
As a habit, parked Monday through Saturday, 10:30-6:00, on Woodhaven Blvd. outside St. John Cemetery, Middle Village, Queens
www.Facebook.com/Dangelos.sausageandpeppers

West Cuisine

Grenada is an island in the southeastern Caribbean Sea not far from South America. So why "West"?

Pabst Harlem Music Hall and Restaurant

Faded lettering, shown on the 124th St. side of this blocklong building, marks a former Kress 5-10-25 cent store. The far side of the building (not shown) is home to a T-shirt and sneaker outlet, one of many along the 125th St. corridor. The massive barrel vault, however, is a legacy of an older and much grander establishment.

The Pabst Harlem Music Hall and Restaurant opened its doors in 1900. Like the Pabst Hotel, built one year earlier on the site of present-day Times Square, the Pabst Harlem figured in a nationwide marketing program to identify the brewery with prestige properties and advance "the cause of Pabst beer." A contemporary postcard view reveals a restaurant that could accommodate 1,400 customers at once, all dining in grand fashion. The PBR would be flowing, too, you'd imagine, though perhaps only in a side room off the glamorous main hall.

The Pabst Harlem closed in 1917, not long before the advent of Prohibition.

Pabst Harlem Music Hall and Restaurant
243 West 124th St. (Frederick Douglass-Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvds.), Manhattan

Lani's Farm

Wasong is a succulent native to rocky soil in China, Korea, and Japan. Adherents of various Asian folk-medicine traditions maintain that wasong fights inflammation, enhances the immune system, even combats cancer. Whatever the truth of those claims, you can imagine how the chopped leaves might add an interesting, crunchy texture to an omelette or a quesadilla, after the fashion of nopales. And if you get your nose right up close, you can detect the faint scent that has earned wasong another common name, rock pine.

Founded in the late 1990s as Yuno's Farm, Lani's has earned a deserved reputation as a consistent purveyor of fresh and varied produce. Shown at bottom, from a market day several years ago: callaloo.

Lani's Farm (formerly known as Yuno's Farm)
Bordentown, New Jersey
At the Columbia Greenmarket, Broadway near 115th St., Manhattan
www.GrowNYC.org/greenmarket/manhattan/columbia-th

Laoma Ma La Tang

A recent eel rice casserole reminded me of these photos from several months earlier. The casserole, one of several very good dishes at a group dinner in Manhattan's Chinatown, had a crispy bottom. Scraped free of the pot, the browned shards offered a contrasting texture to the eel and the fluffier rice.

Many cultures incorporate slightly charred rice in similar fashion. At Treichville, a now-closed Senegalese restaurant, this rice was an essential component of a predominantly softer-textured thiebou djeun. At the Dominican restaurant Margot, so-called concon is available to complement dishes such as stewed beef, but only on request. In my experience, usually this rice has seemed to be a byproduct of cooking, thriftily scraped from the sides and bottom of the pot. Just once, at a Dominican steam table in Bushwick, did the crispy rice give the impression of manufacture rather than happenstance.

Make that twice: This Sichuan stir-fry counter had obviously troubled to brown the rice and to portion the crispy shards. Only because I passed by at an off-hour, between the after-school mayhem and the dinner rush, did I spot the evidence.

Laoma Ma La Tang
New World Mall food court, stalls 16-17
136-20 Roosevelt Ave. (Main-Union Sts.), Flushing, Queens
www.LaomaMaLaTang.com