Eating In Translation

Horn & Hardart Automat-Cafeteria Building

This limestone-clad structure, trimmed in glazed polychrome terra cotta, was built in 1930 for the self-serve restaurant chain. Horn & Hardart occupied the ground floor and mezzanine but rented out the top floor, originally to a "midget golf" course, then to a billiards hall. In the 1940s, a later billiards establishment added ping-pong tables, too.

Horn & Hardart did business here until 1953. Since then the building has been home to many tenants, most recently a Rite-Aid pharmacy at street level, law offices and a Latino arts center above. Renovations in 2014 exposed the tracery of the old Horn & Hardart signage (second photo) as well as that of a long-vanished supermarket, Food-O-Rama (third photo). The new ground-floor tenant is CityMD, an urgent-care facility; no word on any upstairs neighbors.

The designation report of the Landmarks Preservation Commission offers much more about the architecture and the tenants as well as many photos.

Horn & Hardart Automat-Cafeteria Building
Surviving signage, 2710-2714 Broadway (at West 104th St.), Manhattan

Mission Cantina

(This venue is closed.) Com tam, the broken rice of Vietnam, when cooked becomes softer than intact rice prepared to the same recipe. It readily takes on other flavors, too, like those from grilled sausage (the blackened discs toward the top of the plate) and fried eggs. If you fuss too long with your photos, however, the yolks will firm up, and you'll miss the moment.

Also shown: shrimp chips with lime and black pepper. Squeeze the lime and listen to the snap, crackle, pop, just as at the breakfast tables of yore.

Mission Cantina
172 Orchard St. (at Stanton St.), Manhattan
212-254-2233
www.MissionCantinaNY.com
Vietnamese menu available at breakfast only

Liebman's Delicatessen

For sandwich do-it-yourselfers, Liebman's offers cold cut platters accompanied by potato salad, cole slaw, pickles, and rye. This assorted platter ($21.95, including a $2 surcharge for the meat in the center, presumably for substance and not style) was of uneven appeal. It's best to pass up the corned beef and pastrami in favor of the tongue, here evocative of a Magen David, albeit with two points too many.

Also shown, both in side view: a slice of stuffed derma (two for $7.95), a.k.a. kishka, which my dining buddies proclaimed insufficiently schmaltzy; a very puffy potato pancake ($4.50).

Liebman's Delicatessen
552 West 235th St. (Johnson-Oxford Aves.), Riverdale, Bronx
718-548-4534
www.LiebmansDeli.com

Linzalato Canio

The sign for this Italian-American grocery was assembled from a series of glazed tiles fitted together in line. Since the time of its installation — the 1930s is a good bet, by the look of the typeface — one tile has slipped a bit.

"Fruits" is interesting. Perhaps the signmaker need one more word to balance the design, or perhaps it marks a time when fresh fruit was less easy to come by, and so more worthy of note. Cured, less perishable items, on the other hand, would certainly have been part of the stock in trade. Is it just a coincidence that the grocery was mere steps away from Olive St.?

Linzalato Canio
Surviving signage, 855 Grand St. (Bushwick Ave.-Olive St.), Willamsburg, Brooklyn

Korbro Salad Oil

Domestic cottonseed oil mustn't be misrepresented as imported olive oil, the Department of Agriculture confirmed for the Korbro Oil Corp. in 1935. Cans of salad oil were "alleged to be misbranded in that the word 'Oil', together with the statement, 'Recommended for the Italian Trade', the vignette of a woman in foreign costume, presumably Italian, and the Italian landscape in background, appearing on the label, were misleading and tended to deceive and mislead the purchaser." Under a consent decree, the product was released under bond and permitted to be relabeled — and repacked, too, since "sample cans taken from the lot were found to be short volume."

A modest sign for a later tenant of the building, Montrose Smoked Fish, is also extant; on this afternoon, construction next door cluttered the view.

Korbro Salad Oil
Surviving signage, 71 Montrose Ave. (Lorimer-Leonard Sts.), Willamsburg, Brooklyn

Junibois Liquor Store

For this humble, out-of-fashion example of the typographer's art, the letters were cut from wood, painted, then mounted with screws. Several, such as the "W" and "N", were fashioned from multiple pieces stapled together. The sign might have been commissioned by Junibois, but more likely it was made at the behest of some long-forgotten predecessor — when a simple "I" fell victim to some mishap, the owner at the time used a shortcut to fill the gap.

Junibois Liquor Store
Surviving signage, 387 Broadway (Keap-Hooper Sts.), Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Festac Grill

Turn it this way, turn it that way: You'll have a hard time making edikaikon look as good as it tastes.

El Sabor del Austro

(This venue is closed.) In New York, it isn't hard to find typical food from most of Ecuador's principal geographic regions.

Joyful Yummy House

(This venue is closed.) At small markets, some of the most interesting items can be found at the point-of-purchase display. Whether the proprietors are Vietnamese, or Mexican, or Bangladeshi, often they'll use the space on and around the checkout counter for foodstuffs that they, and their regular customers, especially love. Many of these items are homemade — or hand-foraged, as the case may be.

In that vein, at small informal restaurants and at food stalls like Joyful Yummy House, an unlabeled tray at the ordering station is virtually begging for attention. These bundles, I learned, contain white rice that has been steamed in and gently scented by the lotus-leaf wrapper. For a family of dishes not yet on the regular menu, the rice is stir-fried with other ingredients — in this case a largely vegetarian combo ($6.50) — then served in the leaf. It's unclear how typical this dish is of Henan province, the earlier home of the proprietors; one fellow diner questioned the red cabbage and (not evident from the photo) a sparing number of what seemed to be nigella seeds.

Also shown: noodles with minced pork and black bean sauce ($6.50). Eating In Translation rarely permits use of the word "yummy"; these noodles qualify.

Joyful Yummy House
New York Food Court, stall 17
133-35 Roosevelt Ave. (Prince St.-College Point Blvd.), Flushing, Queens
347-542-2555

Beyti Turkish Kebab

Goodness, I thought at first, surely the counterman is loading this plate for someone else — but all the other customers were already hunkered down over their own meals. This was my order, a small order, of mixed cold appetizers ($9), with bread for tearing, scooping, and ultimately swabbing.

Beyti Turkish Kebab
414 Brighton Beach Ave. (Brighton 4th-Brighton 5th Sts.), Brighton Beach, Brooklyn
718-332-7900
www.Beyti-TurkishKebab.com