Author Archives: didjaeat
Paesano’s
My friend Matt recently got a sweet new computer. I went over to take a look at it (it is sweet and…shiny) and, after much deciding we decided to go get some lunch (Johanna’a idea, good call!). Off to Paesano’s we went.
Paesano’s is a sandwich shop owned by the guys who own Modo Mio, an Italian place that everyone I know who has been there loves. I had never been there before and Matt described it as a closet that sells awesome food. I was in!
Paesano’s Window
Paesano’s is, indeed, an extremely small place. A small sandwich shop like you might remember from when you were a kid. Old guys smoking Lucky’s would hang out and talk about Roosevelt and you could come in and buy a water ice in the middle of the summertime heat. Well, there is no water ice and there are no Lucky’s, but there is a pretty good menu. At least, what we had anyway.
Wading thru the hipsters, we decided on a Daddy Wad for me and a Paesano for him. The guy behind the counter doesn’t particularly speak very good english and I am half deaf so it was fun ordering, and once I ecplained to him I wanted mayo on my sandwich, all was well (it does not come with mayo, but I wanted it. Must. Have. Mayo.). The wait was not too bad, about 15 minutes, then we got our sandwiches of gold and escaped to Matt’s air conditioned living room to stuff our faces with sandwiches, cokes and Patton Oswalt on the Roku Box.
Daddy Wad
I got the Daddy Wad, which is a classic Italian Hoagie with sharp provolone, hot and sweet peppers, arugula, lettuce, tomato and onion. When you order hoagies, the lunchmeat is usually very thick cut and laid on thick. These guys cut the meat pretty thin so that it’s not like biting into a loaf of bologna. The roll is fresh but not too chewy and even the arugula works nicely, giving it a fresh bite and separating it from the Wawa special (altho I love that too!).
Here is an inside shot:
Daddy Wad Insides
They also use cheap mayo, of which I am a great big fan. Capicola, soppresata, mortadella and mayo. Yeah, I’m a fan.
What I didn’t mention was that Matt and I traded halves to I got to try the Paesano.
The Paesano
The Paesano is a hoagie with Beef Brisket, Cheese (sometimes provolone, sometimes ricotta, I guess it depends on the day), horseradish mayo (which I want to put on everything), a fried egg and a roasted tomato. I haven’t had meat that juicy on a sandwich in forever. Check it out!
Paesano Side Shot
This thing is a heart clogger, but you’ll go out smiling! Fried eggs on things is a new fad (“it’s the good morning burger!”) but I am all for it. The egg gives it that little extra bit so that you don’t feel so bad eating this fantastic bit of juicy goodness. As much as I liked the Daddy Wad, I think I liked the Paesano better.
What I liked about this place was the reasonable rate you pay for these sandwiches ($7), which might not look giant but will be with you the rest of the day, trust me. The place is very tiny (it was so small I couldn’t really take a pic, it was crowded) but they move along at a decent pace. I’d hate to be standing outside in the winter, but you can call in and then pick up, which is cool.
Will I go back? Surely! Will the parking get seriously crappy once the giant Pathmark next door opens? Oh yes. Will that stop me? Nah. Once a fat kid, always a fat kid. Eat up!
A Trip To Kraftwork
After a long and kind of boring day at the farmer’s market, I enlisted my friend Mary Kate (of Ida Mae’s Bruncherie) to go get some food at this new bar/restaurant Kraftwork on Girard Ave. I was expecting this place to be huge, but in actuality, it is the size of a regular corner bar, which, honestly, surprised me a bit. Even tho it was a Saturday early evening, the place was full, but we managed to score some seats at the bar. We had two people (one girl who I assume was the hostess/waitress and the bartender) both ask us where we would like to sit and thier attitudes were great. It irks me when you walk into a crowded place and the hostess gives you attitude.
The decor is interesting. The tables surround the perimeter and you sit with others. Besides that, there are seats at the bar, with sturdy, not crappy bar stools (also a pet peeve of mine). While the hipsters were aplenty, the staff was nice (even if super busy), but we never had to wait to get drinks, food or anything else. It is, however, super loud, I am guessing from the acoustics. The place is barebones, plenty of room for voices to bounce around.
There are landscape printed excel sheets on the bar for you when you sit down, with all 25 beers on tap mapped out for you. What is really awesome, is that there are two columns, the regular list, and then a corresponding column with the beers that will replace them right away when they kick the keg. Talk about planning! Most places would either just replace the line with another keg of the same or have to wait for something to come in and replace it with. Very cool. Even funnier is that they have a ton of neat beers, but they also have PBR on tap. A nice nod to the hipsters in the area.
We were both starving so we started with the Cheese plate.
Cheese Plate
While it was super loud, and we couldn’t really hear the guy who brought it out, the cheese plate was pretty kick ass. In the middle was some kind of creamy parmesan. The one with the candied almonds I think was a sort of soft stilton and the one with the thinly sliced apples and honey was a very, very blue cheese. We didn’t catch the others except for that the one had some sort of soaked cherries (which were great) and the other had finely chopped olives (also awesome). The cheese is served with sliced garlicy flatbread:
flatbread
Mary Kate said that she thought they used the same flatbread to make a delicous Flatbread Pizza Margherita. It went perfectly with the assortment of cheeses, and we hoovered it down quickly.
While we ate the cheeses, our appetizer came out, the Ricotta Dumplings:
Ricotta Dumplings
Please note that they come with 4, but we both speared one before I managed to dig out the IPhone 4 to snap a pic. They were creamy, with that parmesan nuttiness, and sitting on a nice roasted red pepper Harissa sauce. It was semi-spicy and a little kick to the dumplings. The greens were a wilted swiss chard, and had a great almost olive oil taste.
I ordered the Beer Can Chicken. It came with fried long hots and onions with sharp provolone. The star of that plate tho, was the red cabbage and apple slaw!
beercan chicken
The slaw, of which I kind of thought would just be a vinegary slaw, was spicy in a slow burn kind of way, and we both thought it was great. The beer can chicken was good, chopped pretty small and it congealed with the provolone pretty quickly. It was on a brioche bun that was just big enough, so that you did not feel like you were getting a bun that happened to have some meat on it. It had a lovely aged provolone, but it could have used a sauce. I ended up putting a big forkful of the slaw on my sandwich, which made it tad bit juicier.
MaryKate really dug her burger.
burger
It came with 2 year old Grafton cheddar, butter lettuce, carmelized onions and a bacon onion jam. She was pleasantly surprised that you could really taste the bacon all the way thru it. The fries were slightly garlicky but not overwhelming. The dipping sauce tasted like a stone ground mustard with some mayo and another secret ingredient we couldn’t place, but I am guessing is sugar. Overall, another winning dish.
They had a bunch of great sounding desserts (I hear the chocolate tureen is fantastic), but we were both too stuffed to order.
From the easy going and friendly staff, to the great (but not overwhelming!) food selections, to the wide variety of beers (and a few very cool looking cocktails!), to the reasonable prices for what you get, I’d say Kraftwork has their proverbial shit together, and I would definitely go back.
Cheese Fry Pizza
I do enjoy many different kinds of pizza toppings and pizzas in general. When my cousin Lori said there was a Cheese Fry Pizza on the Boardwalk in Wildwood, well, I had to try it. At first we were looking for something they were calling “doritos pizza”. We walked up and down the boardwalk looking for this thing with no luck.
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at Three Brothers II Pizza for pies to feed that late night hunger. The owner was a big dude, not unlike Bull from the show “Night Court”, shaved head and all. We asked him if he knew about the doritos pizza, and it turns out it was a taco pizza with crushed doritos on top, which also sounded awesome but we had already ordered a plain, a pepperoni and now a cheese fry pizza.
The owner explained that he was trying to save people time, as he saw them walking the boards with pizza in one hand and fries in the other, so why not combine them? Why not, indeed! That’s some American ingenuity, my friends!
Cheese Fry Pizza
This pie has no sauce, but it loaded with regular mozzarella and then nicely fried french fries (the thin kind like you would get at McDonald’s. I think bigger fries, like at Wendy’s, would be too potato-y) and Cheesewhiz (a fun fact: my cousin Kelly lives in Austin, Texas and she says they do not have cheese fries with whiz down there. Can you imagine? Savages.).
You would think the pizza would be so incredibly heavy, what with carbs and starch and starch and carbs and heavy cheese, but it really was not.
Cheese Fry Pizza Slice
It was f-ing awesome! I was sober but I think it would have been even better as drunk food too! The starch, carbs, grease and cheese melded together to create unique vacation pizza gold. After a suggestion, I also added some ketchup to it, and it was 5 times better. The ketchup gave it some kick! I wish I had some hot sauce, or even better, Siracha, to give it an even better kick!
I ate this with 5 adults and 3 kids and the general consensus was “wow!”. However, the kids the next day weren’t feeling so well, but they also ate a ton of pizza and then proceeded to beat each other with pizza boxes, so you be the judge of what happened with that.
Would I recommend this? Again, HELL YEAH! I am a HUGE pizza fry fan and I am also a huge Whiz fan and a huge pizza fan. All these things are in one spot and I can’t get enough! Unfortunately, this is yet another food that you just can’t eat all the time or you’ll die of hardening of the arteries or just from getting way too fat. It is vacation food, and fantastic vacation food at that! If you find yourself on the North Wildwood Boardwalk, go for it!
Fried Peanut Butter and Jelly with Banana
Once in awhile you hear about something ridiculous, like a burger with donuts as a bun or a $350 cheeseburger or something like that. You never think you will actually see these things in person, in the flesh, in real life. But sometimes…YOU DO.
Enter the Fried Peanut Butter & Jelly with Banana. Another one of my cousins, Jeanie, was telling me at her shore place, about this fried sandwich. She said I had to try it, that it was amazing. She had me when she got to the banana part. As we walked to the Boardwalk, I kept looking for the place she was talking about, called “Betty Scoops”. She had told me to get to the Boardwalk and go left. The problem was that she didn’t know if it was 2 blocks or 10, and no one else could really find it either. Other cousins had had it and didn’t particularly like it, while more others wanted to anoint the creator King Of The Universe. Needless to say, I was intrigued.
And then, last nite, we found it!
Fried PB&J with Banana
I tried to take pictures while they were making it, but I am short and there were about 400 kids in there with thier parents so I was shit out of luck. But, this is how it’s done: they make the sandwich, on white bread (save your “white bread it bad for you” bs, this is a fried sandwich, all nutrition had been killed by the slow clogging of my arteries), cut them in half (yes, you only get a half, cut diagonally) and then they freeze them.
They probably pull so many out of the freezer for the day and then have to pull more later. More on this in a bit.
They then toss it in funnel cake batter and fry the bejesus out of it, sprinkle it with sugar and voila!
What’s it like inside?
Fried PB&J with Banana closeup
It was hard to get a good picture because I was standing in the middle of the boardwalk, but you get the general idea. You really can’t taste the bread, it almost melds with the funnelcake to create some strange mutant being. As I took my first bite, I then understood why it’s just a half. Any more then that and it would be too much. Waaaay too much.
The insides meld together and mix with the funnelcake in a really lovely way. It isn’t that greasy, just kind of heavy. In my sandwich, the banana slices were still slightly frozen. I don’t think that’s the goal (other cousins have had it and said theirs wasn’t) but I liked it. The cool banana gave you something to actually crunch into and the temperature was a nice ying to the hot sandwich’s yang.
Would I recommend it? HELL YES. If you find yourself in Wildwood, look this sandwich up! I did, however, end up with some nasty heartburn, but I think that is because of all the other crap I ate as well.
Polish Water Ice
I am coming clean here: I am not a huge water ice fan. Also: I pronounce it “wooder ice” because I am from Philly and that’s what we do. Anywho, ever since I was a little kid, I always thought water ice was a cheap replacement for ice cream, just like sprinklers were a cheap replacement for a pool or Hostess products were a cheap replacement for Tastykakes. Was I a snobby kid? Nah. But it is true, while I won’t run away from water ice, I am not a huge fan.
So, while down the shore the other nite, I had my eye on a frozen custard from Kohr Brothers (side note: I never got there. boooo.) and my cousin Michele starts going on and on about this Polish Water Ice stuff. If it was almost anyone else, I would have blown them off but we both like to eat (she just has a better metabolism then me) so when she recommends, I tend to listen.
As I perused the menu, they have someone, who I guess is the owner, talking in a deadpan way on a loop about how you can try free samples (which I appreciated) and how they were featured on Food Network. What made me giggle was how they advertise “100% fat free, 100% cholesterol free, 100% dairy free, they don’t mention how much sugar and hfcs is in there. But, like I said in the above post, when on vacation, everything is good for ya.
"Polish Chiller"
I like anything cherry (“what? you dipped a tire in cherry? and it’s on fire? yes, please!”), so I knew I’d get that, but they offer this “Polish Chiller” which is like a Gelati from Rita’s: water ice and ice cream. However, this place only has vanilla ice cream, which I found bizarre. Details, details.
The soft serve tastes exactly like you’d like it to: soft, cold and vanilla-y. The water ice is silky smooth and very cherry. No cherry bits, but at least the flavor didn’t sink to the bottom and it held together for a good long time before melting, which was great too.
I don’t exactly know what makes it Polish. I am Polish (I run a pierogie biz) and we don’t have any secret water ice secrets, but I guess I’ll let that slide.
Would I recommend it? Sure. I had a plain cherry one the next day (sometimes kids order stuff then don’t want it. we wouldn’t want to waste would we?) and it was pretty good. Is it better then ice cream? No, but the smooth texture, and I mean smoooth….no chewing involved, no ice crunching, nothing, is a good sell. If you go, and there are locations all over, try all the flavors, they pride themselves on free samples. See which one you want and go to town.
Fried Oreos
So, I took a trip to Wildwood, NJ with some of my family this week. Boardwalk food has really exploded the past dozen years or so, I think because most people aren’t thinking healthy when they are on vacation. And guess what? Neither am I!
First up? Fried Oreos!
trying the fried oreos in wildwood
At first I wasn’t sure I would like them. I am not a huge funnel cake fan (I get one and can only eat about a quarter of it before I get sick) and I am not a huge cookie fan. However, after much prodding from my relatives, I ordered them from the booth on Morey’s Pier.
As you can see they are caked with powdered sugar but the heat coming off these puppies would have melted my tongue right out of my mouth, so I had to hit a few rides (watching my little cousins) before I could eat them. Finally, outside the kid sized big swing, I bit into one!
Inside of the fried oreo
The inside was cakey, the filling of the cookie was chewy and the funnelcake was delicious. Of course as soon as I took a bite, I was covered with powdered sugar, but that was alright by me. I realized if I ate all four, I’d be sick, so Judy helped me eat the last 2.
Do I recommend them? Sure, if you like either cookies, funnel cake or sugary delights. They were not overly greasy, which was nice. I hate eating stuff and having to practically take a shower to get all the grease off of me. Would they have felt different in my stomach if it was ungodly hot and humid? Maybe. But, I say go for it.
DidjaEat? 