Three Pizzerias - Angela's, Woodstock, La Roma

Little Red and I have eaten pizza at several joints  in recent weeks — at Angela's, on Route 9W in Lake Katrine, at the Woodstock Pizzeria on Tinker Street, and at La Roma Pizzeria at 516 Broadway in Kingston, in the Millard Building, right across from where you turn coming down from Benedictine Hospital.

All three of these pizza joints cook the pies “properly” from my point of view — and by this I mean they bake the pie, let it cool on the shelf, and then reheat a slice or several slices for each individual order.  That  is the New York style pizza I grew up with on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and for me this is the gold standard.  Serving a fresly baked pie without letting it cool and then rebaking slices means the crust will be flabby.  Some people like it that way — most of them willingly eat at Pizza Hut, I believe -- but the success of real New York Pizza depends more on the texture of the crust than it does on on the quality of the sauce and the cheese, though these are also important factors in judging a pizza.

Little Red and I stopped at Angela’s on a very cold night after visiting my mother at the Ten Broek Commons nursing home.  We were hungry and discouraged and Angela’s didn’t cheer us up much.  We sat near the back door, which was probably a mistake.  Angela’s is  a small place, popular with the locals, but the cold draft from the door was wnough to make us think we should have moved to a table that was closer to the pizza ovens.  We waited almost half an hour until finally Little red got up and asked where our pizza was.

“Omigod,” said the young waitress, clapping her hand to her mouth.  “Someone must have sent it out with one of the delivery orders.”

Angela's  pizza was passable — when it finally arrived.  But waiting so long made Little Red  cranky, and that is probably why she showed little interest in going there again.  We decided to try a few other pizzerias just to check to see what we could learn about the caliber of local pizza baking — just for fun..

Not because w e both love pizza, or anything like that.  I mean — Little Red still beliesves Pizza Hut makes pretty good pizza.  But I don’t like the sauce there — too much sweetener, the salt and pepper balalnce is too high, and the last time I ate there -- w0 years ago? -- they didn’t cook pizza by the slice “properly.”

The Woodstock Pizzeria, on Tinker Street — we stopped there about ten days later on the way back from visiting my mother at Benedictine.  It was on the way home.  My slice of plain cheese was cooked properly, but Little Red’s two pepperoni slices arrived scorched to a cinder.  Inedibly burned.  Never should have been served to a customer.  How can you explain -- to a teenage waitress/cashier? -- that when the slice is burned you don't serve it?  Little Red just took them back to the front counter and before long the definitely way too cute blonde brought two more slices of pepperoni.  These were only slightly too well done.  My cheese slices were okay.  Nothing extra.  This was disappointing — cooking a slice of pizza is properly is hardly rocket science, and one ought to be able to expect pizza good enough to eat.

La Roma Pizza, in the Millard Building at 516 Broadway, seemed the best of these three pizzerias.  The sauce was tasty.  The cheese was good.  The pies were cooked properly.  There was almost no one in the joint the two times we went, even though the physical plant seemed brand new.  Possibly La Roma does a good delivery business sending pies up to Benedictine and to Kingston Hospital?  The neighborhood’s a bit dicey after dark — not extra bad, but the streeets in Kingston aren’t very well llit, and a family might feel a bit unsettled going out to eat there at night.  They have a Wednesday  special of two cheese slices with a small soda for $3.99.  The menu shows a good variety of reasonably interesting "gourmet" pizzas, too, and they were willing to dot a cheese slice with ricotta when I asked.  Little Red and I went  back again, a few nights later, fairly certain we would find what we were lookiung  for: pretty darn good pizza in what we found to be a convenient location on the way back from the hospital.

I might even get up the  nerve to try a steak sandwich at La Roma, though I know it probably won't measure up to  Dalessandro's Steaks -- which is in Philadelphia on the north side of the Schuylkill at 600 Wendover Street, near the entrance to the park and the Walnut Lane golf course.  Dalessandro's Steaks is worth a  long detour any time you're in the neighborhood.  Hint:  It's not downtown on Mifflin Street.  Second hint:  Forget Pat's.

Carl's Ice Cream in Fredericksburg, Virginia

Carl started a soft ice cream place on Princess Anne Street in Fredericksburg when he got out of the Army -- after WWII. The legend is that Carl used to use real grain alcohol in his frozen custard mix -- and he still does even though it is harder to get now. I believe the legend is probably true. Carl's Ice Cream is not pretentious. There was no place to sit, last time I was there.. There's no shade on a blazing hot day. Vanilla, Chocolate and Strawberry are the only flavors. I prefer the vanilla. You can order a cone or a dish or hardpack (by the quart, I can't remember which). The hard pack is frozen  hard enough to travel several hours if wrapped in a towel or blanket. That way you can take some home to Richmond or Charlottesville. I always used to stop at Carl's whether I was going North or South ...

You get off on the northernmost Fredericksburg exit (for Route 17, as I remember) and head east to Route 1, where you turn right to  go over the Rappahannock, and then as soon as you're across the bridge, turn left on Princess Anne Street and go up the slight hill a few hundred yards; Carl's will be on the right.

But most people don't like ice cream as much as I do. They won't travel for it, and they won't go out of their way to get something really special, because they can't neither recognize it nor appreciate it when they finally bump into it. Most people can't even tell the difference between Ben and Jerry's and Hagen Dazs, I think they get confused or even sort of hypnotized by the all the weird names, and they don't remember that Ben and Jerry may have started out making pretty good ice cream long ago in Vermont, but then they sold out to a giant corporation that diluted the brand by adding guar gum and carageenan and other fillers, plus a lot of "over run"  to all the ice cream. You can get plenty of it at a supermarket right down the road from Carl's.

And my opinion is that captious tourists who want "toppings" should skip Carl's entirely; those of us who love Carl's will be happy they went somewhere else. Often there is a line around the building, and no one waiting in that line needs to listen to any strangers whining; it gums up the works.

The view across the street or on either side of Carl's is probably still of a car dealership.

I used to get several quarts of hardpack vanilla on trips north to visit my parents in Woodstock, New York, and I'd pull off the road and eat at least one somewhere way north of the tunnel in Baltimore, at one of those giant rest stops where the food used to be so terrible. At Carl's, the staff's not surly -- they are just used to dealing with people who already know what they want and want it in a hurry. They have to bend over to talk to you through the little window, and they're usually very busy. Also, I am pretty sure the shop is not air conditioned inside. There are two service windows, and both used to be open on busy nights. You can expect a good line all the way around the building on any summer evening, but the line will move along quickly. Be patient, and be sure you get some hard pack.

Talking to the people waiting in line can be very entertaining.  You can ask questions like: "When was the first time you ever came here?" or "Which flavor do you prefer?" or "Do they still put grain alcohol in the custard mix?" or even "Is Carl still alive?"

 I have stopped by Carl's in the middle of winter on a snowy night and found a line around the corner of the building. I think that probably says about all you really need to know.

You can see a picture of Carl's Ice Cream online at http://Iheartconsumerism.blogspot.com

My friend Ed Haile claims his mother was the first to suggest the 15 cent puppy cup to Carl.  Bravo, I say.

Down at the middle Fredericksburg exit -- if you take Route 20 South, you will come to the Wilderness/Chancellorsville Batlefield Visitor Center, and in it you will see (probably it is still there) a gorgeous mural painted by Ethel Magafan, one of Woodstock's better painters. The mural shows Grant and his officers riding over the battlefield surrounded by dead and dying soldiers. It is a gruesome subject, especially for Southerners, because Chancellorsville was where the South really started losing the war -- they lost Jackson, and hubris caused Lee to invade Pennsylvania, where the war was lost for keeps -- but it is nonetheless a wonderful painting. Ethel Magafan is a very good painter; so is her husband Bruce Currie, and so is their daughter Jennie Magafan Currie. Last time I was there, the best view of Ethel's painting, actually, was from halfway back in the women's lavatory. Knock to be sure it is not occupied before you prop open the door, especially during the summer.  I mean, if the mural is still there.

Three Indian Restaurants

Little Red and I been out a few times lately to some Indian restaurants: Kingston Indian Restaurant (downtown, where the Tea Garden used to be), Mountain Gate (in Woodstock), Tanjore (in Rhinebeck) and the Indian Grill (on Broadway in Kingston). We had mixed results.

Kingston Indian Restaurant was the first place we tried. Little Red had never been to an Indian restaurant before, but she claims to like lamb curry, and I wanted a masala dhosa. I rode my bike over from Woodstock, down the Sawkill Road through Zena, and we tried the lunch buffet. It was not bad. Little Red like the lamb curry and the tandoori chicken. It seemed to be the only restaurant in downtwon Kingston that had a good sprinkling of people at the tables -- but that was probably just an illusion. It seemed "a clean, well-lighted place." The wait staff and the owner were friendly. They had only just opened a week or ten days before our first visit. There was no dhosa on the menu. Well -- no matter. Many Indian restaurants do not serve dhosas.

We tried Mountain Gate next. Little Red and I were the only two people in the restaurant when we got there and no one else came in before we left. Possibly Christmas Eve is not the best time to visit an Indian restaurant? The waitress, an American teenager, looked after us fairly well. We liked the creamy chicken and coconut soup. And the papadoms. Mountain Gate does not have a dhosa on the menu. The dining room seemed clean. They charged me what seemed a steep price -- $3.50 -- for a cup of tea made with a Lipton tea bag—not even Brooke Bond Red Label. Little Red and I managed to get enough to eat for around $40.00—tip included. I call this the “Indian restaurant problem”—I think you often pay what seems a lot for what you get at an Indian restaurant. Overall, my opinion is we paid nearly twice as much as the meal might properly have cost — but that's just my opinion. The dining room was a bit chilly.

Mountain Gate made me miss the old Deanie’s. It seemed a well-appointed tablecloth restaurant, clean and well-lighted, and perhaps on a busier night the kitchen might have pleased me so much I'd be willing to overlook the price.

About aten days later we went down to Tanjore early on New Year's Eve. It was a buffet night. The rice was good. The samosas on the buffet, however, were too soggy to eat and the nan had been steamed until it took on an oddly gelatinous texture. Little Red liked the lamb curry; but I thought it was not only a bit dull but also that it had been stewed a bit too long. We both liked the tandoori chicken wings. I liked the vegetable biryani and the palak paneer; the chicken tikka masala was unexceptional -- did you know it's the new "national dish" of Great Britain? -- and seemed to have been made, if that is possible, with a starting base of canned tomato soup. There were many choices on the buffet, but overall most items seemed to be swimming in a lot of gravy. The chai was not bad, though, and it was included in the price of the buffet, as was dessert. I especially liked the honey balls and the white cheese balls in syrup, but by that point in the evening Little Red was too full of curry to think of eating dessert.

If Tanjore was closer, I might go fairly often, but Rhinebeck seems a bit far, though I might go back for a masala dhosa if I’m in the area on other business. This meal also cost nearly $40.00 for two people (including the tip), but at least we got plenty to eat, and it did seem that Little Red was at least warming up to the different types of Indian food. Perhaps we would have fared better later in the evening, or on a non-holiday night.

At Kingston’s Indian Grill, which is on Broadway near but across the street from the mid-town Diesings, we did fairly well, I thought, though Little Red felt we should have gotten more of lamb curry for dinner. It’s true we did not get much of the curry, but at least it was good. The papadoms at the start were freshly crisped. The samosa chat was a relatively crisp samosa in a bowl of chickpeas with yogurt sauce—and there seemed to be a lot of chickpeas. The alu nan was toasted nice and crispy on the exterior. I forgot to order chutney. A large party sitting nearby got some very nice looking tandoori meats on sizzling platters. There were not many seats in the restaurant. The carpet seemed perhaps even older than the carpet at Eng’s. Possibly a new carpet sweeper would help keep it cleaner. Though I found the lamb curry to be spiced just right, and we both agreed that it tasted good, Little Red felt we did not get much of it (the IRP again), and Little Red complained it was slightly to hot for her. So I ordered a mango lassi. We went home relatively happy, because at least we hadn’t spent an arm and a leg, and we both thought the tandoori grill items might be fun to try in the future. The Indian Grill has a lunch buffet, which made Little Red’s ears prick up, but alas they seem to have taken lamb chops off the new menu.

Overall, none of the curries we ate at any of these restaurants was better than the curried potatoes or lamb curry I can easily make at home using Patak’s Mild Curry Paste — which you can find at Hannaford's.

The Hudson Valley seems ready for a few totally vegetarian restaurants like the Udupi Palace, so I can at least hope some udupi cuisine nearby ... before long.