Katz’s Deli, Burgers, Pizza and Fried Chicken: New York Feasting

New York wasn’t just about getting drunk and watching baseball. We were also there to eat as much as possible.

Burgers were the early focus and Shake Shack, 5Napkin and Burger Joint were the top three targets.

Shake Shack at Citi Field

Shake Shack came at the baseball, a soft and cakey bun and a succulent slab of meat. The experience of having it with a great beer in a ballpark made it even better.

5Napkin: Great burger, crap photo

5Napkin came at the end of a long drinking day as we hustled to order before they shut. The fattest hunk of beef, a round and glazed bun, basket of fries and a bottle of Racer 5 (Matt had Racer 5 anyway; I made the mistake of not ordering it). I almost fell asleep on the pillowy bun, the lull of a lupulin haze and the hit of jet lag taking their toll, but it was still brilliant.

Burger Joint

Then there’s Burger Joint. What a place. It’s one of those used-to-be-secret hangouts, hidden inside the plush hotel lobby of Le Parker Meridien (you can tell how fancy it is by the use of ‘Le’ instead of ‘The’). We swish through the revolving doors to see nothing but a reception desk and a sweeping red curtain, but look a little closer and there’s a small, dark alley between the desk and curtain and inside that alley is a sign: an illuminated burger and an arrow. That’s all you get.

Inside it’s small, busy and warm, with walls lined with photos. The servers are squeezed into a small space, running as fast as they can when you can only jump forward or back two steps. Ordering is easy: do you want cheese or not; how do you want it cooked; do you want onions, gherkins and sauce (go Fully Loaded); do you want fries, soft drink or a beer.

Burger Joint burger with Sam Adams

The burger is excellent – no frills bun, oozing cheese, a stack of tomato and onions struggling to stay in place, and a great piece of meat. The Sam Adams Lager we have with it is the best we’ve ever tasted it.

Burgered out, we moved on to pizza. Just down the street from Mugs Ale House in Brooklyn is a by-the-slice place cutting floppy, hot triangles from huge rounds of pizza. It was so good I had to order another. The top of our pizza hit-list was Artichoke Pizza but when we were researching it the website didn’t work so we gave up hope and forgot about it, only reminded of its existence when we walked past one on the way to Chelsea Piers. Still stuffering from a massive lunch we shared a slice but probably could’ve forced ourselves to eat a whole pizza it was so good – we went for the eponymous choice, a creamy white-sauce base topped with artichoke and cheese. It was amazing (and the first ‘white’ pizza I’ve had – I’ll definitely be having more).

Matt wanted chicken and waffles (no idea why – the idea of fried chicken served with waffles and maple syrup is beyond me but I think he wanted some culture or something) so we headed to Amy Ruth’s in Harlem for some soul food. I ordered Nandos-style: chicken wings, fries, coleslaw. It was the best chicken and coleslaw I’ve ever had. Like normal fried chicken and coleslaw but about 100-times better - highly recommended.

And then there’s Katz’s Deli. An NYC food attraction in its own right, complete with a queue to get in, door men and tickets. Most famous for selling ridiculously big sandwiches, it was also where the ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ scene from ‘When Harry Met Sally’ was filmed.

Walking in you are given a ticket as you hit a humming wall of noise and excitement. This place is like no other deli. It’s huge, it’s completely packed with people eating and there’s a five-deep queue to get served at each of the six serving points where enormous men wearing blood- and meat-juice-stained aprons wield giant knives and slice massive hunks of meat before organising (stacking – the meat comes about two inches thick) them on top of impossibly thin (comparatively speaking, anyway) pieces of bread.

The hunger builds as you see the people in front of you turn excitedly with their skyscraper sandwiches as they look to seat and eat. And this place is all about the sandwiches. They also serve a few Jewish classics, and then sodas, fries and sides from a second serving area a little beyond the unending line of sandwich making, but it’s mostly about the meat and bread.

We order a pastrami on rye and a Reuben and it’s made fresh in front of you with the maker taking boulders of beef and slicing a few pieces off for you to try while they work. The meat is just about the best we’ve ever tasted – impossibly tender and full of flavour. When the sandwich is ready it’s passed over with a pile of pickles on the side and we turn excitedly and begin the hunt for somewhere to sit.

It’s really busy so spare seats are a premium, even if this place can fit around 300 people in, and you have to fight through a queue of people just to get into the dining ‘space’ (space isn’t the right word as there is none of it...). We find a spot, sit and prepare ourselves for the meat mountain. The Reuben is corned beef (not like the stuff in tins), Russian dressing and cheese, somehow held together by the bread which is really just a form of transport for the meat. The pastrami is thin slivers of fragrant pink meat served with lots of mustard and piled between rye bread.

Brace yourself for meat sweats...

The sandwiches are insane. They are so big, so juicy, so meaty and so good. It’s hard to not be impressed just by the volume of food you are getting, but it tastes great too. The pickles on the side provide a bolt of sharpness to cut the richness while the fries (we couldn’t not order them once we’d seen how good they looked!) are chipped perfection.

Katz’ Deli is the Globe of sandwich-making; food theatre from beginning to end, with excitement (look at that sandwich!), fear (how am I going to eat this sandwich?!), suspense (can I finish this sandwich?!), a chase for seats, the gut-wrenching choice of what to order, the sounds and sights of the people in the dining audience. It’s an amazing experience.

We ate and drank far too much in New York and it was brilliant.

Brooklyn Beer Bars

Brooklyn is a very cool place to drink beer, eat and hang out. Manhattan is big and busy and tall; Brooklyn is its relaxed, quieter neighbour; chilled out, interesting, charming, cool.

Both of our ventures across East River from Manhattan were to meet up with Lee from Hoptopia and Stevie from all sorts of beer things. Our first trip was Mugs Ale House, Barcade, Fette Sau and Spuyten Duyvil. The second trip was Brooklyn Brewery, Mugs Ale House and Barcade. This post squashes everything together into one round-up.

Mugs Ale House is an open two-room corner boozer with drinking in the front and dining in the back. The bar is lined with colourful beer taps and the ever-present chalkboard listing all the day’s choices.

It’s here that we had the best beer of the trip (and possibly the best, most perfect beer I’ve ever drunk) – Ithaca’s Flower Power. A juicy tropical fruit punch, a mix of mandarins (from the tin), peaches, mango; a smooth and gluggable beer with a bitterness that teases but never terrorises. We returned later in the week and drank more of it. And I’d fly straight back to New York in a heartbeat to get another pint of it.

We also had pints of Captain Lawrence Pale Ale, Bear Republic’s Apex 7, an experimental IPA series which allows the brewers to play around with hop combinations, and Smuttynose IPA, so it was all about the hops.

Jumping on the subway we went to Barcade. It mixes great craft beer with 80s arcade machines in a wide open space with a few pub benches in the corner. It’s a real hipster hangout with people clutching a pint in one hand and a pile of quarters in the other while tattoos wrap up their forearms. If ever there was a bar I wanted to franchise and open in London, this is it...

The beers were really good, too. Victory Prima Pils was excellent, although I didn’t like the Schwarz Pils so much – it was also more like a hoppy brown ale to me and I didn’t want a hoppy brown ale otherwise I would’ve ordered one. Sixpoint’s Bengali Tiger, a local beer, was the spiciest IPA I’ve ever drunk, with some tea flavours, herbs and spices and lots of tannic, oily hops. Founder’s Centennial IPA was exactly what I wanted: a fresh kiss of Centennial hops and a hug of booze. Sixpoint’s Diesel stout was the winner though: intense, oily, rich, roasty and bitter. A super stout.

We finished our first visit (we went twice we liked it so much) by stepping things up and ordering Hudson 4-Grain Bourbon and some of Rogue’s whiskey (because Barcade also has a good spirit list, including those made by breweries – although not Dogfish Head’s, which I was looking for). The bourbon was rich and smooth but hot as hell and the whiskey was delicate and fruity. We washed these down with a magnificent monster imperial stout, as one does when he’s drinking terribly irresponsibly – Black Xantus.

Wobbly legged and in need of a late meal, we stumbled around the corner to Fette Sau just as they finished serving dinner… which, luckily for us, coincides with when they start serving their evening menu. Five minutes later we were sipping beer and stuffing our faces with pork and burnt end beans (the beans were so incredibly delicious!).

Fette Sau is pretty much my dream place: a BBQ joint which sells great beer and bourbon. Set back from the street, its bare-brick walls are warm and filled with the aromas of cooking meat, while a few benches are lined with diners. The beers are poured from the best tap handles I’ve seen – butcher’s knives and utensils. We had an Arcadia Sky High Rye and a Sixpoint Vienna Pale, but all I remember is how good the beans were, how awesome the bourbon bottles looked, how cool the cleaver tap handles were and how much the Vienna Pale tasted like biscuits. My memory turns to a meat-filled, booze-fuelled fug around about here...

More bourbon next. Not knowing what the hell we were ordering we gave the barman a mission: up to $10 each, we want two very different bourbons to try. We got Eagle Rare 10 year old bourbon and Elmer Tree Single Barrel. One was rich and sweet, the other was light and floral; both were fantastic. I think we could’ve hung out in Fette Sau all day and night without getting bored.

Stumbling and bumbling more than we were an hour before, we crossed the street to Spuyten Duyvil. All I remember is being too drunk to know what was going on and that the beer I ordered wasn’t all that. I did, however, have the journalistic foresight to write down what were ordered. Apparently we had Two Brothers IPA and Smuttynose Single Star. I don’t think I did the place justice on my visit…

Then, thinking we knew where we were, over-confident from over-consuming, we decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and get a night sight of Manhattan. About 45 minutes later, and still drunk, we were halfway over Williamsburg Bridge, which has no good views of the city and is just noisy and nasty. We then had to find a subway and schlep our way home. I don’t remember what time we got in but we climbed up the stairwell and out the fire exit of our hotel to see what the view was like from the roof. It was pretty damn awesome (I remember that part!).

And then there’s Brooklyn Brewery (visited on day two, not at 4am). The open-to-public part is an expansive beer-filled warehouse, lively with a cool mix of drinkers in their twenties and thirties. All the beers were on tap, served in half-pint pours, plus some bottles of the Locals in the fridge: the Weiss was excellent, all creamy and bananary with just a little clove, and the EIPA was delicious, the only thing I didn’t drink... Lager. And I don’t know why I overlooked it. Silly me. They put on a tour which is fun and simple, just a discussion of the history and the present expansions, which is really interesting and free.

Brooklyn is an amazing place to drink and eat. Barcade is very cool, Mugs Ale House has a wide choice of beers and the best beer we drank in the week. Fette Sau is unmissable if you like meat. Brooklyn Brewery is must-see for the beer geek. There’s also a really nice feel about Brooklyn as you walk around. We only wished we could’ve seen more of it because there’s so much we didn’t see.

Manhattan Beer Bars

Rattle N Hum is easy to find as long as you can get to the Empire State Building, which can be a little like finding the end of a rainbow given how frequently it appears on the skyline from wherever you are in New York City... Once you get to the Empire State you’re only a block away.

Long and narrow as you pass the bar, it opens out into tables and benches at the back, with TV screens showing sport and bright beer signs hanging all around like trophies of conquered victims – it’s busy, lively, colourful and there’s a great atmosphere. The beer list is chalked onto a large blackboard with a selection of 40 to choose from, almost entirely American.

Our first visit was fresh off the plane, complete with luggage and that dizzy haze of what-time-is-it jetlag, so that chalkboard had our heads spinning. Freaking out with excitement at the number of beers on offer we each start with a flight of four 4oz pours before moving onto a couple of pints. Troegs Dreamweaver Wheat, Pretty Thing’s Jack D’Or Saison and Coney Island’s Mermaid Pils were all good. Stone’s Ruination IPA smelt amazing and was super fruity, then the kickass bitterness pummelled in; they call it Ruination for a reason. Founder’s Double Trouble was the standout choice, with oranges, peaches, apricots and tropical fruit before a lingering bitterness.

Later in the week we timed our visit perfectly to get a great seat right by the TV showing baseball. A Cigar City Maduro Brown and an Oskar Blues Dale’s Pale Ale were both good and then another flight between us to try a few different brews. An OK Dogfish Head 60 Minute, an excellent black IPA from Barrier called Oil City, Pretty Things Once Upon a Time Porter, which Ron Pattinson helped out on, was dry, roasty and smoky with lots of hops, but they were all overshadowed by Avery’s Maharajah IPA which was so good Matt and I both ordered a pint of it (at 10.5%) and enjoyed every last gulp – amazingly good.

The Ginger Man is a short walk from Rattle N Hum and it’d be silly not to visit one without the other. An English-style pub inside with dark wood all around, complete with tables scratched with the names of past drinkers adding a hidden texture and story, there’s a long bar lined with bar stools and a lounge area out the back.

The beer choice is excellent in range and quality. Crossroads Outrage IPA was that desired smack of citrus we’d flown 3000 miles to get while Lake Placid IPA was the weirdest IPA I’ve ever tasted, being more like a beer made with berry syrup added... Odd but strangely good. Later in the week Anderson Valley Oatmeal Stout was super and Matt said Oskar Blues Gubna IIPA was one of his top beers.

Pony Bar is a fun place to drink. It’s a few blocks over from Times Square and you pass the excellent 5Napkin Burger and Shake Shack if you get hungry on the way. ‘All American Craft Beer’ is the banner you walk beneath to get in and they list the beers on two large blackboards. Wooden floors inside, old barrels as tables, benches and bar stools – it’s like an old Western tavern uprooted and brought forward to NYC 2011.

It’s busy when we get there, standing room only, and we squeeze to the bar to order. Ithaca Cascazilla was a big, red, hop monster and Ballast Point Sculpin IPA was all juicy tropical fruits and delicious with a bitterness to keep it interesting. Another Ithaca beer was the worst of the week – Apricot Wheat. Why the hell did I order an apricot wheat beer?! Probably because it was the only thing under 5% but I should’ve known better; it tasted like yogurt. Captain Lawrence’s Captain’s Reserve DIPA restored the balance back towards awesome. Matt had Sixpoint Sweet Triple Action and Left Hand Warrior which were both really good. All beers are $5, which is great value.

We left a little lightheaded and decided to walk to Blind Tiger, figuring it wouldn’t be that far... it was pretty far. Hugging the bright lights of Broadway, we crossed through the city seeing a few sights on the way, gawping at the Empire State Building by night, marvelling at the Flatiron and stopping to ride the wooden escalators in Macy’s (in desperate search of a toilet pit stop).

Blind Tiger is in a cool area of town and there’s a village feel to the place. It’s packed when we arrive, lit by candlelight and a few uplights at the bar. It’s a saison showcase the day we go, with almost half the beers being of that style. The Bruery’s Seven Grain Saison was spectacular; stunning to look at as a hazy lemon colour with a thick foam, it was dry and clean and a little spicy; perfect after that long walk. Lagunitas Pils was equally good to refresh.

We liked Blind Tiger a lot. There’s a cool atmosphere to it with groups of friends chatting animatedly or people on dates chatting intimately; it’s the sort of bar where everything works together. And the beer list is fantastic. Stillwater’s Cellar Door, Southern Tier IPA and Blue Point Rastafa Rye were all good.

And then there’s Heartland Brewery, which have a few places around Manhattan. Walking through Times Square in the rain, one light shone brighter than any others: Brewery. We took shelter from the constant shower (which thankfully stopped when we left the bar) and ordered a flight of the beers. All of them were weird and none made us want to order a pint. It’s worth stopping in and trying the beers, especially in a flight to get through them all, but I was expecting better things.

That’s our beer drinking in Manhattan. The main four bars are all great places to hang out, to drink and to try lots of really good beer.

Here's a map of all the bars, which I'll update with other places as I blog abuot them. These are just the places we drank at on Manhattan and I'm sure there are other great places. We also spent lots of time in Brooklyn; that post is coming soon. I’ve put some photos from the trip on the Pencil&Spoon Facebook page.

FABPOW! Sam Adams Noble Pils with a Shake Shack Burger at Citi Field

I’ll always remember the first time I went to a football stadium to see a live game. I don’t know where it was or who was playing, I just remember seeing the pitch and thinking how much smaller it looked in real life, how much closer the players were and that they were real, how green it was, how it sounded (cheering and swearing) and smelt (cigarettes, frying onions, piss). Most of all I just remember being in awe of it all and I’m sure I vowed to go back every week after.

Walking onto the concourse of Citi Field, the home of the New York Mets, I had that same feeling I did when I was a 10-year-old boy: amazement, excitement, wonder; how it’s smaller in real life than on TV, but how impressive the stadium is as it hugs the gleaming emerald outfield; how bright and colourful it is; the hum of chatter, the call of food sellers ‘Hot dogs here!’ and the smell of fresh air and frying food.

It was my first baseball game after being a fan of the sport since university, and I’m there with Matt, the guy who got me into good beer, who also shares my love of baseball and eating and drinking too much. As we walk around the open concourse, past bars and food vendors, the excitement only grows in a sea of fans dressed in white, blue and orange.

Spot the baseball...

Our first beer was an odd but easy choice: Rolling Rock. It’s a look back to the uni days when our housemate Jess would bring us cases of Rock from the off-licence her dad ran (she also brought us a 6-foot inflatable Corona bottle...).

The second beer was an easier one: Budweiser (with a hot dog, of course). What is everyone else drinking? What beer is synonymous with America and sports? We had to have one while we were there. And you know what? It was exactly what we wanted while we watched the game: cold and crisp, easy to gulp, not distracting as we sat there like excited boys staring out at the game before us.

As this trip was specifically to see baseball games (as well as to eat and drink New York into a state of famine), we emptied our wallets and paid for shit-hot seats. This meant a great view, plush leather chairs, and, even better, a waiter service for food and drink so we didn’t miss any action (even better still, it meant access to a different bar which included craft beers!).

We ordered beers, going to the bar ourselves to see what was on. I had a Sam Adams Noble Pils and it was excellent; exactly what I wanted and expected, only better.

Then the burgers arrived.

Shake Shack burger have a few locations in America and, more recently, two in the Middle East. One of their outlets is at Citi Field and when we passed it earlier it had a huge line waiting to be served. We’ll get it later, we decided, before we knew about the perks of our expensive ticket purchase.

Juicy meat, oozing cheese and the softest, sweetest bun I’ve ever tasted, melting like candy floss into the warmth within, becoming chewy and working so well with the salty char of the beef and the sharp cut of the condiments. A mouthful of the Noble Pils to follow it down (FABPOW!) while we look around at the bright green playing field and things, I think to myself, don’t get much better than this.

Beer, burgers and baseball. That’s why we went to New York. This moment brought the three Bs together in the perfect way: our first night in NYC, our first baseball game, a great beer and a brilliant burger.

None of these pictures do it any justice...