Taqueria y Fonda la Mexicana, Amsterdam Ave. between 107th and 108th

For authentic regional Mexican cooking, try Taqueria y Fonda.  This is not your gringo Tex-Mex place that glops sour cream and guacalomole on your cheese covered entree.  This place is the real thing -- with homemade burritos and enchiladas that don't have a just-out-of-the-bag chemical residue.  They are fresh and pull like fresh-baked bread.

You might think you're in Mexico, but for the open door and windows that look out on a Domino's Pizza across Amsterdam, parked cars, and parking meters with bikes locked to them.

The dining room is tiny -- seating maybe 16-20 people at a time.  The owner sat down at a table next to our to have his dinner around 9 pm, when things were slowing down.  I asked what he was having -- and had never heard of the dish before:  chicken covered cooked with avocado leaves and a paprika colored hot red sauce.  "It's my favorite!" he said as he sat down to dine.

We ordered more standard fare:  a giant steak burrito ($8.25) -- enough for 2 or 3 people -- that had really good steak -- not the shredded stuff you normally get, but real slices of flank steak grilled and mixed with rice, beans, tomatoes, guacamole, sour cream, cheese and salad.  I had the chicken mole enchilada ($8.95) which had chunks of chicken (again, not the shredded stuff you get at commercial places) -- and a brown, mildly spicy chocolate sauce made with peppers, sesame seeds, raisins and almonds in a homemade corn enchilada.   I was tempted by the chicken pipian that has a pumpkin seed sauce and cilantro and other herbs, but will have to save that for the next time.

We took home more than half of what we'd ordered (just 2 meals) and had them the next night for dinner, too.

East Dumpling House on 106th just east of Broadway

When you have a noodley yen, there's the East Dumpling House -- which serves a variety of dumplings with both hot and mild aromatic sauces.  We've tried the sampling of their dumplings:  pork with chives, pork with cabbage, chicken with green pepper, chicken with corn, vegetable, shrimp and pork, basil chicken with shitake mushroom (7 pieces for $6.50).  Our favorite is the shrimp and pork -- chopped pieces of tender, yet just cooked shrimp mixed with a green (chives?) and ground pork.  All are yummy -- wrapped in an al dente pocket made of rice flour and either steamed or pan fried.  We like both ways and can't decide which is better.  The pan fried are browned on one side allowing a crunch as you bite in.  The steamed dumplings make you feel a bit more righteous (fewer calories, no oil).  If you know which dumpling you prefer, you can order either 8 pieces of a single type  ($5.50) or 12 pieces ($6.95).

The cold noodles with sesame sauce ($5.95 were a bit bland, over-cooked and watery.  The Pan Fried Ugly Dumpling with vermicelli, celery, chives and egg felt a bit excessive.  The crust of the dumpling was rather thick -- and it felt a bit oily.  We enjoyed the potato pancake Korean style ($3.95) -- a fast fried mix of shredded potatoes, onion and green pepper -- tasting like a combination of flattened hash-browns and really good onion rings.  Service was friendly and prompt.

The small, paneled dining room was comfortably cool on a night so hot we were grateful of shade on the south side of 106th.  You can bring your own beer or wine -- and dine for well under $10 a person.

Hudson Beach Cafe, 105th in Riverside Park

To dine outside in New York with a view of the Hudson River and the Palisades and an occasional sailboat crossing through the sunset's reflection -- there's Hudson Beach Cafe, inside Riverside Park at 105th, just across from the dog run.  You can bring your dog and they will serve him his own cup of water.  You can come with your team in uniform and drink beer served in buckets of ice.  And you can order burgers with fries ($10.95) with beer ($5) -- as we did.

The burgers were served with lettuce, pickles and a tomato.  They were plump, and medium rare -- just as ordered.

Best of all -- you can sit on a terrace under green umbrellas above the beach volleyball courts and gymnastic equipment that's on the lower level of the park -- and gaze out at the Hudson River.  No need to go to the country.

Henry's: An American Bistro, Broadway and 105th

When we want a place to meet friends for conversation where we can have a good glass of wine or beer and a good meal, we choose Henry's.  Henry's is spacious enough -- with wood paneled walls and deco chandeliers -- to allow for some privacy, unlike so many bistros where the tables are squished side by side and others' conversations intrude into yours. 

Henry's tables, covered in blue checked tableclothes, are spaced comfortably.  Even the outside dining offers some quiet from the normal bustle of New York City restaurants -- aside from the occasional fire truck or ambulence racing down Broadway.  A couple doors north is Smoke, a jazz cafe, and if you're lucky enough to be sitting outside, you may hear the fusion of live musicians.

On one occasion, I ordered chicken with spinach and roasted fingerling potatoes, which I found a tad salty.  Another time I had a burger (you have a choice of two:  a standard, beef burger for $10 or a grassfed burger for $16).  I had the standard burger, which was thick and juicy and comes with crisp French fries served in a paper cone.  

Another time, I had the kale salad with grilled, herbed shrimp.  The kale salad is so good, I've tried to reproduce it with fresh kale from our garden in Connecticut -- to no avail.  Our kale, parboiled and squeezed in paper towels comes out soggy.  Their kale arrives slightly parboiled and crisp.  Roasted hazelnuts and fresh grapes, fennel strips and a flavorful citrus dressing -- not too oily, not too tart -- are mixed into the kale -- providing a wonderfully textured salad.  The grilled shrimp are done al dente -- covered in their shells, they crunch when you bite in and are char-grilled with herbs.

I've also tasted three of the four pastas on the menu.  The homemade pappardelle Bolognese, Parmasan, and parsley ($15) makes you think you are in a cafe on a street in Rome:  the pasta is both fluffy and al dente, the sauce rich and seductive.  The Gemelli, covered in a light sauce with asparagus, zucchini, yellow squash, arugula and tomato, was good, but left me a bit hungry ($18).  And the Fettucine with Hudson Valley rabbit, carrots, peas, kalamata olives and chives was once perfectly cooked, and a second time, the pasta was a tad undercooked.  The rabbit tasted more like a stewed chicken than anything else. ($20)

On another occasion, we split several appetizers, including three soft corn tacos:  one with shrimp, arugula, pico de gallo and avocado salsa, one with marinated hanger steak, romaine lettuce, cherry tomato and salsa verde, and the third with spinach, cremini mushrooms, queso fresco, and roast tomato salsa.  All were delicious.  (choice of 3:  $16, choice of 5: $21)  The tacos were fresh, the ingredients were fresh.  We also shared the mezza platter while waiting for friends to show up.  The hummus, babaganoush, beet tartar, and spicy carrot salad provided a variety of flavors for the toasted pita. ($13)

Desserts?  Who can resist desserts.  We tried them all -- the bread pudding (very rich), the apple tarte -- crisp and hot with homemade vanilla ice cream melting into it, the volcanic chocolate cake (a bit too much melt in the center) and the special last week:  perfectly cakey angel's food cake -- dark chocolate with a chocolate ganache filling sprinkled with chopped hazelnuts with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. (desserts run $6-12.)

Awash Ethiopian Restaurant, Amsterdam Ave. between 106th and 107th

When I ate the soury, spicy leftovers from Awash, an Ethiopian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue, I thought of Abraham Verghese's characters in Cutting for Stone and how they longed for the taste of Ethiopia.  Verghese's narrator, after he's moved to America, finds himself entering an Ethiopian restaurant in Boston.  "The smell of fermenting honey elicited a Pavlovian response from [his] taste buds."  He eats as  if he had lived through a famine.   An Ethiopian restaurant in New York conjures up for the narrator "the sour taste of injera and a fiery wot" and his mouth begins watering.

I ate at Awash several months ago with my sister.  On the walls, painted in shades of lemon and lime, pictures of women and pastoral scenes hang.  The food we ordered was served on a big round tray, set in the middle of the table.  The yebeg wat, a lamb stew seasoned with berbere sauce contained tender chunks of meat in a rather thick brown soury-spicy sauce.  The gomen, collard greens, were cooked with onions and a hint of cardamon.  The yemesir kik wat, split red lentils cooked in berbere sauce were perfectly al dente -- a bit of a crunch as you chewed into the soft center.  All was served on a wonderful, spongy bread.  There is no silverware.  You pull a piece of the plentiful bread and scoop the sour-hot stew from the platter.  I imagine this is a taste you acquire.  But it is fun to tear off the bread, scoop up the food, and talk.  

Cafe du Soleil, Broadway between 104th and 105th

A late, light dinner for a Friday evening away from the bustle and noise of the city:  Cafe du Soleil.  The restaurant is light and cheerful -- a yellow-gold awning covering cafe tables on the sidewalk (too cold) and a warm, tiled interior with big mirrors on the walls, reflecting and opening up the space.  We arrived about 8 p.m. and were immediately seated at a table in front of the window -- and beside the host's lectern.

We could have been adventurous (well, as adventurous as one can be in a French bistro,) and ordered something other than the steak frites, but that is what we both like very much.  And I have a tendency to want to try out the French fries where ever I go.

We started by sharing the Frisee au Rocquefort Salad with thinly sliced apples, ground walnuts and a Dijon vinaigrette ($9.95).  Then we split the grilled, marinated hanger steak ($23.95), a generally tough cut, which was tender in portions and a bit chewy in others.  The steak was covered with a rich Bordelaise sauce suffused with fresh rosemary (in fact, a branch of rosemary lay across the layered steak portions.  The pomme frites, served in a paper cone, were superb:  buttery and crisp on the outside, soft and potatoey on the inside.  We ate every single one -- dipped either in ketchup or the wonderful reduced red wine sauce.


For dessert we shared a banana cream pie which was more a tiramisu with bananas in a vanilla wafer crust ($7.95).


Cafe du Soleil offers specials every day:  Monday, any steak is $12.95; Thursday any fish is $12.95; Wednesdays bottles of wine are half-priced.  They offer a pre-theater special (just hop on the #1 train at 104th and you'll arrive at Lincoln Center in about 5 minutes) for $21.95, a prix fixe menu on Sundays for $25.95.


                             

Mama Mexico, Broadway @ 101st Street

Mama Mexico has fun drinks, live music (a traveling guitar player with a fabulous voice who croons Happy Birthday in English and Spanish, as well as more traditional and modern songs), decent, higher end Mexican food, and lots of noise -- depending on where you're seated.  It so happened that a large party of men were in one room, we were seated in the glassed in "green house" decorated with colorful hanging lanterns and baskets of twining ivy.

Two at our table ordered festive margaritas that looked like a lava lamp as the layers of blue, pink, and yellow bled into each other.  There is also a full complement of Mexican (and American) beer, as well as an extensive wine menu.

Hot tortilla chips with a fresh salsa -- full of tomatoes and cilantro -- are served before you order.  Then the drinks came.  We ordered a guacamole which was prepared at our table -- a whole avacado scooped out and mixed with chopped tomatoes, onions, and spices.  Two at our table ordered the Tacos al Carbon ($16) -- soft corn tortillas rolled with grilled skirt steak with refried beans and pico de gallo,  and served with black beans and rice, lettuce and guacamole.  One of us ordered the cheese enchiladas ($15).  And I ordered pollo con mole poblano ($16) -- two tender boneless chicken breasts smothered in a spicy, (not sweet) chocolate sauce and sprinkled with sesame seeds.  (Since reading Like Water for Chocolate, I've always ordered chicken mole when it's available).

We might have ordered dessert, but it took fifteen minutes for our waiter to return, and by then we asked for the check.  It took another half hour before the charged statement was brought back for our signature.

Dinner for 4 with two margaritas and one beer came to $104 and change.

Rack & Soul, 109th just east of Broadway

Stacked to the right of the entrance behind the window (where else do you stack wood in NY?) is a quarter cord of split wood for Rack & Soul's wood-smoked barbecue.  And what barbecue it is!  We passed through the charming, wooden bar area with its half dozen tables to the back room -- a paneled extension with planked floors and a few tables and booths.  Photographs of old New York (circa 1900) grace the walls.  There's even a photo of our building just after it was built!  The restaurant was quiet on a Sunday night around 8 pm.  Usually, it's far more crowded.

Right after we sat down, plates with two hot, just-baked biscuits were set down before us.  We ordered two Abita beers ($6 each) brewed from Louisiana spring water, and fried crawfish tails with a creamy smooth pink sauce faintly tasting of lemon juice, ketchup, mayo, and cayenne pepper.  The crawfish, brought almost immediately from the kitchen, were covered in a deep-fried film of batter.  We also ordered the combination platter (choose two entrees from ribs, pulled pork, BBQ chicken wings or fried chicken, and choose two sides from broccoli, asparagus, collard greens, string beans, black-eyed peas, lima beans, baked beans, cole slaw, stewed okra, macaroni and cheese, candied yams, white rice, mashed potatoes, french fries, potato salad, or a belgian waffle).  I would have liked a taste of everything.  Alas, something to save for another day.

The wood-smoked ribs were tender, not fatty, and so thick, it seems we'd ordered pork-roast with a little bone. A sweet barbecue sauce covered only the outer surface, though you could squeeze on more sauce (piquant or sweet) from a plastic bottle on the table.  Or, you could add tabasco sauce, also on the table.  The fried chicken was what I remembered from my childhood -- when Maggie, who sometimes cleaned and sometimes cooked for us -- whipped up her version of fried chicken: A crunchy, dry crust of batter around tender, moist chicken.

The collard greens were over-cooked as they have to be, dark green (making us feel righteous about our healthy choice of a side dish), with a hint of vinegar and butter.   The finely chopped cole slaw in a creamy, celery seeded sauce was among the best cole slaws I've ever had.  Yay, vegetables!

And then dessert.  We had to try the pecan pie and the banana pudding layered over sliced bananas and vanilla wafers, as if it were a trifle.  Both were very good.  The pecan pie was loaded with chopped nuts in a fairly dry (for pecan pie) pudding redolent of brown sugar, molasses and butter.  The banana pudding melted the vanilla wafers, making me feel like a kid again who liked to dip her vanilla wafers in milk.

Our bill came to $60.59.

Community, Broadway between 112 and 113

Despite the snow and the three inch thick ice blocks that traversed the sidewalk in front of stores that didn't shovel and the six inch puddles of slush you had to step into (or walk great distances to circumvent), we made our way up 4 blocks to Community, a restaurant we'd been meaning to get to since it reopened in October after a grease fire had closed it down for six months.

Community seats its guests at, well, communal tables.  Long tables fill the center of the main dining room where the acoustics verge on loud.  We found ourselves talking in more than hushed voices to be heard over the laughter and good stories told at nearby tables.  In fact, we found ourselves entering the conversations at the tables on either side of us -- eyeing and commenting on the butterscotch pudding topped with whipped cream two women shared, overhearing a discussion between a brother and sister of last year's production of Euripides off-Broadway and ogling the very attractive shrimp pot stickers and perfectly browned zucchini scallion pancakes .

Ordering wine was easy, once we'd decided against the $50 dollar bottle of pinot noir from France.  I ordered the malbec ($9) and David ordered a pinot ($12).  Then the hard part:  how to choose among the apparently healthful, organic beautifully prepared entrees.  We ordered the special salad:  arugula, toasted walnuts, bacon and blue cheese tossed in a pear vinagarette -- which we shared.  I judge a salad on the crispness of its vegetables and the smoothness of its dressing.  This was ambrosia -- the sweetness of the pear emulsified with olive oil and vinegar.

David ordered the Hudson Valley duck breast ($23) served with sheared and grilled brussel sprouts, whole wheat spaetzle, and a rich port sauce one would normally find on a steak.  In fact, the medium rare duck tasted like steak -- but more tender.  I ordered a hamburger ($14) medium rare (more for the fries than the hamburger!) -- but it came medium well, and our enthusiastic, charming waiter took it back to the kitchen and brought me back my fries.  Rather than another burger, I ordered the shrimp pot stickers ($8.50) -- which were delicious.  These pan-seared dumplings arrived perfectly browned.  Inside the al dente rice paper, chunks of shrimp mixed with ginger and something green I could not identify.  Suffice to say, it was as good as it looked -- and better.

For dessert we ordered the special which will soon be on the menu:  coconut-banana cream pie.  So creamy the dollop of whipped cream on top seemed redundant.

Our bill came to $75.32.

Silver Moon Bakery, Broadway @ 105th

On weekends, the line snakes out the door.  Weekdays, you see the odd couple or solo person sitting on the bench outside the bakery balancing a cup of coffee and a pastry.  I often walk by the steamy windows which signify just baked breads and cakes and pies.  And "real" doggie biscuits.  The fresh oven aroma wafts out to the street, like the genie from Aladdin's lamp luring you into a deal you're not sure you want just now.  I don't often allow myself to go in -- but when I do, I reward myself with golden brioche baked into jelly-filled doughnuts or swirling cinnamon buns topped with sugar frosting.  There's something irresistible  about pulling off fresh chunks of sweet, yeasty bread that melts in your mouth.  You want another and another, even though you vowed to yourself when you bought the highly caloric pre-dinner snack that you'd only take one bite and save the rest for later.  There never is a later.

about $4 per pastry.