The cemita is the Rolls Royce of Mexican sandwiches; no extravagance is spared. From bottom to top: black beans, mayo, meat, lettuce, tomato, pickled onion, stringy Mexican white cheese, avocado, papalo – a pungent Mexican herb whose strength puts cilantro to shame – and a spread of stewed chipotle pepper, all enclosed in a soft, eggy, seeded bun. Most American sandwiches want to be it. And if you’re going to sell them, you may as well just call your business “Cemita.” No other name will do it justice. That’s exactly what Cemita’s owner Danny Lyu did for his Mexican sandwich stand at Smorgasburg, the food-only extension of Brooklyn Flea based at the Williamsburg waterfront on weekends. A plate-sized panko crusted chicken cutlet ($9, top) juts out from both ends of the towering sandwich before its all wrapped in wax paper, a necessary evil if you want to maintain any semblance of order and front-of-shirt cleanliness during eating. It’s worth arriving early for the breakfast special cemita ($5.50, above), served from 10am-11:30am; eggs, beans, cheese, chorizo, pico de gallo, and tater tots – both inside your sandwich and scattered around the tray – will make you a morning person. If there’s a Mexican deli near your house, odds are they sell cemitas too, but if you want your first experience to be the best, head over to Smorgasburg. It will be on the waterfront for just three more weekends before moving to a heated tent at One Hanson Place in Fort Greene on Nov. 19.

Cemita’s Mexican Sandwiches Link Sat & Sun 10am-5pm at Smorgasburg Link Williamsburg waterfront b/t North 6th and North 7th St at the East River, 10am-5pm

What’s better than BBQ and pie? How about when the pie is arguably better than the BBQ? This was the thought running through my mind upon tasting First Prize Pies S’Mores Pie ($6/slice) last week at Fatty Cue. All of the Southeast Asian-inspired BBQ was spot on, but when someone can take a foolproof recipe like S’Mores and make it better, it’s time to rejoice. Creator Alison Kave’s recipe features a tightly packed, buttery graham cracker crust which provides a crisp, crumbly and slightly salty shell for a layer of creamy Belgian Callebaut milk chocolate ganache crowned by sticky and pleasingly burnt homemade marshmallow fluff.  It’s the dessert dreams are made of.  Kave’s culinary prowess is no accident. Her brother is Corwin Kave, executive chef at Fatty Cue, and her mother is Rhonda “Roni-Sue” Kave, of Roni-Sue’s Chocolates, home to NYC Food Guy’s favorite bite at the Hester Street Fair: the red velvet truffle from Roni-Sue’s new Bake Sale collection.  But enough about Mom.  You need to go try her daughter’s S’Mores Pie which you can find at Hester Street Fair, Fatty Cue, Saturday at Roni-Sue’s Chocolates, Sunday at God Buns Market (next to Fatty Cue), or on the First Prize Pies website.

Looking to make this pie at home? Here’s the recipe complements of NYTimes.com’s T Magazine Blog

It’s pretty cool being the first person to try a new drink.  Thursday night at Fatty Cue, NYC Food Guy received this honor alongside Hagan the Wandering Foodie and Andy from Wined & Dined.  Adam the bartender calls his $8, Thai-inspired pickle back “Tong Po,” a reference to the pony-tailed villain from the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme classic “Kickboxer.”  And while you don’t have to coat your fist in broken glass before taking this shot, Adam’s custom made pickle juice is definitely a kick to your taste buds.   First you take a shot of Mekhong, a dark Thai sugar cane spirit with a slightly smokey flavor.  Then you follow it with the pickle juice giving yourself a nice kick of spice right in the back of the throat.  If you actually taste it for a moment, before drowning it out with your can of Singha Thai beer, the pickle juice’s flavor is complex.  Adam cooks Thai basil stems, honey, pineapple juice, vanilla bean, and assam (tamarind skin) to a simmer.  Then he strains it all and purees the concoction with smoked long green Chiles, ginger, rice wine vinegar, and salt to taste.  It all goes down a lot easier than you’d imagine and unlike a beating from the real Tong Po, it will have you calling for seconds.  Read on to find out about Fatty Cue’s other pickle back shot and how you can get it for just $6…

There’s also an $8 “recession special” pickle back on the bar menu, featuring a shot of whiskey, a different variety of spicy pickle juice and a PBR tallboy.  And Thursday to Saturday, from midnight to 4AM, is Late Night Happy Hour, where you can get your “recession special” for $6 alongside a late night only pork shoulder bahn mi that Adam the bartender calls the best in New York City.

Fatty Cue website 91 S. 6th Street near Berry Street Brooklyn, NY 11211 718-599-3090

Like a baseball scout keeping tabs on an up-and-coming prospect, I’ve become a fried food scout.  I first read about St. Anselm’s Newark Double in August 2009 and I’ve been craving it ever since.  Much more than just another New Jersey sandwich overstuffed with fried food, this bad boy features two deep fried, custom made Karl Ehmer hot dogs, cornmeal-dusted fried onion and red pepper and French fries double fried in beef tallow (beef fat) vegetable oil all inside pizza bread from nearby Napoli Bakery.  The dogs are spicy and flecked with visible Chile flakes.  The onion and pepper are paper-thin.  And the fries, cooked in the fat that made McDonald’s fries so delicious before 1990, are perfectly crisp outside and creamy inside (Note: Upon the Newark Dog’s debut, the fries were cooked in beef fat but that was outlawed by New York City’s Trans Fat laws).  It’s an intimidating sandwich.  I spent a few minutes holding it and repositioning before abandoning any eating strategy and just diving in, onion, pepper and French fries falling like a fried food avalanche. The toasted pizza bread is appropriately hearty to support the weight of its filling whether dry or doused in one of St. Anselm’s three housemade sauces.  Sweet and spicy mustard was my favorite over thin ketchup and  a spicy, smokey ketchup-based BBQ sauce.  Eaten in neighboring sister bar Spuyten Duyvil’s outdoor backyard, this sandwich is a beer-drinking man’s best friend.  And as far as cementing my legacy as fried food scout, like David Wright or Derek Jeter, the Newark Double is the franchise player.

Ready for dessert? Read on for chocolate truffles…

“We’ve already killed you with the deep fryer, no need to do it with dessert,” said St. Anselm chef Al Bacchiochi as he offered me a plate of two chocolate truffles.  They’re made by Bacchiochi’s wife, a former pastry chef at the Austrian restaurant Wallse, and they’re excellent.  A thin dark chocolate shell provides a surprising yet welcome coating to the rich ganache filling subtly flavored with Grand Marnier liqueur.  The chocolate is Cacao Barry 64% extra-bitter Guayaquil, from Ecuador, and it provides an intense yet elegant end to a hearty meal.

St. Anselm 355 Metropolitan Ave at Havemeyer St, Brooklyn NY 11211 718-384-5054

Fresh Mozzarella Gets Better With Age

Age of the woman who makes it, that is. In this case, 91-year-old Georgi, who has been preparing handmade, melt-in-your-mouth fresh mozzarella that according to her “puts you in your own world.”  If you want to be transported, you better move fast.  By 3pm on weekend days, the 100 pieces of fresh mozzarella Georgi makes with the help of friendly sandwich-maker Dominic, are usually gone. We arrived at 4pm lucky enough to find one solitary hunk of delicately-smoked fresh mozzarella remaining.  It would prove to be well worth it’s $12 price tag.

The only caveat? They’re out of bread. Fortunately, Dominic pointed us to Napoli Bakery right across Metropolitan Avenue, where plenty of bread was to be found.

We went with tw0 standard Italian loaves ($2.75 each) with the intention of making three sandwiches. Would we have enough mozzarella to go around?

Dominic locked the softball sized hunk of tender cheese into the slicer and started on a prosciutto and salami hero for two of our friends who had to catch a train, hence the lack of photos.

Charlie, Andrea & I opted for two different sandwiches. The first one combined smoked mozzarella with a brightly-flavored sliced eggplant salad swimming in delicious extra virgin olive oil and chopped fresh basil. If you’re opposed to hearty, juicy and seedy slices of tender eggplant, this salad is not for you.

91-year-old Georgi sat calmly through the sandwich making, not rising from her chair by the window.  She seemed to ignore our questions, instead telling us how much she enjoys seeing young people enjoy her mozzarella.  It wasn’t until Charlie made three consecutive attempts at asking the same question that we realized she wasn’t ignoring us, she just couldn’t hear or see very well.  But the moment Dominic suggested homemade sausage with peppers and onions for our second sandwich, Georgi jumped all over him.  “You can’t put the smoked mozzarella with sausage and peppers!,” she shouted.  He rolled his eyes sarcastically, calmly disagreeing with her, and eventually produced a massive sandwich wrapped in wax paper.

The homemade sausage was disappointingly bland, dulled by the microwave it was reheated in.  The temperature did melt the cheese, however, which when combined with the juicy peppers and onions made for the tastiest bites of the sandwich; smokey, savory and sweet.  Dominic says the real draw Saturday is the homemade roast beef, but if there’s none left, NYC Food Guy says get the mozzarella and combine it with ingredients of your own.

As we started saying our goodbyes and thank yous, Georgi smiled nostalgically in our general direction, pleased more by the concept of us three youngsters than by us specifically.  “Go into the world and enjoy it,” she said loudly. “Before you know it, you’re 90!”

Tedone Latticini (No Sign) aka The Mozzarella Lady

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That’s a Cheesy Meat-a-ball!

Cosmo Kramer wasn’t far off in equating a screen door to a sense of neighborhood.  But Graham Avenue Meat & Deli (GAM&D) has a leg up on the butter-bathing buffoon;  their springy screen door offers a gateway to a super-cheesy meatball parmigana hero ($6).

Don’t get me wrong, I love cheese, but when it comes to grated Parmesan, a heavy hand isn’t always a good thing.  Small beef and parsley meatballs, so tender that they border on hearty meat sauce, pour from the sandwich leading strands of stringy mozzarella cheese as you pull its halves apart.  Streams of tomato sauce follow, but they overwhelm the flavor of the sandwich with their infusion of sharp, grated parmesan.  The soft & airy hero roll quickly gives way, proving that the sandwich would really benefit from a trip under the broiler to crisp it up; a microwave does not make a masterful meatball melt.

But you can’t judge a mountain by just one rock.  And GAM&D is prodigious when it comes to Italian food offerings.  Part butcher shop, part deli, part Italian market, they’ve got it all and “like a Chinese take out joint,” the owner says, “We’re always open.” Seven days a week from 8am to 7pm (4pm Sundays), a taste of Italian home cooking is readily available.

As advertised on the front window, they’ll make any kind of sandwich, hot or cold, from their vast library of cold cuts, Italian meats and chicken cutlets.

If you want to create a meal for dinner, you can start with homemade sausage or steak, perhaps lamb chops or maybe veal.

And if you want something lighter, lasagna is an option along with cheese which you can serve and slice with some sopressata.

Or if you’ve already got your meal and you’re just looking for some side dishes, there’s no shortage of choices.

Graham Avenue Meat & Deli

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Spicy & Mild Chorizo at Bedford Cheese Shop

Front of the room fare - Desserts, Scones & Muffins from Marlow & Sons

Bedford Cheese Shop aka the Hipster Stiff Arm

We came for sandwiches, we left with chorizo and a vendetta against laissez-faire hipsters.  There was one tray of pre-made sandwiches on the counter, bread on the back wall and a ton of meats and cheeses in the display cases.  A perfect recipe for sandwich creation, right? Wrong.  One employee of this bedroom-sized cheese and meat shop didn’t even take the time to unfold his arms from his hooded sweatshirt while telling us, “No, we don’t make sandwiches here.  That’s the only one we have.”  This was news to Andrea, my lovely tour guide for the day, because she has had sandwiches made for her at Bedford Cheese Shop.  We immediately realized we were victims of the hipster stiff arm.

Spicy (red string) & Mild (white string) Chorizo at Bedford Cheese Shop

My friend and all around good guy Charlie, was just as surprised by the confused and annoyed look he received from the counter-girl when he asked her to slice the spicy Spanish chorizo he purchased. God forbid we actually wanted to eat it right then and there.  The hipster stiff arm strikes again!

I will not be returning to Bedford Cheese Shop next time I’m in Williamsburg because I like patronizing stores that appreciate my business. Bedford Cheese Shop is too cool for school but unfortunately for them, NYC Food Guy says class is not in session.

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Marlow & Sons Is Not Worth The Trip for Lunch

I haven’t been to the heralded Marlow & Sons for dinner, but after trying several of their early afternoon offerings, I can confidently say it’s not worth trekking to this southwest Williamsburg spot for lunch.   If you happen to be nearby, and want to stop in, your best bet is pizza or something from the dessert counter, but pass on sitting down for brunch.  I can’t speak to the deliciousness of dinner at Marlow & Sons, but all of the press I’ve read has generally been positive.

Marlow & Sons Dining Room Interior

Nothing we ate was bad, but nothing really impressed.  Since it was a sandwich tour, we started with the Muffaletta ($11), flimsy focaccia stuffed with mortadella, sopressata, salami, coppa, provolone and an overpowering olive tapenade.  For $11 I would like to see this New Orleans classic stuffed with a little more meat and a little less olive tapenade, which really dominated every bite.

Marlow & Sons Muffaletta ($11) was overwhelmed by olive tapenade

Chorizo with potatoes and sunny side eggs ($12) was recommended by our waiter and while it was tasty, the tomato-based sauce didn’t allow the chorizo’s spice to shine.  The best bites of this dish are when you pile a little bit of everything on the buttered and toasted slices of bread.

Chorizo & Eggs ($12) lacked the spice I was hoping for

The pizza with sopressata ($4.25) was easily my favorite dish of the meal.  The flavor was definitely homemade, from the airy crust to the sweet sauce, but the slightly sharp sections of burnt cheese were the best part.

Pizza with Sopressata ($4.25) is best where the cheese is burnt

Marlow & Sons front room, which turns into a dining area in the evening, is populated by a few others pizzas, sold by the slice…

Marlow & Sons Front Room Fare - Pizza by the slice ($4.25 each)

…a nice selection of other sandwiches…

Front of the room fare - Sandwiches at Marlow & Sons

…desserts including attractive white cake, milk chocolate frosted cupcakes…

Front of the room fare - Milk Chocolate Frosted Cupcakes from Marlow & Sons

…other cupcakes, scones and muffins…

Front of the room fare - Cupcakes, Muffins & Scones at Marlow & Sons

and a chocolate chip cookie featuring discs of bittersweet chocolate ensconsed in a buttery, slightly salty dough.  It was a tasty cookie, but nothing to write home about.

Front of the room fare - Chocolate Chip Cookie from Marlow & Sons

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