Monday, March 06, 2006

All roads lead to Hummus

I try to do the whole organic-Italian-in-Brooklyn thing. Places with friendly names like Franny's or Frankie's, where you know more about the farms that produced your meal than you really need to, but where you allow the restaurant to charge an extra dollar for each item because, gosh darn it, that cow was happy before its milk was turned into cheese. Or worse. But regardless, sometimes I am not in Brooklyn, but rather in that lesser-known borough, the one with not so many culinary options. Meaning, of course, Manhattan. Katherine and I were trying to find a place in the East Village to get coffee around 10:30 on Saturday night, and were basically stumped. Getting progressively less picky as we walked, I had the brilliant idea that we could get Turkish coffee at the Hummus Place. I had vowed no more hummus, after making the unfortunate "pairing" choice of hummus and beer several weeks ago, but no Hummus doesn't have to mean no "Place." Or does it? For whatever reason, the coffee, which is usually quite good, was all grounds, even by Turkish coffee standards. Katherine was a bit more desperate for caffeine than I was, and asked if they had any "regular" coffee, which seemed to disappoint our waitress. Explaining that it wasn't the foreignness but rather the graininess (or, really, hummus-like quality) that was the problem didn't seem worth the bother. Irregular coffee it was.

2 comments:

Libby Pearson said...

The Hummus Place was THE reason that I almost moved to New York.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Sounds reasonable. But the place is sort of hit or miss, and if you're there on an off night, you will feel like you've been hit in the stomach by a brick made out of chickpeas.