New in New York: Potatopia is a Paradise of Potato Possibilities

By Mitch Broder

If, like me, you can’t enjoy a potato without a choice of 10 aiolis, then you grasp the importance to total potato gratification of Potatopia.

Well, actually, that’s not like me. I really don’t want any aiolis. And if I did, I probably wouldn’t want them anywhere near my potato. I would want sour cream, or maybe cheese. But Potatopia has those, too, which means that it seeks to gratify everyone, which makes it truly a Potato Utopia.

Potatopia is a new idea that, in New York, you’d think is an old one: a restaurant that serves only meals featuring potatoes. It offers 10 different forms of potatoes, 16 different toppings, six different “proteins,” and 15 different sauces, including, indeed, 10 different aiolis.

I got 100 on my eighth-grade math midterm, but I still can’t begin to calculate how many different potato-meal options those choices can yield. But I’m pretty sure that you could get a different one every day for the rest of your life and die in old age regretting all the potato combinations you missed.

Your potato choices include Baked Potato, Baked Sweet Potato, Smashed Potato, Mashed Pie, Skin Chip, Shoestring, and Curly. Your topping choices include Broccoli, Sweet Pepper, Cilantro, Red Onion, Cheddar Cheese, Asiago Cheese, Pepperjack Cheese, and Specialty Cheese.

The proteins are Chicken, Sausage, Bacon, Shrimp, Steak, and Egg. And the sauces — besides Sour Cream, Melted Cheddar, Ketchup, and BBQ — include Mustard Aioli, Ranch Aioli, Curry Aioli, Chipotle Aioli, Truffle Aioli, Savory Bacon Aioli, and Roasted Pepper Aioli.

All these choices are on the menu under “Build Your Own/Follow Steps 1 - 4.” As I have previously expressed here, I tend to get ruffled by Steps. But for the Step-averse, there is “Signature Meals/Leave It To The Potato Experts.” The Potato Experts offer seven Step-free selections.

These include Frequent Friers, comprising “Shoestring, House Salt & Pepper, Parmesan Cheese, Parsley, Garlic with Parmo Aioli,” and Smashed Hit — pictured here — combining “Smashed Potato, House Salt & Pepper, Cheddar Cheese, Asiago Cheese, Scallion, Red Onion, Garlic, Cilantro with Roasted Pepper Aioli.”

There have long been guys in the city with potato carts. But to make all the stuff in Potatopia, a guy’d need a potato Winnebago. That’s the point of Potatopia: It’s not a baked-potato joint. It’s closer to an unprecedented spudian smorgasbord.

Not unprecedented, though. Potatopia had an out-of-town tryout. Its first store opened two years ago in, inventively, Edison, New Jersey. But its founder, Allen Dikker, acknowledges that he opened it with the goal of opening his second store in New York.

He anointed potatoes, he says, because “everything else is out there.” In a city with restaurants like OatMeals, that’s more or less true. He conducted aioli experiments at home to assemble his roster of sauces. Not surprisingly, he’s now at work on an all-potato cookbook.

Before the grand opening.

Potatopia’s top potato is the Smashed Hit, though there is interest in the most complex choice, which has 16 ingredients, four of which are cheeses. It’s called the Comatoser. The store has been open for just a few weeks, but Allen says that more are already on the way. He’s understandably feeling his oats.

Still, he also acknowledges that I’m far from the only person who is perturbed by the profusion of potato possibilities. As the store manager, Albert Sierra, told me: “In the beginning, people find it a little intimidating. But by the second or third time, they get used to it.”

Weigh your options at Potatopia, 378 Sixth Avenue, between Waverly Place and West Eighth Street, New York City.

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New in New York: Another French Roll Rocks at Baguette Bar

By Mitch Broder

I can’t promise you a Houska House or a Pumpernickel Pub, but I can follow my report on Croissanteria with one on Baguette Bar.

And considering that the city is full of places like Popover Café, it could soon very well have a restaurant named for every bread and roll.

For now, Baguette Bar is the apparently the newest, undoubtedly the tiniest, and surely the most focused. It serves meat-and-vegetable sandwiches on toasted baguettes. If you don’t want your meat and vegetables on a toasted baguette, you’ll most likely have to take them in a pile.

The meats are pretty much limited to corned beef, pastrami, salami, and turkey. The vegetables include corn (the cereal) and avocado (the fruit). On a standard sandwich you get one meat, two vegetables, and one sauce. Ketchup Mayo is a sauce. Ketchup is still a sauce.

The bar is about to roll out its Signature Sandwiches, which are based on five of its most successful combinations.

The New Yorker is pastrami, lettuce, red onions, pickles, and honey mustard. The Pirojok is corned beef, roasted red peppers, jalapenos, and spicy honey mustard. Lettuce does not count as a vegetable. Pickles and onions do. Pirojok means pie, even though it’s a sandwich.

The categorization may be challenging, but the concept is simple. The appeal of the simplicity is nicely explained by a comment on Yelp: “Cool New place downtown and its open super late! Perfect for when you’re really drunk and need something to eat…”

Just weeks ago the Baguette Bar space was a storeroom for Pink Elephant, the glittery new club whose entrance is around the corner on West Eighth Street. The club’s owner set up his brother, Ben Nahmani, and Ben’s friend Zachi Ozery as baguette baristas.

The idea came from places that sell comparable food in Israel. The furnishings came from a nearby defunct delicatessen. The location is the MacDougal Street corner of the regenerating West Eighth Street, just across from the appealingly simple Sticky’s Finger Joint.

The sandwiches, besides being panini-style, are also kosher-style, which means that the corned beef and pastrami are better than what you get at the diner. And they’re toasted not once but twice, the second time with an olive-oil glaze that Zachi says makes for “a much more nice taste.”

“Now,” he says, “I want people to recognize this product, and we’ll be able to open more.”

I’ll let you know when they do.

I’ll also let you know about the Brioche Boîte and the Sourdough Saloon.

Belly up to Baguette Bar, 179 MacDougal Street, near West Eighth Street, in New York City.

New in New York: Warm Up to the Cup at Meatball Obsession

By Mitch Broder

When it’s hot, you want a cup of ice cream. When it’s cold, you want a cup of meatball.

When you look at it that way, you may begin to grasp the logic behind the Home of the Original Meatball in a Cup.

The Home is Meatball Obsession, which looks like an ice-cream stand except that instead of ice cream containers it has meatball pots. It serves you a cup with a giant meatball in the flavor of your choice, with the toppings of your choice and Parmesan bread instead of a wafer.

It opened in time for summer, since it is clearly up for a challenge, but it is now embarking upon its maiden meatball season. It has unveiled new items, new toppings, and a new meatball, and it is waiting to see you having yourself a little Italian meal walking.

In keeping with popular practice, it provides you with three steps toward acquiring your optimal movable feast. Step 1 is “Indulge Your Obsession,” which means “Choose Your Meatball,” which means you can have Beef, Turkey, Pork Sausage, or the new Chicken, in Sunday Sauce.

Step 2 is “Choose Your Style,” which means that if you don’t like cups you can have your meatball stuffed in the Original Pocket Sandwich. Step 3 is “The Toppings,” which means that you can complicate your meatball with flavorings from Locatelli Pecorino Romano to the new Sautéed Peas and Onions.

You get a single meatball — in either format — for $4; you get one topping free and others for 50 cents or $1 apiece. To expand your options, there are now ravioli, and to complete your meal there are now cannoli, which come from Arthur Avenue but get assembled in the store.

It may all sound a little detached, but be assured that, in fact, it all came straight from Grandma’s kitchen. The Grandma was Anna Mancini, and her grandson is Daniel Mancini, who has spent his life obsessesed with her meatballs, which is why he brought them back.

“One of my favorite memories was waking up every Sunday morning to the wonderful smell of her meatballs and Sunday Sauce cooking on the stove,” Daniel says in his meatball credo. “Sunday afternoon our home was full of family and friends enjoying the feast my grandmother prepared.”

He had a career running clothing companies but ditched it to make meatballs, which he has since sold in stores under the name of MamaMancini’s. But he also wanted to sell them hot, so this year he opened his meatball stand. He didn’t come up with the cup. Grandma did that, too.

The city, of course, has been in a meatball phase for a while. The phase has given us, among other things, The Meatball Shop and The Meatball Factory. No meatball source, however, has been quite as accessible as Meatball Obsession’s color-coded pots and open window.

I had meatballs. I had Beef and Turkey. (I had them before there was Chicken.) Both of them were excellent, and the sauce was delicious. Two or three make a good meal. You get two for $7.50 and three for $10. You get a 10 percent discount on 50, but my limit is 45.

“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little nervous before we opened Meatball Obsession,” Daniel says in the credo. “Would people not want a meatball in a cup?”

So far people have wanted it. And more are bound to want it, because meatballs always look better in December than in July.

Roll with it at Meatball Obsession, 510 Sixth Avenue, between 13^th and 14^th streets, in New York City.

New in New York: Populence and Pop Karma Make a Crop Pop

By Mitch Broder

For Porcini Cheddar popcorn, you want the East Side. For Three Cheese popcorn, you want the West Side. Then again, for Pumpkin Spice popcorn, you want the West Side, whereas for Bacon Apple Bourbon Caramel popcorn, you want the East Side.

It could have been simple. But nothing ever is. So the popcorn department of your life just got complicated. Through what you’d have to call karmic opulence, New York has just furnished you with two new popcorn shops — Pop Karma and Populence.

Each is a little place run by a woman inspired by corn. Both popped up at practically the same time, though apparently by coincidence. Each offers popcorn in flavors that you don’t get in cellophane bags. Both sell popcorn with a conviction that it will make you happy and healthy.

So take your pick. Or don’t, for if you love popcorn, you’ll want to try both. They’ve made themselves just different enough so that you have no choice.

Populence, in the West Village, is run by Maggie Paulus, whose very life was essentially launched by popcorn. “My dad proposed to my mom with a ring in a Cracker Jack box,” she told me. “So growing up, popcorn was always associated with something fun.”

Pop Karma, on the Lower East Side, is run by Jean Tsai, who wants to inspire you in much the same way that popcorn inspired her. On the chalkboard outside her store, she puts inspiring quotes like Herbert Spencer’s “The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.”

Populence carries six flavors at a time — usually three sweet and three savory. The top sellers have been Salted Caramel, Sun-dried Tomato, and Jalapeño Cheddar. There’s also Kettle Corn, Ginger Caramel, Garlic Rosemary, Real Raspberry, and Sweet Cinnamon. Salted Caramel could count as sweet and savory.

Pop Karma carries six flavors at a time — usually three “classic” and three seasonal. The classic are Caramel, Mediterranean, and Zen Cheddar. The seasonal have included Barbecue, Margarita, and White Truffle Cheddar, and now include Za’atar, which is described as “a visit to a Middle Eastern souk.”

The Populence Web site says: “Our artisanal method of creating cornfections involves small batches of heirloom popcorn combined with the finest whole ingredients.”

The Pop Karma Web site says: “Our ingredients lists are minimal since we source the best food possible from responsible, sustainable producers.”

It’s close, but I have to give that round to Populence, because of “cornfections,” and in spite of “heirloom.”

Maggie and Jean, of course, are not the first to have popcorn stores in New York, regardless of which one of them thought of having one first. Awhile ago, Times Square had a store called Popcorn, Indiana. In the eighties, the Upper East Side had Jack’s Corn Crib. The Jack was Jack Klugman.

Those are gone, of course. But they were chains. Pop Karma and Populence aren’t. Yet. And their owners both seem devoted to their products and their neighborhoods.

As the Pop Karma Web site puts it: “Kind words and kind actions inspire a beautiful day. A lifetime of beautiful days is a work of art. Live it.”

Pop into Populence, at 1West Eighth Street, and Pop Karma, at 95 Orchard Street, in New York City.

New in New York: Allow Yourself a Taste of Forbidden Fruit

By Mitch Broder

Forbidden Fruit was founded on two sound principles: Fruit belongs in chocolate, and chocolate belongs on fruit.

Except maybe in the cases of melons and grapes. But every principle gets resistance.

Forbidden Fruit is an all-chocolate-covered-fruit place, which makes it a good fit for the all-peculiar-place food court that is MacDougal Street. It’s a simple store with a simple selection that harbors the simple hope of conquering all the other food courts of the world, peculiar or not.

When you’re ready to help it succeed, prepare to “dip it!!!” or “drip it!!!” (With either choice, you get three exclamation points.) The dip-its are the individual fruits, which are coated with chocolate. The drip-its are the medleys of fruits, which are drizzled with chocolate.

The dip-its include strawberries, pineapples, bananas, and apples (in wedges). The drip-its include fruit sticks, fruit cups, berry boats, and clementines (in wedges). The chocolate comes in the customary white, milk, and dark. You can add coconut or walnuts. Or sprinkles, but just on bananas.

A manager gave me chocolate fruit. This was especially generous, since a clerk had already given me chocolate fruit. The manager gave me all dark chocolate, which is the correct kind. Everything was delicious. The bananas tasted like chocolate-covered banana ice cream.

So Forbidden Fruit has the product. Then again, so does Edible Arrangements. But Forbidden Fruit is different from that global fruit-bouquet chain. It has no Grand Confetti Fruit Cupcake or SpongeBob Bikini Bottom Bouquet. It has no fruit growing out of footballs. It’s not about arrangements. It’s about a snack.

The idea for the snack reportedly came from a fountain — specifically, the chocolate fountain at Dylan’s Candy Bar. Abbas Devji saw lots of people there waiting in line to dip things. He was uneasy with the public dipping. He envisioned fruit predipped.

He enlisted a creative director, Matthew Higginson, to create a store. Matthew led a six-month quest to develop the look and the menu. He dipped many fruits. He found that some of them didn’t agree with chocolate. Those included watermelon, cantaloupe, and grapes. They are the forbidden fruit.

Matthew wants to see Forbidden Fruits from Boston to L.A. Meanwhile, he’s planning  a Chocolate of the Month for New York City. And he’s just added a Fruit of the Season. The first one is the cherry, which, of course, has had a long and successful relationship with chocolate.

For now, though, the star fruit is the banana, which is convenient, since the banana is the symbol of Forbidden Fruit. You might not think it would work with a chocolate peel, but it does. As Matthew puts it: “You could cover a rock with chocolate and it would taste good.”

Take a dip at Forbidden Fruit, 106 MacDougal Street, between Third and Bleecker streets, in New York City.

New in New York: Catch Those Imperial Woodpecker Sno-Balls

By Mitch Broder

The groundhog’s at his Hamptons timeshare, but he has dispatched the Imperial Woodpecker to report the good news that there will be six more weeks of winter this summer.

This is startling, since the Imperial Woodpecker is supposed to be extinct. Then again, the groundhog is supposed to be 126.

Still, the woodpecker saw its bill, or whatever it is that it does, and predicted abundant snow in New York City through September 24^th. The snow will be saturated with flavored syrups, served in paper containers, and sold at the coincidentally named Imperial Woodpecker Sno-Balls.

Make no mistake: This is snow, not ice. A snow cone is ice; a sno-ball is snow. It comes from a sno-ball machine, in this case the SnoWizard sno-ball machine, which is made in New Orleans, which is the home of sno-balls. Ask the Bronx Zoo who predicts ice.

The machine is owned by Neesa Peterson, who is as warm as snow is cold, and whose store, correspondingly, feels like a little party. She makes sno-balls in forty-six flavors, and she will make them through the end of summer, which, she recognizes, does not fall on Labor Day weekend.

She makes a sno-ball by switching on the sno-ball machine, which shoots snow into the container that, with luck, she is holding at its spout. She adds flavor from one of the bottles of gaily colored syrup, along with a spoon and a straw, since you start with the spoon and finish with the straw.

Her flavors ($4 to $8) include Granny Smith Apple, Pink Bubblegum, Red Velvet Cake, and her favorite, Tiger Blood, which fortunately is strawberry-coconut. Her cream flavors (“Add $1”) include Almond Cream, Chocolate Cream, and her favorite, Sweet Lou’s Nectar Cream. Her grandfather was Sweet Lou.

There are also three toppings (“Add $1”): condensed milk, vanilla ice cream, and marshmallow cream. In the end, though, the flavors and toppings matter less than the sno. Whatever it happens to taste like, it’s fluffy and refreshing, which is why it’s been around for over seventy years.

The first sno-ball machine was reputedly made by Ernest Hansen in 1939 (though the SnoWizard company claims their guy made one in 1936). Before that, guys sold sno-balls from carts with snow they shaved by hand from ice blocks. Ernest found this unsanitary. Luckily, he was a machinist.

Also luckily, his wife, Mary, was a pretty good cook. So Ernest made his Sno-Bliz machine, and Mary made sno-ball syrups. They sold sno-balls under a tree, then moved into a store. The store, Hansen’s Sno-Bliz, still exists, along with a flurry of other New Orleans sno-ball stores.

Neesa is not the first to bring the sno-ball to New York City. In 1996, Mary Frey opened Guru Sno-Balls in the East Village. It was in an abandoned gas-station office on Lafayette Street. Guru was her Rottweiler. It’s not clear what he could predict.

Mary had roughly the same flavors — plus, in deference to Guru, Doggie Balls, which came in Chicken or Beefy. She moved on in a couple of years, but she left people wanting more. That’s good news for Neesa, who is also a  hit and who doesn’t seem likely to drift from her snow.

She came to New York a few years ago and worked at modeling agencies but discovered that her heart was in her New Orleans roots. She opened Imperial Woodpecker last year on Seventh Avenue South, but it was open just through August. This year she plays the full season.

In fact, she wants to open a year-round store, with warm stuff in winter. And she’s already marketing sno-ball stands for weddings and bar-mitzvahs.

She’ll be happy to tell you anything you want to know about sno-balls. But if you want to know why hers are Imperial Woodpecker, you’ll have to ask the bird.

Summer at Imperial Woodpecker Sno-Balls, 124 MacDougal Street, between West Third and Bleecker streets, in New York City.

New in New York: Breakfast is Lunch and Dinner at OatMeals

By Mitch Broder

I politely declined a bowl of oatmeal with bacon, cheese, and apples.

I write now in the hope of sparing others my lingering regret.

The bowl was proferred by Samantha Stephens, who knows she has a pop-culture name, not long after we agreed that she has a more significant challenge. That challenge is me, or at least people like me, who need a bit of bewitching to embrace the pleasures of New York’s first all-oatmeal restaurant.

Samantha has just opened that restaurant, the culmination of a decade’s worth of dreaming, studying, imagining, and planning, not to mention spending. She calls it OatMeals. It’s a rustic shop that puts things into oatmeal that, to be fair, would probably get the Quaker Oats Man to quake.

It puts in dried figs, crumbled gorgonzola, and balsamic vinegar glaze. Or sundried tomato, parmesan, cracked black pepper, sea salt flakes, and glaze. Or raisins, sliced almonds, coconut milk, crystallized ginger, cardamom, vanilla, and brown sugar. Or chocolate, marshmallows, and graham crackers. That would be the oatmeal S’mores.

It also lets you put your own things in, starting with a base of hot oatmeal. You get to put your first two things in free. The toppings, besides those above, include dried pomegranate, pineapple, butterscotch chips, pesto, almond milk, and nutmeg. Don’t order these together.

“The cool thing about New York,” Samantha said, “is that it’s always about something new. We want to try new things. We go out of our way to try new things.” She invoked Rice to Riches, the ten-year-old all-rice-pudding restaurant in Nolita. If rice pudding could make it, Samantha reasons, oatmeal can.

She asked me what I like oatmeal with. I said one cup of sugar. Still, she suggested The Canadian, even though it’s listed as Savory. It has bacon, sharp cheddar cheese, roasted apples, maple syrup, and sea salt. I didn’t think I’d like that. She sagely brought me a small sample anyway.

It was stunning. It was a veritable party of flavors. The ingredients blended seamlessly to make cereal I’d never dreamed of. I already knew that Samantha had graduated from the French Culinary Institute, and yet I had doubted her. Now I am all alone with my Cheerios.

After the Canadian sample, Samantha brought me a bowl of what I’d selected, which is called, not surprisingly, the Pumpkin Pie. It has pumpkin purée, pecans, brown sugar, pumpkin spice, and whole milk. It was sweet and delicious. But more pleasant than stunning. Samantha had wanted me stunned.

It’s understandable. She took the scenic route to restaurant ownership, starting twelve years ago, when she came to New York from Fairfax, Virginia. She went to Baruch College, where she studied psychology and gained weight. She turned to oats to help with the weight. She didn’t say if she used the psychology.

Though the oat seed was planted, she took a detour into investment banking. But she also took classes in business management at NYU. Finally, she attended the Institute, from which she emerged a pastry chef. She had taken night classes. She was serious about her oatmeal.

She chose a store near NYU, so other students could turn to oats. She decorated it with her collection of vintage rolled-oats boxes. She created a menu of two dozen oatmeal bowls, a dozen kinds of oatmeal pastry, and sandwiches made, naturally, with oatmeal bread.

She knows she has to get people to think of oatmeal as a meal. She knows she has to get people to expand their concept of oatmeal ingredients. She knows she has to get people to stop resisting The Canadian. Maybe she should start them on oatmeal S’mores and work them up from there.

Get bowled over at OatMeals, at 120 West Third Street, between MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue, in New York City.

Old New York: Anyone Who Would Share This Garden is a Saint

By Mitch Broder

A private garden in New York City would cost a lot if it weren't free. Happily, it is free. And you don't have to spray for beetles. You might have to let in some company, but your garden will inspire you to share. Saint Luke was a physician, and The Gardens at Saint Luke in the Fields are just what the doctor would have ordered.

They're at the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields, which is bordered by Hudson, Barrow, Greenwich, and Christopher streets in the middle of the West Village. There are six gardens, but the one for which you'll be happiest not to pay is the one called the Barrow Street Garden, even though you enter it on Hudson.

Appropriately, it's paradise, a sanctuary full of flowers and birds and butterflies, and benches for every occasion. It's tucked behind brick walls, which separate your street life from your garden life. And company tends to be well-behaved. People come here to be quiet. They can go just about everywhere else to not.

The garden is in quadrants, but you can easily ignore that and just wander the paths looking for the latest blooms. Then you can sit on a bench that's alone or on a bench that's with other benches, depending on whether you want to escape other people or want to watch other people escape you.

The church was built in 1821, and a garden was started in 1842, but the Barrow Street Garden wasn't started until 1956. Its creator was Barbara Ellen Leighton, who worked for the Port Authority and thus must have needed a sanctuary as much as anyone.

Barbara first dug into Saint Luke's in 1954, when she revived the Rectory Garden, which was the original. Her new garden was called the Corner Garden. It's not clear why its name was changed. The Rectory Garden is now known for its roses, but its name was not changed to the Rose Garden.

The North Garden has silver maples; the South Lawn has grass; the Allée has a cherry grove; the Contemplation Corner has thoughts. But of all of them, the Barrow Street Garden is the priceless getaway, especially when you don't have the price of a getaway.

There are just a few rules of garden conduct. Luke would have wanted it that way.

And there's a memorial bench that says "Exit Laughing." You may be exiting that way.

Disappear at The Gardens at Saint Luke in the Fields, 487 Hudson Street, in New York City.