An ethnic-food run for Mexican, Peruvian and Syrian specialties

An order of Fish Tacos at Taqueria Los Gueros on Main Avenue in the city of Passaic, above. Below, store-made Spinach & Cheese Pies, Mini Vegetable Pies, Fig & Walnut Roll and more at Fattal's in Paterson.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

This past Saturday, we went on an ethnic-food run to the cities of Passaic and Paterson for Mexican, Peruvian and Syrian specialties.

See The Sasson Report for all the details.

Enjoy.

In Englewood, Emma waiter has a bad day and Starbucks is a mess

Emma Restaurant in Englewood has a comfortable waiting area, but I found only a couple of other tables occupied when I had lunch there with a friend on Tuesday.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

I had a wonderful dinner of beautifully composed pan-Latino dishes at Emma Restaurant in Englewood in May 2015, but didn't return until I met a friend there for lunch on Tuesday.

The restaurant was nearly empty.

Still, the waiter was having a bad day after serving a half-dozen spoiled teenagers who left behind a mess on their tables and on the dining room floor. 

Yes, he said, sit anywhere you like.

When I saw a seafood salad listed on the lunch menu for $18, I asked whether the dish was a ceviche -- raw seafood cooked in lime juice.

No, he said emphatically, he knew ceviche well, even caught fish and made the dish in his native Ecuador.

No. Certainly not ceviche, but good.

I ordered the Baby Kale Salad with brioche croutons and shaved Parmigiano in a Caesar dressing, and my friend chose Choripan, chorizo or pork sausage sandwiches in a chimichurri emulsion with french fries ($10 each).

When I asked for the check, our server showed us an image on his phone, said the total was $21.50 and asked how much of a tip we wanted to leave.

I said $4, and he said he could email me the receipt. Then, he disappeared.

I wrote down my email address on a pad at the front desk and waited almost 10 minutes for him to come out of the kitchen so I could give it to him.

More than a day later, I haven't received an email receipt.

Coffee at Starbucks

Across the street at Starbucks, the front counter where we placed our order for medium-roast black coffee was covered in crumbs, and the only empty table we found also was a mess.

The baristas were so busy handling the crush of customers they ignored basic housekeeping.

My consolation prize was a Cheese & Fruit Bistro Box ($4.95) I took home free, using rewards on my Starbucks card.

I've eaten a lot of kale, but never tasted anything as tender or as delicious as the baby kale in Emma's salad.

My friend filled up on the tasty Choripan, but couldn't finish the fries.

Details

Emma Restaurant, 34 E. Palisade Ave., Englewood; 201-227-6103. BYO, metered parking on street or in a municipal garage about a block and a half away.

See post on our May 2015 dinner: Art on the plate

Eating ceviche to the sounds of doo-wop

A martini glass of seafood ceviche, above, and a salad with diced fruit, below, were two of the items available on Sunday during a fund-raiser at The Shops at Riverside -- "The Taste in Hackensack" -- for the Hackensack Blue & Gold Scholarship Fund.

Smaller servings of the ceviche and salad, from Dos Cubanos Restaurant in Paramus, were enjoyed by donors who paid $75 each to support a scholarship fund at Hackensack High School.

Most of the samples available contained meat, such as this pork loin with mashed sweet potatoes. One restaurant served a sinful mac and cheese with lobster.

A delicious corn soup was offered by Biddy O'Malley's, an Irish pub in Northvale.

Hackensack's Chit Chat Diner served guacamole with crab meat on an edible spoon.

Dane Marble's Wide Variety, a doo-wop group.

A filling meal of Peruvian specialties

Image by Another Pint Please... via Flickr

 
What I love about Pollos El Chevere, a clean, well-run Peruvian restaurant in Passaic, is that even if you ignore its signature rotisserie chicken, there are so many other great dishes to indulge in -- some of them showing Japanese and Chinese influences.


My wife and I haven't eaten meat since the end of February, so on Friday evening, she ordered a tasty fish soup with a green broth (parsely?) and I started with ceviche, the Peruvian twist on sushi, this one with pollock marinated in lime juice and onions, and served with crunchy corn kernels and a small sweet potato. My son had a Chinese-Peruvian chicken soup with noodles.


We shared another appetizer -- papas la huancaina -- boiled potatoes in a light, mildly spicy cheese sauce, and tostones -- green plantains that are smashed twice and fried beautifully, perfect for dipping in the restaurant's milky hot sauce. We also shared an entree -- tallerin verde, a pesto-like spaghetti. I asked the waiter to substitute fish for steak, and he brought us a big, fried fillet of pollock.


We all drank chicha morada, a preservative-free soft drink made from purple corn extract, sugar cane, cinnamon, cloves, lemon and other natural flavors. The bill for three was $53 before the tip, and we took home leftovers.


We didn't miss the rotisserie chicken. One of the Japanese-Peruvian owners once confided the chickens he buys are nothing special before he marinates them in wine, garlic and other ingredients he wouldn't disclose, and roasts them in the special rotisserie cases that fill the front window. When we ordered chicken regularly, we stuck to moist dark meat over dry white meat.


After our meal, we drove a block or so to Compare Foods, a supermarket, and bought two, 64-ounce bottles of chicha morada for $2.28 each, normally $3.19.


Pollos El Chevere, 228 Washington Place, Passaic; 
973-249-6330. Open seven days, 
parking in municipal lot on same block.

Oh! Calamares Peruvian Restaurant

My wife and son weren't interested in the black mint sauce, ceviche, squid or rabbit. Before I could order the braised tripe, she asked for a small sample. We were looking over the adventurous menu at Oh! Calamares, a Peruvian restaurant in Kearny, and trying to put together a meal on Saturday night, our one dinner out last week.

The menu listed dishes I had never seen at our favorite Peruvian restaurants, including Pollos El Chevere in the city of Passaic and Jaimito's in Clifton. The former is owned by Japanese-Peruvians, the latter by Chinese-Peruvians. Italians also influenced the cooking of Peru.

My wife and son insisted on ordering chicken soup ($8.50), and the bowl was so big, they not only couldn't finish it, but they had room for little else. Each bowl contained a quarter of a big, boiled chicken in one piece and fat, Chinese-style noodles that were falling apart.

I ordered chicharron de pescado ($10.50) as an appetizer -- fried chunks of breaded grouper fillet, fried yuca and tartar sauce. We ignored the tartar sauce and doused the fish and yuca with the pale-green hot sauce we got when we sat down with a separate dish of addictive, popped and salted corn kernels. The fish-yuca appetizer was great.

Our entrees were cau-cau ($9) -- braised tripe and potatoes with peas, served with white rice -- and tallarin saltado ($15) -- thick, Chinese-style spaghetti with shrimp. I did my best, but we took about half of each home. We drizzled hot sauce on the mild, toothsome tripe and potatoes. The shrimp snapped.

So there are lots of dishes left to try, probably when I go alone for lunch: grilled, marinated veal-heart kebabs; sliced, boiled potatoes in a black mint sauce; oven-roasted rabbit; spicy, braised duck, black-conch ceviche, and more.

The articulate, young man who showed us to our table said the restaurant, once located in North Bergen, was named after his father's onetime favorite place in Peru. He is a second-generation restaurateur. The building looks modern outside and traditional on the three levels inside. Tables are bare. The atmosphere was marred by a poor quality DVD of a concert that was playing at high volume on flat-screen TVs in the two-level dining room.

Kearny Avenue, once solely a destination for Scottish fish and chips, now is home to several ethnic restaurants besides Oh! Calamares (that's "Oh! Squid" in English).


Oh! Calamares Restaurant, 102 Kearny Ave., Kearny;
201-998-4111. Peruvian beer and wine available.
Municipal parking lot across the street.