At Aroma Espresso Bar and Simply Vietnamese

At Aroma Espresso Bar in Paramus, Shakshuka is described as a mild tomato, onion, and pepper sauce topped with 2 eggs sunny side up and parsley. The menu says it is served with tahini, but I didn't see or taste any.

By Victor E. Sasson
Editor

I had been looking forward to trying Shakshuka, a saucy egg dish from Israel that is one of the all-day breakfasts at Aroma Espresso Bar in Paramus.

But when I ordered it last Thursday, it came without the tahini sauce described on the menu -- the second straight glitch I've experienced with Aroma's food service.

The Aroma Espresso Bar at Westfield Garden State Plaza is the only New Jersey branch of an Israeli chain with other shops in Manhattan, Maryland and Florida.

The single employee I've seen in the Paramus kitchen doesn't seem up to the task of including everything described on the menu.

And the manager appears to spend a lot of his time walking around or sitting at empty tables, all the while chatting on a cellphone.

I recall ordering the Organic Quinoa Salad ($8.50), and wondering why it was so tasteless. 

I got the salad, but not the Lemon Olive Oil Dressing, which is supposed to be served on the side. 

Shakshuka is a great dish ($8.90), but why doesn't Aroma serve pita, the Hebrew word for Middle Eastern pocket bread?

A spoon is ideal for enjoying all that sauce. Still, I thought the dish could use hummus.

Corner tables at Aroma Espresso Bar.

When I got home and looked at my copy of the menu, I saw the dish is supposed to be served with tahini.

Shakshuka comes with bread and butter, but I didn't want them, and asked if I could get some veggies instead (they're listed on menu for 50 cents extra).

No substitutions are allowed, said the employee who took my order.

So, I paid $1.25 more for feta cheese, but it came in a small bowl, not sprinkled over the top of the warm eggs and sauce.

My wife enjoyed a Steak Sandwich with mayo, jalapenos, sauteed onion and red pepper, and Swiss cheese ($6.50 for half), and a 20-ounce Lemonade ($4).

"Chik chak" is an Israeli phrase meaning "pronto," "quickly" or "chop chop," but I've found the kitchen at Aroma Espresso Bar in Paramus doesn't know it.

After you place your order and pay at the register, be prepared to wait until your name is called for you to pick up your coffee or food at the counter.


Aroma Espresso Bar, 1 Garden State Plaza, Paramus; 1-201-556-1700.

Seniors get a cool reception at the AMC movie theaters in another part of the Paramus mall. Discounts on the $11.25 tickets are available only after 4 p.m. and all day Tuesdays.

Simply Vietnamese

We had no service or food problems on Saturday night at Simply Vietnamese in Tenafly, one of the half-dozen Asian restaurants we return to time and again.

I love Chinese, Thai, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese restaurants for their abundance of seafood and vegetables.

At Simply Vietnamese in Tenafly, a steaming bowl of Chef's Noodle Soup -- a combination of shrimp, pork, chicken, noodles and greens ($14).

On Saturday night a little after 6, Peter greeted us and told us to take any table. 

We sat in the quieter of the two dining rooms, the original one with the entrance.

Look for the word "Saigon" in red neon hanging in the window -- a vestige of the old Englewood restaurant.

Outdoor seating under umbrellas also was available. 

Peter said Chef-Owner K.T. Tran was in the kitchen, too busy to come out and say hello, so we sent her our regards.

An appetizer of Summer Rolls with Shrimp ($8.50). Translucent rice paper is stuffed with rice noodles, lettuce, cucumber and carrot, and served with a mildly spicy peanut sauce.

Grilled Pork Chops in a caramelized lemongrass sauce ($16.50).

Broiled Basa Fillet, a farmed catfish from Vietnam, is served on a bed of greens with either a sweet-spicy ginger-scallion sauce, above, or with curry coconut milk ($19.50). Brown rice is available for $2 more.

Free Shrimp Chips with a spicy dipping sauce.

Simply Vietnamese is a BYO.

Simply Vietnamese, 1 Highwood Ave., Tenafly; 201-568-7770. Open 7 days for lunch and dinner. BYO, free street parking.

Guacamole, falafel and vegetable souffle

Image via Wikipedia

We've tried two more of the prepared-food items I found at Costco as I widen our choice of non-meat dishes for the five or six meals we have at home every week


Last night, we started off with a 16-ounce container of  Wholly Guacamole, a brand made from Hass avocados and spices. I spooned the thick guacamole into a bowl and, to thin it, added two chopped, herbicide-free Campari tomatoes and fresh lemon juice. We made guacamole tacos with whole-grain tortillas, also from Costco. A terrific appetizer.


A few days ago, we also tried falafel balls from Meal Mart. They're vegan and kosher. You just heat up the falafel balls. They are tasty but dense. I served them with a chopped cucumber, tomato and onion salad dressed with extra-virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar and dried mint, along with warm Syrian pocket bread and a tahini sauce (falafel, sauce and salad are stuffed into the bread).

The fully cooked Classic Cooking-brand vegetable souffle looks like a winner. (I plan to serve it tonight with soy burgers or leftover pasta and  Mexican-flavored "sausage" made with wheat gluten and soy I bought at Whole Foods Market.) The ingredients include potato, eggs, carrot, zucchini, broccoli, red pepper and spinach.

Spicing up our breakfast

Image via Wikipedia

"That was a great breakfast," my 12-year-old son said as he got up from the table today after polishing off two pocket-bread halves stuffed with organic greens, hummus and fava beans. (Photo: Hummus at Maxim Restaurant in Haifa, Israel.)

My breakfast sandwiches also held greens and hummus, but I added a fat Moroccan sardine and a slice or two of plum tomato sprinkled with the thyme-based mixture called za'atar. We both ate some taboule salad, the last from the container I bought at Costco in Hackensack. Everything else but the greens came from Fattal's Bakery (and market) in Paterson.

This breakfast was fragrant with Middle eastern spices -- cumin, coarse Aleppo red pepper, allspice -- and lemon, garlic and extra-virgin olive oil in the hummus with tahini I made from a can (Lebano Verde brand).

As we ate, we discussed how my son's bean, bean and bread sandwich made such a great vegetarian meal and how I would be happy giving up meat as long as I could eat sardines and other seafood. After I finished, I put another half of Fattal's Syrian bread into the toaster to warm and assembled a hummus and fava bean sandwich. Absolutely wonderful.

Fattal's Bakery, 975 Main St.; (973) 742-7125;

Paterson; open seven days.

Fresh pita bread in Hackensack

When I run out of soft, chewy Syrian bread from Fattal's Bakery in Paterson, getting more involves a 16-mile, round-trip drive. The other day, I was running an errand in another part of Hackensack and found fresh bread at Sahara Stores on South Summit Avenue.

Image via Wikipedia

This is a small, Middle Eastern deli and grocery store, with prepared food and shelves of imported goods, and now, fresh pita bread delivered seven days a week, the friendly owner said. (Despite the name, it's only one store.)

I found Nouri's Syrian bread there and another brand I had not seen before, Kings Pita, a thinner Lebanese-style bread, both from Paterson and both $1.50 a package at Sahara. You get more with Nouri's -- 12 loaves weighing 22 ounces versus 6 larger loaves that weigh only 14 ounces. But what I like about Kings Pita is that after a minute or two out of the fridge, it is soft and chewy -- not card-boardy like some Lebanese bread -- perfect for scooping up hummus or wrapping around spicy lamb sausage.



Sahara Stores, 242 S. Summit Ave., Hackensack, 201-487-7222.

Delivering food the old-fashioned way

I shop for food in probably half a dozen stores, so you'd think I would be drawn to one of those supermarket delivery services. But some of the stores I patronize regularly (Costco, Trader Joe's, Fattal's Bakery) don't deliver and I haven't warmed up to the ones that do.

I do speak regularly to the home delivery staff at the ShopRite in Hackensack, because they know exactly where everything is and whether it's in stock, saving me valuable time.

Ah, if I had the delivery services that were available to my mother, Grace Sasson, in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in Brooklyn, life would be sweet. My mother self-published a cookbook of Sephardic Jewish recipes and made a lot of the food we ate -- including string cheese and baklava, which she learned from my father, the son of a pastry maker in Syria. We kept kosher and rarely ate out.

We had one refrigerator and two big freezers stuffed with food. One of her big time-savers was preparing a dish such as stuffed grape leaves or black-eyed peas with tender beef, placing them in a pot and putting the pot in the freezer. She only had to pull out a pot and place it directly on the stove or into the oven.

Just about everything she bought was delivered -- produce, fish, meat and Syrian bread from individual stores on nearby Kings Highway or Avenue U, and groceries from the C-Town supermarket near McDonald Avenue. She could call or stop by the store and leave her order. There was even a live-poultry market only a couple of blocks away.

One time, my father saw the fruit guy kiss my mother on the cheek, and went ballistic.

We spent the summers in Bradley Beach, on the Jersey shore, and my father would commute by train to his dry-goods store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. (As a kid, I'd place a coin on a track and retrieve it -- flattened -- after the steam locomotive had left. ) After we picked him up, we would drive across the tracks to the farmer's market and buy 50-pound bags of potatoes and other items.
 
Luckily, we didn't have to go without fresh Syrian bread. A man took the train down from the city most days and hawked the pocket bread from a baby carriage he pushed down the center of the street in the sleepy, sun-spalshed community.

Tasting and shopping notes

Image via Wikipedia

The block of smoked-mackerel sushi from Mitsuwa Marketplace in Edgewater didn't disappoint. (See previous post.)  In fact, my wife, who squirms at the the thought of eating raw fish, loved the slices she tried. I ate mine without wasabi or soy sauce and they nicely set up our dinner of frozen wild sockeye salmon in a light Asian sauce.

I placed the frozen salmon (from Costco) in a glass plate set atop my steamer (it didn't fit inside), in a shallow pool of olive and sesame oils, fish sauce and cheap sake. I sprinkled salt on the fillets, rubbed them with coarse red Aleppo pepper and steamed them about 20 minutes for medium, serving the fish with leftover rice and peas, salad and pita bread.

The latest batch of Aleppo pepper I purchased from Fattal's on Main Street in Paterson is noticeably darker than what I had and noticeably spicier, a good thing. I keep it in a plastic container in the freezer and sprinkle it over eggs, fish and chicken, but wonder if the intensity fades over time.

I forgot to mention I bought aged Manchego sheep-milk's cheese from Spain at Costco the other day. The price, $8.29 a pound, is 70 cents less than the sale price at Fairway Market in Paramus and several dollars less than the regular price. Storage tip: Trim off the inedible rind, slice the wedge into three pieces and wrap each in plastic wrap before placing them in a freezer bag in the fridge. This also works with a large wedge of Reggiano Parmigiano.

North Jersey markets are running some good sales, starting today.  

Fairway Market has three pounds of herbicide-free Campari tomatoes for $5, three heads of organic romaine for $2.99 and Columbia supremo coffee for $4.99 a pound. Stop & Shop is reprising its sale on drug-free Australian shoulder lamb chops, $3.69 a pound for three pounds or more. And two markets on Railway Avenue in Paterson, El Campesino and El Rancho, are selling limes or lemons at 10 for 99 cents, 20 pounds of Canilla rice for $3.99, three cups of La Yogurt (6 ounces) for 99 cents, Lactaid milk for $4.99 (96 ounces) and Hass avocados, 2 for 99 cents.

If you think Paterson is going too far for food, stop first at Aleppo Restaurant, at Main and Thomas streets, or Hummus Restaurant across the street for a nice lunch, pick up Syrian bread and spices at Fattal's down the strteet, then go food shopping. Hungry food shoppers spend more, research has shown.

We'll eat, talk and shop for food

Please join me for an exploration of some of North Jersey's great ethnic food enclaves.

Initially, I will be conducting walking tours of Middle Eastern and Korean restaurants and food shops that will begin with a great lunch. Later, I'll be adding a Latino food tour, starting with lunch at the best Cuban sandwich shop in Hudson County.

I will need a minimum of four people for each tour. Please contact me for details at vsasson@hotmail.com.