So my last food excursion was this past weekend to the Bronx. It was a quick visit to Arthur Avenue. If you're not familiar then let me explain. To sum it up, Arthur Ave in the Bronx is a solitary block, yes one long block of mostly italian restaurants and food stores like bakeries, bread stores, pasta, etc. It is surrounded by non-italians mostly puerto rican and a mix or other latin cultures. It's a great place for eats if you're visiting the Bronx Zoo or the Bronx Botanical Garden or coming from a Yankee game, as many of the patrons that day were.
We ate at Dominick's Restaurant. There are no menus. Instead, your waiter comes over to your table and recites a list of the day's meals, he gives you a few minutes to decide then returns without pen and paper to take your order. Pretty simple! The 4 of us ordered a bottle of Chianti, a tossed salad to share(not pictured). The salad was romaine, tomoatoes, olives, cucumbers tossed with oil and vinegar. Then we followed that by sharing 2 large stuffed artichokes (not pictured, sorry!) It was a good thing we didn't each get a stuffed artichoke because the thing was big and very filling. It's stuffed with breadcrumbs, grated cheese and seved in a broth.
Now for the main course....we looked around at the other tables and realized the portions were huge so we decided to share 3 courses so that we could get a taste of several different things instead of eating a giant portion of one thing. As pictured in the first photo above, we ordered chicken cacciatore, a braciole (that's the thing that looks like a giant meatball), and cavatelli with broccoli rappe in garlic sauce. The cacciatore was cooked in a tomato sauce with potatoes, mushrooms and onions; the braciole was served with a tomato sauce as well and is rolled with cheese, breadcrumbs and prociutto or ham inside (yums!); the cavatelli with rappe was garlicky just the way I like it. Cavatelli is a pasta that is made with cheese inside the dough, so it has a soft, sort of chewy consistency. Don't you just love my skilled culinary lingo?
Anyway the food was great, worth the trip uptown. We capped it off with a stroll along the rest of Arthur Avenue and a stop at one of the bakeries for some desserts- pignoli's (cookies made with almond paste) You'll either love it or hate it. Some people find it too sweet, but the ones from this particular bakery were really good!
Hope you get a chance to try Arthur Avenue!
