Posts Tagged ‘Spaghetti and Meatballs’
Portland, OR – New York New York Italian Restaurant
Mrs BDB was hitting the road witht he gal pals tonight, which, as you know, means BurgerDogBoy gets a food self-indulgence night. Ok, yeah, you’re right, all my nights are pretty much self-indulgent nights. Even tho I had a pot of left over home made bolognese in my icebox, I had a hankering for Italian that someone else made, because I was exhausted from fooling with a Wii remote for half the afternoon, trying to coax it in to service, so Mrs. BDB and I might sword fight later in the evening.
I fired up Delivered Dish, Portland’s version of the multi-restaurant delivery service, and perused the Italian choices for my zip code. Just down the street from me is a place called “New York, New York”, which I have driven by a thousand times and never been in. My reasons for not trying it in the past are sort of inane, the building’s outward appearance is kind of ramshackle, and the windows, for some reason, give the appearance to the outside world of being absolutely filthy. They had a second location in Tigard, which is now closed, I believe.
I’ve had a number of great meals in my life in places that most people would call pretty disgusting (as I did too), so I shouldn’t have been predisposed not to eat here, I just was.
But I decided to try them out anyway, and went with my usual 3 meat pasta, spaghetti bolognese, with a side of sausage, and a side meatball. It came with a small loaf of warm bread, I ordered cheese bread with black olives, and I also ordered a gnocchi soup that I put in the cooler for Mrs. BDB later. She is a soup hound!
I plated. The pasta was done right, my personal preference would have been for far more meat sauce. It was cooked down from real tomatoes, which were still present, and had that residual watery debris in the pan that comes from cooking tomatoes. The sauce was mild but flavorful.
The meatball ($2.50 each) was the size of a baseball, and surely included the usual meatball 
fillers of egg and breadcrumbs, some dice onion, not sure what the combination of meat was, onion was the dominant flavor. The meatball was firm to the touch prior to launching into it, but crumbled easily, not a complete crumble, but certainly the sign that the meat was lean. The crumbliest meatball I have ever seen, and I can’t imagine how they are prepared, is at Venezia, an old timey place in New Orleans. Their larger than baseball-sized meatballs come intact when served, but once your fork touches them, they crumble into minced pieces on the plate. They are wonderful.
New York New York’s sausage was the ‘sweet’ Italian kind, again, very mild. The cheese bread was soft and chewy, with gooey real cheese, and canned black olives.
I like the spaghetti enough that I would get it again, but I would ask (and even pay for) more bolognese. I don’t think I’d get the meatballs again, but the sausage was good enough.
Delivered Dish tacks on a mild delivery charge, and I believe the restaurants jack the prices a little from their regular menus. Soup, bread, pasta with meat-sauce, side of sausage, side of meatball, $30.50 delivered. Spendy? Depends on your priorities. Tonight, for me, it was exactly the right price.
