Monday, October 30, 2017

You Can’t Go Home Again

A week ago Sunday, I stopped at a street food cart in Battery Park City. It is one that I had passed by multiple times and often contemplated patronizing. In the end, though, I always concluded that I didn’t particularly like what was on the menu. Still, there was this curious and powerful pull at work—a byproduct of my boyhood, I think, when those hot dogs and crinkle-cut French fries had unmistakable allure. 

The cart in question serves up Nathan’s famous frankfurters, since 1916, and their very deep fried potatoes. When I was a youth, there was a big Nathan’s restaurant on Central Park Avenue in Yonkers. It was about a fifteen-minute drive from my front door in the Bronx. I fondly remember consuming their dogs and fries on an outside picnic table. My kid-friendly stomach never failed to appreciate franks and fried anything by the side of the road. It is not the case anymore.

Anyway, I threw caution to the wind last week and purchased two hot dogs—plain—and an order of crinkle-cut fries. I don’t use any condiments, except ketchup occasionally on my French fries. That’s something that has remained constant in my life. The picture menu on the outside of the cart included numerous condiment possibilities for the wieners, including sauerkraut, cheese, and chili. The crinkle-cuts, too, could be topped with melted cheese, bacon bits, or chili. Suffice it to say, my contemporary stomach couldn’t stomach any such additions.

Interestingly, I never really liked Nathan’s packaged hot dogs from the supermarket. I found they had a disagreeable crunch and left a strong garlicky aftertaste. But I boiled them at home. That’s not quite the same as putting them on a griddle en masse, where they commingle with one another and tan an appealing black-brown. The frankfurter, for me, was a thing I relished in the fresh air at baseball games, cookouts, and from street wagons. Home cooking of them was—more often than not—a strikeout.

I guess I hoped to reclaim a glimmer of my youthful appreciation of things no longer appreciated. Mission accomplished? Not quite. The franks tasted very, very salty, but the crunch didn’t turn me off as they typically did in the cozy confines of home. It was the crinkle-cut French fries that pushed me over the limit, I believe, reminding me once more that you can’t go home again. The squirrels and sparrows, who got the lion’s share of them, enjoyed the greasy potatoes a lot more than me. The bottle of lukewarm water that I washed them down with proved to be my only salvation.

Next time, I vowed to call on a smoothie seller, which are now competing in earnest with the hot dog and pretzel mob. But less than a week later—on Saturday—when I passed by a fellow selling every imaginable smoothie drink, I didn’t stop. I had skipped breakfast and was too hungry to settle for a mysterious fruit cocktail. For some inexplicable reason, though, I couldn’t get past the previous week’s salty hot dog experience. They were on my mind as I wondered what eating a couple of them would be like sans the unnecessary complication of uber-greasy French fries. And so I got up for Round Two. My conclusion: I’d eat Nathan’s franks in the future. They are certainly a giant step above their main competitor on the street: Sabrett. But I fully accept that Nathan’s famous fare will never taste like it did forty years ago on that picnic table down wind of a heavily trafficked thoroughfare.

(Photographs from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

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