Liberty on my mind

Aboard the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, February 2008. 

Chasing a chicken in the hills of New York

ONEONTA, N.Y. – There is a classic flashing pink neon sign outside Brooks’ House of Bar-B-Q displaying a chef wielding a hatchet chasing after a chicken.

This sign, as well as the jam-packed parking lot, give me the immediate impression the food is good and fresh in this roadside restaurant in south-central New York.

I take a seat at the curving Formica lunch counter the color of an orange Creamsickle and begin to take in the kitschy ambiance. The counter has swiveling wooden captains chairs. Images of large chickens are stamped across the brown, red and white wallpaper surrounding the room. There are more chicken doodads hanging on the wall facing the counter.

More than 20 people are standing in line for one of the 300 seats in the adjoining dining room, and nearly as many wait in the lobby to place take-home orders. A large moose head hangs above the dining room entrance alongside other animal trophies that add a strange hunting lodge feel to this 1970s-style restaurant that could well have been the backdrop for a Brady Bunch episode.

“Is this where everyone in town comes on a Friday night?” I say to the waitress, after she drops before me a paper placemat with descriptions and images of the different barn types in the region.

“It’s pretty much where everyone comes most nights,” she responds.

I’m directed here while on a trip to the area by a bubbly coworker at the Observer-Reporter, Chistie Campbell, who grew up in nearby Delhi, N.Y.

“They’re famous for their sauce,” she says.

The city, pronounced oh knee yawn ta, is home to a little more than 13,000 people, most of whom vote Republican. It supposedly takes its name from an Indian phrase for “place of open rocks,” a reference to an outcropping of tablerocks.

Among Brooks’ most-famous customers is Hillary Clinton, who stopped here in 1999 during her successful campaign for New York’s U.S. senator. But Oneontians were not especially nice to her when she arrived at the business at 5560 State Route 7 to a large crowd of hecklers.

My waitress, though, has a pleasant smile as she takes my order for a half-dozen wings with mild sauce. Then I watch waitresses deliver platefuls of grilled chicken breasts and spareribs to chubby diners. This is much more interesting than studying those illustrations and descriptions of such barns as the New England connecting or Dutch Gambrel.

My wings arrive in short order. The sauce they drip doesn’t taste any different than your average red-hot Buffalo sauce, but the chicken is especially plump and moist.

It isn’t until I place a cell phone call from the counter to Christie that she tells me the best juice in the house is the yellow chicken variety.

I purchase her a bottle of the stuff while paying the $4.99 tab for the wings, and continue on my journey south to Scranton, Pa. She promises to prepare some chicken in this yellow magic sauce for the newsroom. We’ll let you know how it tastes.

These Buffalo wings are the real McCoy

The real McCoy, originally uploaded by Scott Beveridge.

BUFFALO, NY – The lanky guy serving food and drink at Anchor Bar in western New York has a telephone just for calls to the kitchen.

While pizza, soups and salads are on the menu, the server in need of a personality mostly uses it to bark orders for Buffalo chicken wings at this blue-collar restaurant, where the recipe was born, they say.

The eclectic décor includes license plates from all points in the United States tacked to the walls beside photographs of celebrities who have come here for red hot wings. Above my seat at the aging bar, an old child’s sled and some dusty tennis rackets hang from the ceiling.

The tale about these particular wings is famous, having been told enough times to draw steady crowds through the doors of this redbrick building that faces Main Street. For anyone who hasn’t heard it, here goes:

On a Friday night in 1964, Dominic Bellissimo was tending bar when a group of his friends with ravenous appetites came calling. He asked his mother, Teressa, to prepare something to eat for them.

Out she brought chicken wings, something that had usually gone into the stockpot for soup.

Teressa, though, deep fried those wings and flavored them with a secret sauce. They were an instant hit and it didn't take long for people to hear about them and flock to the bar to experience that new taste sensation. From then on, Buffalo wings became a regular part of the menu.

Although many cooks have tried to duplicate the sauce, the closely guarded secret recipe has helped to put this place on the map, the bar claims.

While the origin of this dish has since been questioned, maybe unfairly, there is no doubt that Buffalo wings have found homes in restaurants from Hot Springs, Ark., to possibly even Death Valley, Calif.

Anchor Bar claims to have sold a whopping 246.8 million pounds of them to its adoring fans.

Its sauce is now imported to Japan, where it became a hit with youngsters while mature people have deemed it to be awful, The Associated Press has reported.

Once inside the bar in late July, I order 10 medium hot wings for $10 after driving around the block in search of a parking spot in this run-down section of the city on the eastern bank of Lake Erie. Windows down, a not-so-pleasant and strong aroma of chicken cooking in hot oil nearly turns my stomach, but it does nothing to force me back.

Later, my wings arrive sticky and steaming beside a few sticks of celery and blue cheese salad dressing, the same way they are always prepared. To my slight surprise, they are delicious, better than any of the many hot wings I have tried back home in Pittsburgh.

And there actually is a recipe behind this sauce, which is nothing akin to the Pittsburgh version of Tabasco stirred with melted butter. I'm suddenly and forever bored by Pittsburgh's Buffalo wings. The Anchor bar variety contains select amounts of vinegar, garlic and cayenne and chili pepper, a gourmet blend that puts it over the top.


Bottles of sauce are sold on the Internet, as well as from the bar’s gift shop. On my approach to this store, a young and rather bored woman appears behind the counter surrounded by T-shirts and large blobs of wrinkly orange rubber that she identifies as hats for wearing at professional home football games starring the Buffalo Bills. (The hats are ugly yet not quite as funny those cheeseheads that crown people in Wisconsin).

I'm disappointed to find the clerk to be clueless about the almost-holy sauce that helps to guarantee her a job.

“I have no idea. I wasn’t born then,” she said, responding to my query about the sauce’s arrival on this planet. That was enough to send me out the door after paying my tab, only to free up a parking space for someone else in the line of cars turning into the joint.

Before leaving, though, I buy a few bottles of the sauce and eventually give one to my neighbor, who never seems to get enough Buffalo wings, the hotter, the better. Later, he said, “That’s good stuff.”

He is undoubtedly scouring the Web as we speak to purchase more Anchor Bar sauce to feed his better-refined habit.

Asian dining on another level

So it was Feb. 8, the second day of the Chinese Year of the Rat, and there I was ordering dinner in one of New York’s trendiest Asian restaurants.

Tradition suggested that you celebrate by decorating your table with inexpensive chopsticks. The pair on my table at Tao Restaurant in the city’s theater district was pretty fancy. For a brief second, I thought about taking them home, and besides knowing that stealing would have been wrong, I have never really mastered the art of handling sticks to put food in my mouth. (I swear some people can eat broth with chopsticks)

Instead, I ordered a bottle of Tsingtao beer and began the New Year celebration in the same restaurant where Madonna has been known to dine. The place has a nondescript facade lit by a giant hanging wicker chandelier that looked like something a hypnotist would use to put someone under his spell.

A 16-foot Buddha served as the main attraction inside, just beyond a noisy and lively bar. After being seated among intimate tables in the second-floor lounge, I ordered sea bass and soft-shell crab rolls. The food was fantastic, as was the service. Don’t believe the nasty things people have been saying online about the restaurant, such as the food isn’t especially Asian, the waiters were rude and the menu's too pricey. My bill came to $58, far less than what I was expecting to pay in such a joint.

Another bottle of Tsingtao and it was time to visit the men’s room. Located inside the tiny room was one beautiful urinal, so pretty in fact that it was almost too nice to soil. A waterfall cascaded down a large pane of blue-green, back-it glass into a black granite troth filled with river rocks.

What a way to mark the new year………

Our Miss Liberty was once dead in the water

NEW YORK – America wasn’t so united about France’s offer of a gift of the Statute of Liberty when it was time to raise money to give her a resting place.

People across the great land scoffed at the idea of raising money to pay for a pedestal for the monumental copper and steel sculpture because it was supposed to be, well, a gift.

“Ordinary citizens considered the colossus a rich man’s folly; many rich felt it a populist symbol,” a sign states at a museum inside the granite structure below Miss Liberty that we now consider a global tribute to independence.

But in 1876, after French artist Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi brought a 30-foot arm from his design of the statue to Philadelphia, U.S. newspapers criticized the nearly $300,000 cost of the statue’s underfunded base. Many believed that New Yorkers should be responsible for the price tag until journalist Joseph Pulitzer came to the rescue and urged subscribers to his newspapers to send money while also criticizing the rich for ignoring the call for donations. Pulitzer’s mission brought home the $100,000 that was needed to complete that 10-story base to support the statue that, itself, is 151 feet and 1 inch tall.

I felt like kicking myself with her big foot Saturday for not taking a tour of this island during my several prior trips to New York. It’s indeed a wonder of the world.

The million folks who tour the site each year are just permitted to climb to the base of the statue, up 154 steep steps, to peek into its frame through a Plexiglass window. After making the climb, I found an enthusiastic, young female National Park Service ranger who was well versed in trivia about the big lady above the observation tower.

The ranger said part of the $10 million restoration project that led up the 100th birthday party for the statue in 1986 involved the removal of 7 layers of asbestos coatings around its metal joints. The substance contributed to saltwater erosion that was damaging the sculpture. It was replaced with joints of stainless steel coated with Teflon.

The perch offers great vantage points to see Lower Manhattan, as well as weird ant’s-eye views of Liberty.






If you visit, plan to spend the better part of the day at the statue and nearby Ellis Island. A treasure of a museum over at Ellis walks visitors through the grueling process poor immigrants faced a century ago after they arrived on boats and tried to make their homes in a land of liberty. All the while, the rich passengers on the same steamships of the era were afforded free passage to America.

Dock here matey

It’s easy to imagine a roomful of drunken sailors from a bygone era swigging back rye whiskey inside New York’s oldest dive bar, The Ear Inn.

And some women claim to have seen one named Mickey, whose ghost, they said, has crawled into bed with them in the apartment above the bar in the city’s Soho district.

The spirits have been flowing here since about 1850, when the brick house built by a black Revolutionary War veteran was turned into a waterfront bar.

His name was John Brown and his likeness was supposedly shown beside George Washington in the painting, “Crossing the Delaware.” Rumor has it, they were sailing buddies.

Having made a fortune in the tobacco trade, Brown built his Federal-style house in 1817 at the water's edge beside the Hudson River. Since then, it has been used for everything from a smuggler’s den to a speakeasy, and in between, a brothel.

Today, the house is owned by Rip Hayman, who once published a music sheet in the city named The Ear. To avoid compliance with a complicated and costly sign ordinance, he simply painted the outer edges of the letter “B” in the neon bar sign over the front door to make it an “E” and complete the word, ear.

A smaller sign at the door to the establishment at 326 Spring Street reminds patrons to pipe down and turn off their cell phones. Live music and poetry flow freely on certain evenings. The food is affordable, and the menu includes a fantastic bowl of cowboy chili with chopped onions and a dollop of sour cream.

The place is an antique in itself, with dusty old booze bottles behind the bar that were unearthed when the rear dining room was constructed. The wood floors sag and creak to create a warm and inviting place to belly up to the bar and make new friends.

Sad to say, I didn’t see Mickey, who was stabbed to death in the house during Colonial times. But then again, I wasn’t just off the water and three sheets to the wind.

A walk around The Rock

Tours of New York’s Rockefeller Center lead straight to Studio 8H, the celebrated set of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

There the audience parks themselves on seats borrowed three decades ago from Yankee Stadium when the show began and didn’t have much money. Today, the cast and crew can afford new, more comfortable chairs but are too superstitious to change anything lest the live show might stumble and fall.

Visitors are reminded that SNL has made history for such odd reasons as singer Sinead O’Connor did on Oct. 3, 1992, when she ripped a photograph of the pope in a protest over sexual abuses within the Roman Catholic Church. The controversy all but ended her career in the United States.

The actors also have left us with some of the funniest moments in TV Land, especially the hilarious skit in the early 1990s featuring a stoned Christ Farley wearing black Spandex pants and pretending to be a Chippendales stripper.

The tour isn’t always as interesting as a walk around the Art-Deco center and its 19 commercial buildings dating to 1929. Yesterday, I bumped into this guy named Joe: