Italian Food, Bagels and Barbecue and How It Speaks to Commitment | Career Angles

I am a former New Yorker, raised in The Bronx. I can’t say that I experienced good food while growing up. My mother’s idea of cooking involved boiling frozen vegetables into submission but she made a mean matzoh ball and gefilte fish.

When I moved to Greenwich Village, I started to learn what good Italian food was; after all, it took effort for a restaurant there to screw it up. The local places made sauce from scratch and bought meat from a local butcher or the meat market on the Westside of the Village.

The pizza was spectacular. Famous Ray’s made a killing selling slices and brick oven pizza was available at John’s of Bleecker Street.

But the barbecue was a disappointment no matter where I went in the city. People would rave over bad Texas barbecue slopped with canned sauce. The meat was flavorless and the red sauce did a bad job masking the mediocre meat. Even places that served what was called barbecue chicken served rotisserie chicken or chicken that was pre-cooked and then grilled to warmth on a grill surface that was heated with gas. Ugh.

And when we moved to Asheville, NC I discovered great bbq and awful Italian food and bagels. There are gas stations with restaurants that serve better barbecue than anything in New York…