Weekends during this Summer Season: Bicycle Tours of the Brooklyn Navy Yard

Take advantage of the (mostly) gorgeous weather and tour Brooklyn history and sights. Dust off your bike and sign up for a Turnstile Tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Tours are from 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays (weather permitting). The cost of the tour is $30 per person and is offered to all ages. Private tours are available. The Brooklyn Navy Yard is located at Washington and Flushing avenues in downtown Brooklyn.

Please visit turnstiletours.com/tours for more information.

The first and third Sundays until Oct. 20: Brooklyn Food Truck Rally at Grand Army Plaza

From Italian ices to grilled cheeses, waffles to lobster rolls, enjoy some of the best summer fare that Brooklyn has to offer at the Brooklyn Food Truck Rally.

The Food Truck Rally will held the first and third Sundays of every month from now until October 20^th, from 11am to 5pm at Grand Army Plaza in front of Prospect Park (weather permitting). Food trucks include Wafels and Dinges, the Mud Truck and the Red Hook Lobster Pound. Grand Army Plaza is located at Eastern Parkway and Flatbush Avenue.

Please visit prospectpark.org  for more information.

November 2011.

It’s noon before Thanksgiving and Gasper and Vincent Zerilli, Carlo Ocello and Carlo Jr. sit down for lunch surrounded by industrial-sized electric mixers in the spacious kitchen of the Court Pastry Shop in Carroll Gardens. They lay out a big bottle of wine. Gasper fried homemade rice balls stuffed with cheese, green peas and meatballs, and made fresh tomato sauce to pour over them. I won’t go in to how good these rice balls were. Gasper easily could launch a side business.

Always Customer No. 38 at Court Street Pastry

The baker is very busy these days. Over the holiday season, Gasper and his brother Vincent, who own the shop, and their employees will work every day from 7 a.m. into the night to make the Italian specialties, cookies and pastries that are so hard to find today. The shop was founded by the Zerilli’s Sicilian father, Salvatore, from whom all recipes and methods flow, but they also make Neapolitan and other Italian traditional treats. People drive from all around to buy them, from out of state, and lines are out the door on Christmas Eve.

Holiday offerings include the Sicilian cuccidati, a ring-shaped, fig-and-nut filled cookie, and honey balls, a grain pie and apple pies that are baked daily. There’s another cookie, that looks like a bone, and features a crumbly/dry sugar crunch, called, “Old bones,” popular at Easter, that’s quite something to try.

Everything is made from scratch. It’s hard work.

“I haven’t had a holiday off since I was 13,” Gasper says. “I don’t get to see my grandchildren around the holidays.”

The Zerilli brothers and Carlo Sr. have been working here, together, for 40 years, since they were kids.

They pull up chairs to the shop’s 100 year-old pink marble table, brought from Italy during the mass immigration to Carroll Gardens, a huge slab of stone brought on a boat in the 1890s. Every morning and all day, the Zerillis fling flour and spread butter and roll long sticky logs of pastry dough on the table. During the week the table is where they dine, and on Saturdays, they eat Gasper’s pizza there. The table was here when Salvatore Zerelli bought the shop in 1948.

Gasper talks to me while he and Ocello Sr. roll a 7-foot-long Sfogliatelle dough, something Court Pastry is known for, a flaky pastry filled with a sweet ricotta mixture. The same dough is used to make the sinful Lobster Tail, featuring crunchy, buttery ribbons swirling around a Bavarian and French cream center. Gasper says the shop offers the same desserts it did 50 years ago.

“All these recipes are my father’s. He was working here from the 1920s,” Gasper says.

Gasper’s father worked at Court Pastry until he was 86 years old. It’s a different neighborhood now, so the shop doesn’t sell the same volume, nor does it compete with the number of Italian bakeries that used to exist here.

“A lot of Italian people left,” said Gasper, who himself left Carroll Gardens at the age of 25 for Staten Island, in 1973. His brother Vincent stayed here, on President between Hoyt and Smith, “the nicest block in the neighborhood,” Gasper says.

“It’s more of a yuppie neighborhood now,” Gasper says. “Back then, we sold more biscuits. Italian people have biscuits in the morning. People changed their eating habits.”

Indeed, like the Esposito brothers, at G. Esposito & Son’s Jersey Pork Store on Court, whose business suffered when people started eating less meat, and women started working more instead of staying home to cook for large clans, well, the bakery business, too, has suffered.

I talk to Gasper about this. He tells me he’s related to George Esposito by marriage. And like George, Gasper says the modern eating and shopping habits are a thorn to his side.

About 20 years ago, Court Pastry started selling “sugar free” cookies for diabetics.

“If I was diabetic, I’d still eat the real thing,” Gasper says. “People, they buy all the health food things, and pay triple the prices. I went into Union Market. They sell a pound of steak for $28. I don’t know how people buy those things.

“People they think they’ll live longer because they eat things they think are organic. I have my doubts. Everything in moderation; I like to eat the real thing, butter, not margarine. What good is living if you can’t eat anything? Why live a long time if you’re going to be a dead beat?”

Gasper says the city makes him use a non-hydrogenated shortening. “I can’t make good food with this stuff,” Gasper says. “In the winter, it turns into a solid block, like ice.”

Gasper tells me the story of his dad, who has quite the immigrant’s tale. Salvatore Zerilli was born on Henry Street in 1917. His parents had a daughter, 7, and had suffered the deaths of two babies before Salvatore came along. When he was 18-months old, his parents got the Spanish Influenza and died. He and his sister were sent back to Sicily to live with relatives. Salvatore lived with one grandmother; his sister, with another grandmother.

They rarely saw each other.

When Salvatore was 15, his family in Brooklyn sent for him, and he began to work at his uncle’s bakery on Columbia Street.

His sister was quite a firecracker, Gasper says. “She wrote a letter to Mussolini, and he granted her request to come back,” to Brooklyn, Gasper said. “She had a good way of writing.”

Salvatore bought Court Pastry in 1948, the year Gasper was born. Gasper remembers standing on a milk crate so he could reach the table to make cookies.

Kids of bakers don’t always want to be bakers. Gasper went to Poly Tech and St. Francis College, and was going to be a math teacher. He lasted nine days at the public school, teaching sixth grade. He went back to the bakery.

Will he stay in the business?

“I’m too old for this,” Gasper says.

And then, he stops his conversation to say something to Carlo Sr., who brings over a bucket of what seems like 100 cracked eggs. They pour them slowly into a mixer, and go back and forth about some tray of rising dough.

“I’m sorry, we have a lot of work to do to get ready for the holiday,” Gasper says, a big smile on his face.

***

To read more South Brooklyn Post features on our old-school treasures, check out:

Italian Social Club: Pride, History and War:

http://southbrooklynpost.com/news-views/italian-social-club/

And Stuffing Salami at Espositos

Court Pastry Shop

298 Court St., at Degraw

718-875-4820

Pastries are $1.75 to $2.50 apiece; cookies are $4.80 to $8.50 per pound. Cash only.

Mon to Sat, 8 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Sundays, 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

“Looking Down from Above.” Ken Solomon, 2013. Pencil and watercolor on paperboard. 2 panels, 7.5 x 11.75.
The installation features 60 individual panels, each the size of an iPad screen, illustrating Google Earth images of the Port of Newark.

Carroll Gardens painter Ken Solomon will surprise you with his solo show of new work at the Josée Bienvenu Gallery in Chelsea.

Not with what Solomon paints – iPhone screens, Google searches, Apple’s powering-off image — those little lines running around in a circle while we wait. Images we run away from as quickly as we approach.

The surprise is in the elegance, the drama, of these images when Solomon transforms them into watercolor paintings.

There’s something refreshing about the artistry Solomon brings to the everyday images of our device-obsessed lives, a painterly quality in the brushstrokes used to depict such scenes as what a computer looks like during a Google search for The Beatles album, A Hard Days Night.

The show, Running to Stand Still, takes the functional, momentary digital world and transforms it to still life.

When you enter the show, you’ll first notice a stunning wall installation featuring 60 panels in five parts detailing Google Earth images of the vast industrial container parking lots of Port Newark, at Newark Airport. The detail and accidental design of the containers in orange, gray and blue, seen from high above, is visually arresting.

“Seeing Double.” Ken Solomon, 2013.

Ken Solomon, 2013. “Google Portrait” of a search for painter Mondrian.

And then there’s the Pandora piece. Covering a long wall and wrapping to another is 100 panels in two rows of Pandora screens featuring six hours of music: 100 album covers, the exact size they appear on the iPhone.

The Pandora piece begins with Start Me Up, the painted screen showing the device at full power, and ends with This is My Last Affair, as the battery runs out.

Solomon says the piece is autobiographical – a snapshot of where the artist is at a certain moment in time. The work creates a poem — the last word of each album title links to the first word of the next, creating a lovely poem. Here is a snippet from the run-on verse:

“Come on the Run For Your Life During War Time is Running Out of Time Waits For No One and Only the Good Die Young…”

I asked Solomon if it was hard to paint such tiny images of the album covers.

“A lot of people talk about a steady hand and a tiny brush, I think it comes down to the power of observation. I don’t need a tiny brush. I just need to see. I’m sort of transcribing, using references, it’s really a matter of focus and concentration. The more locked in I am, the things that look very detailed are fairly simple.”

Solomon started off as a painter creating serious figurative oil works, and then moved on to an experimental performance project in the ’90s, when he spent “years and years” putting up flyers looking for people to wear his natty old wig in his Williamsburg apartment. He photographed the willing subjects, an effort he dubbed The Wig Project, and which was chronicled in the New York Times.

There’s something very Warholian about Solomon’s work – the repetition, the taking of banal objects (in Warhol’s case, soup cans, images of Marilyn Monroe), painting them in repetition and elevating them to works of art, in Solomon’s words describing his own painting, “fossilizing disposable things.”

Google images, Pandora screens, “these are all functional. They are tools. They are visual,” Solomon says. “I eliminate the functionality and slow it down to paint it.”

And indeed, the works, though they show just about everything you see on your computer screen, are not attempting to achieve photo-realism. In contrast, they are quite painterly. There’s something fun about admiring watercolor brushstrokes used to paint the ever-present blue framing of Google land.

“A lot of it is about the painting process,” Solomon says. “I can’t think about a better subject than information speed, and information on the web” juxtaposed with “the slow process of painting.”

How’d he pick this subject matter?

“I found myself on my computer, on Google images, thinking about imagery,” Solomon says. “I call them Google portraits. I think of it as portraiture.”

Solomon says he was flying out of Newark Airport and noticed the vast container lots of Port of Newark. When he arrived at his destination and looked on Google Earth, and saw the endless expanse, “I thought it was the most mystical, magical thing ever,” Solomon says.

“What I tackled is one hair on the armpit. You could spend a lifetime painting this,” Solomon says. “You can paint a rock, a flower, you can paint anything. “If you paint it well, it’s cool.”

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Move quickly people to check out this show. Open through Friday, May 24.

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Josée Bienvenu Gallery

529 West 20th Street

New York, NY 10011

Tel 212 206 7990

Fax 212 206 7990

www.joseebienvenugallery.com

http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A29558&page_number=&template_id=6&sort_order=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/nyregion/neighborhood-report-williamsburg-eyes-beholders-this-artist-may-be-pile-sand.html?pagewanted=1

Homemade pastas, candle-lit, hipster charm and an eclectic menu of modernist twists on Italian classics pack in the tables every night at Brucie’s. If you haven’t been, you should go, as owner Zahra Tangorra is one of the most talented chefs in this neighborhood. The dinner atmosphere is perfect for a date night.

Just this week I selfishly asked Tangorra to make me one of her specialties — pork belly. It wasn’t on the menu, but she whipped one up, and — well let’s just say it’s a mouthful of heaven that exhibits Tangorra’s stregnths: juxtaposing textures of soft and crisp, flavors of sweet and sour, elements of creaminess and crunch. In this iteration, the pork belly came out as it often does, very crisp on the outside, very moist in the interior, with a savory spice crusted around. The darling was dressed with yogurt, fresh chopped chives and wonderfully nutty roasted/fried chickpeas. To die for.

March 2011.

There’s a neophyte chef, an eccentric young red head with bright red lipstick and crazy hair, running a new style of Italian restaurant on Court Street, near the heart of old Italian Brooklyn.

Her name is Zahra Tangorra. The restaurant is Brucie. With it Tangorra has created a hip, fresh take on the old-school red sauce joints and fine Italian cooking she grew up with.

She designed the restaurant, cooks, manages and is the sole investor. All the recipes—house made pastas and mozzarella, spaghetti and lemon-infused meatballs, meat and fish and the house signature dish: tagliatelle noodles with fresh corn, creamy burrata cheese and charred brussel sprouts with tomato butter–are hers. She even compiles playlists, soundtracks of indie rock to play through the night. She grew up in the small town of Northport, L.I., lives in Ft. Greene, and her restaurant is a welcome taste of Williamsburg in South Brooklyn.

“I’m pretty bossy, so it works out. It’s all mine,” Tangorra says.

Tangorra is 26. The restaurant is named after her and her boyfriend’s dog, Burrito, and Burrito’s canine pal, Lucy. She gives much credit to her boyfriend Dan and her co-chef Frank Justus for the early success of the restaurant.

Growing up on Long Island with her extended Italian family, Tangorra learned to cook at an early age. Her parents owned a specialty food shop, “The Loving Oven,” which inspired her to include a specialty Italian grocery at Brucie, with some of the best pastas and ingredients available. She sells fine dried pastas and her own house-made pasta, charcuterie meats (from Salumeria Biellese in Chelsea) and cheeses, capers and olives, white truffle oil, organic dark brown sugar, Polenta, parchment-baking paper, cooking twine — everything you need to make a nice meal at home.

Tangorra, who says her second passion to cooking is design, went all-out on decorating to create a sweet, modern-retro dining space, featuring a back room lined with striped cream and navy wallpaper, large square tables and white benches.

Before Brucie, Tangorra was a display artist for Urban Outfitters and Brooklyn Industries. She looks to Design*Sponge for inspiration, and picked up antiques and salvaged items in the Berkshires and at a salvage yard next to Lowe’s in Gowanus.

“In Brooklyn, we are in the age of the beautiful restaurant,” Tangorra said. “I wanted to make the place stick out.”

Brucie has enjoyed a strong showing out of the gate. On a recent Friday night at 8 p.m., the tables were filled and diners poured in from the street, crowding in front to wait. On a Saturday in October, only a month after she opened, Brucie saw two rushes, at around 5 and again in the evening. The kitchen ran out of its cod special.

From the sidewalk, Brucie doesn’t look like much. You can see a refrigerated case holding dairy, and it might throw you off. Inside, lit with romantic old-fashioned glass lights and candles, there’s a long communal table, a few smaller tables, and metal swivel chairs at a handmade copper bar, where you can watch Tangorra’s team of young cooks make fresh pasta and mozzarella. There aren’t many standard two-seat and four-seat tables.

Earlier this year, Tangorra had never been in a restaurant kitchen, and she did not attend culinary school. But she loved to throw big dinner parties and prepare the food that she grew up with. Her dinner parties got bigger until there was no more room around the table. She needed more space.

Tangorra says she found the location for Brucie “randomly,” on Craig’s List.

She said people were fighting tooth and nail for the rental. “It was too good to pass up,” she said.

The food at Brucie is hearty and satisfying. The charred vegetables that turn up on many dishes are exceptional.

Tangorra says she’s dedicated to fresh, local, seasonal, sustainable. Meats and dairy come from area farms, veggies from farmer’s markets. The bread comes from Caputo’s in Carroll Gardens. The fresh ingredients make a difference.

In the tagliatelle dish, it’s the sweet pop of the corn kernels that add zing to the dish.

“We went to the farmer’s markets and stockpiled all the corn in New York,” she says. The freezers are filled with it.

“I take painstaking efforts to make sure all the food is locally sourced and as seasonal as possible. For instance our lemons, we make sure they are domestic and come on a train instead of a truck.”

The vibe is fun and casual, and that’s on purpose.

“We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We just want to make something that people say, “Yum, this is good,” Tangorra says. “I love the ‘yum’ face.

“We are a crew that doesn’t have a ton of experience. Everything we do definitely is from the heart.”

Growing up with Red Sauce

Tangorra says the Italian food of her youth is in her blood. Her parents are artists and cooks, her grandmother, an interior designer.

“They were fabulous cooks, funky creative people,” Tangorra says. “They used to say they pushed me around in a mixing bowl.”

She has fond memories of her grandfather making marinara sauce, after picking tomatoes from his garden. He made his own pasta.

“My grandpa was really big, with a big pregnant stomach. He’d sit on a high chair by the stove all day. He wouldn’t move, stirring and tasting the sauce all day.”

She wanted to create a place reminiscent of the old-school pasta joints she would go to as a child, like a place called Mr. Sausage that had cold salads, meat, cheeses and Italian wines on the wall.

It’s not been all roses and lollipops for Tangorra. Some time in between her happy upbringing and throwing dinner parties in Ft. Greene, Tangorra was touring with a band, riding in a bus out West. Around Arizona, the bus driver fell asleep and drove off a cliff. Nobody was killed or seriously injured. Tangorra’s hand was severed. She can use it but it was severely impaired. She received a settlement.

She used the money to open Brucie.

“I felt like I had to do something with [the money]. I feel so happy to be alive, I want to pay that karma forward.”

At Brucie, “we try to make people feel happy.”

Menu sampling: Chicken Parm Hero, $10; Tortellini en Brodo (pork belly tortellini in pork broth) $12; Chicken Francaise with Baked Chicory and polenta, $16; Fried Housemade Mozzarella with marinara and radish top pesto, $9; radish and green tomato salad, $3; Lemon Pie, $7 per slice.

Brucie

234 Court St.

(347) 987-4961

‎brucienyc.com

Thousands of kids were originally scored too low, and now another 300 will get their scores increased.

There was a new test this year, as the city attempted to wean the growing number of kids scoring above 90 percent, and even in the 99 percentile, making seats at desired schools — such as the Brooklyn School of Inquiry, and NEST+m, ever-more difficult to win. 

Read all about it.

Providence Hogan was convicted last year of embezzling $80,000 over four years while she was the treasurer of the P.S. 29 Parent Teacher Association and falsifying documents to cover up the thefts.

The case has been fairly traumatic for many parents at the school who were friends with Hogan and trusted her to collect and record earnings from fundraising events that can eat countless hours of a parent’s time.

The Times reports that the PTA gathered $200,000 in donations last year, though the school’s PTA budget is more than four times that amount. The PTA raises additional money by running a robust after-school program and camps during school holidays, and pays for a vast array of programming and teacher-training and other services at the school.