first meal: red hook ballfield
For the past few years I’d been hearing of the Red Hook Ballfield as a mecca for foodies. The Village Voice’s excellent food blog has been touting it for a while, and this summer they had full coverage of the Ballfield’s vendors’ struggle with the Health Department to stay open for business. I also started hearing about the food from friends, including a vegetarian who spent time in Central America and raved about the papusas, a Salvadoran specialty.
The Ballfield is about a ten minute walk form the Smith-9th Street stop on the F train. There are somewhere between ten and fifteen stalls set up around the soccer pitch, selling everything from full meals to fruit to small plastic toys.
My friend recommended that we get the papusas first because they take longer than any of the other foods. He was right; as the stuffed masa pancakes are made to order and there is always a long line, it can take about 10 minutes to get your order. They have about ten different versions, both with meat and without. I went for the one ingredient I’d never heard of, loroco flowers mixed with cheese. The women behind the table slap the ingredients into a ball of premixed masa, form it into a pancake, and throw it onto an enormous smoking griddle while you wait in line.
The papusa is served with a side of pickled cabbage, and at $2 per papusa is an excellent deal. The crispy masa is good but doesn’t have much flavor. Biting into the melted cheese and flower filling is satisfying, however, and piling the cabbage on top helps enormously. After wolfing it down, I was more than ready for more.
After passing by traditional taco stands with piles of meats outside, I stopped at a Guatemalan stand that advertised chiles rellenos, which are usually vegetarian. When I asked, however, I was told that their version has meat but they had a vegetarian item called pacaya for $4. Not knowing what it was, I ordered one.
As I was waiting for my pacaya, a young woman approached the stand and asked if she could interview the people behind the table for her school. She had a video crew with her and she also asked if she could interview the two of us waiting for food. We agreed but my food arrived while she was still speaking with the proprietor, so I took my pacaya and left.
The pacaya was amazing, it was my favorite dish of the day. The pacaya (I found out later) is produced by a type of palm tree, and looks like a tangle of baby corns. The entire blossom is fried in an egg batter and served on slightly grilled tortillas with a tomato sauce and sliced raw onions piled on top. The slightly bitter vegetable flavor matches well with the egg and tomato, and the onions added a nice crunch. Wrapped up in the warm tortillas it was easy to consume in five or six bites while watching the soccer.
I was beginning to get full but I wanted to sample at least one more dish; I settled on a cheese empanada which I had seen advertised when we first arrived. The gooey melted cheese was nice and salty, while the crispy outside was not too greasy. At $1.50 each, what more could you want?
After all the rich food I needed something to wash it down. I got a small (which was rather large) melon juice, refreshing and not overly sweet, for $2. With a full belly I reluctantly left the Ballfield, juice in hand.
One vendor spotted us non-Hispanics and asked if we were from a newspaper. He went on about the ethnic mix of people he’s seen at the Ballfield recently, and how he’s never seen such a mix of people in the neighborhood. He was happy about the vendors’ victory over the Health Department, but said he worried about next year.
The food at the Red Hook Ballfields is very good, but that’s not the reason to go. You should go because it’s a quintessentially New York experience, and even more than that a truly Brooklyn experience. Do it now, while it lasts.
To see my entire day in Red Hook click here.