On a Tuesday morning in February, the back half of my bottom front tooth fell off.

It wasn’t painful really. Just surprising. There I was, chewing on a pen and sifting through the New York Times Dining & Wine RSS, and then…oh, what did we have here? Ah, yes—the back half of my tooth. That’s what we had there.

At that early stage, the worst part seemed to be the incident’s undeniable lameness: the chipping had not resulted from a tremendous athletic feat, nor was it the consequence of some hilarious, drunken mistake that could become part of my personal mythology. I wasn’t even doing the things that moms advise against (chewing open headphone packaging, prying off bottle caps with molars, etc.). I was just, as I said, chewing a pen like a regular guy paging through his RSS feeds, and now I had to deal with no end of bullshit: finding a dentist, making an appointment, talking to my bosses about taking a half day, and figuring out whether or not I actually had dental insurance.

And that really was an important question. Did I have dental insurance?

“Did you ever fill out this form?” my boss asked me, leaning over a file cabinet.

“Yes.”

“Really? I don’t see it.”

She stuck her nose back into the drawer. Scenes from Sicko started running through my mind. I contemplated a trip to Cuba, where, as Michael Moore tells it, they throw free healthcare from the backs of floats in Havana’s continuous, ever-raucous We Have Universal Healthcare parade.

“Oh, sorry for scaring you. You’ve got insurance.”

“Is it good? Do you think they’ll cover this?”

“I don’t know. I’m on my husband’s dental.”

Yes, Cuba would do just fine. Cut me a cigar, Comandante Castro—we will be smoking in celebration of my bicuspids.

Dragging my tongue along my tooth, I thought about the Simpsons where Lisa looks at the Big Book of British Smiles. My tongue grew tender; I dragged some more.

As the hours crawled by, I drank bitter coffee at my desk, growing hungry. The central question of my existence—what will I eat?—gnawed at me with newfound importance. The problem is vexing enough for Penn Station area workers in prime dental health, and it had just gotten much worse. Skylight Diner? Out. Pizza Suprema? Out. That one Italian deli that charges extra for tomatoes on your sandwich? Out. In desperation, I bought a 3pm smoothie from the Penn Station Jamba Juice. This choice ranks among the worst I have ever made.

That night, I returned to my apartment and left messages at dental offices while I ate Campbell’s clam chowder. The soup, needless to say, had been a poor decision brought by the crazed hunger of a lunchless Tuesday (life lesson learned: a smoothie is not a lunch). I’d only ever had clam chowder once before—at a Model United Nations conference in D.C.—and I can only say that, in both instances, the hearty, nautical fare had seemed like a good idea at the time. Losing motivation, I gave up and watched Friday Night Lights in bed, miserably sipping at my so-called dinner.

At work the next day, I took a series of extended bathroom breaks during which I called the lion’s share of New York’s Aetna-eligible dentists. Finding an appointment, I discovered, is even harder than finding decent vindaloo near 31^st and 9^th.

-

“Is it an emergency?”

“I don’t know. Kind of.”

“Are you in pain?”

“Not really. Just hungry.”

“We don’t have any appointments available during the daytime.”

“What about nighttime?”

“Your insurance will only cover an after-hours appointment if it’s an emergency.”

-

“We actually don’t have any room in our schedule. We often refer patients to a dentist in Riverdale. Would you like her number?”

“No, thank you [RIVERDALE?!]”

-

“No space? Fine.”

“Okay. Thank you for calling Dr. Fin—“

“Hey, by the way, can I eat solid foods? Will the rest of my tooth fall off?”

“It’s best not to. At the very least, avoid chewing on that side of your mouth.”

-

At lunch, I set out to find liquid or emulsified nourishment. Waiting to cross 8^th Avenue, I caught a peripheral glance of the stalwart, superlative Pizza Suprema, whose door was propped ajar by a long line of lucky customers. I grew jealous. These people didn’t know about the perfectly salted, perfectly crisp crust. They didn’t appreciate the sweet sauce, the appropriately-sized cheesetop grease puddle, the mozzarella that doesn’t blow.

Three minutes later, at a middling soup place in the shadow of Madison Square Garden, I hatefully spooned shitty gumbo into my mouth. On the way back to the office, I saw the Pizza Suprema line again. Assholes.

Later in the day, sipping a mid-afternoon shake from McDonald’s (they have whipped cream on them now, by the way), I bagged a Friday evening slot at an in-network dentist. My delight, however, was tempered by the realization that three full days of chipped tooth living remained. I spent them in a cloud of voracious hunger, which merged with a newfound, bitter hatred of dental professionals. I began to suspect that the city’s dental community had been hiding appointments in order to teach me some kind of lesson (“this is what happens when you chew on a pen: you have to pay $7 for a Penn Station Jamba Juice and then get hungry two hours later”). I had, after all, seen several openings for Wednesday on ZocDoc—what do you mean a gum disease specialist can’t fix me up? I’m eating chowder over here, doc. Clam chowder.

On Friday afternoon, with four days of accumulated hunger and a temporary insurance card, I set out for the dentist. Rain fell as I endured the various indignities of the crosstown bus.

When I arrived at the white tiled office, my guard was up. There’s a Philip Roth line about how businessmen need to have a bit of the goniff in them, and, though I don’t work in business, I’ve found that mine comes out when I negotiate with strangers. Even strangers that happen to be extraordinarily beautiful dental hygienists.

“My insurance won’t cover this, you’re saying?” I asked, my shoes squishing.

“Correct,” said the hygienist. She had perfect teeth.

“But you take my insurance.” I gestured authoritatively to my moist, folded printout from the Aetna website.

“Correct.”

“So you accept my insurance, but it does not apply. Tell me…”

“Because it is cosmetic.”

“But you’re also saying that if I don’t do it I will have tooth problems.”

“Your enamel is likely quite worn down,” she said. I considered if there was any way that her statement could be interpreted as a come-on. Unlikely.

“So I could wait until I have a cavity?”

“That wouldn’t be a great idea, sir.”

“What if I came after hours? At another office, they seemed to…” I trailed off, wondering if I’d unwittingly made an advance. My stomach grumbled.

Deftly, she talked me into the dentist’s chair with more cavity fearmongering, and as I lay on my back, an electronic massage and hot towel subdued my homuncular goniff. Perhaps this was why they were five-starred on ZocDoc: the hot towels and comely, fast-talking dental professionals.

The dentist came. Numbed by the chair’s gentle vibrations and the evening news, I watched her approach. The hygienist stood next to me, latex-gloved and beautiful, and I thought about taking her out to pizza. Somewhere classy—not a slice joint: Otto, Barboncino, Roberta’s, maybe.

The dentist’s news, from best to worst:

• I would likely be seeing the beautiful hygienist again.
• Yes, I could eat right afterwards.
• They would take care of everything; just relax.
• They could do the whole shebang tonight.
• There would be a $5 copay.
• The operation would cost $400 dollars.
• To reiterate, my insurance would not cover the cosmetic surgery.
• I will be seeing the beautiful hygienist again because of an overbite that will result in more chipped teeth over the course of my life.
• The beautiful hygienist did not seem into me, possibly because of the overbite.

Yesterday I did some preliminary scouting on the Fei Long food court in Sunset Park, which has generated limited buzz on Chowhound (more on this in a later post). In addition to being a decently sized multi-restaurant emporium, the Fei Long complex is home to a massive supermarket with all kinds of delicious, hard-to-find foods. Unadventurously, I bought none of them. Instead, entranced by a stack of orange Cafe du Monde cannisters, I bought some of the New Orleans-stamped coffee-chicory blend. My brother lives down there, and during a recent visit, I found that Cafe du Monde’s reputation for coffee and begnets is well-earned. Since I can’t afford a plane ticket right now, this was the best I could do:

Now I just need to find some begnets. I think Cheeky Sandwiches has them...

Subsequent cups will be made au lait.

The cadillac of gummy bears: now on a plate

Spent some quality time with this turkey sandwich tonight.

No fancy introduction here. What you’re looking at above is the sandwich I just ate aka Old Faithful:

• Boar’s Head cracked pepper turkey breast
• Rounds of red onion
• Mayonnaise
• Gulden’s brown mustard
• Parsley, finely chopped
• “whole wheat” bread
• Utz’s ridged potato chips (on the side)

With Passover around the corner, I’ve become something like a bear during the lead-up to hibernation. Except instead of eating berries and lost hikers, I’ve been devouring pizza, pasta, and bread—anything made from a grain that will ferment in water (these forbidden granular fruits are known as chametz). I won’t be able to eat any of this stuff during the week following April 6^th, so I’ve been packing it in.

Today, in my drive to eat as much chametz as possible, I have been doing things double. Instead of getting my usual patty from the West Indian place by me, I got a patty sandwiched between two pieces of coco bread. Instead of making a reasonable meal that contains a single starch, I decided to make kasha varnishkes, an Ashkenazi Jewish dish that features “buckwheat groats” and noodles. To seal the deal, I decided to make a double recipe. Go hard or go home.

I'VE GOT KASHA FOR DAYS

By the way, if you’re not familiar with kasha varnishkes, you should be. The buckwheat groats, which have a pleasing toasted flavor, tuck nicely into the folds of the farfalle, and the dish trades in the uncomplicated principles behind most good Jewish cooking: salt, pepper, fat, onions, and large portions. I’ll be missing this one during Passover.

Kasha Varnishkes (this is the single recipe) [via Epicurious/Joan Nathan]

• 2 large onions, sliced in rounds
• 3 tablespoons of butter
• 1 egg
• 1 cup kasha, not too fine
• 2 cups chicken broth
• 3/4 box farfalle
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
• Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a big pan on medium-high. You’re going to end up combing the pasta, onions, and kasha in this pan, so make sure it’s decently sized. Once the butter’s melted, throw in the onions and let them get soft, slightly sweet, and a bit browned. Remove the onions from the pan and stash them in a bowl.

Beat the egg in a mixing bowl, add the kasha, and stir. Make sure that all of the uh… groats?… that is, the kasha bits, are coated in egg. Then, add them to the pan on high. Cook until the kasha isn’t glistening with egg anymore, about 2-5 minutes, making sure that the pieces aren’t sticking together.

Add the onions back into the pan, then pour in the chicken broth. Cover the pan, turn the heat to low, and simmer for around 10-15 minutes. Basically, you cook it down until the kasha has absorbed the liquid and become soft.

At some point during the above process, put a pot of water on to boil and make the farfalle.

Once the kasha is done, combine it with the pasta, add the chopped parsley, stir, and serve. It’s a good idea to have extra parsley on the table. Otherwise you’ll probably find yourself ducking back into the kitchen for more.

Golden fried dumplings from Golden Fried Dumplings.

Through a strange twist of fate/an article assignment, I now know downtown Brooklyn’s culinary landscape better than any other neighborhood’s. But it still feels weird to like…desire to get food in the area. Which is an urge that I’ve been having lately. The other night, for example, I was riding the train home from work, when I realized that I needed dumplings. Badly. Where could I find some that didn’t suck? Without transferring? Downtown Brooklyn, duh, at an undeceptively named place called Golden Fried Dumplings.

Like the majority of Yelp’s five-starred dumpling places, Golden Fried is very inexpensive—they’re four for a dollar. Unlike some of those places, though, Golden Fried’s food is seriously delicious. The first time I went, the fried chive and pork version delivered exactly what I needed, even if the four-pack picked up some Styrofoam flavor while it sat in the warmer. When I visited again, I successfully communicated my desire for fresh dumplings to the clerk [via gesticulation], who told me that this was the unique privilege of those that place orders of 10 ($3). This option appealed to me (since it signed me up to eat a ton of food), and my order of boiled cabbage and pork dumplings, oozing with juice, was the cheapest religious experience I had during February. During my visits, I have also found time/stomach space to try some of the place’s noodle dishes, which are meal-sized and run you $3-4.75. The shredded chicken chow mein’s scallions and crunchy onion slices snap to life when you add some of the chili paste that sits on every table ($4), and the noodles with mashed sesame sauce ($3), a steaming pile of starchy goodness, did me well on a cold, rainy night.

So, hankering for dumplings after a long day at the office, I was crushed to discover that the restaurant’s chicken-cabbage-mushroom dumplings were kind of bad. They display all the signs of being delicious—they’re almost off-menu (publicized on a typo-riddled 8.5” x 11” by the register), they include mushrooms, and they’re fried—but my meal ended up being dull and slightly bitter, a promising third date gone awry.

At any rate, I recommend Golden Fried highly to anyone passing through downtown Brooklyn. Just trust your inner seven-year-old/your friend that had a bad trip: stay away from the mushrooms.

Where to get dumplings in downtown Brooklyn: 192 Duffield Street, Brooklyn NY 11201

When they are open: 10am-9:30pm, seven days a week.

How to get there: take the 2/3 to Hoyt or the A/C, F, or R to Jay Street Metrotech

Funny mug...until you try to drink from it.

In these heady times of ours—these heady times of drone warfare, unstable nuclear programs, and armed food cart robberies—a man does well to return to first principles. As we feel the ground shifting beneath us, we must seek truth.

The most stable of these truths, I have found, involves mugs. It goes something like this:

There are two kinds of horrible mugs.

1. Those huge mugs with loopy handles that are basically just bowls
2. Mugs without handles

Mugs from the first category, which I associate with people like Phoebe on Friends, attempt to flout the rules of physics, and they always fail. For example: despite exposing like 70% of your coffee to the air, these audacious mugs seem to believe that they’ll somehow keep it hot. This is total nonsense: you’ll definitely be drinking something tepid if you go the bowl-mug route. The smart thing to do when you’re served in one of these vessels, it seems, is to drink your coffee as quickly as possible. Oh wait, the mug contains so much liquid—and its stupid, hoop-like handles are so small and unwieldy—that you have to pick the thing up with both hands, as if you were a child. If you try to pick it up with one hand, curling your index finger around the ceramic loop, you end up clumsily using your middle finger to prevent slippage. Horrible.

Mugs from the second category, perhaps because of their rarity, are less enraging to me. They are nonetheless as moronic as their bowlish bretheren: if you were designing a vessel to hold hot liquid, why would you not put a handle on it? The aforementioned laws of physics dictate that the ceramic container will absorb its contents’ heat, which means that your options are a) pick up an insanely hot mug or b) wait to drink coffee. Both are unacceptable.

The mysterious force that drives people to produce and use these things baffles me. I feel like Steve Jobs would agree.

The robber, who wields a handgun, has been described as a white or Hispanic male, aged 20 to 25, 5′ 10″ to 6′ tall and weighing in the neighborhood of 150 to 170 pounds.

Fork in the Road asks anyone with information to contact the Crime Stoppers Hotline at 800-577-TIPS. The public can also log onto the website at NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or can text their tips to 274637(CRIMES), then enter TIP577.

The wall at Cheeky Sandwiches. Whoever did these drawings most assuredly ate delicious sandwiches before, during, and after their installation.

A couple of months ago, I got a series of communiqués from a fellow Sandwich Club member that was scouting on the Lower East Side. She had found Cheeky Sandwiches, a small outfit near Orchard and Hester—the first text messages came fast, furious, and excited.

“I am eating such a good sandwich right now.”

“What kind?”

“Fried chicken.”

“What else is on the sandwich? You need some moisture on that bad boy.”

“I’m not totally sure because EVERYTHING WENT TOGETHER SO SEAMLESSLY. I think there was gravy and cabbage and something had a lot of black pepper.”

Subsequent intelligence reports alerted me to a critical consensus: Cheeky Sandwiches is great. Paging through laudatory reviews online, I grew restless with anticipation. I needed to eat this.

A couple weeks later, I finally got a shot. After a dinner in the East Village, I suggested that the Sandwich Club postgame at Cheeky. A short walk south would stoke our appetites, and we’d have those widely-acclaimed sandwiches waiting for us at the other end. Trekking through the “winter cold” on Allen, the thought of fried chicken sustained me.

Then, devastation:

“We are out of the chicken,” the cook told us.

Sullenly, we tried to reconcile ourselves to the idea of the beef sandwich.

“This is an opportunity to explore the menu,” I said.

“It was positively reviewed.”

In a sign of real class, the sandwich ignored our lukewarm enthusiasm and delivered a stunning, balanced flavor profile. The braised meat, moist and tender, sat between gently sweet pieces of yellow challah. Arugula and tart, halved cherry tomatoes set off a delicate horseradish sauce. Messr. Cheeky, I am sorry for doubting you. This is a serious sandwich for serious people.

I left the restaurant resolved to return, but long, unchickened weeks rolled by. Caught up in work and a couple of outer borough projects, I made my sandwich-loving colleague trek out to Borough Hall to help me assemble a downtown Brooklyn food guide. Like a fool, I scoured Joralemon and Court for passable dinners, all while this sandwich called my name from across the East River.

Then, last night, we returned.

This hot, saucy beast will take your taste buds to delicious new worlds.

The mood was triumphant, but a suspicion nagged: could the fried chicken actually top the beef? The first Cheeky sandwich I ate was one of the best I’ve ever had, and I don’t mean that hyperbolically. I don’t have a list of all-time sandwiches written down, but I keep a mental top ten, and the beef sandwich had definitely unseated one of the po’ boys I ate in New Orleans a while back.

The verdict? Something like a tie.

Let me break the sandwich down: it has a small footprint, but it’s a decent amount of food. A healthily-sized piece of fried chicken is adorned with white country gravy (a worthy mayonnaise substitute) and crunchy red coleslaw. All of this tasty action takes place in between two halves of a buttery biscuit, which somehow hold together through the entire eating process. As any amateur breakfast sandwich cook will tell you, this is no small feat. Despite the restaurant’s laid-back vibe, the biscuits are impeccably fresh. The chicken comes hot, peppery, and perfectly cooked, directly from the fryer (the top of my mouth is actually burned right now). I remind you of the original description:

“EVERYTHING WENT TOGETHER SO SEAMLESSLY.”

So I guess what I’m saying is that my top 10 is now a top 11. Or 12.

Where to get mind-blowing sandwiches: 35 Orchard Street, NYC

How to get there: quickly, hungrily, and via the F to East Broadway. Or the B/D to Grand.