Issue 15a: Special edition!
A mini newsletter about food in Jersey City
Hello! As promised, here’s a mini version of the newsletter with some food places discussed, since I keep running out of room with the weekly one to get to them. I’ll be back on Sunday morning with more news and stuff going on, but I did want to sneak some food stuff your way. — Amy
To me, the most boring kind of place to eat is one that feels like it has dutifully checked off all the boxes on How To Build A Successful Restaurant: big, sweeping space (check), tasteful decor (check), polite and accommodating but ultimately mostly-invisible staff (check), good-looking patrons (check), food that hits upon some kind of trend everyone is talking about (check). That, my friends, is sad — it’s nice to occasionally stop by a place like that and feel rewarded for recognizing all the things on the list (ooh, I have good taste!), and never have to make any sort of real decision in your mind about: do I actually like this place? Is it interesting? Is this experience fun? Is the food actually good? Does any of this matter?
What I like most about a place to eat is the sense that I am in a space that couldn’t exist anywhere else. I understand that by now, it’s probably impossible to find any place that is so totally unique that it exists completely on its own and without comparison to other similar places, but these things come in degrees. Ok, maybe you don’t find a place utterly original, but you can definitely find something out there that is specific to the time and place in which you’re visiting it; that reflects the personalities of the people running it and the customers that frequent it. That’s what I always look for.
So, here goes on a few Jersey City places — some that exist now, some that we’ve lost — that are pretty special. Is the food the best in the world? Who cares. That’s not what I’m looking for.
Samosa Paradise
The Indian restaurants on Newark Avenue between JFK and Tonnele represent some of the absolute best that Jersey City has to offer1, and this has been the case for the 25+ years I’ve been here. Some of them are true holes-in-the-wall, others are much more upscale. It’s hard to get a truly bad meal on this strip, with the restaurants running the gamut from “ok” to “fantastic.”
This past winter, much beloved local vegetarian place Sapathagiri moved in with Vaibhav further up Newark Ave, leaving their small restaurant space to eventually become Samosa Paradise. Now, samosas being one of my very favorite things in the entire world, I was beside myself waiting for it to open. When it did, it was glorious: their samosas are homemade (most restaurants on Newark Ave use frozen, pre-made samosas) and super fresh. The one I had was bursting full of mint flavor mixed in with the delicately cubed potatoes. Oh, and they were huge. Please do not ask why I walk around with a picture from back in January of one of their samosas saved on my phone, but trust that I do:
I’ve stopped in a few times, and I’m sad to say the recipe has changed a bit. There’s still bits of green in there, and they’re still very fresh (often right out of the oil so that it soaks through the bag they put it in), but the mint isn’t at the forefront anymore. The other spices are toned down as well, but the pastry remains perfectly flaky. I feel safe saying they’ve gone from the samosas of my dreams to just good, decent samosas, which isn’t bad.
One thing of note — they are now bigger:
Look, I don’t know what kind of decision-making went into making them even bigger than they were before — did anyone actually complain they weren’t big enough before? But now they have a special deal where you can get two for $4 or THREE for $5 which, by the time you ate three, you would be dead. It’s just not possible. There must be an entire potato in each one.
You walk into the place and almost inevitably, Family Feud is on TV. Except for tonight, when I stopped by and this weird karaoke channel was playing, featuring a woman with a thin, tinny voice performing a much too cheerful version of Blinded By the Light. Her song mixed in with the voice of the guy behind the counter screaming on the phone:
“Oooooh! I’m blinded by the light…!”
“Look, I told you, you have the wrong man. I am not the owner!! — I told the owner all about you and there’s nothing I can do, nothing — hello? HELLO?!”
I ordered my two giant samosas and waited — the wait was a good sign, because that means they were coming up fresh. The guy kind of stomped around a bit and eventually emerged from the back with a greasy bag, heavy with samosas. He looked like he was going to cry or scream. He shoved the bag my way. Then he stared into my soul.
“Look. You like our samosas? Do you?” Uh, sure? He was staring at me, his eyes filled with sadness and rage and hopelessness. “Ok look, go on Google and leave us a review there, ok? Tell people you like our samosas. Please.” Pause. “You want green sauce?”
Anyway. It seemed pretty clear to me some former customer was being a jerk to them, so soon as I got home, I did as I promised:
Look, was it really five stars? No, probably not, but you know how things are — if you don’t give five stars, the poor restaurant really suffers. And the truth is, it’s a $2 samosa. Like, give me a break. Some person sits back there all day, making a batch of these things, frying them up, starting again with a new batch. You go in, you pay your $4 for two and get enough food it can pass for dinner, you listen to some really bad pre-recorded karaoke, and you’re good to go. Can we please stop expecting every single meal we consume to be the greatest event ever?
Anyway, go to Samosa Paradise, and get a couple of samosas. They’re good.
The ghosts of restaurants past
The McGinley Square Burger King has finally closed. You wouldn’t be wrong for thinking, “so what? there’s a million Burger Kings around. This completely defeats your opening statement about loving places that are really unique.” Yeah well, you would only say that if you’d never been to the McGinley Square Burger King. I was able to get some pictures of it from outside on the sidewalk and behold:
You might be thinking that a lot of its pathetic charm comes from it looking sad and lonely now that it’s closed, but I assure you: this is what it looked like when it was open. The Burger King was in a large, wide space right on Montgomery Street, and that space — at least in the times that I went there (which, granted, was always pretty late at night) never had more than a couple of people in it ever. In fact, when I first saw people online complaining it was closed, I just figured they mistook the usual way it looks for being out of business. Alas, this is not the case.
It was decorated with this weird, retro pink and green decor that looked like someone really depressed who lived in the 1980s took a lot of bad drugs and decided to decorate their home like they imagined Miami was like in the 1950s, having never actually been to Miami or really having ever left the house before in their life:
Every time I went there, I felt this sense of dread that I associated with my imminent death, but it’s a little hard to pinpoint where that feeling was coming from. It just seemed like the kind of place where multiple murders had taken place. Anyway, it was awesome. It was considerably cheaper than NYC Burger Kings, and you could sit there for a while nursing what you had bought if you needed to get into some air conditioning or sober up before the long walk home.
The closing of this Burger King follows the closing of the one on 440, which had an insane retro “Hollywood” theme — imagine framed pictures of random celebrities that haven’t been relevant since circa 1985 (half the fun of that place was going there and wondering, “who the hell is that?”). I wish I had pics of that one, but I don’t — it is now transforming into a perfectly normal Jollibee.
New coffeeshop opens
I have not yet been, but this place comes highly recommended by a friend.
JSQ is really lacking in nice places to sit down and have a meeting. There’s Mod Cup on Senate, but that’s a little far out from the station if you’re meeting someone coming in from NYC. Emma’s right in the station serves up some great food, but doesn’t open til the afternoon. The JSQ Starbucks is kind of the go-to, and while I tend to consider it the Greatest Starbucks Ever (look, the baristas there are just really, really awesome and kind; the same people have worked there for years and they know my name and my boring order the second I walk in the door), it can get mobbed.
Enter Belle Ame, which is a sleek looking coffeeshop connected to a new fancy-schmancy building that went up recently on Cottage Street. I’m frankly a little turned off by quite how fancy they are — it looks more like Dean & Deluca than what I’m used to in JSQ — but I’m willing to give them a try. And remember, this is in a neighborhood where there’s nothing really like that, so it is nice to have the option. If every place in the Square was super fancy-schmancy I might push back, but this is an outlier, so I’m into it. Plus I hear the breakfast sandwiches are really good, and I am quite the breakfast sandwich girl. They have pretty limited hours, maybe just because they’re new, so I haven’t been able to catch it when it’s open but I hope to soon.
Canton Tea Garden (RIP)
I was tickled to realize that the newly reopened JSQ Lounge has a cocktail named after the Canton restaurant:
What, you mean you didn’t live here twenty years ago and don’t get the reference? Or maybe you’re sick to death of hearing the old timers talk about how cool the Canton was? Either way, humor me.
We first moved here in the mid 1990s. At the time, there wasn’t a whole lot going on in Journal Square (well there still isn’t, but there was even less at the time) or really anywhere else in JC. But one night I was up extra late and happened to catch a random public access show where the host mentioned being in Jersey City. Delighted at the (at the time exceedingly rare) mention of where I was living, I tracked the guy down (ok, I stalked him) and invited him out to get drinks with me and my husband.
You have to remember that at this time, it was so rare to meet another person who was our age, doing weird arty things to the point where they have a public access show, and also living in JC that it was pretty reasonable (really!) to reach out and connect with this other person and be like “omg we should be friends.” I mean, he didn’t hesitate. The guy we connected with was born and raised in JC, and he invited us out to the Canton.
The Canton was like a whole other world. Located where the Bally’s Total Fitness is currently on Bergen Avenue, it was elegant and regal in a neighborhood in the midst of complete decay and collapse:
Built in 1930 and really not changed ever since (imagine if you will, a restaurant that appealed to American sensibilities of what a Chinese restaurant should look like, circa 1930, so lots and lots of Orientalism, almost to an absurd extent), the Canton Restaurant offered that hint of glamor I now snarl at with more recent places that open. The space was vast, the waiters — holdovers from many years — were elderly and surly. We would go and drink there, and often be the only people in the whole place.
Friends of mine who are older than I am remember it in its prime, and that it was a place that you went to celebrate landmark days — birthdays, graduations — in style. They talk about how wonderful the food was and the bright white tablecloths that graced the many tables, and how proud they were to go with their family to celebrate occasions there.
By the time we hit the Canton in the late 1990s, it was on its last legs — not that we ever thought it would close since it was such an institution. But it was ailing — just creeping along, barely staying open, still beautiful. The waiters seemed annoyed we’d shown up, maybe just wanting to take off early for the evening. It was perfection.
The food — described by so many of my slightly older friends as amazing — was, by the time we got there, horrendous. We’re talking stale wontons, and well, that’s all I wish to get into. There were some things. I don’t dare speak too ill of the Canton, but it was not doing well by that time, and it was obvious.
Their bar, however, was rocking. They had a Tiki bar2, with ridiculous sugary sweet drinks (The Volcano — for two!) and that’s what we ordered. And we could hang out there and regale our new, weird public access friend (who actually wasn’t really that weird — he was just a young filmmaker looking for an outlet for his work) and smoke cigarettes and have a great time. As opposed to the other bars in the area, it was completely safe from any kind of creepy harassment from weird guys. It was chill.
Anyway. The Canton was our salvation. And one day I was walking home a few years later and saw it being gutted. It ended quickly and with little fanfare, which is odd for a place so near and dear to people’s hearts. The absolute heartbreak, from the Hudson Reporter at the time:
“Once word of mouth spread in the Chinese-American community, there were a number of people interested in the restaurant,” said Pang, “until they would ask about available parking.”
That impediment along with evaluating the location turned off those same interested buyers. By late August, arrangements were made to file for bankruptcy.
Ugh. From that same article:
Canton was originally named the Hudson Royal. In 1932, Dan Fong and a partner, Dick Leung, took over the restaurant and renamed it in honor of their birthplace: Canton, China.
The Tea Garden moniker was added later to compete with another Journal Square restaurant, the Plaza Tea Gardens.
When Fong and Leung took over the management of Canton, they intended to create a place for dining and dancing that would mirror what existed in New York City. But after a dance floor was built, the two owners were advised that then-Mayor Frank Hague had enacted a law banning dancing in restaurants. So the dance floor existed only as part of the décor.
The restaurant, over the years, served generations who came for the experience of eating Chinese food prepared and served as if the customer was having dinner in a home on the Chinese mainland.
Many longtime Jersey City and Hudson County residents, on hearing that Canton closed, lamented the passing of an era when Journal Square was the center of night life across the river from New York City.
Joyce Laterra, a native of Union City, recalled that when she would go on dates with her future husband in the 1960s, “We would go to the Canton, which was the big restaurant in Journal Square.”
Laterra added, “The ambience of the place you can’t forget.” She said she grew up listening to stories of her parents’ courtship taking place during multiple visits to the Canton.
Ughhhhh. I can’t believe we let this place just go and become a gym (which is now out of business).
But, that’s Jersey City.
Anyway. See you all on Sunday. RIP, Canton Tea Garden. I love you forever.
I’m often asked for recommendations and I’d suggest: Rasoi for all around great food (if their lunch buffet comes back post-COVID YOU MUST GO!!!), and Sapathagiri for vegetarian stuff. Dosa Hut is a good, cheap grab-and-go place if you’re in the mood for South Indian street food. But really, try them all. Every restaurant on the strip is an experience. I’ve had a few meals here and there that were maybe a little too oily or just not my taste, but nothing ever bad. And everything there is a bargain.
Are Tiki bars inherently racist? I’m still not sure.
Paradise East was another great Jersey City Tiki Bar. It was on 440 at Danforth, where the Wonder Bagels is now. Different ambiance than Canton - not as darkly lit and sexy, but still plenty fancy! Their flaming volcanos and pupu platters were a big draw for family fun and celebrations. And for my friends and me, there was also the underage drinking they never hesitated to endorse. Good ole Paradise East!