Day 144 - Christmas, Brooklyn-style

So, Dyker Heights isn't a particularly new thing for me. But it's the kind of thing I feel like I never do enough. I get there once every third year or so. There's even less incentive these days now that Lento's amazing, unprepossessing barroom meatsauce pies rather unceremoniously faded into memory a couple of years ago as part of a family dispute. (I just found out that there's a new Staten Island Lento's, apparently of the same family. I'll be checking that out in short order, but it can only go so far since part of the allure was the unchanged--in good ways and bad--1930s Deco barroom.)

But despite Lento's demise (or, at least, relocation), there is a new reason to see the Dyker Heights Christmas lights, and to spend time in Bay Ridge, generally: Tanoreen. This is a Palestinian-owned middle-eastern restaurant on the corner of Third & 77th--just a block-and-a-half from my old Bay Ridge home. Chowhound it and read all of the reviews yourself because they do a much better job than I will in describing individual dishes. All I can implore you to do is to ask the server what's been made on the night that you go that isn't on either the menu or the specials listing. This was one piece of advice we got and my friends and I had the most delicately wonderful lamb sausage in a tangy tomato-sumac sauce. Now a few days on, I get a little weepy just thinking about them.

Tanoreen has no alcohol, but you're welcome to step across the street to Hendrick's wine shop which has what seems like a perfectly serviceable selection of wines--at least to this non-connoisseur. And if you're really feeling old-school after that, you can wander into Mooney's Pub next door. If it's after 10pm, you can even enjoy a cigarette or two or twenty inside. While strangely nostalgic, I remembered when I woke up the next day and smelled my jeans why I so much prefer the smoking ban.

Not the most elegantly executed photo, but possibly my favorite since you get both Christmas AND
the emerald-top of the Verrazano to the right.