A bagel truck is tucking Spam into hand-rolled bagels in LIC

Plus 4 other recommendations for the weekend from Brooklyn and New Jersey

Hey, Rob here. I’m excited to introduce some new writers this week: Alex Leo-Guerrra, AKA @BurgerChild, and Angela Xu, AKA @BrooklynFoodLady.

This week we also have Peter Candia writing about a New Jersey pizza shop (again? haha), Lindsay Paulen writing about udon in Crown Heights, and Mehr Singh tracking the first Sikh American to lead a Michelin-starred kitchen to a taco pop up in Williamsburg.

This column is 100% funded by your subscriptions. Thank you for your support. But with that said, I have turned off the paywall on this column for 2 reasons:

1. I want small businesses to know when they’re being written about, and to be able to read their pieces.

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The Google Map resources will stay behind the paywall, as well as the chat. You can also look forward to some fun subscriber-only content for fans of Martinez & Mu, including an aftershow for season 2.

As always, I am here to listen to feedback and suggestions. Get in touch with me in the chat.

Without further ado! Here’s Alex Leo-Guerra on Rollin’ Bagels, a spot I tried and loved a few weeks ago:

A bagel is as synonymous with New York as pizza, so when a new spot opens, there tends to be hype. Yet Rollin’ Bagels has built its following the old school way: slowly, from its spot outside the Court Square Station, on the northeast corner of 23rd Street and 44th Drive, where regulars congregate for breakfast before work.

Founder Quentin Guntur is a Queens kid. He started making bagels in a Bayside shop at 15 years old, and after falling in love with the process, he never stopped. “Bagels are a quintessential breakfast item for New Yorkers,” he says. “When I was growing up, I ate bagels all the time going to school with my mom. It’s a pure nostalgia food.” With his bagel truck, he’s brought that nostalgia to people in motion.

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Quentin hand-rolls, proofs overnight, and kettle-boils his bagels each day. One bite and you taste the fruits of his labor: a crisp exterior and soft, fluffy interior. When paired with his homemade cream cheeses, they emerge as an ideal start to your day. Order a BECSPK, and you’ll find even more beauty in it all: fluffy eggs, crackly bacon, and the perfect balance of condiments that can make your morning commute feel like a dance.

And then there’s the Spam, an homage to his Korean upbringing. “Spam is a comfort food from growing up — especially for many of us who didn’t grow up rich,” he says. “Having it on a bagel makes it different from everyone else’s. I want them to feel like home when they come to my cart. Friendliness, good product, good taste. That’s something worth coming back to.” No question — once you get a taste, you’ll be back. - Alex Leo-Guerra

📍 Rollin’ Bagels
3 Ct Square W, Long Island City, NY 11101

Alex Leo-Guerra is better known as @burgerchild, and has been eating, mapping, and writing about burgers (and all things food) for over a decade. He believes the best stories in New York start with what’s on your plate, and that the world would be a better place if we ate together more often.

2. NYC’s Best Key Lime Pie

At the very end of Van Dyke St in Red Hook stands a small storefront, a single window serving as a portal to the city’s best key lime pie. Welcome to Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pie. Bright pink flamingos linger by the window, paying homage to owner Steve Tarpin’s hometown of Miami, Florida.

Steve wasn’t always a baker – in the 90s he was working as a carpenter until a back injury took him out of commission. That’s how he started baking out of his apartment on Smith Street. He brought one of his pies to a barbecue where a restaurateur friend asked Steve to bake for his steakhouse. His customer base grew organically as more and more people tasted his pies. At one of those restaurants, a young waitress was falling in love.

“I noticed the pies first,” Steve’s wife Victoria Tarpin giggles. “I fell in love with the pie first.”

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What makes Steve’s pies so special that they could induce marriage? According to Victoria, it comes down to authenticity, which requires great quality ingredients. She shows me their processing facilities where the buttery graham cracker crust is baked fresh, dried, crumbled, and densely packed into tins of various sizes. Nearby, the golden ratio of condensed milk, egg yolks, sugar, and lime juice is mixed into their beautifully balanced custard filling.

The key (pun intended) is the freshly squeezed key lime juice. “Bottled juice is a no-no for Steve,” Victoria explains. In Steve’s words, “it shouldn’t be used for baking, but for stripping paint.” - Angela Xu

📍 Steve's Authentic Key Lime Pie
185 Van Dyke Street

Angela Xu is a curious eater and food storyteller based in NYC. She founded Brooklyn Food Lady in order to share stories at the intersection of food, culture, and community with a focus on amplifying immigrant voices. Her passions include showcasing diverse cuisines, highlighting mom and pop eateries, and exploring the vibrant neighborhoods of New York City.

3. How Eggplant Parm Should Be

Dom Maisano has been in the pizza shop since before he could walk. His father, Carmine, an Italian immigrant, opened Mainline Pizzeria in the 1970s. As soon as Dom was tall enough to see over the counter, he began slinging pies alongside his father, before taking over the business in the early 2000s.

Mainline is a slice shop. A quintessential New Jersey–New York kind of place. Forget the new-school pizzerias with lines around the block and dough recipes that read like scientific papers. It’s places like Mainline that keep the working class of the New York metro fed. Nothing more than you need, nothing less. For all intents and purposes, it’s a classic pizzeria. And here’s the thing about classic Jersey pizzerias: the sandwiches are often just as good as the pizza. Mainline is no exception.

I’ve eaten the eggplant parm here more times than I can count. Like the shop itself, set inside an old-school cablecar diner, the sandwich isn’t complicated: a fresh roll, bright tomato sauce, melty low-moisture mozzarella, and paper-thin slices of breaded, fried eggplant. That’s it. No Parmigiano Reggiano grated on top, no vodka sauce, no fresh mozzarella, no burrata. This is how parms used to be. We’ve strayed too far—it’s time to come home.

The first thing I do after receiving a Mainline eggplant parm is throw on a healthy dose of red pepper flakes, from the shaker that every true slice shop keeps on each table. The cheese stretches, the sauce is laid on thick, but what makes this sandwich the gold standard are the shingles of eggplant inside. Dom slices eggplant on a deli slicer, gives them a drench in egg and bread crumbs, then fries them to a golden crisp. People talk about chicken cutlets needing to be thin—and they’re right—but eggplant cutlets? Even more important.

This sandwich tastes like home. It brings me back to my high school days, grabbing one during my lunch break as a senior. It’s got everything you want, and nothing more. Forget the gimmicks—the viral parms that look better than they taste—this is a real eggplant parm. Why fix something that isn’t broken? - Peter Candia

📍 Mainline Pizzeria
8 Main St, Little Falls Township, NJ 07424

Peter Candia is the Food & Drink Editor at New Jersey Digest.

4. The Udon that Lindsay Almost Gatekept

I honestly debated if I wanted to write about Don Udon; it’s the kind of place that could easily go unnoticed if you aren’t clued in. With only 13 seats inside, all at communal counters, it’s hard to resist gatekeeping a spot like this. But ultimately, I realized it would be a disservice not to write about the bowl of soup that I can't get off my mind.

After luckily snagging the last two spots at the counter, my friend and I placed our orders through a QR menu. Within what felt like seconds, trays of piping-hot udon appeared before us. I got the kitsune udon, topped with a heap of scallions, fish cake and pieces of fried tofu skin, which soaked up the flavors of the rich, umami dashi broth. Unsurprisingly, the noodles were the star: bouncy with a slight chewiness. I opted to get a side of tempura crunch after remembering an udon spot I went to in Tokyo that left containers of the fried batter out on the counters, which added a lovely crunch to an otherwise texturally-delicate dish.

The beauty of a spot like Don Udon is in its simplicity, both in atmosphere and food. The menu is sparse, with only a few offerings outside of udon. For me, this tends to be an indicator that the restaurant is focused on perfecting the craft of a single dish, an approach that I often came across in Japan. This is undoubtedly the case at Don Udon — so much so that I spent a few minutes staring at the bottom of my bowl at the end of my meal, genuinely thinking about if I wanted to order another.

If I lived in Crown Heights, I’d be here more than I’d like to admit, particularly given that a hearty meal from Don Udon is easily under $20. But since I don’t, I'll just spend my days dreaming about the next time I can get another bowl. - Lindsay Paulen

📍Don Udon
634 Park Pl, Brooklyn, NY 11238

Lindsay Paulen is a self-proclaimed food person and writes Lindsay’s List, a twice-monthly Substack that recaps her monthly favorites and chronicles her adventures eating through NYC, from A to Z.

5. A Sikh-American Chef pops up with Tacos

It’s an exciting time for Chef Jassimran Singh. Earlier this summer, the executive chef of Crown Shy became the first Sikh American to lead a Michelin-starred kitchen, filling the late Jamal James Kent’s formidable shoes.

Singh grew up in Old Delhi, where labyrinthine lanes specialize in different kinds of chaat: the umbrella term for lip-puckering street snacks that are a jolt to all five senses. Last week, he brought this signature sensibility to New York’s expanding taco scene through a pop-up with Enrique Olivera’s Esse Taco.

The menu included a lamb shoulder asada with a cucumber pico de gallo that nodded to kachumbar, a flaken short rib raco with Kashmiri chilli, an aloo tikki chaat-nacho hybrid with broken bits of aloo tikki (potato fritters) zapped with mint chutney, and more. “[Nachos and chaat] are the same but with different components for texture, flavor, and heat, and, most importantly, the same cultural regard as a snack, not tied to a hierarchy of food,” Singh said.

Despite all these incredible, meaty tacos, the sleeper hit was the saag paneer tetela, which was also Singh’s favorite. Lush spinach saag and paneer filled the triangular blue masa pockets, and fried until crisp. Rich, savory, and crisp, the same satisfaction as a samosa but with an explosive filling. He cited Punjabi makki (corn) rotis with sarson (mustard greens) da saag as the inspiration behind the dish, and made fresh paneer in-house. “I wanted to do quesadillas, but Milton [Revilla] showed me tetelas, which eat really well…I added paneer to keep the quesadillas’ essence with cheese,” Singh said.

If this pop-up proves anything, it’s that Singh’s genius lies not only in flavor but in translating the street food energy of Delhi into a decidedly New York bite. - Mehr Singh

📍Esse Taco
219 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Mehr Singh is a food writer and recipe developer from New Delhi, India. Her work appears in The New York Times, Grub Street, Resy, Eater, and other publications.