Philly.Com
By Joel S. Denker for the Inquirer
Posted June 27, 1999
Newark, NJ—The Portuguese counterman plunges a three-foot stalk of sugarcane into the hole of the juicing machine. He pours the juice into glasses and we sample the mildly sweet refreshment. It’s morning in the Ironbound, a vibrant Portuguese enclave, only a block’s walk from Newark’s Amtrak station. I had come to rediscover its European flavors and to introduce my wife to the neighborhood byways.
I had persuaded her to forsake the predictable breakfast of our hotel, which conveniently adjoined the station. Instead, we stopped in front of Play Ball, a storefront restaurant that had caught my eye on previous excursions. My wife cringed at its shabby exterior. Reluctantly she followed me through the door where we found a clean Latin luncheonette full of baseball memorabilia, bats, gloves, photographs of famous players.
The previous owner, a Cuban, was responsible for the baseball motif. The new management carried over many of his menu items. Play Ball offered customers a media noche, the grilled ham, pork, and cheese sandwich, a “midnight” Cuban pleasure. Also featured was a Cuban burger, a hamburger topped with shredded fried potatoes.
The lunch counter’s drawing card is its repertoire of “batidos,” tropical fruit shakes made from tamarind, papaya, spicy soursop leaves, pineapple, passion fruit, banana, and other flavors. Brazilians, the Ironbound’s latest arrivals, were fanatic about sugar cane juice and the fruit drinks of their homeland.
Like the Ironbound neighborhood itself, Play Ball is a place of constant ethnic flux. The eatery, whose owner had previously waited tables in a nearby Portuguese restaurant, catered to an Iberian as well as a Caribbean and South American clientele. The densely packed village, an area of 4.5 square miles, has pulled in a succession of newcomers seeking jobs in factories and construction. Irish, Italians, and Poles settled there in the nineteenth century. Preceded by Spaniards and Cubans, Portuguese immigrants poured in during the 1960s and 1970s. Newark is now home to the country’s second largest Portuguese colony (the Fall River-New Bedford, Massachusetts concentration is the biggest).
The early immigrants called the neighborhood Down Neck because of its position along the Passaic River. Enclosed on three sides by railroad tracks and on one side by factories, this urban island today is appropriately named Ironbound.
The Portuguese have infused this section of long, narrow streets, squat frame houses, machine shops, and garages with an old world conviviality. Men congregate on street corners, in front of bars, cafes, and restaurants, and gather in social clubs based on village ties (Iron Bound has more than fifty such societies). Women assemble in front of Lady of Fatima, the dominant Catholic church, to meet their children coming from parish school.
Start at Play Ball and stroll along Ferry Street, the community’s main commercial road. You will feel transplanted to an intimate European village. Signs in Portuguese announce a multitude of enterprises—law offices, travel agencies, pharmacies, real estate offices, jewelry stores, a dentist, a urologist—to provide for locals’ every need. Food shops nurture nostalgic immigrants and tantalize a visitor’s fancy. Bakeries display loaves of sweet bread, a festival treat that has evolved into a favorite morning repast. Coutinho, Texeira, and other stores sell broa, the crusty corn bread, a mainstay of the Portuguese diet.
A visit to one of Ironbound’s fish markets reveals a Portuguese shopping ritual. We watched as housewives inspected sardines, mackerel, grouper, and the stacks of dried cod, the bacalau that are used in countless dishes. Fresh fish are flown in from Portugal for sale on Thursdays and the next day’s meatless meals.
Groceries showcase glistening plums, nectarines, oranges, and other fresh produce. Shoppers come in search of fresh coriander, the tangy herb that the early Portuguese explorers brought back from Asia. This, their most widely used spice, flavors soups, salads, vegetables, and other dishes. Piri piri (pronounced “peedi peedi”), the tiny Angolan peppers, are another exotic legacy of the imperial age. Originally grown in Brazil, the chilies were taken by the Portuguese to their African colony. A fiery marinade for grilling shrimp and chicken was made from the peppers. Returning settlers introduced the sauce to their homeland. Piri piri has since found its way on to the grocery shelves of the Ironbound and the other new Portuguese settlements.
There were other sights to see in the neighborhood food outlets. A sales clerk puts large green leaves of kale through a shredding machine. Kale is a key ingredient in caldo verde (green soup), the celebrated Portuguese national dish. Chorizo, the popular spicy sausage used in caldo verde, hangs from hooks in butcher stores. Store coolers offer up serra cheeses, the goat milk products that come from Portugal’s mountainous north.
Ferry Street has a Brazilian flavor, too. Brazilian bakeries, bars, restaurants, and cafes have invaded the Portuguese stronghold. We even spotted a Brazilian-Japanese eatery just off the main drag. Churasquerias, Brazilian barbecue houses that were transplanted to Portugal, dot the avenue. (A churro is a large open grill.) Portuguese and Brazilian expatriates alike flock to restaurants like Brasilia that advertise the rodizio, an all-you-can-eat feast of grilled meats. Waiters carry long skewers of pork loin, chicken, beef, and sausage around to each table, slicing off pieces to order. The festive crowd devours plates of barbecue, beans and rice, fried bananas, and french fries. The initiated spoon a vinegary tomato and onion sauce on their dishes and sprinkle them with farofa, a cassava meal resembling parmesan cheese, from shakers on the table.
The Ironbound is overflowing with dining rooms, more than fifty restaurants that represent the full range of Portuguese cooking, from caldeirada, the fisherman’s stew, to piri piri chicken. We headed up Ferry to Sol e Mar, a neighborhood restaurant I had chanced on during a previous expedition. We passed locals sitting outside their flats in the muggy evening in lawn chairs. The path to this hideaway was a crazy quilt of apartments, bars, groceries, and cafes. I had often dug up restaurant gems in such inauspicious surroundings.
Our destination stood opposite a shopping center parking lot. Inside the restaurant, a lovely square bar was covered with blue and white tiles. Workmen ate their meals and chatted animatedly at the bar. Couples and extended families sat at the surrounding dining tables. Two television sets played over head, one broadcasting a Yankee game, the other a Portuguese program.
While we nibbled on a complimentary lettuce and tomato salad and munched on padas, crunchy rolls, we surveyed a menu that listed such traditional specialties as boiled tile fish, breaded baby goat chops, and beef stew. For a starter, we chose a simple red bean soup over such tempting appetizers as steamed little neck clams fragrant with olive oil, garlic, and parsley. The soup was a tasty Portuguese minestrone, a chicken broth laden with pasta, cabbage, and carrots. Our waiter then brought out our main course, a mammoth portion of pork chops suffused in garlic, adorned with black olives, pickled carrots, and cauliflower. Dinner came with the classic batatas fritas, wafer-thin fried potato chips. We were sated. This was hearty, village cooking.
In Portuguese tradition we followed dinner with a cafe. Delicia, my favorite, is a combination pastelaria (pastry shop) and gathering place. Women with baby carriages enjoy conversation and morning coffee and patrons at night watch Portuguese soap operas and soccer matches. Behind the counter are newspapers with the latest sports scores from back home. The display cases are filled with egg yolk sweets, quintessentially Portuguese confections that were created by nuns in convent kitchens. We gazed at rice pudding, cakes, flan, and coconut cups. We ended our Iberian sojourn, savoring pasteis de nata, the rich, creamy custard cups, and cappuccino.
