A tasty tour

I had to drop Natalie at Newark Airport today to send her on her way back to Alaska. It was of course sad, but it is good to release her back into the wilds so she can keep flourishing. We had had a good visit, it was time.

From there I hustled into Newark's Ironbound neighborhood, a longtime stronghold of a Portuguese community to have lunch at the Iberian Restaurant, a classic old Portuguese place, where I had basically a paella and also nibbled some on my friend Larry's mixed grill platter. As lunches go, it was excessive. From there I hauled ass out to Bedminster where I met my old colleague Hemant for coffee at a place called Taekwon Coffee, a small coffee shop in the front of a laundromat. All good.

Then I hustled back up 287 and across the Hudson before rush hour got really bad. As I pulled into the driveway I got a text from Mary informing me that she had no plans for dinner, which was convenient as we had been discussing getting pizza from this place La Manda's, a classic pizzeria founded in 1927 or so about 7 minutes from George's house that somehow nobody had ever noticed until my keen eye espied it on the way back from Rockefeller State Park a year or so ago. Natalie, George and I had checked out its fare last summer and had found it to be delish. As a place, it's just what one would expect viewing it from the street, all ancient booths and pine-paneled walls, as if striding straight from the pages of the Hardy Boys.

But they had messed up our order. I had ordered a cheeseless pie for Graham, and they had made one with cheese. So the manager or owner came and told me they had messed it up and it would be about 8 minutes more. Then he got me a drink, started asking me about Graham's allergy. I told him how much I loved the place and when he heard I was from NC, he told me about his best buddy who had moved down to Cary and started a small network of ATMs and then had flipped some houses... In no time the pizza was ready. And he even threw in the mistake pizza for free. All in all, it was perfect hospitality, really the high point of the day. Good service, turned a potentially negative situation into pure positive.