Hackensack, NJ Community Message Boards
General Category => Hackensack Discussion => Topic started by: Editor on August 24, 2005, 05:23:05 PM
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Latest article: Diverse, lively restaurants dress up Hackensack (http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2MTUmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTY3NTMyOTMmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkxNQ==)
While I don't want to detract from the more positive side of this article, this is worth noting:
Merchants say Main Street has the makings of a lively restaurant row, but customers find the parking tight and the presence of the homeless unsettling
Also, the following is from Bergen County briefs (http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkzJmZnYmVsN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2NzU0MTEx) August 25, 2005 which discusses the expansion of Bergen Mall.
The $102 million proposal calls for the shopping center to get a new facade reminiscent of a "Main Street..."
Why not shop at the "real thing"? Main Street Hackensack!!!
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My comment is not really about the issue of the homeless but rather the article on the diversity of the restaurants on Main Street. What a great story. About a month ago, I was listening to radio station WBLS FM. The DJ mentioned that Queen Latifah would be opening a restaurant in Hackensack. Has anyone heard anything on the subject? I know that Latifah has ties to Hackensack and this could possibly be true.
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I understand a restaurant named Mangos has opened on Main Street. I am told this is the restaurant owned by Queen Latifah. Has anyone heard if this is true? Maybe the answer to lower Main Street is to make it a restaurant-night club row like those in Hoboken. Parking in the municipal garage could be used to accomodate those businesses after a certain hour.
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Mango's Menu
(http://www.hackensacknow.com/Menus/Mangos5.jpg)
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Thank you for the menu. I went to the restaurant tonight. The food is great and the prices are low.
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Ate at Mango's tonight. You have no idea when you walk past the place just how pretty it is in the back. This place competes with the most trendy restaurants in Hoboken. Great food, great ambiance, great service. We need more businesses like it on Main Street.
This picture and another one like it hang in the lower level:
(http://artforafterhours.com/files/ah_hackensack_sessions.jpg)
'Hackensack Sessions' by Allan Hill.
Notice the words "Blue Note" toward the bottom of the painting.
Blue Note was/is a jazz record company that Van Gelder engineered for. Van Gelder had a home studio that recorded Blue Note artists. For more about the Hackensack Jazz scene, click here (http://www.hackensacknow.org/forums/index.php/topic,453.0.html).
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A food festival is a great idea. There are so many nations represented in food on Main St, and the shop owners are lovely.
They have been more than happy to explain what to do with foods customers are unfamiliar with. I spent one Saturday about a year ago just shopping the different stores and felt like I was on vacation, except for a few minor incidents. Some of the stores were filthy, however, and when the International Food Warehouse opened up on Essex, that became my preference. I've shopped the farmer's market on Berry and Main, but often that is filthy, too. Great fish market and unique salad bar, but it cannot be relied upon for fresh produce and the stench in the parking lot and recently at entrance on main street is disgusting. I prefer the market down Route 17 in Rutherford.
Before I got involved with the homeless, I often took a spin down Main Street because I liked the quaint look and the diversity of Hackensack, and thought there was so much more that could be done with the town. There are\were no attractive stores for me (as far as clothing and home decor), however, and parking was bad. The parking behind Aylwards is treacherous, and Vitamin Shoppe offers a lot of the same stuff at lower prices.
The few difficult encounters I had were actually with people at the head injury treatment office. A young man followed me, asking for a date. I coincidentally met him again at a flea market, where he was accompanied by a social worker and several peers. Depending on what part of the brain has been injured, some of these patients have poor impulse control, and can be frightening to passers-by. No one mentions these patients spending prolonged periods of time on Main Street. Do people think they are homeless? They're not.
No one brings up other deterrents for shoppers, such as the Riviera Lounge crowd. What was a bigger problem for me were the few guys hanging outside the Riviera Lounge. These are not homeless people. How many outsiders will come to a neighborhood with a go-go bar in the middle of it? Women don't really feel all that comfortable walking past people who have been drinking.
I like Aladdin Restaurant and the nearby Colombian bakery's coffee, but avoid parking near the mental health office up on Ward and Main because sometimes the clients are foul-mouthed, some are no longer in charge of their finances and then they panhandle. Parking stinks up in this area.
There ARE several homeless people who help out at the cheap liquor store way down Main St. One tall, thin, guy with long hair can be spotted in doorways. He's severely schizophrenic, but harmless. He doesn't belong on the street.
My friend, a general manager for a large store in Edgewater, is taking a continuing ed course at Ciarco and while on break, checked out a building for sale. "John" who works or owns a wireless tech business saw her and gave her a guided tour of the neighborhood, including Mango's (Qu. Latifah's Mom's place). She really appreciated his efforts. She also feels that with the current immigration debate that the diverse population in Hackensack is a deterrent, as she watched all the ESL students exiting onto the streets. While she and I might love the Peruvian, Ecuadorean and Mexicans we meet, I'll bet their all being classified as illegal immigrants, just like anyone who doesn't look like the rest of us is being classified as homeless. You won't find too many homeless people in Hackensack in these ethnic backgrounds either.
Hackensack's shopping district has problems other than the homeless and it should stop using them as their scapegoat. It serves the poor population and the office workers of Hackensack and unless the businesses clean up their acts and people actually get to know who is hanging out on their streets, it will continue to attract the same kinds of shoppers.
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The Chamber of Commerce looked into this idea as a "Taste of Hackensack."
As I understand it, the street is closed for a festival like this allowing people to easily cross to go from one restaurant to the next. It's very problematic to close Main St. and the City has to charge for additional police overtime (as all other towns do too). Closing the street can also hurt other businesses.
Perhaps this could work without closing the street. There could be a day where restaurants simply set up a small "food sample table" on the curb for passers by that would also include menus.
I also understand that the Blue and Gold have planned a "taste of" at Riverside Square Mall for 07 and will probably seek to include many on Main.
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This IS a great idea.
Couldn't Main St be more easily closed on a Sunday when all the other businesses HAVE to close? I don't think a full-fledged food festival would be as successful if the street was open - business as usual - and oh-by-the-way, there are some tables with food samples scattered about. That won't draw big crowds.
It would require some other entertainment activities to fill the street gaps and draw more people, but as an international cuisignoramus, I would prefer to sample the many different foods in this manner rather than make believe that I'll actually make the effort to dine at all of the restaurants someday.
I would also much prefer to associate the foods with the restaurants IN FRONT OF the restaurants for future reference rather than at an off-Main St location where the food may be memorable, but the restaurant location wouldn't be. I would think the restaurants would prefer that too.
I would also think that their chefs would prefer to do this on-premise, where all their preparation materials would be, rather than schlep a truckful of things to a mall.
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Saturday afternoons are pretty quiet on Main St. A food festival could be done in conjunction with a sidewalk sale.
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El Potrero Grill is now located at Pfeiffers on Main Street. You'll remember Potrero Grill's Mercer and Moore location burned.
American and Mexican Food at the new location. It's great. Stop by.
Will post menu when I get it.
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Why can't the City apply the same security and safety measures used in the past for parades. I know we have not had parades recently but if cost is the problem, maybe the local Chamber of Commerce can kick in on the security. It would be beneficial to both the City and the merchants. The street could be closed on Saturday between 12 and 5 pm and all of the restaurants and merchants on Main Street could participate. It would be similar to the Harlem Festival held in the City in August. 125th Street is closed down and the merchants and restaurants sell their products. If cost is still a problem, charge outside vendors as we do on the 4th of July.
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What happened to Pfeiffers?
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Pfeiffers is operating as usual during the day, but with Mexican Food as well.
At night and on weekends, it's just Mexican. 215 Main Street.
Related post: Fire at Potrero (http://www.hackensacknow.org/forums/index.php/topic,611.0.html)
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Today's Chronicle list an article where the City will host a street festival in the Upper Main Street area hosted by the Upper Main Street Alliance. This is what we have been suggesting for the lower end of Main Street which has been neglected. It can be done.
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Latest story: Another life calls, and deli owners cut their ties to Main Street (http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkzJmZnYmVsN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2OTUxOTgw)
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Further proof that something needs to be done about lower Main Street is the recent closing of The Stealth.
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Why and when did the Stealth close?
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Latest stories: Starters: Sayat Nova in Hackensack (http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkxNSZmZ2JlbDdmN3ZxZWVFRXl5NzA3NzM3OA==)
Eating Out on $50: The Cheesecake Factory (http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkxNSZmZ2JlbDdmN3ZxZWVFRXl5NzA3NzMwNQ==)
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Bangkok Garden in Hackensack (http://www.northjersey.com/food_dining/Eating_Out_Bangkok_Garden_in_Hackensack.html)
UNG: Bangkok Garden in Hackensack
Friday, October 9, 2009
By ELISA UNG
RESTAURANT REVIEWER
Vivid flavors of Thailand right in the neighborhood
Like many of us, Suramitr "Sammy" Suwanarusk was tired of driving around. He was a supervisor for a group of 10 convenience stores and got to thinking that life would be simpler if he had a job closer to his Hackensack home and to his wife, Yupin, who worked at their beauty salon on Main Street.
As it happened, his sister-in-law, Chureerat Lolak, was a cook to be reckoned with.
"Come on, let's open a restaurant," she proposed back then. "This way, everyone will be working in one place." So they remodeled a former French restaurant that had sat vacant for a few years, turning it into the family business, Bangkok Garden.
It opened in January 1990 and will soon celebrate its 20th anniversary as a special Bergen County institution — a restaurant still owned and operated by the family that opened it, still run out of the same Main Street location and still having the same work ethic that finds Suwanarusk regularly shopping for fish and vegetables himself at the New Fulton Fish Market and other spots in Hunt's Point in the Bronx.
Over the years, Bangkok Garden has evolved from one of the few Thai restaurants in the region into a popular, ideal neighborhood restaurant — one with solid food, polite staff and plenty of room to handle groups (the main dining room and newly remodeled back room together seat 95). And for those who like it spicy, there is the restaurant's well-known spice system: zero is no spice, 10 is the hottest. On average, customers go for 7. (One customer once requested 30, which the kitchen served but did not taste beforehand; it turned out that the customer used to grow chilis in his back yard.)
A warning: Except for the massamon, curry dishes cannot be ordered at zero because they have a chili base. And the foundation of all of Bangkok Garden's curries is canned and imported from Thailand — though the deep flavor of our panang curry with coconut milk seemed no worse for the wear. We ordered it over a whole striped bass ($24.95), deep-fried to crispy, yet still light.
A special of "three flavor duck" ($20.95) — a half duck, roasted then deep-fried — was topped with a sauce that rang with clear chili, garlic and tamarind notes. And salads and soup were where we found some of the most vivid flavors — a papaya salad ($7.95) countered the chilis with cool shreds of fresh papaya, and a roasted duck salad ($11.95) was a deft combination of crispy bright and spicy with orange slices, cashews and shreds of ginger, along with chili and coriander. Tom kah gai ($4.50 for a small), the classic, soothing coconut milk soup, was gently flavored with kaffir lime and cilantro. And spicy fried rice ($9.95), with distinct fresh ground chili and Thai basil flavors, is an excellent complement to the meal.
We did encounter a few duds. "Thai bar-b-q beef" ($10.95), one of the many items called "famous" on the menu, was bland and stringy, pad Thai ($9.95) came with overcooked shrimp and the "Bangkok combination" appetizer plate ($12.95) was a collection of unnotable fried items.
Dessert is unnecessary, though the classic pairing of very ripe, very sweet mangoes with sticky rice ($4.95) did not disappoint. Fried bananas ($3.95) tasted rather raw and firm; those who prefer less-sweet desserts may enjoy the squares of grainy Thai custard made with mung bean ($2.95). Fragrant jasmine tea is complimentary.
Suwanarusk encourages customers to speak up if something's not to their liking. He'll tell you all about his sister-in-law's initial heavy hand with the sugar — it's long been quelled, but now Suwanarusk has a nephew working on the weekends who he fears may be following suit. Says Suwanarusk in his characteristically cheerful manner: "If you feel the dish is a little different than normal, let us know, we can correct it."
Judging from a recent packed Friday night, you wouldn't know his business has slowed this year, but with food like this, it's bound to pick up again soon.
E-mail: ung@northjersey.com
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Best of 2009 at North Jersey restaurants (http://www.northjersey.com/food_dining/North_Jersey_restaurants_hits_and_misses.html)
Most vibrant flavors: The roasted duck salad at Bangkok Garden in Hackensack...