only in ny #3: snack shop

  

snack: snickers cupcake
drink: manhattan special espresso coffee soda

in the BOCOCA (boerum hill, cobble hill, carroll gardens) area of brooklyn, smith st gets all the hype. they've got the requisite hip neighborhood quota of restaurants, bars, shops & boutiques. they've got a comic book store, a cheese shop & a brooklyn industries and american apparel. all told it equals H-I-P. in my time in brooklyn, i've spent a lot of time on smith st. i've had many a drink in its hip bars & food in its hip restaurants. there was a time when i used to go to faan at least once a month. in some forgotten restaurant on smith, i had dinner one night with this dude who was a friend of a friend, only to realize after that it was likely a date. i even got dumped in one of the handful of interchangeable sushi joints. good times on smith st.

...but in my book, smith st is so 2004. in 2010, court st is the way to go. it's filled with restaurants & shops, but it's never got the same sort of attention that smith st has. still, the more i've lived in brooklyn & the more i age & the more i become a hermit, the more i find myself on court st. that's mainly because while smith is home to lots of places to go out to eat & drink, court st is home to american beer distribution (where i often buy beer to drink in the comfort of my home) & cobblestone foods (where i often buy cheese to eat in the comfort of my home). if lines & cramped spaces didn't freak me out, i'm sure i'd frequent the fairly new trader joes on court. there's a movie theater on court st, but i read somewhere that it's MAD SCARY. scary or not, smith st doesn't even have a movie theater. so yeah, court st's more my style these days.

in the carroll gardens area of court, way down between 1st pl & 2nd pl, there's a store called "snack shop." sounds like it'd be right up my alley, right? when i first came across it, i thought the same thing, but let's just say that if i opened a store called "snack shop," it'd have a lot better selection of snacks. it's not entirely lame, but when i see a place with the word "snack" in their name, i expect awesomeness. basically, it's a healthy bodega with some prepared foods. the interior of the place is filled with a lot of quality stuff--baked goods & packaged sushi & healthy cereal & coffees & teas. that's nice & all, but there are way too many bags of nuts & dried fruit & trail mixes for my tastes. that sort of stuff bores me.

i still go there though & when i do, it's for one reason & one reason only--the snickers cupcake. it's a chocolate cupcake with creamy, chocolatish frosting, chocolate chip pieces around the edge & a slice of a snickers bar on top with caramel & chocolate drizzles. seriously, folks. it's AWE-SOME. sure the cake portion could be a little more moist & there's a LOT of frosting, but when all the ingredients are combined, it's like a chocolate explosion in your mouth. i sort of enjoy explosions in my mouth. i also enjoy foods with diverse textures, a quality which the snickers cupcake has in spades.

the key to the cupcake's mixed textures is getting the proper ratio of cake-to-frosting-to-topping in every bite. luckily, i'm 88% OCD & when consuming my snickers cupcake, i'm more comfortable if i first take it home & cut it up into three evenly-sized slices. doing so not only gives me a good look at the cupcake cross-section, but when i'm cramming it into my cakehole, i'm able to come at it from a side angle that fits perfectly & gets bites of all the ingredients at once. maximum frosting! maximum cake! maximum chocolate chips! together! the best part is that i get to finish with one slice devoted to the snickers piece, making it possible to eat around the piece & save it until the very last bite. maximum snickers!

this "only in ny" column is supposed to be about places all over nyc, but i've yet to leave brooklyn in it, so i decided to throw manhattan a bone by matching my cupcake with a 10 oz bottle of manhattan special espresso coffee soda. technically, it's brewed by a company based in brooklyn, but they've been around for forever (since 1895), so i'm going to give them a pass. i guess going with manhattan in the name over brooklyn makes historical sense, since in the year before manhattan special was founded, brooklyn had just decided to become a borough of nyc, which centers on manhattan. also, according to urbandictionary.com (which i'm pretty sure was around back in 1895), the phrase "brooklyn special" (which i'm pretty sure was also around back in 1895) was already taken.

regardless of what borough they're claiming, i can't give them a pass for the weirdness of their soda. it took me years to give chocolate soda a second chance, but it's going to take a lot for me to ever give espresso coffee soda a second chance. it's that weird. i mean, i rather enjoy the taste of espresso, but when that espresso flavor is infused with carbonation, it's just plain disconcerting. each sip began innocently enough with the pleasing bubbles of a soda, but once my taste buds sprung into action & realized that my mouth was being overtaken by a cold, sugary espresso taste, no amount of bubbles could chase away my befuddled emotions. in the end, i was so skeeved out that i struggled to finish the bottle. with a taste like that, manhattan can have it.

snack shop, 414 court st, brooklyn, 718-797-2266