Boy do I miss that place! I love Florida, but we don’t have any places that compared to that
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Fewer and fewer everywhere. There’s nothing in the Boston area, where I mainly reside, that I’m aware of that compares. This cuisine is also vanishing in NY.
To establish the authenticity of my last comment, let me say that the food at Park Side is the cuisine of my wife’s people. Once – 15-20 years ago – places with respectable versions of this kind of food were commonplace in Queens and Nassau County. I remember many excellent meals at Montebello in Port Washington, for example. This was the kind of food that my in-laws cooked at home, and the food they were most comfortable eating when eating out. When they really wanted to spend – and these were people now with expensive second homes – they ate at places such as La Parma (hard to track down the original now since the name is ubiquitous) that offered the same food at higher prices. (Hence, if you rifle through my other posts, my parties at my NYC place catered by Parm, Carmine’s and such like.)
To add further weight to what I say, I like this kind of food a lot, and cook it (with my wife offering expert theoretical guidance). Everything we ate at Park Side is something I’ve made at one point or another – not, however, in the same meal. For me that was a side-pleasure, plus the no-dishes-to-do bit.
I’m not the most qualified GBA Onion to chime in about this, but how about Rino’s in East Boston as an example?
Rino’s is certainly close, but does not quite fit the specific requirements of my wife (and her family). No knock against it, but without chicken Scarpariello or stuffed artichokes it didn’t sing to my wife when we first looked at it on arrival on the Boston shore.
A note on chicken Scarp: there are different versions, with or without potatoes (with in my wife’s family), with or without peppers (without), chicken on the bone or off (on, although lately my bil has gone for off), etc. At Carmine’s in midtown, the dish with that name is far from anything my wife’s family would recognize, but their Contadina is close to Scarp (again, according to one extended family). During the pandemic I often made a close relative, Chicken Murphy, from a recipe offered by La Boîte, the spice store:
The tang of this from the pickled peppers, etc., makes it superior in my book to Scarp, but it’s even harder to find in restaurants.
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Absolutely. I do miss Queen, Frost, and quite a few others (anyone else old enough and Bklyn enough to remember the McDonald Ave Collaro’s or the namesake unrelated one on Coney Island Ave)?. However, this being NYC, there are more good Italian-American red sauce places still around, although most don’t get much play on food boards. Off hand, there’s Michael’s, Manducatis, Emilio’s Ballato, Don Peppe’s, Monte’s, and Bamonte’s - all of which scratch the itch (although I can’t say that I like all of them). And I’m sure I’ve left out some others. Park Side is by far my favorite of this ilk.
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This is a Belmont Tavern thing, which is excellent but their menu is really narrow and idiosyncratic. It’s red sauce, but it’s almost its own thing. It’s not like Park Side really at all. I much prefer to Murphy to the Savoy tho.
I remember all the Collaro’s, even the one on Ocean Parkway near the cemetery.
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That’s one of my favorite dishes. On the bone, please!
