If it were a Sunday morning in the ’70s, you might find my family bundled into our silver Dodge Dart, its formidable snout pointing us out of the New York suburbs and toward the city. I am sure the stated purpose of these trips was culture, but not in my mind. In my mind it was pickles. I was a kid obsessed with the half-sours fetched from a barrel on the street at Guss’ Pickles in the Lower East Side. (Guss’ recently relocated to Brooklyn, changing its name to Ess-a-Pickle due to a lawsuit. It was the end of an era.) The pickles’ green skins were just beginning to veer into olive. They were crisp, bright, sour without being puckery. The tub that contained them would inevitably leak in the trunk on the drive home, and wafts of garlic would be released each time we popped it open for weeks to come.
Pickle craft
Loaded with nostalgia, the humble nosh with crunch may be the ultimate comfort food
I’m still obsessed with pickles. I am not alone. There is a pickle of the month club. A Facebook page for pickles has 6,110 fans (some of whom make comments not suitable for work). If you Google “obsessed with pickles,’’ a) you are obsessed with pickles yourself, and b) you will find you are in good company. Not that you need Google to tell you this if you’ve eaten in a restaurant in the past few years. This humble food that reminds me of my grandfather is increasingly featured on the menus of restaurants catering to hipsters who dress like my grandfather.
What is the appeal?
“I think a lot goes back to the revival of comfort food,’’ says Mark Goldberg, chef at Woodward, the trendy lounge/restaurant in the Ames hotel. “We all grew up with some sort of pickles, so it’s a bit nostalgic.’’
Goldberg hasn’t had the monkey on his back for long. “It’s a relatively new pickling fetish,’’ he says. At Woodward, he features a so-called “pickling program.’’ This means pickled crudites on the table instead of bread — baby carrots, cauliflower, beets, grapes, pearl onions. He and his staff make pickled cherry peppers for their pizza, pickled garlic for their mussels, pickled figs for cheese plates.
Many enthusiasts say their love for pickles is as much about connection to family and culture as it is about crunch and big flavors.
Travis Grillo grew up eating the pickles his grandfather and father made with ingredients pulled fresh from the garden. He loved them so much he turned them into a business. His Grillo’s Pickles started out as a handmade pushcart by the Park Street T station. Now the dill spears are also sold at Whole Foods and smaller specialty markets including City Feed, Dave’s Fresh Pasta, and Sherman Market. Grillo recently started pickling green tomatoes, too.
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