Staten Island Restaurant Tour, Part II: Fina’s Farmhouse (Arthur Kill)
Arthur Kill.
No, Arthur, no!
“Kill” is actually the Dutch word for “little stream,” so naming a neighborhood after one is less a horror-movie scenario than a nod to New York’s Dutch heritage — the city originally was Nieuw Amsterdam, after all. This episode of the Staten Island Restaurant Tour, my series of reports on comfort food in New York’s “forgotten borough,” brings us to the second-from-last stop on the Staten Island Railway as it trundles down from the ferry along the big island’s eastern flank.
As usual, I take the subway from Upper Manhattan to the ferry. Before I board, one of Staten Island’s native sons blesses my journey. Pete Davidson had hosted Saturday Night Live just the night before.
Another of SI’s native sons, Samuel I. Newhouse, had a ferry named after him when it was commissioned in 1981. S.I. Newhouse Sr. and Jr. were the owners of the Staten Island Advance, the borough’s primo media outlet, on which they built the newspaper and magazine empire that owns The New Yorker. I was a proofreader of Newhouse-owned fashion mags as a young shaver just out of college.
And on to the Staten Island Railway. Hardworking guys need their electric scooters. The lithium ion batteries that power them do have a way of bursting into flames, though. Mayor Adams is handling it with a new law. I was grateful that these two gentlemen did not object to having their picture taken, though one was giving me the fishy eye.
One local point of interest in Arthur Kill is La Bella Marketplace, a super-supermarket, at least compared to anything in my neighborhood. Space-starved NYC tends to have smaller supermarkets than the burbs.
Here’s where you get your golfera, your creminelli, your rovagnati, all of which are words I just learned. Salami, salami, and ham. It would make a pretty story to say I had red meat on the brain by the time I got to Fina’s Farmhouse, today’s lunch destination, but I didn’t look up golfera, creminelli, and rovagnati until later.
Fina’s is a cheerful bright red presence on a quiet street.
It is not large, but airy and pleasant.
The small table with stool was the best I could hope for on a Sunday-brunch afternoon. As a solo diner who hates making reservations, I was glad to get a table at all. I acknowledge the aleatory nature of it all.
My table was Lucky 13, the napkin dispenser informed me.
Fina’s has breakfast, lunch, coffee, and kids’ menus which you can check out here. What caught my eye was The Farm Wrecker, a piquantly named footlong hotdog that won out over The Wicked Tuna, on ciabatta, which I may get back to someday. A friend had a footlong at the Brooklyn Diner last year — the one down the street from Carnegie Hall — and having one today gave me a chance to deal with my footlong envy.
I ordered it with the salad option, as opposed to fries or onion rings, on the recommendation of my coronary artery. The server asked if I wanted “everything.” I answered, “everything but ketchup. I hate ketchup on a hotdog.” She agreed that ketchup on a hotdog was an abomination, or words to that effect, just as a good server would always say “good choice.” The food arrived. It looked gorgeous. But…
It emerged that my footlong was not a footlong. It might have been a foot long (or even better) at some point, but that was before it was bisected both vertically and horizontally. A cruel thing to do to any phallic object, wouldn’t you say? Ouch. And ouch.
Insanely ambitious as always, because I wanted my first footlong to be an indelible emotional experience, I carefully layered the delicious sweet fried onions on the bottom meat platform, with mustard, and loaded up the top meat platform with relish and kraut. The result was hugely messy, with the footlong excreting wildly as I devoured it, and I used eight or nine napkins to wipe my face. This may not have been the best time I grow a beard, I reflected. The meat was rich and toothsome, light-years ahead of supermarket franks, the bun notably sweet and substantial enough to stand up the meat onslaught — almost. Next time, I might eat one or two of the four meat pieces with a fork and knife.
Salad is “the cleanup crew that comes after the parade,” Stan Mack or possibly one of his dinner guests once observed in “Stan Mack’s Real-Life Funnies” back in the glory days of The Village Voice.
Since these trips are as much about exploring as eating, I decided to scope out the next rail stop and the restaurants near it. Google Maps made it seem simple. Just walk up Arthur Kill Road and go left on Richmond Valley Road. Both streets have rail stations named after them with the latter hosting several restaurants on the Tour’s master list. But walking conditions were quite hazardous, I discovered. Sometimes there were sidewalks, sometimes decidedly informal paths with ankle-turning stones, and sometimes nothing, forcing me into the roadway. I’d have turned back if I hadn’t noticed several times that the next stretch of safe walking territory was a short distance away. It also helped that both lanes of the bidirectional road were wide, and that drivers were considerate enough not to honk, though I was probably in the wrong. I’ll not pass this way, in exactly this way, again. Here’s one of the less hazardous stretches.
In compensation, the view of the Outerbridge Crossing — one of two bridges from Staten Island to New Jersey, the other being the Goethals Bridge — was stunning, even at muddy low tide, with tall grass gently waving in the wind.
At the Richmond Valley station, where the next leg of our comfort-food tour may take us, the countdown clock sentenced me to just 12 minutes of what might have been up to a 30-minute wait, since the Staten Island Railway is timed to coincide with the half-hourly crossings of the Staten Island Ferry.
The company was soothingly low-key and the playlist may have been in Arabic. People who sit quietly and mind their own business are my favorite kind of New Yorkers.
The skies made the Freedom Tower, hoving into view as the ferry arrived back in Manhattan, an especially colorful and moving sight.
If I stick with the pattern of starting at the bottom end of the island and working my way north, the next stop will be take us to the aforementioned Richmond Valley station, with nearby Syrian, Mexican, American diner, and (of course) Italian options. I may have to return to Richmond Valley several times. Not necessarily for touring, just for eating and relaxing. The people are nice and I’m less tense here than I am elsewhere in the city. Staten Island, I’m discovering, is a wonderful place to be alone with your thoughts.
See Staten Island Restaurant Tour, Part I: Angelina’s (Tottenville).
If you’re enjoying the Staten Island Restaurant Tour, please follow my blog by clicking follow next to my name at the top. Then subscribe to get emails on new episodes. See you soon!
