Staten Island Restaurant Tour, Part XXIV: Da Noi (Travis)

Ready for lunch in Freshkills Park.

M y story about Travis begins with a picnic table on top of the world’s largest trash heap. It ends with chicken martini at Da Noi, the local high-end Italian eatery. That’s not a poultry-flavored martini, but rather, chicken breast in white wine and butter sauce with artichokes, shitake mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, and capers. In between, however, it’s the story of your kitchen floor, or maybe your grandma’s kitchen floor, and about what happened to the contents of her kitchen garbage pail. It’s sitting underneath the picnic table.

Courtesy of Prodigy Real Estate.

In the mid-19th century English inventor Frederick Walton noticed a rubbery dried residue forming on a can of linseed oil. He soon realized that when the polyunsaturated fats of the oil met oxygen, and then were combined with binding agents, they would form an awesome floor covering that would improve sanitary conditions in grandma’s kitchen. Naming it linoleum — after the Latin words linum, meaning flax, and oleum, meaning oil — he formed a company to manufacture it in England. He then established America’s first linoleum factory in Staten Island, in a town originally known as Long Neck, then Travisville, before it became known as Linoleumville.

Photo by Willard D. Decker, collection of Historic Richmond Town, via onfife.com.

Walton’s American Linoleum Company made kitchen flooring for grandmas all over the United States. A rival in Kearny, New Jersey, eventually known as Congoleum, started with linoleum, later developing vinyl flooring, which has eclipsed linoleum in most modern construction. Walton decided to move the company to Philadelphia. The largely Polish-speaking people of Linoleumville, former known as Travisville, immediately voted to change the name of their community back, sort of, to Travis, after a pre-Civil War settler, Col. Jacob Travis. The only smokestack still visible in Travis is this one, belonging to a Con Ed power plant on Victory Boulevard. Pylon imagery at no extra charge.

Power on Victory.

All this smokestackery would make a good segue into my dining experience at the tail end of Victory Boulevard, main street of Travis and several other Mid-Island neighborhoods. Here was my approach to the restaurant with a few representative samples of Travis’s modest homes — but that was at the end of another exploratory urban walk. I like to work up an appetite for lunch.

Stacks and victuals.

Here on Parson Street is the entrance to the North Mound of Freshkills Park, which brings recreational facilities to what was formerly the site of the four tallest trash piles on the earth (hence the word mound in the name). Smaller adjacent Schmul Park includes the ballfield below, a playground shown further down, and a handball court. All this is part of Phase 1 of the park redevelopment, completed in late 2023, with more phases presumably to come.

Left, entrance to North Mound at Freskhills Park, alongside ballfield at Schmul Park.

An unfortunate part of the history of Travis and its northerly neighbor Chelsea was and is their proximity to the Fresh Kills Landfill, chronicled in the New Springville episode of the Staten Island Restaurant Tour. It was a vision that, if you saw it, you’d wish you could un-see it. Yet Schmul Park looked idyllic as I shared it with the solitary stroller ahead.

Playground at Schmul Park.

This green hill is what gives the North Mound its name. Formerly a scene that would give nightmares to Hieronymus Bosch, it is dotted with pumps, three of them barely visible here, extracting methane, a.k.a. natural gas, from the festering trash underground.

The pumps are those three black dots just below the horizon.

It was hard to get a good shot of one. The phone cam preferred to focus the chain link. Might be a good Zoom background, though. If you have a small head.

Methane pump, as though in a dream.

Reawakening the grassy wetlands has brought back so many bird species that the park includes a two-story metal birdwatching tower.

Birdwatching tower at Freshkills Park.

Let’s climb up and take a look.

Up the first flight of steps we go.

View from the first level. In those peaceful wetlands, the five boroughs of New York City dumped their trash for more than a half-century.

Pity the wildlife. Except for the rats.

Up to the second level, looking back the way I’d come. Not in the picture is a guy who I saw walking down the left side of that path, shortly after I did, then walking backward up the same path. I wondered if time had stopped and reversed itself.

A place to sun yourself and enjoy the birds.

View from the front. Or perhaps the sense of time having stopped was some kind of chemical spell from the methane fumes, a faint sulfurous note that mingled with the salty and marshy smell of the reawakened wetlands.

View from top of birdwatching tower, looking east toward the waterway.

But more likely the backward stroller just felt safe indulging in an eccentric form of exercise in a quiet place where there were few people around to comment, just wide open space and blessed quiet. I thought of him as I walked to the front of the top platform.

Prime birdwatching real estate.

I zoomed in trying to capture the gulls who had just landed in a photogenically sweeping (but sadly missed) flock on the dark wooden structures in the water. Were those rotting piers for the now-gone garbage scows? Unidentified structures beyond might have been residential or park infrastructure or just neighboring New Springville in the distance. It was hard to tell with all the open, undulating, flat but not quite flat space. I’ve put in a fact-checking query to the park authorities to figure it out. Will update if I hear back.

Still life of rotting wood and enigmatic structures.

There was also a less elaborate one-level viewing deck, perched between waterway and gravel path.

Another way to watch birds.

Walking to the end of it, I was reminded of the Dorothy Fitzpatrick Fishing Pier, a glimpse of heaven from my pizza trip to Pleasant Plains.

A view to a kill.

The garbage-laden boats that once plied these peaceful waters are gone.

The waters don’t miss them.

Nearby, the picnic tables have taken over.

Sandwiches not included.

Picnics. Food. Oh yeah, this is a food blog. Among other things. The Da Noi Italian Restaurant is near the dead end of Victory Boulevard, which reaches northeast to southwest across the broad top half of Staten Island just as Broadway cuts a swath from northwest to southeast through Manhattan (historically, from southeast to northwest, but I’m an uptown guy).

Bring on Da Noi.

View from my table.

My nook in the dining room.

Panorama shot, with friendly server visible at right, if you squint.

Another dining party behind the pillar.

The bread was nice and warm, the butter nice and cold.

The warm melts the cold.

I loved this hearty salad with romaine, sweet corn, red onion, and tomato, or tom, as I call it on my grocery lists.

A nice mound of veg.

No-extra-charge sides included two veggies that need no introduction and some sweet fried mozzarella. It combined the best attributes of cheese and candy.

Not listed on the menu but more than welcome.

And here was the main event, the chicken martini. If I told my friends I had a martini in Travis, they would totally miss the subtle play on words involving cocktails and Italian cuisine.

I can be a bit obscure.

Sip on a stemmed glass of this. With capers, not olive.

Study of fowl and fungi.

I boarded the bus back the ferry, full of chicken, salad, shrooms, and natural gas. The S62 bus and its limited-stopping cousin, the S92, run on Victory between Travis and the ferry, offering the most brutally spine-jarring ride in the city, especially in the last couple of neighborhoods before Travis. The people boarding with me were low-key and tolerant, as nearly all Staten Islanders are, but were giving each other looks that said, this man is insane.

Or maybe: Doesn’t he own a car?

My heart said, wouldn’t you like to come back here and try the pizza at Verde’s? My back said, hell no. Fortunately my bus to Rossville, farther down the West Shore, will take another route. After Rossville and Manor Heights, I’ll have finished the Tour south of the Staten Island Expressway, except for return visits, and will be exploring North Shore neighborhoods away from the railway. Fun, no doubt, will be had.

The slice that got away.

Previously on the Staten Island Restaurant Tour:

Part I: Angelina’s (Tottenville)

Part II: Fina’s Farmhouse (Arthur Kill)

Part III: Laila (Richmond Valley)

Part IV: Il Forno (Pleasant Plains)

Part V: Breaking Bread (Prince’s Bay)

Part VI: Woodrow Diner (Huguenot)

Part VII: Il Sogno (Annadale)

Part VIII: Riva (Eltingville)

Part IX: Marina Cafe (Great Kills)

Part X: Do Eat (Bay Terrace)

Part XI: Canlon’s (Oakwood Heights)

Part XII: Prince Tea House (New Dorp)

Part XIII: Inca’s Peruvian Grille (Grant City)

Part XIV: Colonnade Diner (Jefferson Avenue)

Part XV: Baci (Dongan Hills)

Part XVI: Chinar on the Island (Old Town)

Part XVII: Cinco de Mayo (Grasmere)

Part XVIII: Phil-Am Kusina (Clifton)

Part XIX: Lakruwana (Stapleton)

Part XX: Pier 76 (Tompkinsville)

Part XXI: Chang Noi Thai (St. George)

Part XXII: Mike’s Unicorn Diner (Bulls Head)

Part XXIII: Melt Shop (New Springville)

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. You can also subscribe to the SIRT channel on YouTube. For offline reading, the first 21 episodes of the SIRT are available as an ebook. See you soon!