Dan's Birthday Part Two: Cheeses!

There was a time when the San Gennaro Feast in Little Italy was the highlight of the year for The Great Plotnik, who reveled in the Southern Italian craziness of the scene...the fried onions, the sausages, the cannoli...

Now, maybe not so much. The trash, New York's finest, the lack of much Italian about the whole scene anymore. It's pretty much like a far bigger multiiculti event now.

Still, it was a fun Sunday afternoon with Belly, 5H and PD...

...which led to a ride on the L Train to The Great PD's birthday dinner, in a restaurant less like Manhattan than anything you could imagine.

You get off the train in Bushwick -- the land that gentrification forgot.

Or did it? When you walk in this door at concrete block Roberta's it's the Twilight Zone again. Outside: graffitti, homeless people, the roll of the dice.

Inside: Chaos. An hour and a half wait for a table, a holding pen out in the back near the vegetable gardens where you sit on picnic benches inside a yurt and drink your damson plum cocktails and craft beer that was brewed around the corner, while you wait for your name to be called. This place could not exist in Shmalifornia. And it would have perhaps been a little bit too much, except for the Cheeses Christ.

Yes, it's a pizza. And it is phenomenal, especially when you add honey to it, which makes it the Cheeses H. Christ. It was so good we had one CHC and then ordered another, to go with the calzone and the seventeen other things.

Isabella went into her I LOVE THIS BREAD AND BUTTER dance. Soon she was standing on her chair. You've got to love a restaurant where they let a five year old sit at the bar.

DC Niecey and the artist formerly known as the Kazakh Desert Princess got taken to Roberta's when they were in Brooklyn a few months ago, and are said to have loved it. It's so -- so -- impossible. Hipsters in Bushwick serving pork jowl and damson plum gin. Maybe you have to know Bushwick to see how insane this is. And yet. What a blast. Cheeses H!!