cherrypatter nyc
and great ideas for what to do too!
mother & son: the caribbean right on 4th avenue
other than super easy access to the r train, which is a much underappreciated train i now realize, there is not much to like about 4th avenue. this is especially true after nyc brilliantly rezoned this strip of nyc yet failed to put any design requirements on the buildings. the result is something that makes you wish we could just have more autoshops (and there are a lot) or even the semi-benign drive-through mcdonalds, rather than more hideous brand new 12-story buildings. i think with this latest disaster 4th avenue could win the award for the most poorly designed place in america.
the one saving grace of living so close to this wasteland of greed and fumes is that even though we are technically in park slope (at the very bottom of the hill for sure), we get access to mother & son, a fruit van where two guys sell all sorts of amazing caribbean fruits all day nearly every day in the warmer months. i love that they have fruits that you just cannot get easily elsewhere (not even the coop) including the guinep (also called a chennette), june plums, lady finger bananas (those sweet baby bananas that i last had in thailand) and dried tamarind too. they also sell huge stalks of sugar cane, extremely sweet mangos and papayas.
mother & son also has quite the juicing operation going. you can get freshly opened coconut water, or juices made with most of the fruits or even chunks of the sugar cane to eat raw on in some sort of drink. clearly, mother & son has a super loyal following. every time i go by they have three to five cars backed up ordering something from the stand. and while i think there are plenty of these trucks around less gentrified areas of brooklyn and queens — last week i saw one last week in bed stuy — they are not a typical park slope trendy vendy truck amenity. now i just need to make more of a habit of picking up fruit from mother & son. so cheap and so good. mother & son, fruit truck/van located on western side of 4th avenue between 1st and 2nd streets, brooklyn, new york.
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