by Helene Stapinski

When I was growing up in the 1970s in Hudson County, N.J., there was plenty to complain about: toxic waste, political corruption, blighted buildings. The one thing people never knocked was the food.

Our mothers made meatballs. Our aunts fashioned pirogi. My father brought home lobster and steaks that "fell off the back of the truck" at the frozen-food warehouse near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel.

And then there were the restaurants. From the edge of Jersey City to the tip of North Hudson on a 10-mile stretch that faces Manhattan, we had everything from first-class red sauce joints to authentic curry houses to some of the best pressed Cubanos north of Miami.

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Source: The New York Times