Word of Mouth

My Worst Thanksgiving and Other Matters

2009-11-25T13:20:00.003-05:00

My worst Thanksgiving was the one where I ate a Swanson turkey TV dinner, alone. I think I was about nineteen at the time, and in the midst of a brief depression.

My brief depression lasted about fifteen years, roughly from the ages of eight to twenty-three. I won't go too much into the gory details, but I was a miserable kid, adolescent, teenager, young adult. My moods ranged from unhappy to inconsolable despair. I made several (probably half-assed) suicide attempts as a teen, one of them in 1970, after attending the first Earth Day festivities at Union Square. Now Earth Days fill me with relief mixed with a twinge of nostalgic misery.

From a bright, outgoing, skinny kid I turned into a chubby recluse. I started gaining weight during a hellish summer at sleep-away camp, when I was eight. By around ten or eleven I was pretty much a hermit, keeping to my room, refusing entreaties to come out and play. I wanted to be invisible. I used to walk down the street staring at my shoes. By junior high I made a new set of "friends" and discovered pot and alcohol (and antiwar demonstrations). LSD was reserved for special occasions, like concerts at the Fillmore East or all-night Marx Brothers marathons at the Elgin Theater, on Eighth Avenue. There was a crowd I hung out with, till all hours, but I wouldn't say that more than a few were real friends, though I remember some of them quite fondly--brilliant, funny kids, all troubled in different ways.

Things got a little better when I got to college and started discovering my voice as a writer. But my psyche was still fragile. I think I may have turned down a Thanksgiving invitation when I was nineteen and chose to "celebrate" alone with my Swanson TV dinner.

The real turning point in my life came when I moved to the East Village, in 1979. For a Brooklyn kid, finally getting to Manhattan was a triumph. I felt I finally had control of my life. And I was fortunate to dive headlong into one of the most vibrant literary and performance scenes the city has ever known.

I don't think I've ever been really, truly miserable since. I joke that I've had more than my quota of misery. Even when I was unemployed for the greater part of a four-year period, not so long ago, I didn't despair. People would ask if I was depressed. "Not really," I'd say. "I'm anxious all the time and unhappy some of the time, but I'm also happy most of the time, at the same time. I'm emotionally multitasking."

You can't second-guess or judge anybody's misery. You can't tell a depressed teenager that they have everything, or that they're being selfish, or that things will get better (even if they usually do). Their despair is real, I know. If I could tell a teenager on the brink of suicide anything it would be: hang in there, I know it's unbearable, but there'll come a time when you can call the shots, when you can tell all the people who are fucking you over to go fuck themselves, or ignore them, it'll be your choice.

And this Thanksgiving, if you know anybody who's lonely and depressed, invite them to dinner. They might even liven things up. Some of the funniest, most entertaining people I know are miserable.

Hey Pete! Let's Eat More Meat

2009-11-25T01:46:00.002-05:00

Hey Pete! Let's Eat More Meat ...

Dumbed-down Southeast Asian Food for Trendy New Yorkers

2009-11-20T14:25:00.002-05:00

I'm just back from lunch at OBAO, serial restaurateur Michael "Bao" Huynh's new noodle bar in Midtown East. I had a bowl of bun bo Hue. Actually, I had a bowl of what they called bun bo Hue.

My only previous exposure to Bao's growing empire was a takeout spicy catfish banh mi (Vietnamese sandwich) from a branch of his Baoguette chain (he goes in for cutesy names for his restaurants, like Pho Sure, which if pronounced correctly would be something like "fuh sure," which would be OK in New York, I guess). The sandwich was pretty good, though it didn't hold a candle to Ratha Chau's catfish num pang. In addition to not having tried Pho Sure, I haven't tried Bar Bao, Bia Garden (yes, a beer garden using the Vietnamese word for beer), or Mai House.

When I started working in the East 50s I was worried about finding decent lunch places. Then I discovered the block of 53rd Street between 2nd & 3rd Avenues. Four of my favorite lunch places are on that block: Marrakesh for Middle Eastern sandwiches and platters, Tadka for their fabulous vindaloo and shrimp curry, Mantao for Chinese sandwiches, and Ariyoshi for their always enchanting deluxe boxes. OBAO is on the same block, and just opened this week. While some might consider it unfair to judge a restaurant in its first days, I'm of the opinion that a restaurant shouldn't open until it's ready, because people like me are going to write about it. Anyway, my job isn't to be fair, it's to write mildly amusing blog posts.

I was thrilled to see that the restaurant was serving bun bo Hue, because I was really in the mood for a spicy, flavorful noodle soup. Bun bo Hue originated, as the name implies, in the central Vietnamese city of Hue. "Bun" refers to rice noodles and "bo" to beef. The soup is made with a beef stock flavored with lemongrass and chili oil. It almost always comes with a pigfoot and some sliced flank steak, often with a piece of oxtail, and sometimes cubes of congealed pig's blood (I prefer to deny myself the latter, a rare asceticism on my part). The noodle is a round, spaghetti-shaped rice noodle similar to the ones used in Malaysian laksa and Yunnan-style noodle soups.

I had an excellent bun bo Hue in Hue itself. How can you go to Hue and not eat bun bo Hue? Perhaps the best version I've had in North America was at the Montreal branch of Pho Bang NY; the broth pushed the lemongrass limit, just the right side of overpowering, and it was wonderfully sinus-opening spicy, with a delightful greasy red sheen from the chili oil. Respectable versions in New York can be found in Chinatown's Pho Tu Do and Sunset Park's Thanh Da.

When OBAO's bun bo Hue arrived at my table I thought they had brought me the wrong item. It had sliced raw beef ("tai," or eye round steak) and the broth looked just like pho, with only a few dots of orange oil clinging to the side of the bowl, which took close inspection to find. In addition to the beef there were slices of pork leg meat (though the menu promised "pig feet"), and it did include the proper kind of noodle (rather than the flat pho rice noodle), but the broth was pure pho--it took a moment of reflection and a lot of imagination to realize that there was indeed a hint of lemongrass and chili oil, the kind of hint one would expect from the vermouth in a very dry martini. It was evident that what they were passing off as bun bo Hue was just their pho bo slightly altered at the last minute. Nine dollars' worth of pure mediocrity.

If his restaurant names weren't enough evidence, a Michael Huynh interview in the Village Voice convinces me that he's pathologically conceited. Huynh said, "We have pad thai, pad see ew, but we make it better. We've also got Singapore noodles, which I make with black soba; it's better than the original one with vermicelli. We'll have a full liquor license and open kitchen there. It'll be like Republic, but better." Like it's rocket science to be better than Republic, the mediocre, trendy noodle bar on Union Square.

OBAO's bun bo Hue is sort of a pho tai timidly trying to be a faux bun bo Hue for timid American palates . . . but worse!

Peruvian Aviation Authorities Even Stupider than American Ones

2009-11-18T16:30:00.002-05:00

Update: If the comment from my friend Al, below, is true, which I don't doubt since he's a reliable source, I owe the Peruvian aviation authorities an apology.

Let's face it, the wannabe terrorists who've had the most impact on frequent flyers are the schmuck who tried to explode his shoe and the nincompoops who tried to smuggle explosive liquids onto a plane. So now, while guns and all sorts of dangerous items can slip through the cracks of airport "security," regular folks like you and me have to take our shoes off (like we can't have explosives hidden in our underwear?) and pay exorbitant prices for water after we've made it though security and proven that we didn't have any of that dangerous H2O on our person or in our carry-on luggage.

When I made my connection from Lima to Cusco I thought the Peruvian authorities were more level-headed. After I had cleared immigration I had to go through security again for my domestic flight. I had a bottle of water in my carry-on, and nobody made any attempt to confiscate it, and there were no signs announcing that one couldn't bring water through security. I thought to myself, at least the Peruvians aren't afraid of water.

Then, 8 days later, when I checked in for my Lima to New York flight everything was different. There were collection bins before security to discard water bottles in. Fine, just like the U.S.A. So I bought a couple of bottles of water after security for the flight. But as I was about to board the plane, airport security personnel were checking everybody's carry-on bags. They found my bottles of water. "You can't take these on the plane," they said. "But I bought them after security," I said. "I threw out my other water before I went through security."

"Sorry," they said, "no liquids allowed."

"That's ridiculous," I said. "If that's the case they shouldn't be selling them, or at least there should have been signs somewhere." But I didn't want to hold up the other passengers, so I gave up my water and boarded the flight. Next time I'll know enough to transfer a half liter of water to six 3-oz. plastic bottles and put them in a 1-qt. ziploc baggie, thereby rendering my water harmless.

So it looks like the Peruvian authorities don't give a shit if you plan to bomb a domestic flight with a bottle of water, just one that's leaving the country.

As I told the flight attendant when I asked her for a glass of water so I could down some downers for the overnight flight, "There are bigger things to worry about than bottles of water."

I Dreamed a B Movie Last Night

2009-11-15T09:42:00.004-05:00

It was in black and white, and the only part I remember is where a hysterical Beverly Garland is claiming she was raped by a Martian in Las Vegas. Her detective husband, played by Simon Oakland, doesn't believe her. He shakes her and says, "But you weren't in Las Vegas!"

Beverly Garland in a similar situation

Oakland, the skeptical husband

Dining Among the Ruins

2009-11-10T14:10:00.000-05:00

What does one do with a 7-hour layover in Lima? I decided that dinner at Huaca Pucllana would be the best bet.

Huaca Pucllana is the name of both an excavated pre-Colombian ruin in the heart of Lima's Miraflores residential district and the upscale restaurant beside the site.

Really, my layover was just enough time for a couple of drinks at the nearby Doubletree hotel followed by a leisurely dinner, as it's a 45-minute cab ride from the airport to Miraflores, and I still had to give myself enough time to check in for my international flight home.

I wasn't otherwise spending any time in Lima. I had read that, except for some world-class museums and good restaurants, it's not an especially inviting place for a traveler. It's a big, polluted city with constant fog, rampant poverty and lots of crime. But the last flight from Cusco leaves mid-afternoon, and most flights back to the states leave at 11:30 PM, so I researched dining opportunities. Among upscale restaurants Huaca Pucllana, though generally garnering positive reviews, might not be the top choice for food alone (from what I've read that honor usually goes to Astrid & Gaston), but it certainly has the most dramatic setting. Dining on the terrace one has a prime view of the floodlit ruins.

As it was my last meal in Peru, I opted for the chicharon de cuy as my appetizer. After all, finding a guinea pig appetizer in New York isn't so easy. For my main course I chose the red quinoa-crusted corvina (Pacific sea bass), since the only fish available in Cusco had been trout. The fish was excellent but the accompanying mix of artichoke hearts and asparagus was somewhat of an uninspired jumble.

There were many interesting-looking, fairly elaborate desserts on the menu, but I was pretty full and opted to try some lucuma ice cream. Though lucuma is a fruit, the ice cream actually had a flan-like flavor. The Wikipedia entry describes the flavor of the fruit as a cross between maple and sweet potato.

Love that Larb

2009-11-04T15:00:00.001-05:00

It was a Saturday afternoon. I had arranged to meet Manda on the 7 train for a trip to Flushing, to try some of the stalls at the Chinese food courts, where little English is spoken and hard-to-find specialties from many parts of China are represented. Neither of us had ever done the Flushing malls before.

But our train was held up at one of the earlier Queens stations for quite a while, and as usual it took at least ten minutes before we got an explanation. And then the announcement came: a sick passenger on a train ahead of us. Jesus, I thought, the sick passenger goes out on weekends too?

We were told the train would go as far as Broadway-Roosevelt, then turn back to Manhattan. Subsequent trains, they claimed, would go all the way. But by the time we got to Roosevelt, in Jackson Heights, we were starving, so we decided to get off and eat in the neighborhood. After all, there were plenty of options nearby. We could do the Flushing malls another time.

Where to go in Jackson Heights? We didn't want Indian or Korean. So we headed to Zabb, a place we'd both liked in the past, for Northeastern Thai. But Zabb, it turns out, is closed for lunch on weekends. I didn't suggest Himalayan Yak, down the block, because I think Manda didn't particularly care for it when we went with a group.

Finally we decided to take a short walk to Elmhurst, to try a Javanese noodle joint on Whitney Avenue, a few doors down from Minangasli (which has apparently changed ownership since I reviewed it). But as we turned onto Whitney from Broadway Manda noticed a Thai restaurant with a window full of rave reviews. "Do you want to try it?" she asked. Sure. We'd already set the Flushing malls aside for another day, we'd already had our original Thai hopes dashed, surely we could put Mie Jakarta on the back burner and give Chao Thai a try.

We ordered four dishes: a duck salad, a chicken larb, and two "over rice" dishes. The rice dishes generally consist of a smaller portion of a main course served on a plate with rice, so I figured two really counted as one. Still, it was a lot of food.

The duck salad was Manda's first choice, as it's her favorite dish at Zabb. Chao's version was good, but very different from Zabb's--a much higher meat to salad ratio at Chao Thai. She also wanted a green vegetable, so we ordered the pork with Chinese broccoli over rice. Quite good, with lots of garlic. My rice dish of choice was the pig leg, a favorite of mine at Sripraphai. I found Chao's didn't compare, yet Manda preferred this version. It was served with a fruity, slightly spicy side sauce; I prefer the star-anise laden brown sauce at Sripraphai. Thai pork leg dishes can be delicious, but prepare yourself for lots of fat.

And then there was the larb.

Larb, or laab, is an Isan (Lao and Northeastern Thai) dish, extremely popular in those places, and also a standard menu item at Thai restaurants everywhere. It's made with minced meat or fish, dressed with fish sauce and lime, and flavored with chilis and mint as the main seasonings. Ground toasted rice gives it a bit of crunch. It's traditionally served warm--not cold, not hot.

The chicken larb at Chao Thai was probably the best larb I've ever had outside of Thailand. It had a perfect balance of hot spice, tartness, astringency and mint flavor. A good larb is all about the balance. The temperature was just right, too.

I've had larbs where the chili spice overwhelmed the other components or where the tanginess was too much in the mix, but compared to some those were decent. I've also had larbs that were flavorless, that were served cold and obviously mass-prepared in advance, and at least one where the meat was shredded instead of minced and served with a sweet-spicy red sauce.

Based on the world-class larb and the quality of the few other things I tried, Chao Thai is definitely on my list for further exploration.

Chao Thai

85-03 Whitney Avenue

Elmhurst

(718) 424-4999

Ollanta for Short

2009-10-28T19:25:00.001-04:00

Ollantaytambo, Ollanta for short, is a town in Peru's Sacred Valley of the Incas, on the way from Cusco to Machu Picchu. It has its own formidable Inca ruin (an uncompleted fortress, abandoned with the arrival of the conquistadores), and there's a train from Ollanta to Machu Picchu. Most tourists who get to Ollanta go for those two reasons. But I'm glad I spent an extra day just hanging out in the town.

Ollanta is known as the "Living Inca City" because the main residential area is still the original Inca-built town, a nearly square grid of narrow streets and alleys, with most homes built on original Inca stone foundations, many including the original portals. It's fascinating, and I think most people who pass through just to see the ruins or catch the train miss it.

This town of about 12,000 got a windfall about 5 years ago, when Perurail started running about 6 trains a day from Ollanta to Machu Picchu, instead of the 1 or 2 they previously had. It brought a lot more tourism to the town, but it hasn't been spoiled. People still go about their very traditional lifestyles and very little English is spoken. While I stayed in Ollanta I used Spanish exclusively.

I'm glad I stayed in Ollanta instead of Machu Picchu Pueblo (formerly called Aguas Calientes), at the end of the train line. Taking the train from Ollanta (1 hr. & 20 minutes) I still had over six hours at Machu Picchu, which I think is more than enough for most people (unless you want to see the sun rise over the ruins). Machu Picchu Pueblo is simply a constantly growing tourist hub lacking in charm: English spoken everywhere, restaurants with touts, lots of places for muesli or cappuccino.

I had originally planned to spend less time in Ollanta. My game plan was to get there with a tour bus that hits other Sacred Valley ruins and markets along the way on a Tuesday (one of the market days), then go to Macchu Picchu on Wednesday and return to Cusco on Thursday. But I was unable to get a train reservation to Macchu Picchu until Thursday, so I had a day to hang out in Ollanta. It actually worked out fine. The ruins at Ollanta require climbing hundreds of steps, quite a workout, and a day between that and Machu Picchu was a blessing in disguise.

I loved my lazy day in Ollanta, wandering the old Inca streets, eating guinea pig, drinking chicha with local old folks, and looking at the ruins from the window of my hotel, the Hostal Sauce.

My stay in Ollantaytambo was one of the most rewarding parts of my visit to Peru. If you're planning a trip to Cusco and the Sacred Valley, I highly recommend you stay a day or two in Ollanta and just go with the flow.

The strange yellowish structure (click photo to enlarge) on the side of the mountain near the Ollantaytambo fortress is believed to have served as a granary, but nobody is quite sure how the Incas accessed it!

Which Came First, the Chicken or the Waffle?

2009-10-26T11:00:00.000-04:00

And where and when did they come together?

Did it happen in Harlem? Was it brought from The South? And what about the Pennsylvania Dutch? Did African Americans and German Americans have the same brilliant idea, unbeknownst to each other? That's my guess, perhaps because I want hold on to the Harlem nightlife angle, which has great appeal. The story goes that Wells Supper Club popularized the dish, even if they didn't invent it. Fried chicken and waffles, which Wells started serving in 1938, became a hit with patrons who flocked to the restaurant in the wee hours, after shows at the Savoy, the Apollo and countless other venues now long-forgotten. A late dinner? An early breakfast? Why not kill two birds with one dish?

But chicken and waffles really took off in the seventies, when Harlemite Herb Hudson brought the beloved dish to Hollywood and opened Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles. Here was a place that not only served the dish, it specialized in it. The restaurant's popularity with black celebrities gave it a major boost, and gave the dish a higher profile. Other restaurants and chains specializing in the combo followed.

Chicken and waffles is an irresistible combination, as far as I'm concerned, but somehow I had never gotten around to trying it. There are a number of places in Harlem that serve the dish today, but Amy Ruth's is reputed to be the best, so that's where I went for my first taste. My verdict? The waffles at Amy Ruth's are fantastic, fabulously fluffy and buttermilky, but I was disappointed with the fried chicken. The meat was on the dry side and the breading was rather bland. I had a taste of the smothered chicken (which one can also order atop a waffle), and that was somewhat better. The macaroni and cheese was too dense for my taste, but the collard greens, cooked with smoked ham hock, I believe, were fabulous. Prices are reasonable and service is cordial. Too bad the fried chicken isn't better.

Amy Ruth's

113 W. 116th St. (near Lenox)

Return of the Hunan

2009-10-22T10:00:00.006-04:00

I was excited to learn, several months ago, that an authentic Hunan restaurant had opened in Queens. Hunan restaurants, the real thing that is, are well nigh impossible to find in the U.S. Forget about the multitudes of places with names like Hunan Garden, Hunan Palace, Hunan Empire, Hunan Dynasty, Grand Hunan, Great Hunan, or Little Hunan that serve generic Americanized Chinese food. I think Chinese restaurateurs must use some kind of name generator to come up with a moniker for their business. Take Szechuan or Hunan, add Grand, Great or Little before it, or Garden, Palace, Empire or Dynasty after it, and voila, you have a generic American-Chinese restaurant. They're interchangeable.

There was a brief time, in the seventies, when New York had several Hunan restaurants, hot on the heels of Nixon's China trip. The most famous Hunanese chef/restaurateur in New York at the time was Peng Chang-kuei (inventor of General Tso's chicken and bean curd home style), who was born in Hunan province and had come to New York by way of Taiwan. Though his cooking was championed by Henry Kissinger, you shouldn't hold that against him. After a brief flowering of true Hunan and Sichuan cuisine in New York, where Americanized Cantonese had been the standard Chinese fare for decades, those spicier cuisines became bastardized and morphed into the Americanized Chinese food we know today. By the end of the seventies you'd have been hard-pressed to find an authentic Hunan or Sichuan restaurant in New York.

In the past ten years or so, real Sichuan food has returned to New York, spearheaded by the Grand Sichuan chain and ably represented by Manhattan's Wu Liang Ye and Szechuan Gourmet (which also has a Queens location), and Flushing's Spicy & Tasty and Little Pepper. It took a little longer for Hunan to return. Let's hope it sticks around.

While there are similarities among the spicy cuisines of the western Sichuan, Hunnan and Yunnan provinces (and all fall under the Chuan category in the "four schools" classification of Chinese cuisine), there are a number distinctive differences. Hunan cuisine, overall, I find less oily than Sichuan food, and its dishes are more reliant on pickled chillies than the aromatic Sichuan peppercorn for spice and oomph.

I organized a group of ten to try a range of dishes at Flushing's Hunan House. We started with two cold appetizers.

The tree fungus (moyee, also known as tree ears or clouds ears) in vinegar sauce was crunchy and refreshing.

Cucumbers with scallion sauce was bathed in a dressing of finely minced scallion and oil. It was subtly delicious, and one can also order the same sauce with cold tofu. I believe I've seen one Sichuan menu where the sauce was referred to as "scallion pesto."

Hunan being an inland province, there's not much in the way of seafood in the cuisine except freshwater fish. We decided to try the fish head (shown at top), and what a formidable head it was (though one has to forage diligently for the meat), topped with pickled chillies. It got mixed reviews, and perhaps the whole fish with the same preparation would have gone over better, even if it would have stripped us of some macho foodie cachet.

For the most part we went with meat dishes, three of them pork. You can never have too much pork, and you can quote me on that.

Steamed spare ribs in bamboo came in a boatlike vessel I've mostly seen used for rice dishes. It had a peppery, soupy sauce. One diner remarked that the flavor reminded her of a Mexican dish, and I immediately knew she was thinking of adobo de puerco; it was an apt comparison. The dish got mixed reviews from the table. I liked it quite a lot while others were frustrated by the scant meat to be found on the chopped bones.

An item on one of several specials menus is referred to as Fuzhi meat dish, and consists of pork belly chunks with a rice flour coating, steamed in lotus leaves. This dish too got mixed reviews. About half of the table rated it among their favorites, but I was disappointed, perhaps because I've yet to find a steamed pork with rice powder that equals that of the long defunct Chinatown Sichuan restaurant Ting Fu Garden.

I think the big winner in the pork category was unquestionably the "braised pork Mao style," otherwise known as red-cooked pork. Made with chunks of belly pork, the dish was mildly spicy (more so than the version I've had at one of the Grand Sichuan branches). While rice wine and soy sauce figure in all recipes for red cooked pork (hongshao rou) I've seen, the spices can vary.

Sliced lamb with cumin dishes are popular in a number of western and northern Chinese regional cuisines, and I'm guessing the cumin came via the silk road trade route through Xinxiang province. Everybody enjoyed this one, though I'm more partial to the crispy version I've had a number of times at Szechuan Gourmet and the truly amazing northeastern version at Waterfront International (now called Fu Run).

Another item from one of the specials menus is the lean dry duck with soybean paste. More prominent than the soybean paste was the mix of chopped chillies atop the dish. It was indeed lean, and crispy, but dry is a bit of a misnomer as the meat is quite moist.

The Hunan-style sliced fish was coated with a complex spice paste and served with steamed bok choi in a way that resembled the Shanghai meatball dish called lion's head. The waiter told us the fish was frogfish.

Hunan House has a more extensive and more interesting vegetable section of the menu than you're likely to find at most authentic Sichuan restaurants in New York. We went with a dish called "pickled with mustard greens." It didn't taste expecially pickly, but it was a wonderful dish, with subtle spicing.

There are a number of tofu dishes on the menu. It was a hard time choosing one, but we went with the mashed peppers with tofu. Slices of firm smoked tofu, in a light sauce, are topped with a mound of the mashed peppers. Several diners remarked on the tofu's resemblance to smoked mozzarella. What's nice about this dish and several others is that they're served in a way that allows the diner to adjust the spiciness of his portion.

Perhaps the dish that was most unique of all (and now that William Safire is dead I can say "most unique" without fear) was the white chili with preserved beef. I had never seen nor heard of white chillies before. The chewy pieces of moderately spicy peppers were a perfect match for the chewy, salty but not overwhelmingly so preserved beef. The dish was a textural complement to the rest of the meal.

Hunan House is, I'm prepared to declare, an outstanding restaurant. It features a large menu of regional dishes, many of which can be found at no other restaurant in the city. The range of preparations and textures along with the subtlety and complexity of flavoring are quite remarkable. While the Sichuan restaurants I've been to all seem to have strengths and weaknesses among their offerings, Hunan House was amazingly consistent. Of the twelve items we ordered at least eight were admired by all and the other four got mixed reviews. There was nothing that everybody declared a loser, and that's an impressive thing.

Hunan House

137-40 Northern Boulevard (between Main & Union)

Flushing

Malaysian Food: The World's Great Fusion Cuisine

2009-10-18T12:01:00.001-04:00

I'm generally skeptical of fusion and pan-Asian restaurants, places with concepts and menus put together either by hot-shot chefs who are trying to come up with bold new flavor combinations or by mediocre Asian restaurateurs who are trying to cover all bases. On the other hand, conquest, migration and trade have certainly influenced almost all cuisines to some degree throughout the course of history by bringing in "foreign" elements. And certain cuisines have developed through a more aggressive melding of diverse influences. The cuisine of Macau, for instance, mixes Chinese cooking techinques and ingredients with those of Portugal and the other former Portuguese colonies. The food of the Indian Ocean islands Mauritius and Reunion melds the cuisines of the French settlers, Indian workers (once known by the politically incorrect term "coolies") and Chinese merchants and workers. For my money, the world cuisine that most brilliantly incorporates multiple influences is that of Malaysia and Singapore.

Perhaps the greatest food trip of my life was the one I took in the early nineties to Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia (though the one that included Bologna and Verona would make a worthy opponent). In Thailand I found that the best food was to be found at food courts and night markets rather than restaurants. The food was dirt cheap, and much of it wonderful, but after a while I found that Thai food lacked real variety, despite the regional variations.

Once I got down to Penang, Malaysia, where I spent about a week, I was in foodie heaven. As in Thailand, much of the best food in Malaysia is sold by outdoor vendors, most specializing in a particular item. Certain dishes tend to be made by members of particular ethnic groups, though in the U.S. a great deal of them find their way onto menus of restaurants run by ethnic Chinese from Malaysia. In Malaysia the best way to eat is to go to one of the hawkers centers, outdoor clusters of vendors selling one or two specialties. You take a table with a number on it, go up to the vendors and order your dishes, give them your table number, and they bring the food to you when it's ready. One of the most famous hawker centers in Penang is at Gurney Drive, a pleasant waterfront setting that is bustling at night. Something I noticed in both Singapore and Malaysia was that all ethnic groups seemed to enjoy each other's food, and sometimes dishes weren't relgated to any particular sub-cuisine.

Hawker Centre in Penang (probably Gurney Drive)

The main ethnic groups of Malaysia are Malay, Chinese and Indian (predominantly Tamil, but also some North Indian). One can find excellent South Indian food in that region, as good as in India. Traditional South Indian cuisine hasn't found its way, in general, onto overseas Malaysian restaurant menus. You won't find a dosa at a Malaysian restaurant. But you'll most certainly find roti canai (pronounced "chanai"--"c" before a vowel in Bahasa Melayu, the Malaysian language, is pronounced "ch") at every Malaysian restaurant in the U.S.

Usually described as "Indian pancake," it's a flaky, multi-layer fried bread that's served with a curry dipping sauce with meat. In Malaysia I think I had it mostly from little roti shops run by Indians, and I think they were Indian muslims as opposed to the mostly vegetarian Tamil Hindus. According to one site I found:

The most widespread local Indian stalls, eateries and restaurants you will find in Malaysia, are Indian-Muslim. Affectionately referred to by locals as Mamak stall or Mamak restaurant, they serve an extraordinary cuisine of Indian-Muslim food - a culinary assimilation of Indian and Malay cooking styles. The curries and entrees are unmistakably Indian, yet unlike those found in India.

Indian Muslims also ran many of the foreign exchange places. At first I found this odd, but I learned that foreign exchange, unlike money lending, does not break the Islamic prohibition against usury.

A pickled vegetable salad common at Malaysian hawker stands as well as overseas Malaysian restaurants is called achat or achar (achar is the name for pickle in India).

The Malaysian version has a tangy sesame-peanut dressing. It's also a component of nasi lemak, a composed plate of coconut rice ("nasi" means rice), some curry (usually chicken or beef), dried tiny fish (ikan bilis), achat, cucumber, and crushed peanuts. It's often eaten for breakfast, and I found mine in Penang at stands run by Malay women. But the Indian influence is apparent, as it is on much of Malay and Indonesian cuisine. In fact, when I first tried Chicken Chettinad, in Chennai (Madras), I noticed the similarity to an Indonesian and Malaysian dish, daging rendang, meat (usually beef) with a dry curry. In Indonesia it is truly a dry spice coating, but the Malaysian version is a thick gravy.

When I told the waiter at that Chettinad restaurant in Chennai about the similarity to Malaysian food he explained that the Chettiyars are a Tamil non-vegetarian Hindu merchant class who traveled throughout Southeast Asia and facilitated a two-way culinary exchange. I prefer the Malaysian style of beef rendang to the Indonesian version, by the way.

Noodles are central to Malaysian cuisine, and were certainly introduced by the Chinese, but popular noodle dishes incorporate various influences. Mee goreng (which combines the Chinese word for noodle with the Malay word for fried) is sometimes called Indian Mee Goreng on U.S. Malaysian menus. Hokkien mee is a thick, yellow wheat noodle served in a brown soy-based gravy with mixed meat and seafood, and the name comes from one of the main Chinese groups in Malaysia, originally from Fujian province (Hokkien is the name for Fujian in the dialect of that province). Mee Jawa, a thick tomato-noodle soup, is of Indonesian origin, as the name implies. Perhaps my favorite Malaysian noodle dish is char kuey teow. Kuey teow is a flat rice noodle, similar to the noodle used for pad Thai, and char just means fried (a variant of "chow"). It's medium-spicy and contains a mix of seafood and sometimes Chinese sausage.

Another dish that's ubiquitous on Malaysian restaurant menus, as well as on many Vietnamese menus, is Hainan chicken rice. It's boiled chicken served on the bone atop very rich, oily rice that's been cooked in fatty chicken broth. It's served with several condiments. Hainan is a southern Chinese island that many overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia hail from.

One of the most popular vegetable dishes in Malaysia and Singapore is kang kung belacan, Chinese water spinach cooked with a preserved dried shrimp paste that is also the base for a Malaysian chili sauce (sambal belacan).

Belacan has a rather funky taste, but used judiciously it adds a wonderful dimension to many dishes. Similar preserved shrimp sauces are found throughout Asia.

When I was in Malaysia and Singapore, satay--grilled, skewered meat--seemed to be an item that was always made by Malay men.

It originated in Indonesia and is served with a peanut dipping sauce. In Singapore there's a famous outdoor venue called the Satay Club where numerous vendors cook their sticks on charcoal grills. It's actually one of the few outdoor venues I could find in Singapore when I was there. Most of the food hawkers had been relegated to sterile shopping center food courts by the anal-retentive leadership of the island who believed that al fresco food preparation was unsanitary.

The fusion cooking of Malaysia and Singapore is generally referred to as Peranakan or Nyonya cuisine. The word "Peranakan" itself refers to a more general cultural or ethnic fusion, growing out Chinese-Malay intermarriage, common in the 19th century. The male descendants became known as "babas" and the women "nyonyas."

All of the food photos above are from a recent dinner at the appropriately named Nyonya, in Chinatown, one of New York's better Malaysian restaurants (though I more frequently go to the Sunset Park branch). One dish that Nyonya does particularly well is cheng lai stingray, which is cooked with a spicy lemongrass sauce.

I've only scratched the surface of Malaysian food here. Because of the diversity of the cuisine, most Malaysian restaurants have very large menus, and the hardest part of a Malaysian meal is deciding what to order. At my recent dinner for six at Nyonya I focused on some of the greatest hits of Malaysian cuisine, making sure all of the major strains were represented.

Malaysian restaurants are "pan-Asian" without the artifice . . . and bad sushi ain't on the menu.

Nyonya

194 Grand Street (between Mott & Mulberry)

Pheasant Under Glass

2009-10-15T13:55:00.001-04:00

When I was a kid, pheasant under glass was the cliche for ritzy food, but often with a touch of pretension-mocking irony. There were countless references, in cartoons, TV shows, conversation. I think some restaurants served the dish at least into the seventies. Now I'm sure you'd get a blank stare if you made a pheasant under glass reference to a kid. I don't know if there's any single culinary equivalent as a cultural reference today, perhaps because the old-school stuffy dining paradigm that persisted into my childhood has been mostly jettisoned.

I decided to putter around the internet looking for references to pheasant under glass. There were surprisingly few, perhaps because the dish had completely disappeared by the digital age.

The term certainly had enough currency in 1969 for it to be used as the joke title of an episode of "Get Smart" (where a Professor Pheasant is imprisoned under a glass dome). One of the odder references I found was a quote from Aretha Franklin in 1982. "Disco," Aretha said, "is like having pheasant under glass when you really wanted ribs!" I'm assuming she was referring to the overproduction of disco and its relative lack of soul, but the analogy doesn't quite work.

As recently as 2001, The New York Times published a recipe for pheasant under glass, to accompany a nostalgic piece by playwright and food writer Jonathan Reynolds.

I've never had pheasant under glass, but now that I've attained the age of nostalgia I feel a terrible emptiness because of it. Just once before I die I'd like to eat pheasant under glass. And when it's presented to me I want the waiter to say, "Dinner is served!"

Image by Allan Bealy

Gambling on Flammenkuche in Cusco

2009-10-12T11:00:00.000-04:00

Colmar (Alsace)

I fell in love with flammenkuche, or tarte flambee, in Alsace. It's deadly stuff, a down-payment on a heart attack, as is most Alsatian food. Flammenkuche is one of the great members of the extended pizza family. In its simplest form, onions, bacon and creme fraiche or fromage blanc sit atop a thin pizza crust. Adding gruyere makes it gratin. Adding mushrooms makes it forestiere. I couldn't get enough of it when I stayed in Strasbourg and visited Colmar. Flammenkuche was one of the reasons I returned to Strasbourg (though it has many other charms, culinary and otherwise), on another trip to France.

I'll bet are plenty of places in Paris to get a tarte flambee (for Paris I'll use the French name, rather than the Alsatian one), but I've never tried one there. The two I've had in New York (Cafe d'Alsace and the Bar Room at The Modern) were totally disappointing. The only town outside of Alsace where I've had a great one was Montreux, Switzerland, when I was there for the jazz festival in the late nineties. I asked the waitress if she were Alsatian. "No," she replied, "I'm Swiss, but the owner is from Alsace, so you get the best of both worlds!"

Flammenkuche, Cusco-Style

It was a longshot, but when I saw that there was a French-Mediterranean cafe in Cusco that served flammenkuche, I just had to try it. So for one meal I took a break from my exploration of Peruvian cuisine. The place was just off Plaza San Blas, and all the other diners were French. The chef-owner is a young guy from Saint-Etienne, near Lyon. I neglected, unfortunately, to note the name of the place, but its menu included familiar cafe items like salads, croque monsieur, and couscous.

If it had turned out to be a great flammenkuche I'd have had something to write about. A great flammenkuche in Cusco--who'd have imagined? But it wasn't a great flammenkuche, or even a good one. There was no creme fraiche or cheese, just bacon and onions, and the crust was nothing like a pizza or a flatbread, but more like a crispy tortilla. It was sort of a flammenkuche tostada.

Still, I did have something to write about after all.

Bart's Birthday

2009-10-10T00:01:00.000-04:00

Bart, me, and Harvey at Harvey's Bar Mitzvah, 1961

My brother Bart died a couple of years ago. Today would have been his 65th birthday, an American milestone he never made.

We weren't really that close, especially in later years. He was 12 years older than me, and by the time I was 7 or 8 he was out on his own. But Bart was a formative influence on me in a number of ways. My father died when I was 2, so my two brothers, both somewhat older, filled in some of the father-figure slack. Once, on an outing to Sam Goody's record store, ca. 1964 (a Beatles-buying expedition), a clerk said to Bart, of me, "He's a cute kid. Is he your son?"

A passion for music is one of the things I got partly from Bart. He was an obsessive record collector. Like our father before him, Bart was a big fan of the Great American Songbook and its interpreters, especially Sinatra and his crowd. As I got older we found mutual territory in jazz singers. But when I was younger Bart encouraged my burgeoning musical interests, sparked largely by the seismic cultural effect of Beatlemania, when I was 8 years old.

He was also an adventurous and enthusiastic eater. I first tried calamari on Bart's recommendation, at a local Brooklyn Italian restaurant. Back in the mid-60s calamari was not the ubiquitous menu item it is today. Back then it was considered weird or exotic food.

My brother was never one to do anything in moderation. Many of my earliest experiences of regional Chinese cuisines, in the early-70s, were in his company. Bart was especially excited by the newly available spicy Szechuan cuisine. One time he went to a Szechuan restaurant in Chinatown, Szechuan Taste, I think, and asked the waiter, "What's the spiciest dish you have?" The waiter named a dish and Bart said, "Give me one of those--and make it twice as hot."

Bart had a great sense of humor, which contributed greatly to his success in the sales game. Styrofoam is a pretty dry product line, but Bart kept his customers in stitches with an endless barrage of jokes. Whether they were good or bad, he really didn't care. In fact, he had a real talent for delivering bad jokes. His wit could be acerbic (a family trait, I think). Once, at a rare restaurant outing with both of my brothers, at least ten years ago, in Chinatown of course, I was reminiscing about the old neighborhood and our childhoods. I have a particularly acute long-term memory, and Harvey, the middle son, said, "How do you remember these things? You should go on Jeopardy." To which Bart replied, "What would his subject be? Dysfunctional family trivia?"

Today, on his birthday anniversary, I'm remembering my brother publicly.

Chicha, the Beer that Made the Incas Famous

2009-10-08T10:40:00.002-04:00

Chicha vendor in her chicharia, Ollantaytambo

Chicha, a kind of beer made from malted corn, has been brewed continuously in much of South America since Inca times, in the fifteenth century. It's traditionally made by women and only served in humble chicharias (private homes or simple shops) rather than bars or restaurants.

In Cusco and the Sacred Valley a chicharia announces itself by hanging a red or blue bag on a broomstick or some other kind of wooden pole. When I was staying in Ollantaytambo I noticed a chicharia right on the main plaza and decided to go in for an adventure. I entered a courtyard, and at the left I saw an entrance to a little place where a bunch of old people in tradtional local garb were sitting. "Ay chicha aqui?" I asked.

"Si, si," someone said and motioned me in. I was served a big (maybe 20-oz.) glass of the cloudy yellow brew and told the cost was 50 centimos (about 17 cents). I sat down and started drinking my chicha.

The flavor of chicha is tart. I've seen it described as cider-like. The flavor reminded me a bit of a coarser version of a Belgian witbier. I noticed the other drinkers swirling their glasses around. This is to keep the corn sediment dispersed throughout the drink, so it doesn't settle completely to the bottom of the glass. Chicha is fairly low in alcohol (average 2%), so people drink many large glasses to get a buzz on.

An old lady, who may have been the co-proprietress, asked me, "De donde es?"

"Nueva York."

She seemed impressed. She looked at the others. "Nueva York!" she said.

This woman did most of the talking. My Spanish isn't very good, and I had a hard time understanding her through her semi-toothless abuela diction. I probably got about 30% and just nodded a lot. At one point I said (in Spanish), "In New York we don't have chicha. Only beer."

"Do you have corn in New York?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, "but only to eat. Not to drink."

For more about chicha, see Bill Ridgely's excellent article.

The Chola Dynasty

2009-10-06T00:30:00.005-04:00

Chola temple at Tanjore

The Cholas, a Tamil dynasty, ruled South India from the 9th through 13th centuries. Perhaps the greatest cultural legacy of the Cholas, stunning temple architecture notwithstanding, is their exquisite bronze statuary. A major exhibit of Chola bronzes opens today at New York's Asia Society.

But there's another Chola dynasty, a current one--a restaurant dynasty. With Chola (232 E. 58th) as its flagship, the group runs a number of multiregional Indian restaurants throughout New York and New England. Chola itself has what is probably New York City's best Indian lunch buffet, and they offer it on weekends too.

The group also includes Tadka (229 E. 53rd), which I wrote about to extol the virtues of its fabulous vindaloo. They've recently opened another Manhattan restaurant, this time with an Indian truck stop theme, called Dhaba (Lexington between 27th and 28th). Dhaba offers a number of gussied-up snack foods, including a wide range of chaats, Indian-Chinese dishes like gobi Manchurian and chili chicken, as well as some familiar Indian restaurant staples. Its menu tends more toward North Indian, while the other restaurants have a range of northern and southern dishes, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian. When I dined at Dhaba I was surprised at how large the servings were, so bear that in mind when ordering.

Calamari Cochin

I spent Labor Day weekend in the Berkshires and ate at Bombay Bar & Grill, their outpost in Lee (435 Laurel St.). Like Chola, the menu includes many South Indian non-vegetarian items not normally found on New York menus, let alone in Western Massachusetts. We enjoyed several Keralan dishes, including the calamari Cochin (a masala fried squid appetizer) and Cochin snapper, a whole tandoor-cooked snapper topped with a Kerala shrimp curry. The snapper as well as the Chettinadu rack of lamb (a Tamil preparation with a black pepper and coconut sauce) were served as "pre-plated dinners," along with vegetable biryani, salad and garlic naan. We topped off the meal with Kundapur vegetables, a moderately spiced coconut milk-based dish from the southern state of Karnataka. The dishes were bounteous, and we were especially impressed by the six respectably-sized lamb chops.

Chettinadu Rack of Lamb

Chola, Tadka and Dhaba are three of the best Indian restaurants in New York City, and Bombay Bar and Grill is likely one of the best restaurants, period, in the Berkshires.

Perseverance and the Writer

2009-10-05T13:56:00.002-04:00

My essay "The Great Unfinished American Novel" appears in the latest Mung Being, the Craft issue.

Chilly Buff and Goat's Guts

2009-10-04T10:40:00.000-04:00

Before I tell you about my dinner at Mustang Thakali Kitchen, a Nepali restaurant in Jackson Heights, please indulge me while I show you a few snapshots from my trip to Nepal in the winter of 1990-91.

Dhulikhel with Himalayas in Background

Swayambhunath Stupa

Bagmati Ghats

Thanks.

Mustang Thakali Kitchen specializes in, as the name says, Thakali cuisine, from the north of the country, as opposed to the Newari cuisine of the Kathmandu Valley, but I'm not going to try to figure out, let alone explain, what the differences are. I will go on record and say that I found Mustang's food significantly better and more consistent than that at another Nepali restaurant in the same neighborhood, Himalayan Yak, which I was never moved to write about. Both restaurants also feature dishes from neighboring Tibet. There are many Tibetan refugees in Nepal, and a number of Tibetan dishes, especially momos (dumplings), can be found at restaurants in Kathmandu.

I went to Mustang Thakali Kitchen with a large enough group to try a bunch of dishes. Though there are a number of vegetarian options on the menu, and though the Nepali diet is largely vegetarian, it's the variety of meat flavors and textures that really make the restaurant special.

One of the best bets to start with is the samya bajee, a bento box with a combination of spicy cold chicken, the dry and crunchy "beaten rice," marinated soybeans, and, best of all, bhutuwa goat, a moderately spicy combo of goat's liver, intestines and stomach. If you're into innards, bhutuwa goat is the dish for you.

Another of the evening's hits was the chilly buff. Buff is water buffalo, one of the most common meats in Nepal. It has an only slightly gamey flavor, and I found it to be one of the tastier dishes of the evening. "Chilly" seems to be the preferred spelling of chili on most Himalayan restaurant menus.

Mutton fry is not mutton at all, but fried goat meat, and quite delicious, as was the sukuti beef, sauteed with "Nepali spices." When I ordered the latter I mistakenly thought I was ordering the beef jerky dish that Robert Sietsema wrote about in his Village Voice review. That one is actually called sukuti sadeko. It was a case of mistaken sukutis.

Pay no attention to the menu's distinction between appetizers and entrees, as it seems largely arbitrary. All of the dishes above came from the appetizers section, while dumplings are listed as an entree.

From the entrees portion of the menu, the vegetable thali was rather sparse and disappointing, but the vegetable momos were wonderful, among the best meatless dumplings I've tasted. The ghoken, a buckwheat roti that was served with a chicken curry, was rather bland, but had an appealing, fluffy texture.

I think the key to satisfaction at Mustang Thakali Kitchen is to be adventurous and to eat lots of meat.

When the Carlsons Become the McBrides

2009-10-01T19:40:00.000-04:00

This is the other song I performed with Lee Feldman at Joe's Pub in July. It's slower than "Everything Reminds Me Of You." Most of it, that is.

Be Lee..Peter Cherches from JMJProductions on Vimeo.

Drink More, Eat Less . . . At King Yum!

2009-09-29T20:30:00.002-04:00

"I should have drank more and eaten less" was Donna's verdict after our dinner at King Yum, on Union Turnpike in Queens, one of New York's last bastions of classic old-school Chinese-American food. Considering how bad the food was, I decided that would make a good motto for the restaurant. But then it's not for the quality of the food that one visits King Yum. It's for a trip in the wayback machine to 1953, the year King Yum opened.

But before we travel back 56 years, let me rewind just a bit. King Yum had been on my radar since I developed a nostalgic interest in the Chinese food of my youth a couple of years ago. I made it to one of the other survivors, Riverdale's Golden Gate, and actually quite enjoyed the spare ribs and butterfly shrimp. Several people who had been to King Yum had warned me that the food wasn't very good, but it did pretty much maintain its fifties decor, was still run by its founder, James K. Eng, who holds court nightly, and they still serve a full list of "exotic" drinks like the mai tai, the zombie, the mona loa, and the tabu for two. And, of course, flaming pu-pu platters, de rigeur with mai tais and zombies.

It was six months after my birthday and Donna still hadn't taken me out to celebrate. Reciprocal birthday dinners are a tradition I try to maintain with my close friends. So I called in my chit. Since Donna and her husband Masa have a car, a rare commodity among my New York friends, and since King Yum isn't near a subway stop, I requested we hold my belated birthday celebration there.

With its bamboo-accented faux-Polynesian interior, King Yum has more of a tiki lounge atmosphere than any of the Chinese restaurants I frequented as a kid, but the menu is pure old-school Cantonese-American, including many dishes I hadn't thought about in years. We got there on a Wednesday night at 7PM, and the place was hopping. Well, not quite hopping, since I suspect a large percentage of the customers now use walkers. The large dining room was a sea of white hair. I think many of the customers were old when the place opened in 1953. Not everybody was ancient, but the three of us were certainly in the youth brigade. I found that rather refreshing.

One of the reasons it was so busy was that Wednesday is one of their two karaoke nights. The incidental "entertainment" added to the kitsch experience. Shortly after we were seated the woman who manages the karaoke came over to our table. "Is anybody celebrating a special event?" she asked. "A birthday? An anniversary?"

"No!" I screamed out before anybody had a chance to say otherwise. I wasn't lying, after all. We may have been celebrating my birthday, but my birthday is in March. Anyway, we had all agreed we had no desire to participate in karaoke. Besides, I only perform my own songs, none of which have, as far as I know, made it into the karaoke repertoire.

We ordered our drinks. I chose a zombie and Donna a pina colada. Masa doesn't drink. I was disappointed that my drink didn't come in a carved tiki mug, but at least it had an umbrella.

We perused the dinner menu. On the specials list was an item called "mish mosh." Donna had to know what it was, and I'm glad she did. The waiter explained: "It's pan fried noodles topped with shrimp, chicken and pork."

"Oh," I said, "subgum chow mein."

"Yes. Chinese dish, Jewish name." As he said this he made a sweeping hand gesture surveying the alter kakers in the crowd. We didn't order mish mosh. In the topsy-turvy bizzarro world of inauthentic Chinese food, a relatively authentic pan fried noodle dish would be too inauthentic. In the wayback machine Chinese restaurant world there are no pan fried noodles. In this parallel universe, chow mein is a plate of meat and vegetables in a mucilaginous sauce topped with dry, crispy noodles.

We started with individual bowls of wonton soup, of course. The broth tasted as if it had been ladled directly out of a lake in Utah, it was that salty. Everything else was overly salty too.

After we finished our soup, the pu-pu platter arrived.

The contents of a pu-pu platter can vary from place to place. This one consisted of spare ribs, shrimp toast, foil wrapped chicken, beef skewers, and fantail shrimp. No egg rolls. C'est la vie. The ribs were scrawny and salty. The beef sticks were leathery and salty. The foil wrapped chicken was really salty. I don't usually like deep fried things, so I passed on the shrimp toast and the fantail shrimp, the latter of which toted a blimp's worth of batter.

Then our two main courses arrived. I got goose bumps when I saw those metal serving dishes and lids.

For some reason I've had an ongoing Jones for butterfly shrimp for the longest time (and sometimes the Jones lasts for longer than four hours). I wrote about the version at Golden Gate, which was a kind of butterfly shrimp-omelet hybrid. King Yum's was more like I remembered: individual shrimp split lengthwise, with bacon pasted on with just a touch of egg, served in a light sweet-sour sauce with onions. It was the best, or at least the least bad, dish of the evening, but it couldn't compare with Golden Gate's, which was actually good. King Yum's was, yes, too salty.

When I saw the wor shew opp (braised pressed duck) I was horrified. What have I done? I wondered. The thick brown gravy looked like the La Brea Tar Pits studded with canned mushrooms. It was, believe it or not, incredibly salty. I can't believe I ate as much of it as I did. I'm thinking the mai tai made me do it. I had finished my zombie by the time the main courses arrived and ordered a mai tai. I had never before had either drink. I'm pretty sure the mai tai was just a zombie (rum and fruit juice) with Angostura Bitters added.

It was a lousy meal, no doubt about it, but I'm glad I went. Think of King Yum as a living museum of sorts. Go, have a zombie or a mai tai, soak up the atmosphere, order some food, not too much, have a few more drinks, be thankful that a place like this still exists, and be even more thankful that very few places like this still exist.

King Yum
181-08 Union Turnpike
Queens

Word of Mouth's Yom Kippur Pork Roundup

2009-09-28T11:54:00.003-04:00

As a radical Atheist Jew, I feel it's my duty to proselytize pork on Yom Kippur, partly because I love pork, and partly to counter the false importance given to pork in the pantheon of treyf by secular Jews. I know plenty of non-observant Jews who don't eat pork but otherwise don't keep kosher in any way. Somehow, over the years, the mistaken impression has arisen among many secular Jews that of all things non-kosher, pork is the most egregious, the one thing that would compromise their Jewish "identity." Feh. In Kosher law treyf is treyf, there are no real distinctions. I think the porkophobia among secular Jews may be a purely American disease.

I also know plenty of non-observant Jews who work on all Jewish holidays except Yom Kippur, perhaps under the belief that this is the holiest of days, and just in case the idiot bastard vindictive god of the Old Testament is more than a perverse fiction, they'd better hedge their bets and stay home just this one day. Double feh.

Here, then, are some of my favorite porky posts.

Liquid Pork

Enhanced Pork

Roast Pork at Kar Won

Pork Shoulder at Lupa

It Ain't Just Ham

Rethinking the Cuban Sandwich

Happy Hour with Pig

Suckling Pig and Zocor

Ripped Off By Jewel

2009-09-26T16:03:00.002-04:00

I just learned that Jewel recorded a song called "Everything Reminds Me of You" on last year's "Perfectly Clear" album. It's perfectly clear to me that the Cherches and Feldman take on the same concept predates Jewel's by nearly 25 years. Whose song is better? You be the judge.

When Life Deals You Green Chuckles, Laugh It Off

2009-09-25T17:05:00.006-04:00

In a raffle at the office today I got the green Chuckle. Not literally, but I did spontaneously exclaim to a coworker that I felt as if I had been dealt the green Chuckle. It's not a phrase I'd used before, but it seemed to fit.

The raffle was for charity, and there were lots of prizes, many of them food and travel related, a number of which I coveted. I didn't win any of those, but I did win a pair of tickets to an advance screening of a film I'm not particularly interested in. My green Chuckle.

I loved Chuckles when I was a kid. Actually, I loved two of the flavors, liked two others, and hated the last one. Cherry and orange Chuckles I couldn't get enough of. Lemon were pretty good. Licorice depended whether I was in a pro- or anti-licorice phase. But lime? Yuck. You couldn't give 'em away. In my neighborhood, everybody hated green Chuckles. Cherry was the unanimous favorite, lime the most detested, and licorice the most controversial.

Is this true, or was my memory playing tricks on me? Was I perhaps creating a fantasy Chuckles childhood? Would I need to undergo regression therapy to solve the mystery? I started polling my coworkers and quickly learned that it's pointless to ask anybody under forty. Not only do they not have Chuckles preferences, they don't know what they are. So I called Howard. "Howard," I said, "what do you think of when I say 'green Chuckles'?"

"The candy?" he said.

"Yeah, what about them?"

"Um, nobody liked them?"

Bingo. Confirmation. And Howard grew up in Queens, not Brooklyn. I was satisfied. Green Chuckles is the perfect metaphor, the equivalent of what they used to call a "zonk" on "Let's Make a Deal," even if it draws blank stares from most people.

Chuckles were invented in 1921. According to one source, "In March of 1921, Fred W. Amend went into business for himself manufacturing marshmallow. Later that year he began producing jelly candy from a formula he himself had developed. The formula solved a problem of the time which was the outbreak of "sweat" on the surface of jelly candies. Fred's wife suggested the name of the product which hit the market in 1921." When I was a kid, Chuckles was a major player in the candy pantheon. They're still manufactured, but they're apparently hard to find (not that I've looked very hard), and probably sell mainly on the strength of nostalgia. Since the seventies they've been made by Nabisco and Hershey's, and now Farley and Sather's, which specializes in legacy candies, including Brach's chocolates, JujyFruits and JuJubes (the latter being another childhood favorite of mine).

Of the green Chuckles, one candy blogger says:

Lime - well, there’s always the underdog in every flavor mix and lime is it here. It’s everything you’d expect from a circa 1920 lime candy - the essence of a clean floor. It’s kind of sad that the fabulous flavor of lime was co-opted by the cleaning moguls, but there you have it, for at least two generations the scent of lime just can’t be separated from the smell of a clean bathroom. Even with all its baggage, I still ate the whole piece (not true with the cherry one) and wondered what was so bad with associating a piece of candy with sparkling tiles?

Another reviewer describes them in very similar terms:

Lime: This is very chemically tasting and very zesty. It reminds me of Lysol, and I even taste the “fumes” in there. My mouth did feel clean and disinfected afterwards.

When I was a kid I'd often offer the green Chuckle to friends, but they rarely took me up on it. I usually threw the green ones away, but occasionally I did eat them. Sometimes you just have to hold your nose and swallow the green Chuckle.

Andean Eats

2009-09-24T11:45:00.001-04:00

cordero asado with tamal, rocoto relleno, papas doradas & vegetables

I already knew from restaurants in the U.S. that Peruvian cuisine was both diverse and excellent, but I also knew that many dishes we find in overseas Peruvian restaurants are Lima-style, with lots of seafood and a number of Chinese-influenced dishes (Lima has one of the largest Chinatowns in the Americas). Andean food, I knew, would be somewhat different. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I knew I'd be eating more meat than seafood, and more than just alpaca and guinea pig. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and diversity of Andean cuisine.

rocotos rellenos with papas doradas

The rocoto is a mildly hot, squat little pepper that grows abundantly in the region, and it's most often cooked as rocotos rellenos, stuffed with chopped beef and topped with cheese. Rocotos rellenos may be served as an appetizer, a main course or a side dish.

Potatoes are abundant in Peru (they originated there, and there are hundreds of varieties). Pretty much every meal will include potatoes, usually fries, papas doradas (browned potatoes, usually whole), or stewed along with meats. The potatoes that are most commonly served are very dense and starchy. You'll often be served rice and potatoes together. Other grains, especially popular as soup ingredients, are barley and quinua, or quinoa, the "mother grain" of the Incas, which has recently become better known here through health food vendors. Though you'll see "frejol" on menus, Peru is not a bean cuisine like Mexico or the Caribbean countries. However, I was served lima beans on several occasions. A popular salad, called solterito (shown left), combines lima beans with cheese, corn, peas, onions and tomatoes. Lima beans do indeed come from Peru, so we've been pronouncing it wrong all our lives.

There are dozens, if not scores, if not hundreds of soups in Peruvian cuisine, some served as main courses. I tried a lamb and grains soup (with barley, quinoa and corn), a chupe de quinua (quinoa soup with egg, vegetables and cheese), which may be the most popular of Andean soups, a fantastic sopa de ajo (garlic soup), which was one of the best things I tasted in Cusco, and a chairo, a soup of mixed meat and vegetables (including lima beans and hominy) in what I took to be a chicken stock--it reminded me of a cross between a Mexican pozole and a Caribbean sancocho. I'm not sure what the difference between a sopa and a chupe is, and I've seen both sopa de quinua and chupe de quinua used. Also very popular are cremas, or cream soups, but I didn't get around to trying any of them.

chupe de quinua

sopa de ajo

chairo

Just about the only fish you'll find in Andean Peru is trucha (trout). But boy is it delicious. Yet it isn't native to Peru at all--it was introduced from Canada. It's a wonderfully rich, sweet, pink-fleshed trout that, grilled or poached, may be as tasty as any salmon I've had. It's also used in local ceviches, though you won't find many dedicated cevicherias in this region they way you will in Lima.

trucha

And then there's meat, and plenty of it. Though it's not a grilled meat dominated cuisine like, say, that of Argentina, Peruvians love their anticuchos, grilled skewered meats. One of the most popular is the anticucho de corazon, made of beef hearts. I had a combination of three at a restaurant in Cusco: heart, beef and that wonderful trout.

anticuchos

I didn't have any pollo a la brasa (rotisserie chicken), a staple of Peruvian restaurants in New York, except as part of a buffet lunch during a Sacred Valley tour, but there are certainly plenty of places to get it in Cusco, including specialty chicken restaurants. The chicken dishes I did have, both wonderful, were aji de gallina and estofado de pollo. The estofado was a stew in a delicious red sauce. The aji is a cream sauce with garlic, cheese, nuts and chiles (aji is a kind of hot pepper), very rich, sort of a chicken a la king with a kick (I was a sucker for Swanson's as a kid).

estofado de pollo

aji de gallina

Lomo saltado, a Chinese-influenced beef stir fry is ubiquitous on Peruvian menus, but the only version I had was a tapa at an upscale Cusco restaurant.

lomo saltado tapa

And then there are the wonderful roast meats. Lechon, roast pig, is found on many menus, and I had mine at a buffet at the luxury hotel next to Machu Picchu, where the whole pig, head on, was laid out and sliced for you. At one fairly humble, completely non-touristy local eatery I had a delicious and enormous hunk of cabrito asado, roast kid, that had a marvelously complex spice rub. The whole plate cost me a whopping $4.

cabrito

I ate so well in Cusco it would be hard to pick out a favorite meal, but a contender would be my final lunch before my flight back to Lima on the way home. It was a Sunday, and the restaurant, Quinta Eulalia, was bustling with local families out for their big Sunday meal. Quinta Eulalia is a Cusco institution, since 1941. It's an al fresco restaurant in a courtyard (that's what a "quinta" is) and is open for lunch only. The day's choices are written on blackboards throughout the courtyard, and I chose the cordero asado, roast lamb. For 18 soles ($6) I got a plate (shown at top) that included a large and muy sabroso serving of lean and tender lamb, a fluffy semi-sweet tamal stuffed with raisins, a rocoto relleno, papas doradas and steamed vegetables.

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Cusco Restaurants

In general, I've decided to discuss the restaurants separately from the dishes. I figure the food will be of interest to most of my readers and the restaurant details will be more useful to travelers to Peru. I had excellent meals in dirt cheap restaurants that catered mostly to locals, mid-range restaurants that seemed to get a mix of local and tourist business, and high-end places that did a mostly tourist business. While there are excellent meals to be had at the more formal or "tourist-friendly" restaurants, don't miss out on meals at local picanterias and quintas, which can be some of the most rewarding food experiences in Cusco.

La Quinta Eulalia
Choquechaca 384

On a quiet end of a street near the San Blas neighborhood, this is a great bet for an outdoor lunch among the locals, and it's an amazing value. I believe most plates include a rocoto relleno and a tamal as well as potatoes and vegetables. As I mentioned above, it's a venerable, classic quinta. In addition to that wonderful plate of lamb 'n' stuff, I had my bowl of chairo there.

La Chomba
Tullumayo 339

This is a picanteria, a working-class eatery where you're unlikely to see other tourists. It's on the street that's the extension of Choquechaca. The restaurant, with long picnic tables, looks like a cross between a mess hall and a roadhouse, and the customers will be doing as much drinking as eating. The food is really cheap and really good, and you'll soak up lots of local color. This is where I had the roast kid.

Pucara
Plateros 309

This pleasant little restaurant just off the Plaza de Armas seems to be one of the best bets in the heart of the city. The food is wonderful and the prices reasonable. I had two lunches there. The first time I had the sopa de ajo and the estofado de pollo. The soup so bowled me over that I went back the next day for the anticuchos, which were also excellent.

Pacha Papa
Plaza San Blas

This open-air restaurant is designed after the quintas, but dinner is served. It's very popular, especially with tourists, and is recommended by most guidebooks, so you'll need a dinner reservation (lunch shouldn't be a problem for walk-ins). They do a wide range of Andean and Peruvian dishes, and the courtyard is very comfortable, with ample heating at night. I had the aji de gallina there as well as an excellent rocoto relleno appetizer. The slightly sweet little rolls (with an almost challah-like taste), baked fresh in an open hearth oven in the courtyard, are fabulous.

Cicciolina
Triunfo 393

On a street that leads up toward San Blas from the Cathedral, this upscale restaurant and tapas bar serves a mix of Italian food, Mediterranean-influenced tapas, and Novo Andino cuisine. I went there to try the causa de cuy I had written about earlier, but the tapas I tried were quite good too. Note that at the bar one can order from both the dinner menu and the tapas menu, but at the tables only the dinner menu is available. If you can't get a table, it should be easier to score a seat at the bar, but make a reservation if you really want a table.

Note: the trout and the chupe de quinua were eaten at restaurants in Ollantaytambo, a town I'll be posting about later.

Toby's Brilliant Brunch Pizza

2009-09-22T09:40:00.001-04:00

I saw the sign on Saturday, around noon. I was walking from Park Slope to Sunset Park, down 6th Avenue, when I noticed the sign. It was a blackboard, outside a bar/brick-oven pizzeria on the corner of 6th Avenue and 21st Street, Toby's Public House. The sign said something like: "Brunch Pizza. Saturdays and Sundays only, 12-4 (or was it 12-2?). Tomato, Mozzarella, Eggs, Bacon or Sausage." What a great idea, I thought. I'll have to try it ASAP. ASAP was the following day.

Toby's opened last year. I can't remember what was at that location before, but the interior looks like a venerable bar, with a great classic tile floor. Toby's has already gotten a fair amount of attention from the pizzascenti (and when that word finally makes the dictionary, I may well be the first citation). One thing the writers can't seem to agree on is what to call the neighborhood. To me, 6th & 21st is resolutely South Slope, but some call it Greenwood Heights (a name I first heard maybe 6 or 7 years ago to describe the neighborhood around Green-Wood Cemetery), and one reviewer quite erroneously called it Sunset Park.

The pizzas are 12" thin-crust Neapolitans, and I thought the crust was quite good--a nice char to the edges and a good crunchy-chewy balance. I wondered how the bacon and eggs would figure in the pizza. Would it be topped with cooked eggs and bacon? No, it appears that everything was baked together, with generally satisfactory results. I'm guessing that beaten eggs were poured directly on the crust after the cheese, dotting the pie, giving the eggs a fluffy consistency reminiscent of a baked frittata. I'd have preferred the bacon crispier, however--partial precooking may be the answer. All in all, though, it was a fabulous combination. Quality mozzarella, a good crust, an excellently flavor-balanced sauce, crowned with bacon and eggs--who could ask for anything more? The pizza makes perfect breakfast sense: eggs, bacon, cheese, tomato, bread--can you show me a better way to put them all together?

Toby's Public House
686 Sixth Avenue
South Slope or Greenwood Heights, depending on who you ask
Brooklyn, NY

Closest Subway: R to Prospect Avenue or 25th Street.