Years ago, Joe and I stopped for lunch at an oyster shack north of San Francisco. It was a quiet autumn weekday. Only one other couple were there enjoying the oysters and the weather. Eventually, the woman asked me where we were from and a pleasant, brief chat ensued. They lived just north of Los Angeles, and, she said, they were having their “Highway 1 fix”.
That wasn’t hard to understand. To call it addictive seems quite reasonable. California’s Highway 1 runs close to the Pacific Coast for most of its length. If you’re a curious traveler who likes a varied landscape, it’s a fascinating and often stunning drive. I was, indeed, due for a Highway 1 fix, and for the first time in almost ten years, last week I had a chance to do that.
I’d wanted to go to Duarte’s Tavern for a long time, but never managed to hit the tiny town of Pescadero south of San Francisco around mealtime. This probably was because we were inevitably making a beeline for Randall Grahm and his merry band of winesters at Bonny Doon Vineyard, which is perhaps 25 miles south of Pescadero. Winemaker Grahm was a big fan of Stanley Elkin, the novelist who taught at Washington University. Joe was going to introduce them, an event that unfortunately never happened. Grahm survived the disappointment and continues to turn out first-rate beverages.
But I digress, as I so often do. Pronounced DOO-arts, the tavern has been around since 1895. Despite the road trippers from Baghdad-by-the-Bay and Silicon Valley, an appearance on the Food Network and a James Beard Award for American Classics, this is still mostly a very unassuming place. Several small dining rooms and a bar feel much like a few ancient spots in south St. Louis, with wood paneling, family photos and a seemingly random collection of art.
An early evening dinner visit started with a herd of unmanned fire trucks parked nearby. Inside, a sign announced self-seating, although they do take reservations – see their website, which has wonderful photos and even suggestions about what to do while waiting for a table. Sure enough, in the first dining room there were three or four tables of CAL FIRE guys, the folks who fight wildfires in California. Talk about local atmosphere – this was more promising than truck drivers.
It’s artichoke country hereabouts, the fields of the quirky-looking plant often seen from Highway 1, and the signature soup is cream of artichoke. Creamy and rich, it satisfies. The other house soup is cream of green chile, and the kitchen wisely offers half and half, a bowl with some of each ladled into it. The combination punches up the richness a little, and it’s a good pairing My pal and I shared a bowl; they don’t do cups. The bread seems to be made in-house, baguette-like, served hot and roughly cut, another mark of the home-cooking feel of things.
A couple of days of deeply inhaling the scent of the Pacific had made me hungry for oysters. The Fanny Bays on Duarte’s menu were large and dazzling, a fine example of what people talk about when they say an oyster is creamy. Certainly that mineral-y saline taste comes first, but after a moment’s chewing, the texture evolves and the tongue realizes there’s something else going on.
The Duarte family came from the Azores, so the roots of the cooking tradition is more or less Portuguese. The first clue may be linguica on the sandwich menu. But it’s particularly evident in another signature dish, cioppino. Despite its name, cioppino isn’t from Italy, it began in San Francisco, apparently out of the Italian-American community in the neighborhood of North Beach. The stew uses several kinds of seafood with tomatoes, onions, celery and parsley. Duarte’s includes cumin in theirs, which they say is Portuguese.
The star of the wide bowl of cioppino is a generous amount of Dungeness crab. The supporting cast includes shrimp, clams, mussels and a piece or two of fish. Nearly all are perfectly cooked – I found one of the large shrimp that had been overcooked, but that was the exception. The ruddy, surprisingly vegetal liquid, was not overwhelming with its notes of cumin at all, but I had hoped for a stronger flavor of fish stock in it. It arrives, of course, with a cracker for the shells, although they were often easy enough to do by hand before popping a segment of meat directly into a waiting diner’s mouth, and real cloth bibs, none of these static-y plastic things. It’s the most expensive thing on the menu at $40, but a very large serving.
Going in another direction entirely, a pork chile verde stew was satisfying, the meat tender but lean, the sauce thick with chile and with a fair amount of heat, easily calmed by the rice that accompanied it. A crisp red cabbage slaw with celery seed rode shotgun, the texture a nice contrast. This, and a number of other options were in a second menu that changes often – make sure you see both before final decisions are made, because this is the sort of spot that may well have quite a few local dishes arousing curiosity, things like sand dabs and abalone.
Duarte’s is a pie house, and while that cioppino was really good, I can certainly see making a meal out of soup and pie. For instance, the Pacific coast grows some berries we don’t see here in the Midwest. Thus, it’s wise to take advantage of the chance to have olallieberry pie. A 20th Century hybrid of the loganberry and the youngberry, the flavor hits somewhere between blackberry and raspberry, a lovely spot indeed. The pies arrived slightly warm, clearly never subjected to the duress of refrigeration, the crust remaining flaky and showing the irregularity that marks pies made by human hands. My pal went for pear pie on the list of specials, its honeyed flavor strong rather than the wan-ness pear can sometimes lapse into, and the lattice crust equally satisfying.
Service was small-town casual, very friendly and obviously used to folks asking detailed questions about items like the crab sandwiches. (Turns out it’s not a crab cake, more like a crab salad sandwich.) The presence of sandwiches is important to note. The prices are higher than most of us Midwesterners would expect from a place like this, but careful choices can help the budget. I suspect walking in at 10 a.m. for coffee and a piece of pie is far from unheard of. Speaking of time, they close at 8 p.m. every day. Do take a peek at the garden behind the tavern if you’re there in daylight.
Duarte’s is a worthwhile, atmospheric stop. It’s just not cheap.
Duarte’s Tavern
202 Stage Road, Pescadero, CA
650-879-0464
Breakfast, lunch and dinner daily
Credit cards: Yes
Wheelchair access: Difficult
Smoking: No
Entrees: $18-$40
It’s no secret that I’m pretty crabby on the subject of morning potatoes. The last place I expected to find platonic antemeridianal spuds was New York City. But there they were, smiling and waving at me from a plate across the street from the Whitney Museum, in an eatery with the unlikely name of Bubby’s. (This is also at the southern end of the Highline elevated park.)
Styled home fries on the menu, they’re slices of panfried potatoes of varying thickness, some fried to dark crispness. They’re laced, indeed, loaded with enough onions, also cooked to varying degrees of doneness but all lending their sweet savor to things. They’re seasoned with just a wee bit of heat, scarcely noticeable until the mouth is empty.
Bubby’s is not a diner, although they serve three meals a day. And it’s not cheap – an omelet with local goat cheese and a fresh New Jersey corn-and-tomato salsa was $22. But frankly, the omelet was superfluous with those babes. All the potatoes really needed was a couple of over-easy eggs – which the kitchen is willing to do. And breakfast is served until 4 p.m. (Take that, dratted hangover!)
Bubby’s is also proud of their pie; I had a nice slice of cherry, or “sour cherry”. (Surely even in New York, they’re not making cherry pie with the dark sweet cherries?) It clearly wasn’t fresh from the oven, but warmed a bit and served with a buttery-thick scoop of whipped cream. They also have a counter in the back serving ice cream from Ample Hills Creamery in Brooklyn, including “ooey gooey butter cake” ice cream. Inquiries about th etiology of that have gone unanswered by the creamery thus far.
The location means the competition is Danny Meyer’s Untitled across the street in the museum. But Danny’s not doing breakfast. I’m sure he’d like these potatoes.
Bubby’s also has a second restaurant, at 120 Hudson Street in Tribeca.
Bubby’s
73 Gansevoort St., New York City
212-206-6200
Breakfast, lunch and dinner daily
Credit cards: Yes
Wheelchair access: Good
Smoking: No
Breakfast Entrees: $15-$24
Folks don’t dress up for seafood in Baltimore.
There, as in New Orleans, it’s an ordinary part of everyday life, not something that calls for nice shoes and something a step up from a t-shirt. Sure, there are fancier spots, but there are also neighborhood hangouts and restaurants folks say their parents took them to when they were kids. Conrad’s Seafood Restaurant, in Perry Hall, one of Baltimore’s northern suburbs, feels like that sort of place. (Baltimore, like St. Louis, is a city not in a county – although, strangely, there are no incorporated municipalities in it.) They’ve only been open since 2003, though, when Tony Conrad, a commercial waterman, decided to open his own spot. Now there’s his seafood market, which also serves food, and this restaurant.
Our clan ended up here to celebrate the biggest and the last of a series of three graduations over the spring and summer. As the matriarch, I was under considerable pressure to lead them to a spot that worked on multiple levels, including for my two vegetarians. But it was Baltimore. Surely we had to have seafood at least one night! The careful choice of Conrad’s turned out to be a hit.
The feel is deeply casual, with a busy bar, a couple of dining rooms, a rooftop dining area and sinks in the dining room for post-prandial cleanup. An order of steamed crabs is preceded by a large sheet of heavy brown kraft paper that’s laid over the table, the easier to clean things up with. For good measure, there’s now an in-house bakery that serves desserts a step beyond what you might expect in such a place.
Things kicked off with a couple of baskets of popcorn seasoned with what turned out to be the house version of crab seasoning, similar to Old Bay brand, but with less celery seed. The crab neophyte and the vegetarians agreed with the Old Hands that this was a tasty start.
The rather Greekish Conrad salad wore feta bits mixed with tomato, cucumber, red onion, kalamata olives and greens; its dressing used white balsamico, producing a mildly sweet note to go with a little oregano. Housemade Caesar dressing was deeply savory, the croutons were crisp but not tooth-breaking, and the romaine lettuce chilly and crisp, a fine version of the classic.
Crab wontons? Yes, indeed, obviously made by hand, absolutely delicious because they were very crabby, with the proper dipping sauce of soy and some black vinegar, although the sauce was superfluous. Littleneck clams on the halfshell didn’t fare so well, simply because they had been carelessly opened with bits of shell in more than half of them.
The Young Carnivore had his first encounter with steamed crabs. Next time he and I will split a bigger order of larger crabs, but these were an encouraging introduction, the house seasoning sprinkled generously over them rendering things spicy but not palate-numbing, the shellfish carefully cooked. Wooden mallets are the instrument of choice; I admit on these little guys I missed having a pick to winkle out bits from the carapace.
And then, sweet heaven, there were the crab cakes. This is the reason people who know get so fussy about crab cakes. Large lumps, barely held together, not a huge amount of seasoning, just molecule after molecule of delicate, briny flavor, rich and satisfying. The menu says it’s a 5-ounce crabcake, and I think that’s accurate. To touch these with tartar sauce or cocktail sauce would be desecration. Maybe if you lived next door and could eat them every day, it might be okay. Otherwise….
Cioppino, the fish stew from the Left Coast showcased a lovely seared fillet of rockfish, plus mussels, more clams, shrimp and plenty of calimari. The seafood broth was a dark bronze and slightly thick, a change from the usual, a little peppery and clearly seriously full of seafood juices. In any other place, it would have been a star; here, it took a back seat to the crab dishes. Our vegetarians fell all over themselves with the pasta primavera, fettucini with things like broccolini, spinach, peas and several cloves of sweet roasted garlic, all lightly hit with pesto, a very different version of the dish.
The french fries are house-cut, piping hot; it was difficult to find time to eat the equally skinny roasted asparagus that our consciences made us order, too. Jambalaya is available as a side, a Creole version since it includes tomatoes. Moist as a risotto, the holy trinity of Louisiana cooking, onion, bell peppers and celery, giving lots of flavor, it probably should have been an entree.
In a move vaguely reminiscent of dessert time at Pastaria, the Young Vegetarian and I went trooping off to the bakery case near the front of the house to inspect our options. Someone is doing some serious pastry work there. I’d hoped for a version of the multi-layered Smith Island cakes, but since this isn’t a place that caters to curious tourists, I suppose it would be coals to Newcastle. What we did find was more than worthwhile, ranging from the traditional to contemporary.
Closest to the usual was a large chocolate eclair, very proper with its chocolate glaze and vanilla custard filling, the choux pastry damp and chewy from living in a refrigerator case for a while. That’s an accepted deviation from the norm. In fact, the chewy factor is part of the charm of an eclair. Very tender indeed was the coconut custard cake, its narrow vertical slab having crunchy sugar sides, the top showered with coconut shreds. “Tastes like the Zinger of your dreams,” remarked someone.
The king of the course, though was titled merely “Lemoncello”, although if there was any of the increasingly popular Italian liqueur in the dessert, it wasn’t noticeable. No loss, though; there was plenty of serious lemon flavor in the layers of cake, lemon mousse and a shiny lemon layer thickened with gelatin on top. Lovely textures and still moist despite having been assembled an unknown amount of time previously, it beguiled.
This is just the sort of place that ought to have reliable help, the sort that stays on the job for years, both in the front and the back of the house. Our server certainly filled that bill despite her youth, answering newbie questions and able to go into deep detail on certain dishes, keeping things moving although it was a busy weekend night.
If you’re considering a visit, remember, this is a menu with plenty of options for non-seafood eaters, rather than just that obligatory pasta dish. (Fajitas? Rack of lamb?) We did make reservations, and were glad we did; people were waiting when we arrived. For a party of six, as we were, it’s foolhardy not to unless you’re eating at a very odd hour. There’s valet parking. Belair Road is a commercial street but it’s surrounded by neighborhoods and the parking lots are smaller than the capacity of the restaurant.
Next time: Both kinds of crab soup. More crabs, more crabcake, and possibly the softshell crab Cuban sandwich. More fries and that lemoncello!
Conrad’s Seafood Restaurant
9654 Belair Rd., Perry Hall MD
410-529-FISH
Lunch and dinner daily, Sunday brunch
Credit cards: Yes
Wheelchair access: Fair
Smoking: No
Entrees: $15-$29 and crabs at market price (just ask)
An overnight run to Kansas City last week found my pal and me knocking back ‘que at Fiorella’s Jack Stack. They’ve been around since 1957, and there are five locations, all rather large. We hit the one in Country Club Plaza – only in Kansas City would there be a barbeque spot in such an upscale location. I’d eaten at another location before, a good while back, and felt generally that while they were good, there were better spots around. (The sheer mega-size is off-putting to me, I admit.) Still, I remembered some first-rate chicken wings and interesting sides.
This isn’t an inexpensive place. $6.99 for 3 onion rings? Yes, they’re large, and very thickly cut. But for those of us who consider a batter-to-onion ratio a serious consideration, that’s way too much onion for a single ring, or, more accurately, a small bowl rather than a ring, because they’re cut from the ends of onion, to give them what seems to be a signature curve.
But I’m willing to forgive them quite a lot, it seems, because they serve lamb ribs. Ribs, I tell you, lamb ribs. (Yes, they have beef ribs, too.) It turns out to be the bones from a full rack of lamb – I believe I had nine bones. They’re dry rubbed and cooked really slowly. This is a very fatty cut – much more so than pork ribs, especially if they’re trimmed so what we call rib tips are removed – so it’s a rich meat, and this truly is falling off the bone without having the feeling that they were steamed or oven-baked first. Absolutely wonderful.
To me, their sauce is superfluous. I tried all three kinds, the mild, the spicy and the hot. They’re tomato-based, but to a palate used to St. Louis-style sauce, there is almost no discernible sweetness. There’s a fair amount of cumin, and the hot is moderately pungent. But all of them overwhelm the delicate flavor of the lamb.
If there’s a lamb-reluctant eater sitting across the table from you, this is a fine introduction. On the other hand, lamb ribs are extremely hard to find, so you could be creating a monster.
$23.99, includes fries and slaw – any other sides require an upcharge.
Fiorella’s Jack Stack
4747 Wyandotte Avenue, Kansas City, MO and other locations.
A road trip? Yes, please. En route to any number of places, Ste. Genevieve's historic sites or the Ste. Genevieve County wineries, or across to Elephant Rocks State Park or down to the whitewater at Silver Mines, 12 North in Farmington would work well. You can read about their brunch here. No guarantees as to whether there's space available on Easter Sunday, but after that, you're apt to find a spot.
Sometimes life is just too rough. I made a fast run to Manhattan to see the new location of Danny Meyer's first-born restaurant, Union Square Cafe. It's bigger, it's brighter, and the food is just as good. One reviewer hints that the food is note quite au courant enough. That just talks about how far restaurant food has come in thirty years. I still say this is the best lamb shank I've ever eaten. And here's a red snapper dish that was thrilling.
How did the chicken cross the road? If the chicken, or the faint-hearted food writer, was crossing the road in Ho Chi Minh City, the answer is VERY CAREFULLY.
Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon as many of us still think of it, is a huge city, more than 10 million in the metropolitan area. The primary mode of transportation is motorbikes. I’ve seen estimates of more than 2 million to nearly 8 million of them in the city. And there are, comparatively, very few traffic lights.
That was the biggest thing I was worried about when I made an eating trip there. I’d heard a little about it, and my friend Barbara, an Australian who lives in HCMC, wrote about it in her book. The bikes are everywhere, including parked on many sidewalks. Those security guards so often seen on the street? They’re there to watch the bikes, the biggest capital investment many of their owners have made, not because violent crime is rampant. And speaking of that, as a woman traveling alone, I never felt unsafe.
But the sidewalks are tricky to navigate for another reason, especially in the mornings, because women – somehow it never seems to be men – are operating al fresco feeding operations making and selling pho, the Vietnamese noodle on lots of blocks People cluster around, and eat off their knees sitting on low, very low plastic stools. I saw kitchen help at the very nice hotel I stayed at chowing down next to the employees’ entrance, for instance.
Pho (pronounced “fuh”) was the focus (or fuh-cus?) of a food tour from Barbara, who, with her husband Vu, runs Saigon Street Eats. Three of us, plus Barbara, went to a small family-owned spot to eat pho and talk about food. I had the chicken pho, the guys had the beef.
Both were wonderful, but did you know all those things that come with pho, the leafy stuff and so on, aren’t just for flavoring?
Well, I’m sure you understood about the bean sprouts, but the greens are considered the vegetables in the soup. So tear them up and throw them in with abandon. It is, of course, one of those dishes that everyone’s grandmother makes differently. Someone could make trying different pho spots the focus of an entire trip to Vietnam.
On from there to go through several markets. It’s heaven for foodists and photographers, beautiful and fascinating stuff. We learned how to tell the difference between Thai basil and holy basil, both of which were on the platter that came with the pho. (Clue: holy basil has purple stems.)
It’s interesting that there were plenty of spice mixtures available, and pre-chopped vegetables to shorten prep time for home cooks, plus some pre-made foods. It could be as easy as picking up your evening meal from a supermarket here. Ever hear of betel nuts?
Lots of those for sale, along with things like fresh turmeric, lotus seeds, and live prawns. We ended up sampling what we bought in a park that surrounds what looks like a temple, but is actually the elaborate tomb of a general.
That’s a walking tour, but we were picked up at our hotels and brought to the restaurant where we began, and then again taxied back to hotels. But for the evening Street Food tour, the usual transport is by motorbike. The reluctant can opt for four wheels, but I threw caution to the wind and rode pillion to our gathering place, out in a neighborhood. The first stop was a banh mi stand, the sandwich that’s become more common in the United States. They warm the bread over a charcoal fire, and remove a little of the crumb, or white inner part of the bread to make it easier to fill. The slight smokiness the bread acquires is part of the flavor profile. Lots of options for filling, as can be seen.
Next we tried banh xeo, the so-called Vietnamese pancake, which is really more like an omelet. I often order them here at Mai Lee, where it arrives with a plate of greens, both lettuce and herbs. Binh, who was the guide this evening, showed us how to deal with that. Place a piece of the egg mixture on the firmer end of the lettuce. Tear off leaves of the various herbs and layer them on top. Then tuck the sides in and begin rolling the whole thing away from you, just like your great-grandmother did when she rolled up blintzes or stuffed cabbage.
Then you may dip one end in the dipping sauce and attack. I could have eaten this all evening, but both the sandwich and the banh xeo were appetizers, so to speak.
Restaurants around us didn’t just spill onto the sidewalks, they often quadrupled their capacity with their outdoor seating. The streets became giant outdoor living rooms, lots of chatter going on between tables and with passersby. Apartments tend to be very small for most people, and kitchens miniscule, so dinner at neighborhood spots is very common. We went to one on a cul-de-sac, alive with lights and people and conversation.
Seafood began coming. Scallops on the half shell. Steamed clams, shrimp. But the greatest dish was conch in an incredible butter-based sauce. Garlic, a little red pepper for heat, and some condensed milk to give just a little sweetness.
The conch was chewy, as is its nature. But it was the sauce that made us beg for more bread, a sauce that made the garlic-parsley butter for French snails seem like something in a school cafeteria. The last stop of the night was for Vietnamese sweets, but we were all so full of seafood and its predecessors, we just nibbled – and those Asian sweets are rather different, texturewise, than the Western ones.
And riding the motorbike was a lot of fun.
Another experience that turned out to be more about food than I’d anticipated was a Mekong River tour with a company called Les Rives. It was a speedboat trip that went off the Saigon River into the byways a good distance out of the city. Very comfortable, a small group – there were six guests total the day I went, with visits to a farm, a small town, and a temple, with lots of real-world life seen from the boat, like a wedding and a funeral. Lunch was lovely – here’s one of the things we ate:
but equally intriguing were the fruits we were offered as snacks on the boat. Little finger-sized bananas, thin-skinned and sweeter than what we get here. Clementines that were the size of the canned “mandarin orange” segments one can by, both sweeter and tarter than expected. And jackfruit, with a texture that was a cross between a pear and a peach, neither of which was quite perfectly ripe, but a slightly melon-like flavor, easy and un-drippy to eat. Not inexpensive but a delightful day and very worthwhile.
Restaurants? I went to several out-of-the-way unnamed dives whose locations I could never find again. But here are two I liked:
A deeply authentic dumpling experience that Barbara took me to is Quan Ca Can Banh Bao. These fat, fluffy guys are made with pork or chicken or even vegetarian. It’s pretty much point-and-eat, but they’re used to that. Lunch and dinner until 10 p.m. daily. You can read about them here, and there’s a map – it’s in District 5.
If you’re craving non-Asian food downtown, look for L’Uisine, a cafe-bistro upstairs, entered off a sort of populated alleyway. The shop is full of lovely modern things, and the (English) menu has sandwiches and desserts, beer and wine.
Saigon is a great shopping city, and prices can be very good indeed. Small shops, big markets and indoor shopping centers that are very modern. I was there right before Christmas, and saw this bunch of kindergartners roaring over to look at a display of penguins and polar bears on a pretend ice rink.
Don’t forget to have some of the wonderful Vietnamese iced coffee when you stop for a break.
As to crossing the streets: I mastered it in a couple of days. The trick is to think of it as wading across a moving stream of water. The bicycles will go around you as long as you don’t panic and stop. I waited until there were no four-wheeled vehicles coming and stepped out with confidence, just as though I were jaywalking in New York. Not even any close calls.
Going from the civilized melting pot of Singapore to Siem Reap, Cambodia, was something of a culture shock. It’s easy for Americans to forget that the fighting there raged on even after the US left Vietnam, and didn’t end until 1991. It’s still a very poor country, so the ride in to Siem Reap from its large airport rolled by cattle roaming, five goats grazing at the roadside and various types of poultry wandering on the outskirts of the city of around 110,000.
I didn’t come to Siem Reap for the food. I came to see Angkor Wat. It seemed a shame to be in that part of the world and not drop by, you know? However, I spent as much or more more time prowling the markets than prowling the temples. Yes, temples plural; there are quite a number of them in easy distance. And I’m glad I did. I learned a lot, ate some very good food, and met some great people. No downside there.
There is food at Angkor Wat, a long line of tents, but I passed on that. At Bayon temple, the one with the huge faces, I found a banquet being served, in the carvings of what’s clearly a kitchen in full feast mode.
The foodstuffs produced by the country are intriguing. Visitors will find lots of curries that are closer in style to the Thai than the Indian, utilizing lots of coconut but seldom very hot-spicy.
One of the best things I did was an evening with Siem Reap Food tours. Glaswegian Steven Halcrow picks folks up in a tuk-tuk, one of the motorbike-carriage vehicles ubiquitous in Siem Reap, and off five of us, plus Steve, went.
It was a great learning experience, including a small restaurant that is next to the garden where much of its food is grown.
We ended up at the night market, where we sat on the platforms to eat the kebabs and other things he purchased from the stalls.
Siem Reap Food Tours
Two restaurants, each very different, stood out. Cuisine Wat Damnak is owned and run by Joannes Riviere, a French chef, and his wife, Carol Salmon. He uses local ingredients to create tasting menus, 5 courses for $24 or 6 courses for $28. (Please note that the US dollar is the unofficial currency in Cambodia. Even the ATMs give dollars. You may get small change in Cambodian riel, though.)
The food is fabulous. Riviere makes his own creations, combining French technique, local Khmer traditions and ingredients with his own imagination. Mekong River shellfish and black sticky ride porridge with mushrooms and glazed turnip? Right here. And take a look at this dessert, a jack fruit cookie with meringue sweetened with palm sugar and pandan whipped cream.
Three of us (Hi, Zakia! Hi, Kathryn!) debauched our way through the two alternative tasting menus with wine and cocktails. Advance reservations are pretty much a necessity and can be made through their website. It’s in a roomy rehabbed home, and while we were in the un-air conditioned part, it was quite comfortable. And, no, no problems with flying insects at all – in fact, I saw or felt few of them the entire trip.
Wat Damnak
Dinner Tues.-Sat
The other restaurant is Marum, a lovely place on a side street that is run by an organization helping street children. One of their projects is training young people for the hospitality industry. English may be a little slow here, but everything else is shining.
There was a killer pineapple-mango frozen daiquiri to start out with, a proper antidote to tropical travel, and a prawn and pork curry that was meant to be served as a dip but was good enough to eat with a spoon.The high point of the meal, however, was a one-layer chocolate cake, moist and slightly brownie-ish, that was made with the local Kampot pepper and served with a sauce of passion fruit and green Kampot peppercorns, an unforgettable combination.
Marum
Lunch and Dinner daily
Credit cards: Yes
And on a totally not-food topic, a few notes on shopping. The Old Market downtown is better than the Central Market, although the Central Market is less overwhelming. Visitors are beset on all sides by greetings of “Madame, madame!” by vendors, but no one’s feelings seem to be hurt by ignoring them, hard as it is to do at first. The Old Market is for both food and non-food things, so you can buy vegetables, a pot to cook them in, and silk scarves for gifts to take home.
In a totally different vein is a nearby shopping street called Hup Guan. Lovely little old buildings and some more sophisticated wares.I particularly loved a place called Trunkh http://www.trunkh.com/, with home accessories, jewelry and some clothing. It’s run by a Californian (and his cat Pepper), and has lots of distinctive items. I ended up with a large denim tote bag with a zippered pocket and an impressionistic design of the shutters so common here.
When I came home, I thought I was Asia-ed out. Now with a few weeks to catch my breath, I want to see (and taste) more of Cambodia.
Is Singapore one of the great eating cities of the world?
Quite possibly. I spent some time there in early December. Less than 90 miles from the equator, it was quite warm, of course, hitting around 90 most days but with far less humidity than I remembered from a visit years ago. But I wasn’t there for the weather. I was there for the food.
There are plenty of food tours offered through places like Viator and TripAdvisor, but I was lucky enough to have a Chowzter buddy who’s a native Singaporean. Juliana gave me pointers and sometimes shepherd me around. Singapore is such a mixture of cultures that the eating possibilities are immense; there were plenty of things I wanted to try but didn’t manage. Much of what I’m talking about here are foods out of their multicultural traditions, which means that everyone’s grandmother made them differently. That means that the arguments are endless over what constitutes The Best, of course, but with the ever-keen Juliana keeping me up to date, I had a great time.
The best dish of the entire trip may well have been a bowl of laksa. I wrote to my daughter, the first Apprentice Eater, after having this, “I’ve eaten fish soups from above the Arctic Circle to near the equator, and I can honestly say this one was mind-blowing.” Laksa uses a coconut-seafood broth, shrimp, rice noodles and varying mysterious seasonings, including things like galangal and dried shrimp. It’s apparently often quite spicy, but one of the nice things about the laksa I had was that the chili paste was politely smeared on the lip of the bowl so as much or little of it could be nudged into the liquid. I like things really spicy, but the small dab I added after my first bites was just enough that I could still revel in the wondrousness of that broth. Laksa is available in many places – the lunch buffet at my hotel had it, for instance – but you’re better off trying it in one of the spots more patronized by locals. They argue about which version is correct the way Americans argue about barbecue, so don’t be surprised by what you find on the internet. Juliana urged me to go to a place quite a distance from the center of town, six or seven miles,. But cabs are cheap and Uber even cheaper. I paid about $4 for the laksa and a cold drink, less than the one-way fare, but it would have been worth five times the price. It’s in a shopping mall, not the fancy Western kind but a building that holds many small businesses. Go in the ground-level door, and it’s almost immediately to your right. Order, pick your drink and pay at the counter. There’s at least one other location for this particular outfit, by the way.
Note the hours. I was there mid-afternoon and it was quiet, but I’m told it’s particularly jammed at Sunday lunch.
The Original Katong Laksa
Roxy Square
50 East Coast Rd.#01-64, Singapore
Daily 8.30 a.m. - 5.30 p.m.
The many of the variations of chicken and rice have, over the years, come to be favorites of mine. I’d heard about Singapore’s Hainanese chicken and rice, but the one version I’d tried was disappointingly wan. I suspected the problem was that version, which turned out to be correct. Juliana took me to Zion Road Hawker Centre for my first lunch, and that was what I had – or, more accurately, part of what I had.
White meat of chicken is poached in a broth that’s strengthened by dozens, probably hundreds, of pieces of chicken that have been poached in it before, the liquid seasoned with ginger, garlic, and, often, pandan leaves. Some of that liquid is used to prepare the rice. It’s served with a dipping sauce of seasoned dark soy sauce. If I hadn’t had lots of other things about to arrive at the table, I could have made a pig of myself on this. It’s a good dish for those hesitant about digging into the local cuisine. Juliana got it from Boon Tong Kee, which has several sites throughout Singapore.
A few tips on dining at hawker centres, which are like the old Miss Hullings’ Seven Kitchen concept gone wild – lots of small vendors cluster around picnic tables. Find a place to sit and hold your place with a packet of Kleenex or an umbrella or something. This is Singapore; the spot will be respected and your belongings will be safe. Wet-wipes are helpful to have, as well as tissues; napkins seem in short supply. This is a good idea throughout southeast Asia, although sanitation in Singapore is generally impeccable. You may have to share a table. Look for stands that have a line – this means the locals think the food is tasty, and there’s a rapid turnover of food. Usually there is someone who’s bussing the tables, but look around to see what locals do. The hardest part will be deciding what to eat.
Another well-known dish is chilli crab. Again, lots of arguments about which is best; I ended up at a spot on Robertson Quay, near my hotel, called the Red Box The dish varies in pungency from restaurant to restaurant; theirs is not wildly hot and in fact, the sauce has a little sweetness to it. Mantou are rolls designed to sop up the sauce, a wise addition. The crab these days is imported, and it’s not an inexpensive meal – my check for the crab and a beer was around $65 American, a decided contrast with the laksa and any hawker centre food.
For upscale Chinese, I had a delightful dinner with Julianna, her husband Guillaume, who’s French (and a chef with two Michelin stars), and another friend, at his favorite Chinese restaurant, Jade Palace. It’s inside a very nice shopping center, much more upscale than the one holding the laksa place, on the big, almost Rodeo Drive-like Orchard Road. Razor clams? Foie gras? Pigeon? Yes, in a Chinese restaurant. Wonderful, and a very good wine list.
For something authentic, non-touristy but only a little exotic, think about a kopi shop, a coffee shop. Kopi is coffee that comes with condensed milk, hot, milky and sweet, not unlike the Vietnamese coffee many of us order over ice. There are other ways to order coffee – here’s a chart, if you’re interested. The traditional accompaniment to the coffee is kaya toast. It’s a sandwich of toasted bread, often crustless, that contains kaya, often described as coconut jam. It’s actually more of a curd – think lemon curd in terms of consistency and method of preparation – but that’s quibbling. One piece of the toast has a slice of cold butter on it, the other is spread with kaya. Some folks like the butter melty, others praise the contrast between the cold, firm butter and the ooze of the kaya. Many people have a soft- or semi-soft-boiled egg with it, using the bread to wipe up egg yolk. Definitely worth investigating. There are kopi shops all over, even chains that are shiny-bright and perhaps less intimidating for the rookie, like the one where I took this picture.
That should do for a kickoff. More adventures in other parts of Southeast Asia sooner or later.
This time last year, I was heading for Europe and the holidays, both to visit family and friends who are almost like family, and to do a little business. Of course, when your business is pleasure, that’s not too hard, and I had long wanted to sample the European Christmas markets. I wrote about it and here’s the story on line.
But the on-line version lacks the photos that the paper version does, so I thought I’d share some of those, as well. Almost three weeks in French-speaking Switzerland, Strasbourg and Stavanger, Norway, led me to good food and interesting things, not to say a great deal of happiness.For instance, this is an example of a log I found for sale at a small market in Switzerland, meant for, I assume, post-skiing warmups and other outdoor cheer. Pretty remarkable, I'd say.
In Montreux, My pal Martha and I found a stand with langosh, or langos, a sort of Hungarian fry bread - just mouthwatering.
I saw stands for foie gras sandwiches both in Montreux and Strasbourg, and as good as the langosh was, the foie
gras was even better. And how about rainbow reindeer cakes?
The market vendors sell from individual chalets. Here's a night shot. The fire in the back is at a stand with a man who was smoking fish over it.
And here's beautiful Strasbourg, worth a visit any time of the year.
To drink, perhaps some vin chaud? Or hot apple cider with honey and cinnamon?
To go with roasted chestnuts sold out of a mini-train engine?
I'd thought santons, the figures that go around a creche, were only found farther south in Europe. But here are some in Strasbourg. Notice the Pope making an appearance. Naturellement.
A riotously OTT tea room, like stepping into a mad woman's jewel box:
They decorate the streets there, too. The cathedral in Strasbourg dates back a thousand years.
The non-food items for sale - which were the great majority of the wares (although one of the 10 markets in Strasbourg was for local food and wine) - were not quite the made by grandfather by the wood stove sort of thing one might imagine. But the experience was great, and occasionally downright magical.
Specialization can be a good thing. There are those who bake, for instance, and those who eat what the first group bakes. But some of us live in the gray area in between the two. For us, we want, perhaps even need, lots of things. Inspiration. Motivation. Equipment. Knowledge.
The search for those provides a great excuse for a vacation in a lovely part of the country. Near the Connecticut River dividing Vermont and New Hampshire is the Norwich, Vermont, campus of King Arthur Flour, sometimes called The Baker’s Store. Right across the river is Hanover, New Hampshire – can you persuade a young family member they should make a campus visit to Dartmouth College, perhaps?
The low, modern wood building features a store, a bakery-cafe, windows to watch the bakers, and two classrooms, where they offer hands-on instruction for everyone from kids to professional bakers. It seems to be a mecca for people throughout the area, whether it’s locals coming for lunch or breakfast, folks from a little farther away who make a day of it, or those who settle in to one of the area’s interesting bed and breakfasts for the purpose of taking a class. (I met two women, living about 300 miles apart, who meet there every year or so. This time they were taking a class on making croissants.)
The store is large, with everything from large bags of flour to plenty of examples of how King Arthur has risen to the gluten-free challenge.
Lots of equipment, some of it delightfully esoteric, kitchen linens and t-shirts are some of the non-edibles found. Ingredients? Oh, yes, way beyond flour. Chocolate, of course. Six kinds of vanilla? Right here.
High-quality extracts and lots of things like sprinkles. And mixes. You might think a place like this would look down its collective nose at something so plebeian as cake mixes. Oh, no. They understand things like the time crunch in contemporary households and, uh, well, let’s be honest, the intimidation factor. I bought some Lemon Magic Cake Mix for the Lemonses in our Washington Bureau, and two boxes of mix for Liege waffles, which they were making in one corner of the big salesroom and handing out as samples. (Liege waffles are Belgian waffles that have coarse sugar in them, which keep their crunch.)
The building, which is shaped rather like two arms reaching out in an embrace, has positioned the bakery-cafe in the middle. They offer light-ish breakfasts and lunches, sandwiches, salads, soups, and in the morning, egg sandwiches, granola parfaits and two kinds of hot cereal – and of course those pastries. Cases with local cheese, frozen pizza and pizza dough, and other goodies hold items for retail sale.
The northern wing, where the bakery and classrooms are, has a hall paneled with wainscoting from a barn originally built in 1753 (“only 37 years before King Arthur Flour began”, as a small sign points out.) A bench is near a sideboard with cookbooks for perusing and some handsome bread specimens for admiring. The class schedule is online.
Most non-baking partners of shoppers seemed to be taking advantage of the cafe or tagging along in the store making hopeful suggestions. In nice weather, there’s plenty of outdoor seating, both for dining and just being thoughtful. It’s definitely a spot worth a detour.
The Baker’s Store
King Arthur Flour
135 US Route 5 South, Norwich, VT
802-649-3361
Open daily except holidays
Credit cards: Yes
Wheelchair access: Excellent
Smoking: No
Open daily except holidays
Credit cards: Yes
Wheelchair access: Excellent
Smoking: No
People who know the visual arts don’t have to be told about the pleasures of Savannah. The city’s architecture is a delight, the proliferation of small squares each a mini-vacation, and the presence of the Savannah College of Art and Design an ever-increasing factor in giving the city continued vitality. Rather than tearing down old buildings, they have repurposed many around town and use them, spreading students and energy in many places. No edifice complex for them.
I spent an afternoon in Savannah, a fast visit to SCAD and some riding around to rubberneck with the daughter Formerly Known As The Apprentice Eater driving. I hit the SCAD bookstore, too – and realized there’s no bookstore quite like a bookstore for a school like this. We had lunch at another SCAD establishment.
Should Gryphon be called a tea room? For many, the phrase evokes quiet preciousness and a feeling of department stores in the 1930’s. It’s on one of those lovely squares, Madison Square (hello, New Yorkers!), an old pharmacy with big windows, lots of wood and lots of room. There’s stained glass, including mortar-and-pestle representations, and a tiled entrance with the original owner’s name.
Open for lunch, Sunday brunch and late-afternoon refreshments, the menu includes entrees as well as salads and sandwiches. I succumbed to the Southernness of it all and had a pimiento cheese sandwich. We’re not talking Kraft spread on Wonder Bread here, naturally. Yes, properly home-made style pimiento cheese, topped with caramelized onions and crisp, very smoky bacon. The menu said it came on jalapeno cornbread. It didn’t look like a skillet cornbread, but rather a yeast bread that perhaps had cornmeal as part of the flour ration. The jalapeno was pretty much unnoticeable, but it would have been superfluous. Toasted to a farethewell, although certainly not burnt, it combined the crunch of the bread with the softly oozing cheese mixture, the sweetness of the onions and the snap of the bacon to make a fabulous sandwich. The other entree was an individual quiche with tomato and spinach, an excellent pastry whose custard filling wasn’t overcooked and thus not watery.
The green salad alongside the quiche showed a little tarragon in dressing the tender leaves. My potato salad, described as French, didn’t have an oil and vinegar dressing, but rather a creamy one, quite acceptable, just surprising; I admit when I think French potato salad, I assume a vinaigrette. We asked for some of the asparagus as a side, which came pencil-thin and carefully cooked. A bonus was the frozen fruit salad with the quiche, a mini-muffin cup’s worth of whipped cream and berries.
We succumbed to red velvet cake with a cheesecake filling – purely professional interest, you understand – which was rich and moist. Red velvet is a good backdrop to rich cheesecake; to me, it’s a relatively bland cake by its very nature, so it worked well here, especially the visuals. We also saw one of those three-tiered servers go by with teatime-type things, although it wasn’t on the lunch menu.
Gryphon is not really a Ladies Who Lunch sort of place. The guests included a few students, some couples and, yes, groups of women. The server was a young woman from Nigeria who was a student at SCAD, and an absolute delight. It’s not a fast-food place, but one never felt neglected.
There are tables for outside dining, to enjoy the neighborhood. When you leave, note that there’s a shop across Bull Street that sells items the students have made, along with other selected pleasures. And then cross into the square and look up to the top of this delightful building and enjoy that, too.
Gryphon
337 Bull St., Savannah, GA
912-525-5880
scadgryphon.com
Lunch and later, Mon.-Sat., Brunch Sun.
Credit cards: Yes
Wheelchair access: Poor
Smoking: No
Entrees: $12-$15
Everyone needs a little French bistro. Even if it’s not in a nearby arrondisement, it’s a place to go in one’s daydreams, to escape the mundanity of vegetable medleys and garlic mashed potatoes. I found one, way not in our neck of the woods, but in a place that’s not totally impossible, at least for some of us.
A.O.C. is on Bleeker Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, just where it ought to be. The proper name is A.O.C. L’aile ou la Cuisse.(That translates as “The Wing or the Thigh”.) The storefront sports tall windows. As I sat looking out at the sidewalk, it seemed for a while as though everyone that walked by glanced inside. Between the two guys playing guitars and the posted menu, the place seemed a magnet.
The menu is not totally, totally French – for instance, breakfast, and, yes, they do breakfast, has home fries and bacon with the oeufs sur plat, as well as pastries, granola as well as a tartine. But it’s close enough, especially as the sun continues across the sky, and as the waitress put down our mussels and snails for a first course, the dining companions and I sighed happily.
We all know that snails are mainly a reason to eat a small lake of garlic butter, and the A.O.C. lake was slightly larger than average, lots of extra butter for the sopping up with the warm bread, and a good introduction for the snail rookie at the table. (If you’ve never eaten them, yes, they’re chewy. That’s the nature of the gastropod.) The mussels were huge and sweet and tender, steamed in white wine with shallots and parsley. My sole complaint was that the broth tasted more of wine and less of mussels than I prefer, a problem I’d run into earlier on this trip at another restaurant. Perhaps New York restaurateurs use the broth for other things. But the mussels themselves were exemplary.
More seafood? Sure. Tender, sweet sea scallops, shrimp and a few more mussels lolled in a saffron-laced cream sauce, all encased in a lacy-edged phyllo shell, a ring of spinach around its base. The spinach, too, carried the blessing of saffron, and who knew what a great combination that was? A salmon filet, grilled to the requested medium, had lemon and capers showered lightly over it, and sat on a base of ratatouille not cooked to mush, but with both individual flavors and the harmonizing of them apparent with each bite. There’s meat on the menu, too, and it took a great deal of self-control to pass up both a duck leg confit and some merguez sausage in favor of hanger steak with a rich red wine-mushroom sauce. Happily, the steak arrived already sliced – it’s best sliced on the bias, an angle far easier to find in a well-lit kitchen, rather than under a coat of dark sauce – and it was as flavorful as a hanger, or onglet in French, should be. Alongside was a bit of salad and a magnificently garlicky potato gratin, perfectly cooked with the potatoes tender but not falling apart, all making for an exemplary plate of food.
We succumbed to a single dessert (but I’m coming back for the tarte tatin). Chocolate mousse was dark, dense but not gummy, relatively un-sweet and with a note in there I’m still trying to recognize. Coffee? Just a wee, wee hint of cardamom? Quite worthwhile.
The music was great – they don’t have it every night – sort of Les Paul in the Forties and Fifties, and not once but twice, couples danced on the sidewalk in front of the door, close, romantic stuff, elbows bent and nearly cuddling. Our service was patient and precise, the setting, with the brick walls, just right. There’s a garden in the back, and now they stay open until 4 in the morning for jazz on Saturday nights. New York City is, to me, the best place in the world to stay out all night, and I’d love to give this a try. The kitchen stays open late, too.
Very romantic. But even more appetizing.
ADDED NOTE 10/14/16: That chocolate mousse? I got another chance to taste it. A little coffee, maybe. But definitely a touch of mint. Spearmint, to be precise. I'm more of a peppermint person than spearmint - enough that I'm not big on mojitos - but this was Just Right. Go for it.
A.O.C.
314 Bleeker St. (west of Seventh Avenue), New York
212-675-9463
Breakfast/Lunch Mon.-Fri., Brunch Sat.-Sun, Dinner nightly
Credit Cards: Yes
Smoking: No (they don’t in Paris any more, either)
I’m probably prejudiced when I say every Missourian should visit the Truman Library in Independence, MO. My parents were living in Independence when I was born during the Truman Administration. Furthermore, coming out of a family of Democrats (who worshipped FDR because he made sure teachers got paid during the Depression), it always seemed to me as a kid that Harry Truman was a sort of surrogate grandfather. My parents and grandparents reminded me of the Independence link and that he, too, had a little girl, although she was a big girl by then. One of my earliest memories is the photos in National Geographic of the White House’s big interior remake during the Truman Administration.
For the first time since a couple of years after it opened, I recently went back to the Harry S Truman Presidential Library and Museum, enjoyed it immensely, and will return the next time I’m in town. It’s a good reminder of what Missouri politics could be like, in the very best sense of the words. That Thomas Hart Benton mural – Harry and Tom got to be quite the pals – is pretty swell, too.
There’s a good lunch place very close by, and easy to find, which will only enhance things. A Little BBQ Joint (that’s really its name) is just across the street. The entrance in the photo is not what you see from the road; that door is from the parking lot behind the restaurant. The darkish interior as well as the spacious multi-level outdoor area (most of which is covered), is themed to recycled vintage automobiles, many of which are in less-than obvious locations. It’s obvious that the place has gradually expanded with a certain what-the-hell flow of ideas, and while that wouldn’t work at some white-tablecloth spot, it’s surely fun here.
Followers of serious barbecue know that Kansas City is the home of burnt ends, a dish that’s evolved from its origins when they really were the chewy-crisp ends of brisket or ribs, and presumably either scorned or sought-after, the way corner pieces of brownies are. Nowadays they’re cubes of meat – in my experience, usually pork, but I admit that could be a statistical blip – that are rubbed and cooked. They’re boneless, so they sometimes show up in sandwiches. But they are mostly very good eating, and A Little’s burnt ends are exemplary, so good that sauce is superfluous. Tender and smoky and flavorful from their rub, it’s a downright dreamy dish. A pulled pork sandwich, generous in the amount of meat, was juicy, but not so flavorful as the burnt ends.
The house sauces here are sweet, spicy and hot, named Sweet Sister, Mad Housewife and Mean Mother-in-Law. (Yes, sexist. Proceed.) I squirted on both spicy and hot and got things just right for me.
Sides include some standard stuff – fries, beans, cole slaw, a mayonnaise-based potato salad that was fine – and some not-standard stuff. That includes a hot potato salad, which is not German style, but was described as more like potatoes au gratin. It’s not – it seems cheese-free – but it’s a sort of nicely seasoned scalloped potatoes, pieces rather than slices, notes of garlic and thyme, and very tasty despite being a surprise in a barbecue spot. Another uncommon side was cheesy corn. At least it’s uncommon in St. Louis, and elsewhere, but it seems to be a Kansas City thing. Whole kernel corn arrived in a thick white sauce. The savory sauce and the corn, sweet and still slightly crisp, were a good contrast, although I didn’t find the sauce very cheesy at all, unless they’d thrown some cream cheese in it, which was possible. Other versions around town are gooier and use cheddar or another yellow cheese, but this was an easy initiation to the dish, and one can imagine seeing it on tables at a family Easter dinner or such.
Live music on the weekends, and a Wednesday special of smoked meatloaf that intrigues. Pleasant servers, too.
A Little BBQ Joint
1101 W. Highway 24, Independence, Mo
816-252-2275
Lunch and Dinner Tues.-Sun. (close 7 p.m. Sun.)
Credit cards: Yes
Wheelchair access: Fair
Smoking: No
Sandwiches & Entrees: $6 - $24
I made a fast run to New York City the other day, and took advantage of the brief visit to go to a place I'd been reading about. Since it was a weekday morning, I thought it wouldn't be impossible to get a seat for breakfast at Russ & Daughters Cafe.
The cafe is an outgrowth of an old New York appetizing store - that's the phrase there, "appetizing" referring to appetizers - that began in the early years of the Twentieth Century on the Lower East Side. Joel Russ had no sons, but he had three daughters who joined him in his business. They were the first business in the country to have " & Daughters" in its name. They sold - and still sell - smoked fish, salads, bagels and bialys, the traditional Jewish foods. Eventually they added caviar. Lines still run out the door at their retail store two blocks from the cafe, which they opened in 2014, the hundredth anniversary of the store.
When the doors opened at 10 a.m., a half-dozen of us were in line. (They open at 8 on Saturday and Sunday.) I sat at the counter, the best place to watch the action. It's a menu full of temptations. Lots of kinds of smoked fish in variations, including platters to serve several people. Three kinds of herring, and I'm hard-core enough that the sampler called to me. Smoked whitefish chowder. Salads. Blintzes, of course. French toast made with babka, the Eastern European filled sweet bread that's having such a revival. Eggs with all kinds of things, scrambled with lox and onions, the same with sturgeon, a "Benedict" with smoked salmon and spinach. I tell you, it was agony.
My decision process was lost in the haze, but I ended up with something called the Lower Sunny Side. Two eggs, sunny side up, Gaspe nova smoked salmon and latkes. And a bialy, please, toasted with butter. A bialy? Yes. Unlike bagels, bialys are not boiled first, and there's only a depression in the center, not a hole. Often the depression contains chopped cooked onions or poppy seeds, or (these days) other things, but this one was plain. They're more tender than a bagel, and they're flatter.
The salmon was paper thin, which is how the really experienced fish guys at New York deli counters do it. The texture was somewhere between silk and velvet, as tender as the egg white on the sunny-sides. But it was the latkes that stopped me in my tracks.
They were not - quite - the size of hockey pucks. Their shape and even the color brought the comparison to mind. Very thick, almost an inch, and dark brown from a trip through a deep-fryer. Deep-frying a latke? What heresy is this? I'm sure I must have glared at them.
Don't judge a latke by its looks. These were wonderful. Plenty of onion in with the potato, something that's always been a sore point with me on latkes. There may have even been a little garlic. The insides were creamy but not mashed-potato-like, with shreds of potato both distinct and disintegrating. Latkes are not part of my culinary heritage, so I can't address the authenticity question, but these were utterly beguiling.
By the time I left, cameras were rolling - the woman who made the film about the Russ daughters, "The Sturgeon Queens", was working on another project there. No wonder she came back for seconds. I certainly will.
They do take reservations. They've just opened a branch in The Jewish Museum uptown, too.
And a bonus recommendation: The Tenement Museum is a half block south on Orchard Street at the corner of Delancey. Even if you don't go to the museum, which is fascinating, it's got one of the best shops in the city.
Russ & Daughters Cafe
127 Orchard St., New York City
212-475-4880
Breakfast, lunch and dinner daily
Credit cards: Yes
Just by Kansas City's Kauffman Center is Webster Hall. It's an old school building, an 1885 Richardson Romanesque charmer of a place, surprisingly airy and light despite its advanced age. The first floor is a multi-room boutique with everything from art clothing to cookbooks. (Some online reviews describing it as an antique store. It's definitely far from that.)
Upstairs is the restaurant, via a wide stairway or an elevator. It's a series of rooms, the street-facing ones clearly big enough to use as a venue for private functions, a bar, and an open tile kitchen with yet another well-windowed room, perfect for a Saturday lunch, which is what my pals and I did.
Mussels steamed in white wine with fresh thyme and caramelized onions was a hit, the broth having clearly been reduced to make it even more flavorful.
A banh mi sandwich with what the menu termed house seasoned pork turned out to be a warm sandwich, an uncommon variation, but it was delicious nevertheless. Pickled julienne carrots gave piquancy, red cabbage added more crunch and there was a little heat from the mayonnaise. Definitely moreish, as the British would say.
Cassoulet crowned the meal. Perhaps not a traditional lunch dish, the hearty stew of white beans, duck and sausage was one of the best variations of it I've found. Long arguments in France rage about what ingredients are traditional and what aren't, including the presence or absence of tomatoes, but this one, which did have tomato, finished in an individual dish with bread crumbs atop it, the old-style presentation, was a winner. The salad alongside included crisp slices of raw fennel, one of those mysterious things with an elusive taste that make most of us think more about what we're eating.
A luxurious, relaxed Saturday lunch, its only blemish a young, eager server who kept snatching plates the minute they were empty. (This happened a lot in Kansas City this trip. I know, it's a controversial subject. But still....)
Webster House
1644 Wyandotte St., Kansas City, MO
816-221-4713
www.websterhousekc.com/dining/dining
Lunch Mon.-Sat., Dinner Wed.-Sat., Brunch Sun.
Credit cards: Yes
Back from a road trip to Switzerland, France and Norway for a little business and a lot of visiting friends and family, including the fifth generation of Pollacks with whom I've shared a table. The photo is taken at a little street market in Switzerland, where these partly-split logs are apparently a combination hand-warmer and signature item. It wasn't very cold anywhere I went, but it's so distinctive, it was hard to resist, a sort of immense long-burning candle.
I wrote about some of the food I had, including a lot about the traditional Norwegian Christmas dishes, on Facebook. I know some people Don't Do Facebook. That's fine, but if you want to see it, click here. Just scroll down to the entries that begin December 19.
And happy new year to all my friends and family and readers I haven't met.
It's always been part of the New York mystique that you can see absolutely anything there. So on an evening not so long ago, I was amused but not nonplussed when, as I sat at a counter overlooking the kitchen at Tacombi El Presidente, the chef nonchalantly slammed down a sheet pan containing two hogs' heads. Not hogshead as in a large barrel, but the real things. Not native to the Flatiron neighborhood where the restaurant is located, I'm sure, but they showed no signs of freezer burn. I grinned broadly and watched a young couple nearby gasp and then quickly go into oh-isn't-that-quaint mode.
I'd wandered into the restaurant, where I'd been before, for a pre-dinner drink and nosh. El Presidente is part of what's become a five-restaurant group, all serving casual Mexican food that has nothing to do with the ilk of Taco Bell. It's not a place for a quiet dinner, all tile and hard surfaces, and not a sombrero in sight. I've learned that after about 7 p.m., it's loud, generally the habitat of well-dressed Gen X's getting off work. A few exceptions - one table, off to one side, of seven older gentlemen in near-identical dark suits all looked extremely serious, almost grim.
The menu is cocktails, tacos, two quesadillas and some sides. Interestingly, the two most expensive non-alcoholic items on the menu are on the side dish list. One is a seafood cocktail. The other is their guacamole, and despite it costing $12, it might well be the don't-miss item on the menu. If you want a floor show with your meal, ask to sit at the counter facing the kitchen. You won't see as much of the other diners, but the action is fun. Soup is ladled, tacos assembled, al pastor sliced off the rotisserie, and from time to time, a line cook tosses the contents of an immense skillet, maybe 16 inches across, in the air, revealing a shower of yellow corn kernels whirling and being caught as cooking proceeds.
That guacamole is fresh and not ice-cold, chunky with pieces of avocado and tomato, nicely seasoned. The chips are uncommonly tasty. My first visit, I asked about why it was so good and a waiter waved his hand in the air and said, "Well, you know they use a lot of pork back there." Maybe they cook the chips in lard? I thought. No, they don't, the chef told me the night of the hogs' heads, shaking his head at the server. But they're fresh, and thick enough to scoop up the guac without crumbling. Four house-made salsas are in squeeze bottles on the table, but it's good enough to down unadorned. And the serving is, in a word, immense. If you're dining alone, it'll be your entree.
Tacos? El Presidente answers the call with ten varieties, including two vegetarian ones, sweet potato and black bean, as well as corn, poblano chiles and cheese. Barbacoa is shredded, deeply beefy in flavor, wonderfully moist. Sonoran shrimp charmed, a little spicy, some crunch from a few bits of cabbage, the shrimp not overcooked and just the right size for a taco, altogether quite notable.
And then there was the pork. The hogs' heads had led to a conversation with chef Jason Debriere,
who told me that he goes through 900 pounds of heritage pork a week. His carnitas were crispy, with a little hit of cumin, but like all the other tacos, definitely not dry. And the taco al pastor, from the rotisserie, the axis being topped with a giant fresh pineapple (just like the one I talked about a few weeks ago at El Morelia on St. Charles Rock Road) , was genius. It included a half-circle of grilled fresh pineapple in it, a graceful touch considering how much al pastor is out there without the traditional pineapple.
That corn flying around the saute pan arrives in the form of esquites, the corn sauteed with cotija cheese and topped with a chipotle mayonnaise, a seriously substantial dish worthy of respect. I'm not quite sure where it would fit in with a menu like this, but I'd eat it happily at any point in the meal.
Thinking about St. Louis restaurant-goers, I asked Debriere, who said he'd made tacos of all kinds of ingredients, including rabbit and goat, if there was anything his customers wouldn't eat. Debriere, who isn't a New York native, said, "People here will eat anything, especially if you charge a little more for it." Ah, psychology and the human palate.
Serious cocktails with lots of references to the Latin part of the Americas - a pina colada, not the kind made in a blender with ice, but a serious shaken drink on the rocks, a daquiri, which had a surprising note of anise in it, and a paloma, tequila with fresh grapefruit and a little club soda, very dry and very refreshing.
Good food and interesting people- and kitchen-watching. If you need to talk, you can always go for a walk afterwards.
30 W. 24th St., New York City
212-242-3491
Lunch and Dinner daily
Credit cards: Yes
Wheelchair access: Good
Smoking: No
Tacos and Entrees: $4-$14
When I was a teenager I dreamed of living in New York. Visions of a tiny apartment in a brownstone and interesting people, subways and the Automat, and, oh, yes, loads of tiny shops with interesting merchandise, not the sort of thing I eyed at F.W. Woolworth in Flat River. Now New Yorkers revel in the appearance of big-box stores ("Can you buy that at Best Buy?" recently demanded an acquaintance who lives in Manhattan.) I don't completely understand it; the small-town dreamer still lives in part of my soul.
Said dreamer was more than happy, then, to finally make it to Bonnie Slotnik's Cookbooks. Somehow, on many trips to New York, I'd never gotten around to it, and when I did, the last couple of times, the shop was closing - but then moving, thank goodness, when she found a great new location. Now she's settled in and I headed for East Second Street, in the East Village, between the Bowery and Second Avenue. Located in one of those partly-below-ground-level basements (technically called an English basement), the new location is homey, welcoming and well lit. It even has access to the back garden, where there's a place to sit and peruse whatever books you're considering buying. While it's technically one room, there are niches and cubbyholes enough to leave a customer always finding something they'd overlooked.
Please note these are, almost entirely, used cookbooks. There are also old pamphlets and magazines - I came away with a vintage World War II cooking magazine. (For a major selection of new cookbooks, there's the great Kitchen Arts & Letters uptown on Lexington Avenue.) Prices are more than the Book Fair, but not heart-stopping. Cookbook geeks like me can spend an afternoon browsing, as long as they please don't pull the books out by the spine. Period pieces like an elderly stove and tablecloths from the mid-20th Century relax the atmosphere even more. Bonnie's as much a host as a businessperson - when she found out I was from St. Louis, her first question was, "Do you know Tim Brennan?" Well, yes, he made our wedding cake.
Usual hours are afternoons only, six days a week - the closing day may vary so check her phone recording. But she says she's willing to open odd hours if need be. The block also has some interesting interior decor shops if you need to kill time until the (usually 1 p.m.) opening. There's a subway stop nearby and several bus lines.
Bonnie Slotnik Cookbooks
28 E. Second St.
212-989-8962
Okay, so it's hot. Maybe some river breezes? Maybe a road trip with plenty of air-conditioned options? It's July - you really don't want to stay inside.
So here's some places to eat along the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. It's a survey piece of an area I used to drive multiple, multiple times a year. Alas, Elsah Landing and its Scintillating Lemon Pie is gone, but there are still some pretty good options.
The photo is of the relish tray at the Wittmond Hotel, by the way.
http://www.stlmag.com/dining/a-river-runs-through-it/
Here's the last bit from the trip to Paris last autumn. The Musee des Arts Decoratifs isn't for everyone, and it probably isn't a must-do on your first visit to Paris. It's a branch of the Louvre with fascinating functional art - furniture, jewelry, toys. I wrote about it for the Ladue News and you can read that story here. There's also some restaurant discussion and you can click through more photos. But in the meantime, here's a great Art Nouveau bedroom.
What's more important? New York's Whitney Museum Of American Art has moved to a new Renzo Piano building in the Meatpacking District or Danny Meyer has completely rebooted his restaurant, called Untitled, at the Whitney?
Discriminating eaters know it's the latter, of course. I visited both of them last month, and I wrote about the restaurant for St. Louis Magazine's Dining blog. You can read about it here.
Years ago, when I was visiting New York, I would slip into a saloon called Bradley's on University Place in Greenwich Village. All I knew was that it was a bar with a music schedule. It took me a while to realize it was famous as a hangout for serious jazz musicians and that the piano had belonged to Paul Desmond of "Take Five" fame. But it was also a fine place for a woman alone to have a quiet drink and enjoy the music. When it closed some years after its owner's death, there was a gap in the jazz scene with no small piano-centric club to take its place.
Now there may well be a successor, and on a fast trip to Manhattan, I wanted to investigate. Mezzrow, named for the late jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow, is a long, narrow basement bar. It offers a few snacks to soak up the alcohol, but nothing so substantial as even sandwiches, so plan on dinner first. Or after; this is, after all, New York City.
There's a cover charge, of course - which also covers its sibling club, Smalls, in the same block. When I arrived a little before 11 on a weeknight, the music was...sort of the jazz equivalent of Phillip Glass, discordant and atonal to my ear, at least. The man on the door volunteered that soon there would be different music, implying that it would be more to my taste - but was he saying that because I was obviously old enough to have hung out at Bradley's and he was assuming?
The acoustics are good, the atmosphere is relaxed and the drinks are swell. Besides the music (of which more in a bit), the best thing about it was the age of the patrons. There I was, the oldest in the place, a couple of guys maybe in their 50s, and everyone else was below that. Young people grooving on jazz: How great is that? The atmosphere was not hushed and reverent; like the clubs of the glory days of the mid-20th century, there was the clink of glasses and the murmur of conversation.
When the discordant sound ended, there was a little polite applause. The minute that group abandoned ship, a young woman with a large bass started to set up shop. She was joined by a piano player. I later learned the bassist was Adi Meyerson, the piano player Miki Yamanaka, and they often host the late-night jam sessions, where other musicians often sit in. After a couple of songs, they were joined by a trombonist. More fun ensued, as the New Yorker would say.
When I left, I asked if the music I heard when I came in was programmed often. "No," growled the manager-type. "That's not our style at all. This," he added, nodding toward the back of the room where a little Ellington could be heard, "is more what we do. I don't think you'll hear that other stuff again."
I think I've found a home away from home.
Mezzrow
163 W. 10th St. at 7th Ave., New York City
646-476-4346
Jazz nightly
In New York last week, lots of walking, a fair amount of slush, and, as always, chasing down good food (once I replaced snow boots that peeled like a third-degree sunburn). Several good things to report, but the most remarkable came from a trek to the end of the 7 train, the (subway/elevated) line that passes Citi Field on its way to the far reaches of the borough of Queens.
The 7 train is famous for passing through deeply ethnic neighborhoods, and I suspect at every stop once it crosses into Queens from Manhattan, there's interesting stuff. But I had a specific destination this first trip. Through my affiliation with Chowzter the international group of food bloggers, I'd met Joe DiStefano, the Chief Chowzter from Queens, and we'd decided to go Eating the next time I was in town.
The end of the 7 line is Main Street in Flushing, Queens, a very Chinese neighborhood, even more deeply authentic than Chinatown in Manhattan because fewer outsiders find their way there. Joe was aiming for Dongbei food, he said, out of northeast China, more or less what was once known as Mongolia. Dongbei is cold, affecting what they eat and what they grow, so this was going to be different from what we usually find in St. Louis Chinese restaurants.
We went to two different places, both only slightly bigger than holes in the wall. Both of them began the meal with two small bowls of what looked like kim chee, but proved to be milder and far less fermented, quite tasty and less intimidating to anyone who is a little more hesitant of palate. Coarse shreds of cabbage were one of the vegetables at the first spot we visited, Golden Palace, and the other vegetable was potato, in matchstick-sized strips. Potato in a Chinese restaurant? Yes. And it wouldn't be its only appearance. The second restaurant gave us more cabbage, perhaps bok choy, and slices of turnip.
At Golden Palace, we had chicken bones (yes), triple delight vegetable and a small flounder. The bones are an appetizer - my guess is the meat has been stripped from them for use in soups and stock, leaving bits here and there, and they're thrown into boiling oil to crisp up and then tossed with whole cumin, a spice in great abundance in this cuisine, and some chili flakes. They'd make a fine bar snack, although no liquor license at this little spot. Triple delight was eggplant, peppers and potatoes, somewhere between a braise and a stirfry in a brown sauce, rich with soy sauce and oil. Surprisingly tasty for what seemed to be a very simple dish. The flounder was fried whole, and absolutely showered with more of the cumin and chili flakes, extremely crisp because of its thinness, quite delicious.
But it was at Lao Dong Bei, our second stop, that I was blown away. Again, three dishes of Joe Di
Stefano's choosing. The first was called sour cabbage with rice noodle in casserole. The sour cabbage, a common ingredient, is sometimes likened to sauerkraut. But it lacks the funky tang of fermentation, and to me is much more like a pickle. This dish was more a soup with a high proportion of solids than what Americans would call a casserole, but when I took a siip from the soup spoon, I felt my heart lurch. I'd been fighting a cold and suddenly found myself downing Chinese penicillin. Shreds of cabbage, probably Napa cabbage, and wire-thin rice noodles nestled in a deliriously rich broth. Chicken, yes, but what else? The cabbage was silken but had almost none of the characteristic sulfurous odor of cooked cruciferates. What I was tasting was some acidity, perhaps a small dollop of black vinegar, adding to the richness. The closest comparison I could make was the Greek avgolemono soup's liquid, minus the eggs.
The main course turned out to be mis-named in two different ways. Joe refers to them as Muslim lamb chops. The menu at Lao Dong Bei calls them lamb chops in Xinjiang style. But they are not lamb chops at all. Rather, they're lamb riblets, braised, then thrown in hot oil to crisp up, then seasoned with a downpour of cumin and sesame seeds, plus a few chile flakes. Cut between each bone so they're eminently snatchable and snackable, it's a stunning dish, managing by turns to be crispy and meltingly tender, texture and taste joining forces to please the mouth. Alongside was another new dish, tiger vegetables. It's a salad, an honest-to-goodness salad, full of fluffy, fresh greenness. Cilantro leaves and a few tender stems are tossed with shredded green onion and green pepper and just a little fresh hot pepper, the whole thing dressed with a little oil and black vinegar and maybe an eensy bit of sugar. It's amazing, cool and crunchy and the perfect balance to the unctuous lamb.
A stunning meal. (That's Joe's photograph, by the way. Mine only shows the remains of the day, so to speak.)
Joe's a free-lance writer who blogs and does some consulting. He also runs food tours of Queens, so if you're intersted in snooping around off the tourist path, he's just the man for you.
Golden Palace Restaurant
140-09 Cherry Ave., Flushing, NY
718-886-4383
Lao Dong Bei Restaurants
44-09 Kissena Blvd, Flushing, NY
718-539-4100
Joe DiStefano
The best news of the flying trip to New Orleans is that one of the great restaurants is back with a bang. Brennan's on Royal Street, the big pink house across from the Supreme Court Building, has reopened. Closed for several years, the result of a family feud that could make the plot for a Masterpiece Theater series, it's been freshened up, to put it mildly. And the kitchen? Ah, the kitchen. After falling to shocking levels on our visit several years ago, the kitchen now will have you dancing in the duck. Other delicious things, too, of course, and we'll get to the duck in good time.
Our group dinner the first night was upstairs near huge portraits of Mardi Gras queens a century ago and smaller ones of entire courts of the various krewes. The meal clued us in that changes were clearly afoot. For instance, in the peak of oyster season, we had oven roasted Gulf oysters topped with smoked chili butter, chives and manchego cheese, just a wee bit of heat and a light shower of the cheese, the oysters still succulently juicy.
Another highlight was a shrimp creole risotto. The shrimp, laid out like soldiers atop a mound of risotto, were surrounded by the creole sauce. The menu said there was ginger in it, but the chowzters around me all thought the tomatoes had been smoked some, so complex was the sauce. It made one regret filling up on the oysters, so hard it was to resist just one more bite. Bananas Foster for dessert, of course, invented there at Brennan's in 1951, pepared for us by Etienne DeFelice, one of the captains.
But the menu is not the same as it was. Some of the old favorites have been retained, viz, the Fosters. But for example, their crepes Fitzgerald, involving fresh strawberries, aren't going to be available until local strawberries are in season. "If they aren't good enough, we're not serving it," was the firm announcement.
Then late Saturday night I discovered that a smaller group of fellow Chowzters were planning a visit the next morning for the meal this house made famous, Breakfast at Brennan's.
With planes to catch, we forewent the famous eye-openers, cocktails like milk punch. But chicory coffee was hot and fresh and good enough to elicit grunts of pleasure. The food began to roll in, a dignified pace, to be sure, in the new downstairs garden room that looks out on the patio. From the pastry chef to go with the savory dishes came huge biscuits, more than 3 inches square and 2 inches high, delicate and buttery.Turtle soup that managed to be both light and very full-flavored, nice notes of lemon coming through. Pan-roasted sweetbreads resting on a mound of truffle-laced grits, a sauce of bacon-laced sherry lightly anointing it. Panfried rabbit, slightly crisp, perched atop a bed of tender creamed collard greens, attended by a couple of over-easy eggs.
More eggs in two of the traditional styles of the house. It's possible to get a divided eggs order, so out came an egg hussarde, housemade English muffin for a base, prosciutto ham, the properly poached egg and both hollandaise and marchand de vin sauce - plus an egg Sardou, my old favorite, a crisply fried artichoke bottom instead of the muffin, very lightly creamed spinach, the egg and a sauce choron, bearnaise with a touch of tomato. Let me point out here that hollandaise in New Orleans is perkier than in France, where it's all about the butter. A little more lemon in the New Orleans style and often just a light, light touch of cayenne or Tabasco, just to put flavors more to the front. Good stuff.
Yes, more food. Grillades, not the usual thin slices of veal, but veal cheek made crispy, with cheese grits and over-easy eggs, all drizzled with a little of the juice from pickled pork, another old Creole dish. And then that duck. The menu calls it duck ham - but to me it was more like lean bacon, strips of breast that had been cured, smoked and fried, a little chewy but not tough, absolutely wonderful. And scrambled duck eggs, cooked over a low heat and stirred almost constantly so they remained creamy, some chives in them, and I suspect perhaps some duck fat for the pan. I nearly called my pal who keeps kosher to shriek, "Get down here!"
And just because it's not a meal without dessert, dark chocolate mousse with the rare Criollo chocolate, enrobed in ganache on a chocolate sable cookie, white chocolate ice milk, and a wonderful chocolate florentine that managed to be chocolatey, caramel-y and slightly salty while remaining as brittle as a light glaze of ice.
The executive chef, Slade Rushing, is a Southerner who's worked in San Francisco and New York. He and his wife, Allison Vines-Rushing, returned to New Orleans just before Katrina hit and decided to stay after the storm. It's quite a story. The Brennans have a history of hiring fine chefs and letting them do what they do best, and it's clear that Rushing falls right into that line. And the service is charming, one step back from formal, accustomed to dealing with long-time local customers and newcomers who stare at the menu and have a dozen questions.
Reservations probably necessary already, so get on the phone.
Brennan's
417 Royal Street, New Orleans
5o4-525-9711
Breakfast and Lunch Tues.-Sun., Dinner Tues.-Sat.
Recent Comments