Desayunos

I had two memorable breakfasts in Mexico City, at two of the city's most famous restaurants.

I didn't eat at the original branch of El Cardenal, but rather the one in the Sheraton near Alameda Park, as it was an easier walk from my hotel on my last morning in town. I think I arrived at about 8:30 on a Sunday and the place was already half full. When I left about an hour later there was a line out the door. The restaurant gets great reviews in general, but they're especially famous for their breakfasts, especially the conchas con nata.

The concha is the quintessential Mexican breakfast pastry, a light sweet roll in the shape of a shell and covered with sugar. It's not overly sweet, and it has a fluffy consistency somewhere between bready and cakey. El Cardenal is considered by many to have the best conchas in the city (though some give the honor to a place called Bondy, in the upscale Polanco neighborhood). A concha is good on its own, but the icing on the cake is nata, which you order separately. It's actually the cream that forms on the top of milk when it's heated, though it's served cold. I guess there's a secret to making it just right without scalding. El Cardenal was my only nata experience, but it was positively culinary-erotic--an amazing combination of freshness, richness, and a sly come-hither sweetness that didn't even hint at cloying. An order of nata as served at El Cardenal is probably sufficient to cover about three conchas; I slathered mine on a concha and another sweet bread, this one bow-tie shaped.

The concha was just the beginning. I also had another house specialty, the tortilla con escamoles--an omelet with ant eggs. You heard me, ant eggs. And they're much tastier than grasshoppers. Escamoles are considered a delicacy in Mexico, and they're quite expensive. I believe they're most often served mixed into butter to spread on corn tortillas (Restaurante Chon, where I ate my chapulines, serves them that way).

The escamoles have a subtle, nutty flavor, nothing like what I'd imagine a "formic" taste to be. They look like little off-white capsules or large rice grains (if you click on the photo above you can see a few wayward ones on the left of the plate--don't confuse them with the cotijo cheese on the beans).

The other memorable breakfast was at a restaurant so legendary that a Mexican rock band took its name for their own--Cafe de Tacuba, established in 1912. It's right in the historic center, and once settled in the vintage interior you'll feel as if you've traveled back in time. Like El Cardenal, Cafe de Tacuba serves three meals a day, which is not that common in Mexico City. Locals love the place and it seems to have maintained the quality of its food all these years. The waiters have an endearing dual nature of attentive and friendly yet somehow bored or pissed off, so as a New Yorker I felt right at home. And the waitresses wear these wonderful white-as-snow uniforms with headgear that makes them look like a cross between nurses, nuns and maids. At Cafe de Tacuba I had huevos con mole and a hot chocolate (Mexicans make so-so coffee but great chocolate), which is served with semi-dry biscuits.

They Don't Taste Like Chicken

When I was in Oaxaca, about fifteen years ago, I was too sheepish, or chicken, to try grasshoppers. I finally ate them last month, in Mexico City, where they're not commonly eaten as they are in Oaxaca. But they're featured at Restaurante Bar Chon, which specializes in "pre-Hispanic cuisine." Chapulines are small grasshoppers that are toasted on a clay griddle with garlic and lime, and seasoned with sal de gusano (worm salt, a combination of powdered chile, salt and gusano--a caterpillar that lives off the agave plant). My little grasshoppers were served with guacamole and tortillas. They were a little crunchy in texture, but perhaps more like sawdust, and while the flavor wasn't at all vile, it didn't win my heart. The aroma was a bit musty and reminded me of the dried baby shrimp you see at Chinatown markets.


I also had a bowl of sopa de medula, which is made with marrow from the spinal column of cattle, served in a consomme. The medula itself had a kind of dumpling-like consistency, weirdly like matzoh balls. Interesting, but not wonderful.

My third item was a tostada with salpicon de venado. A salpicon is a shredded meat salad, but I didn't know the word venado. The waitress pointed to a painting of a man wearing antlers. I figured it was venison, not human, and later research bore me out.

The restaurant is in what appears to be a working-class neighborhood near the bustling La Merced market. Bustling is an understatement. The metro let me off right in the middle of the indoor market that was overwhelming to even a mild claustrophobe like me, and all the surrounding streets were an extension of the market. It took me quite some time, and several attempts at directions to find my way out of the market area to the street that would take me to the restaurant. On the way back to my hotel it was much easier and quicker to go in the other direction to a station that was technically about a third further than the market.

Restaurante Bar Chon has a large and interesting menu, and I'm sure much of it tastes better than the stuff you'd eat on a self-imposed dare.

There aren't many things I won't try once. Really there are only three I can think of: dog, monkey and poutine.

Blonde Like Me

I went to the Soviet Union in 1990. It was still the Soviet Union, just barely. I had been advised to bring plenty of items that were scarce in the Soviet Union (which was really just about everything), to give out as gifts, tips, bribes. Especially important were packs of Marlboros. There was a serious shortage of cabs in Moscow and Leningrad (it was still Leningrad), and many people moonlighted as gypsy cab drivers. Flashing a pack of Marlboros was the best way to hail a cab. I also brought coffee, cassette tapes (for some music industry people I had introductions to), and hair dye.

The hair dye was courtesy of a friend who was working as a product manager for Clairol at the time. He had come up in the world, having recently left Ty-D-Bol and Cincinnati. "The women will love you," he said.

Back then the hotels had floor attendants, women who were stationed on every floor of every tourist hotel. Obviously they were there to keep tabs on the guests, to make sure Soviet citizens didn't come up to the rooms, and perhaps to make sure that only approved prostitutes gained entry. My floor attendant in Moscow was a chubby woman of indeterminate age with thinning, dreadfully bleached blonde hair. The first night in the hotel I unpacked my bags and brought a package of Clairol hair color to the lady at her station.

"A gift," I said. "For you."

She looked at the box. "Blonde!" she exclaimed gleefully. "Like me!"

Dinner of the Year! La Tecla, in Mexico City

Fish filet with zucchini flowers and huitlacoche sauce

Yes, I think this was indeed the dinner of the year, at a cozy, understatedly elegant and quite reasonably priced restaurant in Mexico City's Colonia Roma neighborhood. Serving "nueva cocina Mexicana," the Mexican equivalent of nouvelle cuisine, La Tecla gussies up traditional Mexican dishes and ingredients while remaining true to the culinary traditions.

I started with an appetizer of mini black bean gorditas (i.e., black bean was mixed into the corn masa) stuffed with shredded cochinita de pibil (a Yucatecan specialty of citrus-marinated pork, cooked in banana leaves), and topped with escabeche (pickled) onions.

That set the meal off to a wonderful start, but it was outdone by my main course, a perfectly cooked, thick fish filet (sea bass, I believe), stuffed with oodles of flor de calabaza (zucchini flowers), and served with a huitlacoche sauce (huitlacoche is the wonderfully earthy, aromatic corn fungus).


My truly indulgent dessert, prepared tableside, was a plate of mini-crepes in a coffee-brandy caramel sauce, topped with chopped walnuts.

Service was impeccable, and with a half bottle of Spanish white (Rueda), the total cost, including tip, was about $38.

As I walked back to my hotel I was literally beaming.

La Tecla
Av. Durango 186-A
Mexico City

Thanksgiving in Mexico City

I spent the long Thanksgiving weekend in Mexico City. I'd been in Mexico City once before, about fifteen years ago, but I only spent two days there, one of which was a taken up by a day trip to the pyramids at Teotihuacan. The rest of the trip had been spent in Oaxaca and in the colonial cities of Queretaro and Guanajuato. This time I spent three and a half days in Mexico City.

I had my Thanksgiving lunch (the main meal of the day in Mexico) at a place that was at the top of my restaurant list, Contramar, considered by many the city's best seafood restaurant. I had spent the morning visiting the Castillo in Chapultepec Park (above), and would return to the park after lunch for the Archeological Museum (which I had missed the first time around).

I was told that Contramar, in Colonia Roma, a quiet residential neighborhood not far from the park, didn't take reservations, but when I got there they had a long list of reservations and gave me a seat at the bar (it's still not clear whether they take reservations from just anybody, or just "certain people"). I started with the waiter's recommendation, tostadas de atun. The crispy tortillas had a first layer of chipotle mayo atop which sat exquisite slices of sashimi-grade tuna loin carpaccio, garnished with artichoke slices and crispy leeks. This is one of Contramar's signature dishes and it's worth signing up for. I noticed later that a number of restaurants in the neighborhood serve the dish, but I think Contramar may have invented it.


The main course they're most noted for is a grilled whole fish served with two sauces, a red chile adobo and a green parsley salsa. The size of the fish depends on the number of diners (they recommend a half kilo per diner), and all of the fish are over a kilo, so as a solo diner I had to go a different route. I was told they could prepare the filet of esmedregal the same way. Esmedregal (also known as cobia) is very popular in Mexico, and its meaty flesh reminded of a milder, less oily kind of tuna (though it's not at all related). The red sauce was excellent, but the green one was a bit too salty for me. Still saltier, unpardonably so, was the chopped spinach served with the dish.

Contramar is probably worth a visit if you're looking for an upscale afternoon meal in Mexico City, but I'm afraid my main course was a disappointment.


The Archeological Museum is overwhelming, and I really only saw the tip of the iceberg. I was exhausted by the time I got back to my hotel.

Later that evening I dragged myself out for dinner at a Mexico City institution, Fonda el Refugio, which has been around since the fifties. It's in all the guide books and is recommended by Antonio Banderas. A fonda is the Mexican equivalent of a trattoria--a simple, homey restaurant. El Refugio makes regional specialties from all over the country, and that evening I had pipian colorado, one of the Thursday specials. I've had pipians (pumpkin seed sauces) with duck and chicken in both California and New York. The ones I've had before were green, but the pipian colorado is a mix of pumpkin seeds, peanuts and red chiles. It actually reminded me of a West African peanut sauce, and it was great for dipping their wonderful homemade tortillas, but there was one fatal flaw: lukewarm meat. I was told that I had a choice of pollo or cerdo, and being a porkaholic I chose the cerdo. It was clear, however, that the meat was not cooked with the sauce, but rather some pre-cooked pork chunks were insufficiently reheated in the pipian. I suppose I could have complained and no doubt they'd have microwaved it, but I don't like to complain in a language I'm not a master of. Because when I complain I really complain.


The atmosphere at Fonda el refugio is pleasant enough, but I suspect the place is coasting on history and reputation.

I Couldn't Have Done It Myself

That's what I love about collaborative writing: the result (when it really works) is something that neither writer could have written individually, but that sounds as if it were written by a single person. The latest collaboration I've published is, perhaps more than any of the others, something I couldn't have written on my own.

A while ago I sent an email to Marina LaPalma with the subject: I Rescue Abandoned Writing, asking her if she had any unfinished pieces I could work with. My preferred form of collaboration is to finish and refashion pieces started by other writers.

I met Marina in the Bay Area in the early eighties and I admired her work from the start. We had kept in touch on and off over the years.

When I looked at what she had sent me my immediate reaction was: how can I do anything with this material? (You'll see why, I think.) I thought of writing back to Marina explaining that I didn't think I'd be able to work with the piece she had sent. But I waited, and somehow a solution, a style, came to me in a flash the following day. I dashed off a draft and sent it to Marina. Marina liked it, but suggested several changes. After a little back and forth we came up with a final version we were both pleased with.

Read Eggs in Mung Being.

Word of Mouth Salutes Russ Feingold

Russ Feingold, the only U.S. Senator to oppose the "Patriot" Act, has made the following statement in response to last night's speech by the President of the Military-Industrial Complex:

Feingold Statement on the President's Decision to Increase Our Troop Presence in Afghanistan

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

I do not support the president’s decision to send additional troops to fight a war in Afghanistan that is no longer in our national security interest.  It’s an expensive gamble to undertake armed nation-building on behalf of a corrupt government of questionable legitimacy.  Sending more troops could further destabilize Afghanistan and, more importantly, Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state where al Qaeda is headquartered. While I appreciate that the president made clear we won’t be in Afghanistan forever, I am disappointed by his decision not to offer a timetable for ending our military presence there.  I will work with members of both parties and both houses of Congress to push for a flexible timetable to reduce our troop levels in Afghanistan, as part of a comprehensive strategy to combat al Qaeda in the region and around the world.

The Old Bailey

I'm a great fan of Rumpole of the Bailey, both the books by John Mortimer and the TV adaptations featuring Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole. I generally don't go in for the lighter side of crime, I'm more the hard-boiled type, but something about Rumpole tickles me. So, when I was in London I decided to make a pilgrimage to the Old Bailey. All right, it wasn't much of a pilgrimage. I was strolling from St. Paul's to Waterloo Bridge, passing time before a concert, and the Old Bailey happened to be en route. The Old Bailey, in case you don't know, is London's main criminal court. I always thought it was named for some old guy named Bailey, perhaps an eminent jurist, but a little research set me straight. Old Bailey is the name of the street it stands on, named for the fortified wall, or bailey, that once stood there.

I was charmed by the inscription on the building.

"Defend the children of the poor & punish the wrongdoer." I imagined those words being intoned in the stentorian tones of the great Leo McKern, perhaps as he snuck a guzzle of his favorite low-rent claret, Pommeroy's Plonk, watching with one eye for the approach and eventual reproach of She Who Must Be Obeyed.

My Worst Thanksgiving and Other Matters

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

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

Dumbed-down Southeast Asian Food for Trendy New Yorkers

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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